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keeping nothing back, expressing to those bare walls, that metal table and black leather swivel chair, that window, with its half-drawn dark blue blind, the crawling distastes and shames, the self-disgust, the shrinking from light and the fear which seemed sometimes to beat with frenzied wings against bars in his brain.
    It had worked—up to a point. This stuff (as he put it to himself) often does work up to a point. The point, though, is on a rather low threshold. Getting it all out and so getting rid of it—well, yes. Nobody tells you how it comes back again. With Rufus it did to some extent come back again, and all he could do was grind it down and soldier on. Time, the best of all doctors, though it kills you in the end, had done more than therapy could, and now days would pass, weeks, without Rufus thinking of Ecalpemos at all. For quite long periods of time it went away and he forgot it. The associative process did not work with Rufus in quite the same way as it did with his erstwhile friend, Adam Verne-Smith, for Adam was an “arts” person and he a scientist, so that Greek or Spanish names, for instance, evoked none of it. Ecalpemos, after all, was not Greek and did not even sound so to Rufus who, unlike Adam, had not received a classical education. Nor was he neurotically sensitive about babies. It would hardly have done him much good in his professional life, where women were always wanting to know if they were having them or how to stop them or conceive them, if he had been. He had long ago gotten the whole business of Ecalpemos under tight control and lived in high hopes of never having to refer to it again in word or thought—and then there had appeared this paragraph.
    If the house they referred to, thought Rufus, had been Wyvis Hall, why had they not said so? Or said “near Nunes” rather than “near Hadleigh”? The place had certainly been nearer Nunes than Hadleigh, three miles nearer, though of course Hadleigh was a town and Nunes merely a small village. There were a great many houses in the vicinity of Hadleigh of the same sort of size as Wyvis Hall, and a newspaper would be likely to describe anyone who possessed a few acres as a “landowner.” For all he knew it might not be unusual to unearth human bones in grounds such as these. Possibly they were ancient bones… .
    The only really hard piece of information the Standard gave was the name of the present owner of the house: Alec Chipstead. A chartered surveyor, it said. Rufus stubbed out his second cigarette, put the paper into his briefcase, and slung over his shoulders the marvelous black leather coat from Beltrami he had bought in Florence and which would have made him look like a gangster if he had not been so fair and ruddy-faced and with such blue English eyes.
    He said good night to his nurse and to the receptionist and walked off down the street, across Wigmore Street toward Henrietta Place. It occurred to him that he could go into any public library where they kept phone directories for the whole country and look up Alec Chipstead and see if his address was Wyvis Hall. There might well be a public library very near where he was now walking. Rufus told himself now was no time to go hunting for libraries; he would go home first. He would go home and think about what to do. He had an idea it was a rule with libraries to stay open late on Thursday evenings.
    Deliberately, he switched his thoughts. Library or no library, he would take Marigold out to dinner. Hampstead somewhere, he thought, and then he might take the opportunity to slip into the big library at Swiss Cottage… . No more of that. Over dinner they would talk about moving. Rufus thought he was growing out of Mill Hill and it was time to consider Hampstead. Marigold would have preferred Highgate, he knew, but in spite of the therapy and the control he shied away from Highgate. These places were all villages really, you got to know the neighbors, met people at parties and given