He shifted by the fraction of an inch the old-fashioned “hand-colored” daguerreotype of his father in Confederate uniform.  “Please don’t wear that black dress again.  It is no cause for mourning that we are rid of an encumbrance.”

Behind him, very far away, it seemed, he heard Patricia wailing, “Olaf——!”

Colonel Musgrave turned without any haste.  “Please go,” he said, and appeared to plead with her.  “You must be frightfully tired.  I am sorry that I was not here.  I seem always to evade my responsibilities, somehow—­”

Then he began to laugh.  “It is rather amusing, after all.  Agatha was the most noble person I have ever known.  The—­this habit of hers to which you have alluded was not a part of her.  And I loved Agatha.  And I suppose loving is not altogether dependent upon logic.  In any event, I loved Agatha.  And when I came back to her I had come home, somehow—­wherever she might be at the time.  That has been true, oh, ever since I can remember—­”

He touched the dead hand now.  “Please go!” he said, and he did not look toward Patricia.  “For Agatha loved me better than she did God, you know.  The curse was born in her.  She had to pay for what those dead, soft-handed Musgraves did.  That is why her hands are so cold now.  She had to pay for the privilege of being a Musgrave, you see.  But then we cannot always pick and choose as to what we prefer to be.”

“Oh, yes, of course, it is all my fault.  Everything is my fault.  But God knows what would have become of you and your Agatha if it hadn’t been for me.  Oh! oh!” Patricia wailed.  “I was a child and I hadn’t any better sense, and I married you, and you’ve been living off my money ever since!  There hasn’t been a Christmas present or a funeral wreath bought in this house since I came into it I didn’t pick out and pay for out of my own pocket.  And all the thanks I get for it is this perpetual fault-finding, and I wish I was dead like this poor saint here.  She spent her life slaving for you.  And what thanks did she get for it?  Oh, you ought to go down on your knees, Rudolph Musgrave—!”

“Please leave,” he said.

“I will leave when I feel like it, and not a single minute before, and you might just as well understand as much.  You have been living off my money.  Oh, you needn’t go to the trouble of lying.  And she did too.  And she hated me, she always hated me, because I had been fool enough to marry you, and she carried on like a lunatic more than half the time, and I always pretended not to notice it, and this is my reward for trying to behave like a lady.”

Patricia tossed her head.  “Yes, and you needn’t look at me as if I were some sort of a bug you hadn’t ever seen before and didn’t approve of, because I’ve seen you try that high-and-mighty trick too often for it to work with me.”

Patricia stood now beneath the Stuart portrait of young Gerald Musgrave.  She had insisted, long ago, that it be hung in her own bedroom—­“because it was through that beautiful boy we first got really acquainted, Olaf.”  The boy smiles at you from the canvas, smiles ambiguously, as the colonel now noted.