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PARTISAN REVIEW
it is gold and it is lying in a gold hand. For Phebe's hand was gold-!
had never noticed how her hand is the color of pure gold. Then I
looked up and she was still staring at me, and her eyes were gold, too,
and bright and hard like gold. And I knew that she knew.'
"'Knew?' I echoed, like a qu'estion, for I knew, too, now. My
friend had learned the truth- from the coldness of his wife, from the
gossip of servants-and had drawn the gold ring from his finger and
carried it to the bed where he had lain with her and had put
it
be–
neath her pillow and had gone down and shot himself but under such
circumstances that no one save his wife would ever guess it to be more
than an accident. But he had made one fault of calculation. The yel–
low wench had found the ring.
" 'She knows,' she whispered, pressing my hand hard against her
hosom, which heaved and palpitated with a new wildness. 'She knows
-and she looks at me-she will always look at me.' Then suddenly
her voice dropped, and a wailing intonation came into it: 'She will
tell. All of them will know. All of them in the house will look at me
and know-when they hand me the dish- when they come into the
room-and their feet don't make any noise!' She rose abruptly, drop–
ping my hand. I remained seated, and she stood there beside me, her
back toward me, the whiteness of her face and hands no longer visible,
and to my sight the blackness of her costume faded into the shadow,
even in such proximity. Suddenly, in a voice which I did not recog–
nize for
its
hardness, she said in the darkness above me, 'I will not
abide it, I will not abide it! ' Then she turned, and with a swooping
motion leaned to kiss me upon the mouth. Then she was gone from
my side and I heard her feet running up the gravel of the path. I sat
there in the darkness for a time longer, turning the ring upon my fin–
ger.''
After that meeting in the summer house, Cass did not see Anna–
belle Trice for some days. He learned that she had gone to Louisville,
where, he recalled, she had close friends. She had, as was natural,
taken Phebe with her. Then he heard that she had returned, and that
mght, late, went to the summer house in the garden. She was there,
sitting in the dark. She greeted him. She seemed, he wrote later, pecu–
liarly cut off, remote, and vague in manner, like a somnambulist or a
person drugged. He asked about her trip to Louisville, and she replied
briefly that she had been down the river to Paducah. He remarked
that he had not known that she had friends
in
Paducah, and she said
that she had none there. Then,
all
at once, she turned on him, the
vagueness changing to violence, and burst out, "You are prying-
