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answer.
    “Dennis—” she started to whisper again and stopped.
    For it was not Dennis.
    It was as if something inside her had screamed it.
    She turned blindly in the darkness and ran up those remaining steps, found the wall, turned, running along that hall whose every twist and turn she knew so well, clutching her skirt, following the wall with a groping hand—so narrow it was that anywhere along it, if the doors were closed, she could have touched wall with both hands. She found her own door; always her room since she was a child. She flung herself inside it; found the lock and the heavy old key and turned it and reached for the light switch.
    She gasped for breath and leaned against the door and blinked in the sudden light that spread over the little, bright room with its chintz and brass fenders and old mahogany.
    The first thing she saw was her wedding veil—a white cloud of net with an old rose-point border, hanging there from the chandelier. Ghostly. Accusing, as if she had killed Ben Brewer. As if she had been the cause of his death.
    “I can’t let you marry him,” Dennis had said. “You are never to be his wife.”
    But he hadn’t meant that.
    He hadn’t meant murder. But the thought of it added a last touch of horror and despair. She stumbled to the chaise longue and sat there before the dead fire, her face in her hands, her coat dragging from her shoulders, stained yellow folds of velvet around her wet, gold slippers.
    There were in the house, that cold winter night of December ninth when Benjamin Brewer was murdered, only members of the family. They had assembled for the wedding, and in spite of its pretensions and the aroma of tradition and wide-flung connections with which the Havilands had managed to surround themselves it was not, now, a large family. And it was one in which a curious little pattern seemed to repeat itself but did not in actuality. For Dennis, brought up under Amelia’s care though he had been, was actually the son of a distant cousin. Daphne was the daughter of Johnny Haviland’s young wife, and very like her, everyone said. Of the three Haviland children—children that is, of old Rowley Haviland dead, now, a year—Gertrude was the one who had given old Rowley a grandson. She had promptly named her son Rowley and had even, after her divorce, considered dropping her married name, which was Shore. But she was a conventional woman and did not like resorting to her maiden name, with the complication, always having to be explained, she thought, of a son growing up. Besides, if she resumed the name of Haviland it would put her on an equal footing again with Amelia, who had never married. So she called herself Mrs. Haviland Shore and strove to forget the brief advent of Archibald Shore who had been definitely a mistake—which in itself rather astonished Gertrude, for she felt she had inherited something of her father’s acumen and force, and he did not make mistakes.
    Also she kept a separate residence, living in the ugly, massive house on Bench Street near the lake and the Loop and coming to Amelia’s house in St Germain only for holidays. But she spoke of her house as the Family Residence and Amelia’s house as the Country Place—where Amelia said, neatly and definitely, “my house” and “your house.” And she’d felt that the family residence was the place for any family event of importance such as a wedding.
    But Amelia had felt so, too, about her own house and had won in the little conflict. Mainly because, in the first days after that engagement had been announced, Gertrude had declared that, wedding or no wedding, Ben Brewer would never darken her doors, and she was obliged to stick to it even when the marriage became, as it was from the first, inevitable.
    So Amelia won, and Gertrude assuaged her feelings by recalling the already well-known and oft-referred-to fact that old Rowley Haviland had died in her house. It had been a definite feather in her cap. It was due