prepared for the manner in which she received it.

"Off? What d'you mean?"

"I've been down and I've seen Mercier."

"He told you what?"

She had raised her head. Her red mouth slackened as if with the passage
of some cry inaudible. Her eyes stared, not at her husband, but beyond
and a little above him; there was a look in them of terror and enraged
desire, as if the object of their vision were retreating, vanishing.

But it was all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only
remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had
spoken of Mercier she had "looked queer."

And the queerest thing was that she did not know Mercier then, or
hardly; hardly to speak to.

He answered her question.

"He told me he'd taken the rooms, of course."

"And so he _did_ take them!"

"Yes, he took them all right. But I had to tell him that he couldn't
have them."

"But you can't act like that. You can't turn him out if he wants to
come."

"Oh, _can't_ I? _He_ knows that. Jolly well he knows it. _He_ won't want
to come. Anyhow, he isn't coming."

"You stopped him?"

"Should think I did. Rather," said Ranny, cheerfully.

She shot at him from those covering brows of hers a look that was
malignant and vindictive. It missed him clean.

"Y--y--you----!" Whatever word she would have uttered she drew it back
with her vehement breath. "_What_ did you do that for?"

"Why, because I don't want the fellow in the house."

"Why--don't--you want him?" Her shaking voice crept now as if under
cover.

"Because I don't approve of him. That's why."

"What have you got against him?"

"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No more would you if you knew
anything about him. Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if you
had him here."

She pushed her plate violently away from her with its untasted food, and
planted her elbows on the table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in
her hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily collapse.
Foreshortened, flattened by its backward tilt, its full jowl strained
back, its chin thrust toward him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of
her hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their slant lids, her
face was hardly recognizable as the face he knew.

But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost on Ranny. He said
to himself: "She's rattled, poor girl; and she's worried. That's why she
looks so queer."

"You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "w