She laughed shakily, with a queer twitching of her mouth.
“Go away,” she cried. “Don’t give me any more assurances, any more of your promises, please. I can’t stand any more tonight. I’m drunk on them now. Please go away.”
“All right. Night.”
“Good night–and thanks.”
I went into my room, closing the door. Mickey was unscrewing the top of a flask. His knees were dusty. He turned his half-wit’s grin on me and said:
“What a swell dish you are. What are you trying to do? Win yourself a home?”
“Sh-h-h. Anything new?”
“The master minds have gone back to the county seat. The red-head nurse was getting a load at the keyhole when I came back from feeding. I chased her.”
“And took her place?” I asked, nodding at his dusty knees.
You couldn’t embarrass Mickey. He said:
“Hell, no. She was at the other door, in the hall.”
XX. The House in the Cove
I got Fitzstephan’s car from the garage and drove Gabrielle and Mrs. Herman down to the house in the cove late the following morning. The girl was in low spirits. She made a poor job of smiling when spoken to, and had nothing to say on her own account. I thought she might be depressed by the thought of returning to the house she had shared with Collinson, but when we got there she went in with no appearance of reluctance, and being there didn’t seem to increase her depression.
After luncheon–Mrs. Herman turned out to be a good cook–Gabrielle decided she wanted to go outdoors, so she and I walked over to the Mexican settlement to see Mary Nunez. The Mexican woman promised to come back to work the next day. She seemed fond of Gabrielle, but not of me.
We returned home by way of the shore, picking a path between scattered rocks. We walked slowly. The girl’s forehead was puckered between her eyebrows. Neither of us said anything until we were within a quarter of a mile of the house. Then Gabrielle sat down on the rounded top of a boulder that was warm in the sun.
“Can you remember what you told me last night?” she asked, running her words together in her hurry to get them out. She looked frightened.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me again,” she begged, moving over to one end of her boulder. “Sit down and tell me again–all of it.”
I did. According to me, it was as foolish to try to read character from the shape of ears as from the position of stars, tea-leaves, or spit in the sand; anybody who started hunting for evidence of insanity in himself would certainly find plenty, because all but stupid minds were jumbled affairs; she was, as far as I could see, too much like her father to have much Dain blood in her, or to have been softened much by what she had, even if you wanted to believe that things like that could be handed down; there was nothing to show that her influence on people was any worse than anybody else’s, it being doubtful that many people had a very good influence on those of the opposite sex, and, anyway, she was too young, inexperienced, and self-centered to judge how she varied from the normal in this respect; I would show her in a few days that there was for her difficulties a much more tangible, logical, and jailable answer than any curse; and she wouldn’t have much trouble breaking away from morphine, since she was a fairly light user of the stuff and had a temperament favorable to a cure.
I spent three-quarters of an hour working these ideas over for her, and didn’t make such a lousy job of it. The fear went out of her eyes as I talked. Toward the last she smiled to herself. When I had finished she jumped up, laughing, working her fingers together.
“Thank you. Thank you,” she babbled. “Please don’t let me ever stop believing you. Make me believe you even if– No. It is true. Make me believe it always. Come on. Let’s walk some more.”
She almost ran me the rest of the way to the house, chattering all the way. Mickey Linehan was on the porch. I stopped there with him while the girl went in.