The conversation was gay and even boisterous.
Jasper and his brother were loud-voiced and all three of them, Jasper, Emery, and Emery's wife, were loquacious talkers.
They chaffed one another, they joked and laughed; they discussed art, literature, music, and the theatre.
Wyman and I joined in when we had a chance, which was not often; Laura did not try to.
She sat at the head of the table, serene, with an amused, indulgent smile on her lips as she listened to their scatter-brained nonsense; it was not stupid nonsense, mind you, it was intelligent and modern, but it was nonsense all the same.
There was something maternal in her attitude, and I was reminded oddly of a sleek dachshund lying quietly in the sun while she looks lazily, and yet watchfully, at her litter of puppies romping round her.
I wondered whether it crossed her mind that all this chatter about art didn't amount to much when compared with those incidents of blood and passion that she remembered.
But did she remember?
It had all happened a long time ago and perhaps it seemed no more than a bad dream.
Perhaps those commonplace surroundings were part of her deliberate effort to forget, and to be among these young people was restful to her spirit.
Perhaps Jasper's clever stupidity was a comfort.
After that searing tragedy it might be that she wanted nothing but the security of the humdrum.
Possibly because Wyman was an authority on the Elizabethan drama the conversation at one moment touched on that.
I had already discovered that Jasper Greene was prepared to lay down the law on subjects all and sundry, and now he delivered himself as follows:
'Our theatre has gone all to pot because the dramatists of our day are afraid to deal with the violent emotions which are the proper subject matter of tragedy,' he boomed.
'In the sixteenth century they had a wealth of melodramatic and bloody themes to suit their purpose and so they produced great plays.
But where can our playwrights look for themes?
Our Anglo-Saxon blood is too phlegmatic, too supine, to provide them with material they can make anything of, and so they are condemned to occupy themselves with the trivialities of social intercourse.'
I wondered what Laura thought of this, but I took care not to catch her eye.
She could have told them a story of illicit love, jealousy, and parricide which would have been meat to one of Shakespeare's successors, but had he treated it, I suppose he would have felt bound to finish it with at least one more corpse strewn about the stage.
The end of her story, as I knew it now, was unexpected certainly, but sadly prosaic and a trifle grotesque.
Real life more often ends things with a whimper than with a bang.
I wondered too why she had gone out of her way to renew our old acquaintance.
Of course she had no reason to suppose that I knew as much as I did; perhaps with a true instinct she was confident that I would not give her away; perhaps she didn't care if I did.
I stole a glance at her now and then while she was quietly listening to the excited babbling of the three young people, but her friendly, pleasant face told me nothing.
If I hadn't known otherwise I would have sworn that no untoward circumstance had ever troubled the course of her uneventful life.
The evening came to an end and this is the end of my story, but for the fun of it I am going to relate a small incident that happened when Wyman and I got back to his house.
We decided to have a bottle of beer before going to bed and went into the kitchen to fetch it.
The clock in the hall struck eleven and at that moment the phone rang.
Wyman went to answer it and when he came back was quietly chortling to himself.
'What's the joke?' I asked.
'It was one of my students.
They're not supposed to call members of the faculty after ten-thirty, but he was all hot and bothered.
He asked me how evil had come into the world.'
'And did you tell him?'
'I told him that St Thomas Aquinas had got hot and bothered too about that very question and he'd better worry it out for himself.
I said that when he found the solution he was to call me, no matter what time it was. Two o'clock in the morning if he liked.'
'I think you're pretty safe not to be disturbed for many a long night,' I said.
'I won't conceal from you that I have formed pretty much the same impression myself,' he grinned.