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This—estrangement makes things very uncomfortable at home. Even Phoebe feels it, and—it just can’t go on. So I thought—”
    “Well, how do we know that Fitz would come to New York if I offered him a job?”
    “Sue might help. He listens to her. Sometimes I th-think she knows him better than I do.”
    “Jealous?”
    “N-no. But he’s always turned to her in the strangest way.”
    “Because she’s always spoilt him.”
    “Perhaps. But you will give him a place on the paper, Cabot? To please me?”
    “Well, I’ll think about it, my dear, you’ve rather sprung it on me, haven’t you!”
4
    T HAT night in their bedroom Eden, hairbrush in hand, broke a thoughtful silence.
    “Cabot, did Melicent speak to you about giving Fitz a job?”
    “She did.”
    “Well, are you going to?”
    “Don’t know. What do you think?”
    “I think it would be rather a responsibility, having him with us in New York. He’s not like Bracken.”
    “He’s not like anybody around here, either. That seems to be his trouble.”
    “Ought we to tell, Cabot?”
    “What good would that do?” They gazed at each other, Cabotsitting on the edge of the bed with one shoe off, Eden brushing out her reddish hair with long, regular strokes. “Well, we can if you like,” he said after a moment. “But it’s going to come as rather a shock to everybody. And just how should we go about it? Shall I take Sedgwick aside and say, By the way, old man, nobody saw fit to mention it at the time of your marriage to her, but the fact is, my sister is not my father’s child.” Cabot shook his head. “He’ll think I’m breaking up in my mind. Or shall I begin at the other end, with something like this: Once upon a time when I was about fourteen, my mother eloped with a vagabond violinist, and Melicent is the innocent fruit of their sin; my poor father found a sort of demented revenge in bringing her up as his own child after our mother died. It sounds, even to me, as though I were having hallucinations.”
    “It might help them to understand Fitz, though.”
    “In the circumstances, wouldn’t they rather not?”
    “Probably. I suppose it is too late now,” Eden ruminated.
    “Too late to change what’s in Fitz’s blood, certainly. Melicent had a touch of the same thing, before she fell in love with Sedgwick. As a child she always had a passion for music. A happy marriage seems to have more or less replaced it. Shall we try to get Fitz married, then?”
    “Oh, Cabot, you are a chump! Anyway, we made our decision years ago. Only you and I and Grandmother Day knew—and of course your father. Gran said not to tell. And Gran was always right. Now we’re the only two people left in the world who know that you and Melicent didn’t have the same father. Let’s not say a word. But let’s take Fitz under our wing. I think perhaps we owe him something.”
    “It’s Bracken I keep thinking of. What do we owe him?” Cabot rose from the bed and came to her where she sat at the dressing-table, the brush in her hand. He knelt beside her and put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her neck and spoke from there, muffled and unhappy. “Sweetheart, the Murray curse has come upon us. I have some idea of what he’s going through, I was old enough to see what it did to my father when his wife left him for another man.”
    “But your father loved his wife.”
    “True. And until it happened, she was sweet and virtuous, unlike the Austrian. But the net result is the same. My father and my son, both deserted by their wives. What’s wrong with us Murrays, Eden?”
    “Don’t be morbid, my dear. And anyway, you’re safe enough, didn’t you know?”
    His arms tightened. She felt his lips against her throat.
    “That doesn’t help either of the boys,” he said then.
    After the light was out, Eden spoke again in the darkness beside him.
    “Cabot. Has Lisl gone with another man—too?”
    “Oh, Lord, you weren’t supposed to know! I can