There was nothing he could do about it, though.
He went in. He hung up his coat. He sat down wearily.
He filled his pipe and grimly faced a night that was going to be one of the worst.
He struck a match and lighted his pipe, and put the match in an ashtray. And he glanced in the tray. There were the stubs of cigarets in it. Jane's brand.
Freshly smoked.
He touched them with his fingers. They were real.
Then a furious anger filled him.
Maybe the cleaning woman had had the intolerable insolence to smoke Jane's cigarets.
He got up and stormed through the house, raging as he searched for signs of further impertinence.
He found none.
He came back, seething, to his chair. The ashtray was empty.
And there'd been nobody around to empty it.
It was logical to question his own sanity, and the question gave him a sort of grim cheer.
The matter of the recurrent oddities could be used to fight the abysmal depression ahead.
He tried to reason them out, and always they added up to delusions only.
But he kept his mind resolutely on the problem.
Work, during the day, was a godsend.
Sometimes he was able to thrust aside for whole half-hours the fact that Jane was dead.
Now he grappled relievedly with the question of his sanity or lunacy.
He went to the desk where Jane had kept her household accounts.
He'd set the whole thing down on paper and examine it methodically, checking this item against that.
Jane's diary lay on the desk-blotter, with a pencil between two of its pages.
He picked it up with a tug of dread.
Some day he might read it—an absurd chronicle Jane had never offered him—but not now. Not now!
That was when he realized that it shouldn't be here.
His hands jumped, and it fell open.
He saw Jane's angular writing and it hurt. He closed it quickly, aching all over.
But the printed date at the top of the page registered on his brain even as he snapped the cover shut.
He sat still for minutes, every muscle taut.
It was a long time before he opened the book again, and by that time he had a perfectly reasonable explanation.
It must be that Jane hadn't restricted herself to assigned spaces. When she had something extra to write, she wrote it on past the page allotted for a given date.
Of course!
Jimmy fumbled back to the last written page, where the pencil had been, with a tense matter-of-factness.
It was, as he'd noticed, today's date.
The page was filled. The writing was fresh. It was Jane's handwriting.
"Went to the cemetery," said the sprawling letters.
"It was very bad.
Three months since the accident and it doesn't get any easier.
I'm developing a personal enmity to chance. It doesn't seem like an abstraction any more.
It was chance that killed Jimmy.
It could have been me instead, or neither of us. I wish—"
Jimmy went quietly mad for a moment or two.
When he came to himself he was staring at an empty desk-blotter.
There wasn't any book before him.
There wasn't any pencil between his fingers.
He remembered picking up the pencil and writing desperately under Jane's entry.
"Jane!" he'd written—and he could remember the look of his scrawled script under Jane's—"where are you?
I'm not dead!
I thought you were!
In God's name, where are you?"