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"Oh, I'm terribly sorry to hear about Deborah," she said. It was the fine, small voice of someone who knew her place as a lady. "Yes, yes. Of course I wrote that letter to Mrs. Tennyson. It came to me in a dream that you would lose the little girl unless you were very careful. I have a profession, you know. I interpret dreams. I told Mrs. Tennyson when I left her that she should take very good care of the little girl. She was born, after all, under that dreadful new planet, Pluto. I was on the Riviera when they discovered it, in 1938. We knew something dreadful was going to happen then.

"I loved the little girl dearly and I regretted my disagreement with Mrs. Tennyson," she went on. "The little girl was one of the fire people—banked fire. I gave her palm a good deal of study. We were left alone a great deal, of course. She had a long life line and a good sense of balance and a good head. There were signs of imprudence there, but a great deal of that would depend upon you... I saw deep water there and some great danger, some great hazard. That's why I wrote the letter to Mrs. Tennyson. I never charged Mrs. Tennyson for any of my professional services."

"What did you and Mrs. Tennyson fight about?" the sergeant asked.

"We're wasting time," Robert said. "We're wasting so much time. Let's go back." He got up and went out of the room, and the sergeant followed him. It took them a long time to drive back. The Sunday crowds crossing the streets stopped them at every intersection. The plainclothesman was waiting in front of the house. "You'd better go up and see your wife," he told Robert. Neither the doorman nor the elevator man spoke to him. He stepped into his apartment and called to Katherine. She was in their bedroom, sitting by the window. She had a black book in her lap. He saw that it was the Bible. It was a Gideon copy that a drunken friend of theirs had stolen from a hotel. They had used it once or twice as a reference. Beyond the open window, he could see the river, a wide, bright field of light. The room was very still.

"What about Mrs. Emerson?" Katherine asked.

"It was a mistake. It was a mistake to think that she would hurt the child."

"Renée called again. She took Mrs. Harley home. She wants us to telephone her when we find Deborah. I never want to see Renée again."

"I know."

"If anything happens to Deborah," Katherine said, "I can never forgive myself. I can never forgive myself. I'll feel as though we had sacrificed her. I've been reading about Abraham." She opened the Bible and began to read. "'And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.'" She closed the book. "The thing I'm afraid of is that I'll go out of my mind. I keep repeating our address and telephone number to myself. That doesn't make any sense, does it?"

Robert put his hand on her forehead and ran it over her hair. Her dark hair was parted at the side and brushed simply, like a child's.

"I'm afraid I'm going out of my mind," Katherine said. "You know what my first impulse was when you left me alone? I wanted to take a knife, a sharp knife, and go into my closet and destroy my clothes. I wanted to cut them to pieces. That's because they're so expensive. That's not a sensible thing to want to do, is it? But I'm not insane, of course. I'm perfectly rational.

"I had a little brother who died. His name was Charles—Charles, junior. He was named after my father and he died of some kind of sickness when he was two and a half years old, about Deborah's age. Of course it was very hard on Mother and Dad, but it wasn't anything as bad as this. You see, I think children mean much more to us than they did to our parents. That's what I've been thinking. I suppose it's