She sounded faintly embarrassed, as if she’d got involved in that rigamarole of explanation and couldn’t find any way to turn it off.

Hampstead was fifteen miles south of town, where you left the highway to go to Javier Lake. It was silly to drive down there and back just for an old khaki shirt, but there didn’t seem to be any graceful way out of it. Then it occurred to me I might learn a little more about Cliffords if I talked to her. I was going to need all the information I could get.

“Sure, I’ll be right there,” I said. “It’s awfully nice of you to go to all this trouble.”

I called to Otis to take over, and hit the highway out of town. Less than twenty minutes later I was in Hampstead. It was a village with a population of less than a thousand, in a tomato-growing community. The highway by-passed it at a distance of about half a mile. There was a big packing shed near the railroad tracks and beyond that a cluster of buildings about a block long that comprised the business district. It was quiet and half asleep in the white sunlight of noon. I saw her old station wagon parked on the left in front of the grocery, directly across the street from the drugstore. I pulled into a space beyond the drugstore and was just getting out when I saw him.

There were a few people on the sidewalks, mostly farmers in khaki and overalls and a teen-age girl or two in jeans, but this one was no tomato-grower. He’d just come out of the hardware place at the corner on the other side of the street and was lighting a cigarette while he studied the other store fronts along that side. He was wearing a snap-brim Panama and a gray suit and had a thin briefcase under his arm. He could be a salesman, of course, but even at a distance of half a block you could see that young, alert, well-pressed neatness of the F.B.I, agent written all over him. They must be taking this end of the country apart. I hoped that bundle I’d put on the bus would start hitting the Kansas City or Chicago banks in a few days; they were making me nervous.

I pushed open the screen door of the drugstore and went in. A couple of old-fashioned overhead fans moved sluggishly, faintly stirring the air. At the left two teen-age boys with gooey concoctions before them slouched on stools and sprawled against the soda fountain like melting wax figures. There was a counter and a prescription department at the rear, and three booths on the right, behind the magazine stands. Most of the floor space in the center was taken up with racks holding cosmetics and candy and other assorted merchandise. She was in one of the booths, watching the door. Her eyes lit up and she gave me a faintly embarrassed smile.

I walked over. “You look very nice,” I said, smiling down at her. She had on a crisp summery dress with very short sleeves and a lacy spray of white at the throat, and this time she’d done a better job with the lipstick. A narrow blue ribbon passed under the cascade of tawny hair and was tied with a little bow at the top of her head. It made her appear younger, not more than twenty at most. “The shirt is in that paper bag,” she said awkwardly. It was on the table before her, with a couple of other small parcels and a half-finished lemonade.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked. “After all, I do want to thank you.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “I mean—please sit down. But I’ll have to run in just a minute.”

She was as transparent as glass, a basically nice kid sticking her toe in the water and then drawing back in alarm. It wasn’t me, particularly. It was the bleakness of her life in general. Probably anybody who bathed as often as once a week and didn’t scratch himself in public could score with any one of the standard approaches if he’d merely take the trouble to restore her faith in her own desirability. She’d called me, and now by God it was up to me; she wasn’t sure, either, just how much she wanted to happen, but it would be nice just to be able to use some of the old defense patterns again,