Ned Beaumont nodded politely, but did not say anything. He left the fireplace and sat not far from her on a sofa with lyre ends. Though he was attentive, there was no curiosity in his mien.
Turning on the piano-bench to face him directly, she asked: “How is Opal?” Her voice was low, intimate.
His voice was casual: “Perfectly all right as far as I know, though I haven’t seen her since last week.” He lifted his cigar half a foot towards his mouth, lowered it, and as if the question had just come to his mind asked: “Why?”
She opened her brown eyes wide. “Isn’t she in bed with a nervous break-down?”
“Oh, that!” he said carelessly, smiling. “Didn’t Paul tell you?”
“Yes, he told me she was in bed with a nervous break-down.” She stared at him, perplexed. “He told me that.”
Ned Beaumont’s smile became gentle. “I suppose he’s sensitive about it,” he said slowly, looking at his cigar. Then he looked up at her and moved his shoulders a little. “There’s nothing the matter with her that way. It’s simply that she got the foolish idea that he had killed your brother and–still more foolishly–was going around talking about it. Well, Paul couldn’t have his daughter running around accusing him of murder, so he had to keep her home till she gets the notion out of her head.”
“You mean she’s–” she hesitated: her eyes were bright “–she’s-well–a prisoner?”
“You make it sound melodramatic,” he protested carelessly. “She’s only a child. Isn’t making children stay in their rooms one of the usual ways of disciplining them?”
Janet Henry replied hastily: “Oh, yes! Only–” She looked at her hands in her lap, up at his face again. “But why did she think that?”
Ned Beaumont’s voice was tepid as his smile. “Who doesn’t?” he asked.
She put her hands on the edge of the piano-bench beside her and leaned forward. Her white face was earnestly set. “That’s what I wanted to ask von, Mr. Beaumont. Do people think that?”
He nodded. His face was placid.
Her knuckles were white over the bench-edge. Her voice was parched asking: “Why?”
He rose from the sofa and crossed to the fireplace to drop the remainder of his cigar into the fire. When he returned to his seat he crossed his long legs and leaned back at ease. “The other side thinks it’s good politics to make people think that,” he said. There was nothing in his voice, his face, his manner to show that he had any personal interest in what he was talking about.
She frowned. “But, Mr. Beaumont, why should people think it unless there’s some sort of evidence, or something that can be made to look like evidence?”
He looked curiously and amusedly at her. “There is, of course,” he said. “I thought you knew that.” He combed a side of his mustache with a thumb-nail. “Didn’t you get any of the anonymous letters that’ve been going around?”
She stood up quickly. Excitement distorted her face. “Yes, today!” she exclaimed. “I wanted to show it to you, to–”
He laughed softly and raised a hand, palm out in an arresting gesture. “Don’t bother. They all seem to be pretty much alike and I’ve seen plenty of them.”
She sat down again, slowly, reluctantly.
He said: “Well, those letters, the stuff the Observer was printing till we pulled it out of the fight, the talk the others have been circulating”– he shrugged his thin shoulders–“they’ve taken what facts there are and made a pretty swell case against Paul.”
She took her lower lip from between her teeth to ask: “Is–is he actually in danger?”
Ned Beaumont nodded and spoke with calm certainty: “If he loses the election, loses his hold on the city and state government, they’ll electrocute him.”
She shivered and asked in a voice that shook: “But he’s safe if he wins?”
Ned Beaumont nodded again. “Sure.”
She caught her breath. Her lips trembled so that her words came out jerkily: “Will he win?”
“I think so.”
“And it won’t make any difference then no matter how much evidence there is against him, he’ll–” her voice broke “–he’ll not be in danger?”