garage door and let myself in at the front of the house. Going on through, I unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out to the garage again. She had already got out and was standing there with her bag. I took it and followed her in.

The curtains were drawn in the kitchen and the Venetian blinds closed in the dining- and living-rooms. We went on through to the living-room and I put down her bag.

She dropped her purse on the coffee table and turned. I caught her to me and kissed the upraised lips and closed eyes and then whispered rapturously against her ear, “Darling, darling; it won t be long,” at the same time reminding myself she probably wouldn’t want to get very sweaty about it here, under the circumstances, and that there was a lot to be done.

She surrendered to it for an instant, and then began pushing me away, breathless and confused but radiantly happy. “No, Barney. No. Let’s hurry and get started.”

“All right, sweet,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

She sat down on the sofa near the phonograph and took a cigarette from her bag. I lit it for her. She smiled and said, “It’s so wonderful it’s like a dream.”

I turned toward the stairs, and then stopped, struck by an odd thought.

“Look,” I asked, “how did you know she was gone?”

She smilingly shook her head at me. “It was in the paper, silly. Don’t you ever look at it?”

“Oh,” I said. I went on up the stairs. Well, there was that to be said for having a rich wife; you could always read the paper and find out what she was doing. I grabbed two of my suitcases from the hall closet, took them into the bedroom, and began throwing clothes into them. It required less than a minute to see I was never going to get more than a quarter of my personal gear into them. And I needed the other bag for the money; it was the only one to which I hadn’t lost the key.

Well, why not ship the trunk? I could put the money in that other bag, throw away most of the useless rubbish that was stored in it now, and pack it with things I wanted to take. I could leave it on the kitchen porch and phone to have it picked up and forwarded collect care Railway Express in Miami. Right. That was it.

I picked up the other bag from the closet and hurried down the stairs. She was still on the sofa. I made the circle sign with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and said, “I’m gaining on it,” as I hurried on toward the kitchen. She looked up and smiled, but remained where she was.

Down in the den, I pulled the trunk away from the wall and unlocked it. Just as I was about to throw the first of the stuff out, I looked at my watch. I whistled. It was two twenty. The bank closed in ten minutes. And I had to cash that check. Sure, I had over a hundred thousand dollars right here under my hand; but how would it look to the F.B.I., in case they investigated, if I ran off like this without bothering to withdraw any of the over fifteen hundred I had in my personal current account? I couldn’t speak for them, but I knew it would look damned suspicious to me.

I slammed the trunk shut and hurried back up the stairs. “Have to get to the bank before it closes,” I called out to her from the door of the dining-room. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, sweet.”

She smiled and waved. “Please hurry, darling.”

I went out the kitchen door and backed the car out of the garage. Luck was with me and I found a parking place right across the street from the bank.

I made a quick calculation of my balance and wrote out a check for $1,540. Arthur Pressler gave it to me in fifties and twenties, looked up once as if to ask me why I was withdrawing my account, and then decided it wasn’t efficient to indulge in such human foibles as curiosity. I glanced at my watch and stopped in Joey’s for a quick cup of coffee. He waited on me himself.

He was a fat and humorous man with six or seven long hairs combed diagonally across a head as slick and shiny on top as a steel roller bearing,