Nicholas Van Suydam stood at my door, unannounced. He had not
telephoned to ask if he might come, and this he at once explained by
the flat statement that he had realized I would not wish to see him.
With between us the memory of our last meeting, we stood mutually
embarrassed. I wondered how he was going to set about saying what he
must have determined to say when he took the step of coming to see me.
He set about it with commendable speed. “My mother appears to think
that you consider me guilty of something dastardly. I’m not sure that,
in her heart, she doesn’t agree with you.”
I watched him narrowly, perplexed as to how much she had repeated of
our talk on the docks: had she, for instance, told him that she had
witnessed the scene which had so shaken her at the time and which had
shaken me when she repeated it to me? Cautiously I suggested that these
things were no business of mine.
He looked me in the eye. “Eva told me she had written you that she had
made up her mind to leave me.”
I sighed: “It was unnecessary to inform you that I knew--as things
turned out.”
He said harshly: “I came here to tell you that she was about to leave
me.” It was now his turn to sigh deeply; but his indrawn breath was
expelled as if it were his curse on his fate. “The suddenness of it,”
he resumed, “would have shocked any man, even one who understood Eva.”