“I don’t want to back any play except
“You’ll be sorry.” Adeane sounded more like a defeated salesman than a disappointed dramatist. “You’re throwing away a fortune. Sooner or later I’m going to get a backer for that play, and then just watch my dust! Where’d you leave the script?”
“I think it’s on the terrace,” Margot replied indifferently.
Adeane thrust his way past her and jerked open the terrace door. Wind hurled a handful of raindrops in his face. “Hey!” He sprang forward with the cry of a lioness who sees her cub attacked. The wind was tossing loose sheets of white paper about the terrace with the heavy playfulness of a gamboling elephant. There was typewriting on the sheets. They had come from Adeane’s script.
Basil went to help him gather the scattered pages together. By great good luck not a single page had blown over the parapet, but all of them were blistered with rain. Adeane stuffed the sodden mass between the green paper covers. “How did that happen?” he muttered.
There was no sign of the brass staples that had held the pages of the script together. Each page was loose and at the mercy of the wind.
“But the wind couldn’t have undone those staples!” Adeane’s eyes were on Basil angry and puzzled.
“Are you sure the staples weren’t loose?”
“No. I tightened them before I came out. I’m always afraid of losing a page or so.”
A clear voice came through the window. “Something wrong?”
They turned to see Margot watching them from the doorway. Her cheeks were flushed, her pale eyes bright as winter sunshine.
“The staples have fallen out of Adeane’s script,” Basil turned back to Adeane. “Are they on the terrace?”
“No.” Adeane was on his knees looking under the porch chairs. “They’re gone. Maybe that maid—”
“Why? Staples are scarcely valuable.”
“Maybe the wind . . .”
“Maybe.” Basil was unconvinced.
They went inside closing the French window against the rain. Basil looked thoughtfully at Margot. Was she capable of such a small act of cruelty? Could she have done it when she stood at the window overlooking the terrace near the garden table where she had left the script? Granted the play was silly, granted Adeane was callous and impertinent, it still seemed a petty, mean revenge for her to have taken. . . .
Damp and sulky, Adeane tucked the script under one arm. “I guess I’d better be going . . .”
“I’ll go with you,” said Basil.
“Don’t go, Dr. Willing!” Margot ignored Adeane. “At least wait until the rain is over. We can have tea or a cocktail.”
At that moment it was a tempting invitation with a dark, wet, unfriendly world outside, and everything warm, dry, and cushioned inside. But Basil wanted to see a little more of Adeane.
“Thanks, but I really must go.”
When the two men were in the elevator, Adeane spoke morosely. “You know, I don’t believe that woman likes me.”
“You chose the wrong moment to approach her—just after her husband’s death.”
“They were separated, weren’t they?”
“Perhaps she doesn’t want to be reminded of that now.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me.” Adeane seemed genuinely concerned. “I don’t know how to get on with people. I just haven’t any tact.”
“It has been said that tact is love,” returned Basil. “No amount of intelligence can replace sympathy when it comes to putting yourself in another person’s place.”
“I should sympathize with a woman like that who’s got everything I’d like to have!” cried Adeane bitterly. “Old Hutchins says I’m an egoist. Sure I am. Why not? How’s a guy going to get along if he doesn’t keep looking out for himself?”
“It didn’t get you very far this time, did it?” said Basil.
The doorman whistled up a taxi for them. Adeane asked to be let off at the theater. “Tact!” He brooded over the word resentfully “I don’t know anyone who can afford to back plays. My script has been knocking around producers’ offices for two or three years. I’ve tried and tried to break into the theater, and it’s been like trying to scale a wall of glass—high, cold, slippery and smooth, without a toehold anywhere. Talent counts for nothing. It’s all done by pull. I’d just about given up hope when Sam Milhau introduced me to Mrs. Ingelow at the theater this morning. They were going out to luncheon together, so I couldn’t speak to her then; but I’d heard she was stage struck, and I’d heard the rumor about her inheriting all this money, and she does owe me something for telling the police she couldn’t have killed her husband.”
“Does she?”
Again Basil discovered that irony was lost on Adeane. “Sure she does. I’m the only witness who testified she came out of that alcove before Ingelow went in.”
“And did she?”
