Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/94

 the right to be with her now; upon them Gregg had no reason to intrude.

He put up his car and ascended to his apartment, which was deserted at this hour; for Dora, the maid, was the daughter of the woman who cooked in the apartment below and she shared her mother's room on the lower floor. Gregg went into Billy's room to make sure that Bill had not returned; then, restlessly, he strolled through the empty rooms. He opened a bottle of whiskey and took a drink; he put a band record on the phonograph and played it over and over, while he sat stretched out in a Morris chair before it. A little after two o'clock, he turned out the lights and shut himself in his own room, where he lay on his bed without undressing. He could not drive off memory of what he had witnessed this night; and now he was not trying to. For his mind had ceased to give him again and again only the vision of that apartment on Clearedge Street; of Charles Hale lying like dead with the doctors bending over him; of Marjorie taking up her father's picture and dropping it and looking from Billy to him and learning. His visions were beginning to go back a little to Mr. Hale greeting his guests at the wide door of his home; to the dinner table with Mr. Hale at one end, all friendly and easy; and his wife at the other as she had been. And her voice seemed to come to Gregg again as, deliberately and merely as a matter of fact, she related incidents of her last long stay abroad and as she went on to her plans for returning to Brittany for several months "with my daughter this time, I hope. It is too bad Mr. Hale's business never permits him to do more than take me across the ocean."

Gregg clenched his fists in a queer instinctive spasm. He sat up. A few minutes later, he heard Bill's key