Horace began to drill the woman, tramping back and forth upon the narrow floor.
Goodwin finished his cigar and sat motionless again, his arms folded and his head bent.
The clock above the square struck nine and then ten.
The child whimpered, stirred.
The woman stopped and changed it and took the bottle from beneath her flank and fed it.
Then she leaned forward carefully and looked into Goodwin’s face.
“He’s asleep,” she whispered.
“Shall we lay him down?” Horace whispered.
“No.
Let him stay there.”
Moving quietly she laid the child on the cot and moved herself to the other end of it.
Horace carried the chair over beside her.
They spoke in whispers.
The clock struck eleven.
Still Horace drilled her, going over and over the imaginary scene.
At last he said:
“I think that’s all.
Can you remember it, now?
If he should ask you anything you cant answer in the exact words you’ve learned tonight, just say nothing for a moment.
I’ll attend to the rest.
Can you remember, now?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He reached across and took the box of candy from the cot and opened it, the glazed paper crackling faintly.
She took a piece.
Goodwin had not moved.
She looked at him, then at the narrow slit of window.
“Stop that,” Horace whispered.
“He couldn’t reach him through that window with a hat-pin, let alone a bullet.
Dont you know that?”
“Yes,” she said. She held the bon-bon in her hand.
She was not looking at him. “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered.
“What?”
“When you got to the house and I wasn’t there.
I know what you’re thinking.”
Horace watched her, her averted face.
“You said tonight was the time to start paying you.”
For a while longer he looked at her.
“Ah,” he said.
“O tempora!
O mores! O hell!
Can you stupid mammals never believe that any man, every man—You thought that was what I was coming for?
You thought that if I had intended to, I’d have waited this long?”
She looked at him briefly.
“It wouldn’t have done you any good if you hadn’t waited.”
“What?
Oh.
Well.
But you would have tonight?”
“I thought that was what—”
“You would now, then?”