until—”
“That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”
“She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—”
The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.
Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:
This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano—forwarded from his publishers—praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether