“A fog.”
“And when he came home this afternoon at five?”
“Five-thirty—nearer six, even.”
“Toward six, he joined you in the living room and gave you the weekly excuse.”
“I didn’t say the living room. It was the top floor—you may have noticed that this house has a peaked roof—in what would correspond in the country to an attic—” She stopped sharply, and her defensive veneer cracked for an instant, long enough to show that she was definitely startled. “I—”
“You feel that you shouldn’t have told me that. Perhaps you shouldn’t. If the fact of your having met Mr. Endicott in the attic has nothing to do with the case at all, it will cause us to snoop around among your personal affairs unnecessarily.”
“He didn’t ‘meet’ me there, as you say. He—I don’t know why he came up there. I never will know why.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
Mrs. Endicott forced Lieutenant Valcour’s full attention by the almost startling intentness of her eyes. “There has never been a direct question put or answered between Herbert and me during the whole period of our married or unmarried life,” she said. “My hold on him was the static perfection of my features and a running, superficial smartness in attitude and mind that passed for intellect. His hold on me was that I loved him.”
“Even when you wished to kill him?”
“I suppose even then. Mind you, I never wished him dead —there’s a difference.”