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with me, must I?” He looked at Idelia, smiling.
    â€œIf this is the truth of the matter,” he went on, while she stared at him with round eyes, “Crenshaw didn’t of course meet Pike originally in Unionboro; he brought him along from California, or picked him up in New York. Well, we have Crenshaw’s isolation explained, we have Pike’s terrifying quality explained—an inherent criminality that you felt rather than consciously saw—and we have the explanation for the sudden flight to New York and the isolation here. And we can understand Crenshaw’s absent-mindedness; in that state he would forget his Shakespeare—and his friend.”
    Idelia interrupted at last, and with feeling: “You didn’t know Mr. Crenshaw. He wasn’t a drug fiend.”
    â€œWell,” said Gamadge, “I didn’t say that this theory does explain everything. Nor does the theory that Crenshaw was an alcoholic.”
    â€œHe certainly was not!”
    â€œYou can’t always tell by looking at them, you know.”
    â€œHe wasn’t any kind of an addict.”
    â€œIs Stonehill dry?” asked Gamadge, ignoring her protests.
    â€œAs a bone.”
    â€œPike might have had bottles in that car. On July the third, Crenshaw has the beginnings of an attack of D.T.s. Pike writes to the apartment in a hurry—I wish you’d preserved that envelope; if he’s a bad hat we might like to have a specimen of his handwriting—and gets the patient to New York before he crashes completely. From the sixth of July on, Crenshaw is flat on his back; acute alcoholism is no joke. Doctor, hospital, lack of bulletins to callers—all as I suggested before.”
    â€œI suppose,” said Idelia with some disgust, “that alcoholics read The Tempest ?”
    â€œI don’t know why they shouldn’t. It would take them right out of this world, into a place where strange, hollow, confused sounds are mild phenomena, and mopping and mowing the order of the day.”
    â€œHe wasn’t an alcoholic.”
    â€œThen there’s blackmail,” continued Gamadge, half to himself. “In that case Crenshaw was forced to keep his blackmailer on the premises; support him as well as pay him. But we know so little; we haven’t the financial picture.”
    â€œI don’t believe there’s anything to blackmail Mr. Crenshaw for ,” said Idelia in a kind of desperation.
    â€œBut you know that he considers himself weak, morally weak. Weak people incur blackmail, weak people submit to it. But an idea strikes me.”
    â€œAnother one?” asked Idelia dryly.
    â€œWould Crenshaw underline passages reflecting on Pike’s character with Pike at his elbow? Or didn’t Pike mind knowing that Crenshaw thought he was born to be hanged?”
    â€œI don’t believe that that Pike ever looked at a book, much less Shakespeare!”
    â€œI have to take your word for so much,” complained Gamadge.
    Idelia looked out of the window. Gamadge, watching her stern profile, realized afresh how much her friendship with this older, literate, cultivated man must have meant to her. To defend it she had stepped right out of character. She was, Gamadge thought, the last person in the world to presume on an acquaintance and force herself where she wasn’t wanted; she was convinced that Crenshaw would not have dropped her unless he had been coerced or in extremis. She was determined, in spite of her natural reticence and her acquired social humility, to find out whether he had been coerced, whether or not he was a free agent now.
    Crenshaw had probably been the most interesting adventure in her life; if that was the case, Gamadge feared that her life had been and would continue to be a flattish one.
    The bus, stopping for lights, stopping at every fourth corner to take on and discharge passengers, had climbed the hill and descended into the succeeding