Shadow of Guilt Read Free

me. It’s terribly late, dear. We’d better get some sleep.” Her hand was pushing me gently off the bed. “And, George, it’s all right about Ala. I’ll tell her in the morning.”
    I hated her capitulation to be as total as that. “But if you really think…”
    “No, it’ll be all right. I guess I’m too strict with her sometimes. Good night, George.”
    Next morning at breakfast a huge box of yellow roses arrived for my wife. When I left for the office, she was arranging them with expert efficiency in a large white vase.

 
TWO
    Ala went to the party. Connie was all graciousness about it but then spoiled everything by waiting up for her and letting me know next morning that she hadn’t got back until after three. “And almost drunk,” she said. Since anyone under twenty who took more than one Dubonnet was “drunk” to Connie, I paid little attention. Besides, everything about my life at Sixty-Fourth Street had become blurred into unreality. All I lived for was the thought of Thursday, and finally it arrived. Around six, after Eve had already left the office, I walked up Madison and across town in the Forties to her little apartment between Lexington and Third.
    Eve lived in the shabbiest of brownstones, but she didn’t give a damn about luxury. After a poverty-stricken California childhood, shackled by ailing parents and a delinquent kid brother, followed by an even drearier marriage to a peevish invalid in Bakersfield who had lingered on for four grueling years, it was still an enormous thrill for her to be independent. Oliver Lord, her husband, had left her twenty-five thousand dollars insurance money, and with that safely in the bank and her salary from Consolidated she felt secure, which was all that mattered to her. The difference between her way of life and the Corliss one was as extreme as anything could be. Maybe that was one of the many reasons why, when I found her, I knew I had finally found myself.
    Usually, for reasons of discretion, we’d eat a makeshift supper in her little apartment, but that night both of us were seized with a feeling of recklessness and Eve suggested we should go around the comer to a French restaurant. I was feeling an almost drunken exhilaration, and by the time we’d got to coffee a huge contentment had spread through me. As soon as Ala was married, I could ask for the divorce. It would be a tough time for all of us, but it would work. Nothing could stop it now. Improbably, at thirty-seven I had found my love—simple love for a simple woman who had nothing to offer but the astounding fact of herself.
    Her hand, very small and pretty, was lying on the table. I put my own hand on it.
    “Where shall we go for the honeymoon?” I said.
    I knew I was breaking every rule; we were both superstitious about tempting providence. But I didn’t care, and as Eve turned quickly to me, her face warming with her wonderful, unexpected smile, I knew she didn’t care either.
    “What’s your mood?” I said. “Europe? Mexico? What about the Caribbean? Jamaica? Tobago?”
    “Tobago!” As she repeated the word, Eve’s eyes were sparkling as if Tobago were the Elysian Fields. She looked about two years old. Our faces were almost touching. I leaned toward her and kissed her.
    That was when I heard a voice saying, “Good evening, Mr. Hadley.”
    For a split second I froze. Then I sprang away from Eve. Don Saxby was standing in front of the table.
    Of all the people in the world! I thought. But then I saw that his smile didn’t have a trace of an I’ve-caught-you-out smirk. It was a friendly, even diffident smile.
    “Excuse me,” he said. “I was sitting across the room. I wouldn’t have come over, but—well, there’s something I think you ought to know. Ala’ll be here any minute. We’ve got a dinner date.”
    I glanced at Eve. I could tell she was wishing the floor would yawn and engulf her.
    “Mr. Saxby—er—Don,” I said, “this is Mrs. Lord. She works at my