Murder by Reflection by H. F. Heard

mixture. He and Miss Gayton had met casually. They had both been walking up the canyon looking for the brief, extraordinary outbreak of wild flowers—blossoms springing from the harshest soil and from stems which look like ribs and veins of rock itself and yet with petals of a delicacy no rich garden flower can show. Even the stony-looking succulents and the fierce cactus then produce blooms which in gloss, bloom, and frail gentleness seem to be the outcome of a sudden wish to compensate for the forbidding impression they have made all the rest of the year—as a harsh businessman will suddenly make a gesture of perfect, unstinted generosity.
    She was lonely too. The intense brightness of the place, the open friendliness of everyone, made her feel pale and gauche. She had come out West from New England because of a pre-phthisical condition, but she had one ground for hope—the optimism of the full consumptive was certainly not hers. They met several times. No doubt each went to the same place with a certain growing hope. But they made no rendezvous.
    He made a psychological bridge for her. He, too, was lonely. He felt no wish to make contacts with Aumic civics, and his grand home was turning for him into no home at all, but a sort of vacant prison. But he had come quickly to love this southern wilderness and gradually, with his help, she learned to see its beauty. About this new interest of his he had no wish to be secretive. In fact, after they had been meeting off and on for a month or so, he remarked to his mother that though the town didn’t seem to have anybody in it who’d be much company—at least for people who cared for the past and its culture—he had run across a newcomer whom he thought she might find quite intelligent.
    â€œWhere is she from?” Irene had somehow suspected that it was a woman.
    The answer, “Somewhere in New England,” which he thought might please, he now saw was also a piece of unwelcome news.
    â€œI’d rather not see anyone from back East.”
    â€œBut the woman’s quite lonely …” He paused; that too was wrong, more wrong. You can’t use for another the plea of loneliness to awake compassion in a woman who herself is feeling that you are failing in your full duty to make her feel un-lonely.
    Irene saw, however, even more quickly than he, that she was making a mistake in making him feel that she was wanting to be unfriendly. She compelled her voice, though not her tone, to say, “She will be very welcome any time she would like to call,” and then, letting her suspicions explode obliquely, “I expect she is pretty wretched in a miserable, upstart little town like this, a pathetic little piece of pretentious stucco standing in this gaunt desolation!”
    Certainly it would have been wiser to let the matter drop. But Arnoldo had no intention of dropping his new friend. She was a fresh interest for him, different from the girls he had known, and of course very different from the woman to whose company it now seemed he might be confined. He saw, further, that if he did not drop Miss Gayton and if she did not meet Mrs. Heron, then the affair would grow, would have to grow, unpleasantly underhand. He knew he would find that too exhausting to continue. Sometimes he told deliberate lies, quite carefully constructed ones; but he always had to have quite a number of good reasons for taking so much trouble and as the reasons were apt to change, he found it very hard to keep up a consistent mendacity.
    Besides, he had no intention of marrying. He knew that marriage would create a frightful storm and cut him off from all those luxuries which were, of course, already almost necessities. His mother gave him everything he asked. He didn’t mind—indeed, he rather liked—going to her like a boy who does not think about money but only about getting the particular thing he wants; and she apparently seemed to like paying