"Horrible. Horrible," said Aunt Ada, and Julia and Maud nodded, while Byron shrugged.

"That trick may just possibly have been a violation of his civil rights," I murmured, but no one paid any attention to that.

Jake took the cigar from his mouth, and said, "I have heard he is not above arranging false evidence, if he can't get proof any other way."

"Possibly." Byron shrugged again. "It's generally acknowledged that he is without moral purpose or even the comprehension of it. But the boys in Wall Street have not been heard to complain."

"No," said Jake. He nodded thoughtfully, and I felt certain he was thinking that after tonight he'd be one of those boys himself. I thought of asking whether Byrnes had had any success in apprehending blackmailers but didn't bother. We talked a little more about Byrnes; then about Guiteau, as always; and finally everyone but me joined in a thorough condemnation of Mormonism. From several references I learned that apparently polygamy was still going strong out on the Utah prairies, and no one here approved of that, though Byron seemed more amused than incensed. Then Julia and Aunt Ada passed around winter-apple pie for dessert.

It was a horrible evening; for me and for Jake. He was up and down, picking up a magazine or newspaper and reading for a few minutes, then hopping up to cross the room and talk to someone, hardly listening. For a while he sat alone at the dining-room table playing solitaire. Twice he went up to his room — for a drink, I suspected — and came right down again.

I was physically quieter but my mind was screaming. Twice I had to beat down the nearly irresistible temptation to get up, walk out to the kitchen where Julia and her aunt were washing dishes, and tell her everything I had to tell — about where I'd come from, why I was here, and everything I'd learned about Jake.

I just didn't know what to do, and I don't remember whether I even tried to read. A little after ten — his mind, I was certain, filled with what was about to happen — Jake couldn't stand it anymore: he said an abrupt good-night to Julia, who was sitting at the dining-room table now, mending a towel, and went upstairs. Maud went up to her room a few minutes later, and within another five minutes — this was an early-rising household — Byron and Felix, who'd been sitting in the parlor matching pennies, had gone up, too. Aunt Ada came in from the kitchen, and when I heard her in the hall locking the front door, there was nothing left for me to do but say good-night, too, and go on up to my room. As I climbed the stairs, Julia and her aunt were turning out lamps and discussing the breakfast menu.

In my room I stood in the dark with my ear at the door crack, heard Aunt Ada and Julia go up to the third floor to their rooms, heard their good-night to each other, listened a few moments longer, and heard no one out in the second-floor hall. Then — now or never — I opened my door, stepped out, closed it silently, and climbed quickly and without a sound to the third floor. Julia's room faced the street, I knew, and there was a crack of light under her door. I walked to it and rapped very lightly with a fingernail. Julia opened the door, and I said, "I waited till you came up here; I have something to tell you that no one else must know."

She hesitated only the fraction of a moment, then nodded. "Come in." I walked into a small room with a single dormer window, a window seat underneath it, a cot with a white spread, a small desk, a rocking chair. Julia motioned politely to the chair, but I said, "No, you take it," and sat down on the window seat. Julia took the chair, facing me, and with her wrists crossed on her lap, smiling at me pleasantly, she sat waiting.

I said the only thing I'd been able to think of during that long long evening, and maybe it was the best thing I could have said, because it was uncomplicated. "I'm a private detective," I told her, and in her nod I thought I could see a kind of satisfaction as though this answered a question. "I'm here to investigate one of your boarders, I'm sorry to say." I waited a moment, then added, "For blackmail." Her eyes grew bigger; she knew I wasn't talking about Felix or Byron, and I nodded in confirmation of what she was thinking. "When this will become generally known, I'm not sure. Perhaps it never will be. It might even be successful; I'm not from the police." I hesitated, then said, "Julia, I couldn't let you marry him; I had to tell you this."

Her voice level, neither disputing nor agreeing, she said, "And whom do you say he is blackmailing?"

I told her; the name meant nothing to her. But then in almost his own words I described Jake's preparations of over two years, his real reason for working at City Hall; and watching her face, I suspected it had the sound of plausibility to her, that some old questions in her mind had just been given a possible answer. I told her about the meeting planned for tonight, that I was going to eavesdrop, and how. Then for quite a while, as long as three or four minutes, which is a long time in those circumstances, Julia sat silently considering what I had said. Before her bed lay an oval hooked rug, faded from many washings, and she'd stare at that, glance up at me appraisingly, then down at the rug again. I sat leaning back against the window, feeling the coldness of the glass through my coat, looking around the room; it was very neat, very spare. There were a couple of framed pictures on the wall, of no consequence, and half a dozen books and a church paper stacked on the window ledge; I couldn't see the book titles. The walls were papered to within a yard or so of the ceiling; clean white plaster after that. The single gas jet, directly over the head of her painted iron bedstead, was fitted with an opaque white globe.

This was a comfortable enough room, an acceptable retreat for a busy person who didn't spend much time in it. But it had a temporary ownerless character, almost deliberately so; looking around it, then glancing again as I did now at Julia — her lower lip was caught under her front teeth, and she was frowning at the rug, moving it slightly with the toe of one buttoned shoe — I thought I could guess what she might be thinking. This was an intelligent forceful girl who helped her aunt run a boardinghouse for a living. There must have been some rough times in that; she'd have a feeling for reality. She'd thought about her own future, and it wasn't in this room but in marriage. Yet as soon as she heard what I'd said about Jake, she knew it might be true.

Was she thinking about marrying him anyway? Warning him about me? Maybe, but I didn't think so. It was a risk I had to take. I didn't know what she'd felt about Jake when she'd agreed to marry him. It was hard for me to believe it was love, but who ever knows about that, or even what the word means to anyone else? She'd felt something for him; she may have been calculating to a degree — forced to be — but she wasn't ruthless. She felt something for Jake but she was also real-minded about herself and her future; she wasn't simply accepting my word against him, but she wasn't denying the possibility either. I don't know whether I saw a movement from a corner of my eye — probably I did — but I turned my head to look down at the street, and Jake was just stepping off the bottom step of the front stoop, buttoning his coat, and I stood up quickly to get out of sight in case he looked up.

Julia knew instantly what I'd seen. She stepped to a curtain, moved it a half inch from the wall, then stood — I was behind her now, looking over her shoulder — watching Jake walk quickly to the Twentieth Street corner and out of sight. I think Julia would have decided as she did anyway, but this cinched it. She stood staring after him for a moment or so after he'd gone from sight, then turned and — not asking, just telling me — said, "I'm going with you tonight."