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eyes to what he ought to be seeing. Because, tough talk or not, ramming the probe in, pretending to go into it from the company angle or however I played it, there was stuff going on here I didn’t understand, and my stomach was telling me it was no good.
    Going into the week-end it was high, wide and handsome, with Jane and me out with the horses most of the time, and he running the roads with Mrs. Sperry. But when he brought her in Saturday morning, to pick up tickets for the football game over at the University, I didn’t exactly like her, but I could see what he’d fallen for. She was a little older than Jane, maybe a little under thirty, small and stocky, but not fat. But in the blue dress with white spots on it that she was wearing, with tan shoes, hat and bag and fur coat, you could hardly miss that trim, pretty shape, with nice legs that reminded you somehow of a cat. Or maybe it was her eyes that did that. Her face was round, with puffy, dimpled cheeks, rosebud mouth and small, perky nose and light hair; but her eyes were the diamond shape you see in a leopard, and light gray.
    But she didn’t look like anybody else, you had to say that for her, and when she smiled at me and clucked over the cups and made herself friendly with Linda, you couldn’t exactly kick her in the teeth. She made my skin prickle a little, and yet I’m human and it wasn’t just to be nice to Keyes that I put myself out for her. After some talk about the football game she said: “I hear you see little Jane Delavan.”
    “Yes, we ride a little.”
    “Lovely girl.”
    “... You know her?”
    “Well—that would be a little complicated. But I’ve seen her and heard a lot about her—and I know a lot of people that she knows.”
    “Shall I remember you to her?”
    “I think it would please her that I spoke pleasantly of her. But if you mention it, don’t say anything as coming from me.”
    “O.K.”
    But how I was going to do it at all was what worried me, because to mention it would mean I would have to mention what Keyes had to do with it, and what was he doing here all this time? But I could have saved myself the trouble of thinking about it, because by dinner Jane already had it. “Ed, I ask you once more what that man is doing here.”
    “He has business.”
    “And what’s he doing with her?”
    “Maybe he likes her.”
    “What’s she doing with him?”
    “Vice versa, maybe.”
    “With her, that’s not enough.”
    “Then maybe she wants a good time.”
    “Ed, have you kept your promise to me?”
    I said I never broke my promises, which sounded a little better than it was.
    I’m a member of Unity, and next morning, when service was over at the Masonic Temple, I stepped over to the hotel to see how she felt on the subject of lunch. But Keyes was in the lobby, slumped down in his chair, and when he saw me he jumped up and came over almost at a trot. “Ed, I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning, and—I’ve got to talk.”
    “O.K.—talk.”
    “Not here. I’m not myself.”
    We went up to his room and first he sat on the bed, then he lay on it. Then he got an envelope out of his pocket, opened it, took out a paper and said: “Read that.”
    It was one of our operative’s reports, and from the first page, where “subject” went to a football game, it was easy to see that who was under surveillance was Mrs. Sperry. “So you got pretty stuck on her, but not so stuck you didn’t have her shadowed.”
    “No, Ed, that’s not how it was at all.”
    “Looks like it.”
    “The whole thing was routine. I put the case in charge of our Department of Investigation, down in Los Angeles. I told them to take the whole thing over. How did I know they’d decide to include her in their check-up? I’d never even heard of her when I left to come up here. But—and the worst of it is the operative doesn’t even know who I am.”
    I read it, and right near the end it went something like