Psyche by Phyllis Young Page A

can’t guess how much pleasure it gives me. Dwight—oh, darling—I think I must be the happiest woman in the world.”
    In the shadows of the high box hedge bordering the back driveway to the house, a small flashlight winked once, no more noticeable in the gathering darkness than a firefly. A moment later the gaunt man was striding purposefully up the drive to the back door, while in his mind’s eye he reviewed the layout of the house as he had seen it on two previous occasions. Yet, having reached the door, he hesitated at this, the eleventh hour, his hand suspended above the iron door-knocker, while his opposing desires and fears engaged in a last desperate encounter over a battleground of nerves still raw from previous skirmishes.
    He could never afterwards recall making the actual decision. His hand, moving apparently without his conscious volition, lifted the knocker and dropped it back into place with a heavy reverberation which rippled across his cold skin like the first deep growl of an approaching storm. From that instant on it was as if he moved in a trance, doing and saying, with a cool precision quite foreign to him, everything he had so painstakingly planned.
    It was the stout cook who answered the door, and he could see that she recognized him at once, even in the diffuse light of the small electric lantern above his head.
    Taking the initiative with bold assurance, he said, “Sorry, Missis. It’s that there special fixture for upstairs.”
    â€œCouldn’t you ‘ave come——” the cook began, but she got no
    further with her protest, for—a conscientious workman not to be deterred from finishing his job—he was already manoeuvring an over-large tool-box through the open doorway. Almost perforce she moved back to let him pass.
    â€œWon’t be but a few minutes,” he told her quietly. “No need to disturb the folks if they’re at dinner.”
    On the far side of the large, brightly lit kitchen, a swing door opened as a maid came through with an empty soup plate in either hand, and he had a glimpse of candlelight and flowers, and heard a man’s deep voice and a woman’s laughter.
    With a quick surge of elation he realized that he had timed his actions perfectly. Walking neither slow nor fast, he crossed the kitchen toward the door that he knew concealed the back staircase.
    The cook, uncertainty written clearly on her broad face, wavered between the necessity to serve a roast at once, and the knowledge that this was no proper time for an electrician to be at work in a private house. The roast won; in part because she took a pride in her cooking; in part because the man’s assured familiarity with the house reminded her that he had been given right of entry twice before.
    Turning toward a gleaming white stove, she said, over her shoulder, “Greta, tell the master that electric chap’s here when you go in the dining-room.”
    The young maid, filling silver entrée dishes, nodded her neat dark head. “Hope he don’t wake the baby,” she said absently, and, a chap of her own to occupy her thoughts, promptly forgot the “electric chap” completely.
    In the upstairs hall the man paused, listening intently. The light from a lamp on a small table against one wall accentuated the razor-sharp contours of a face devoid of all expression, and found no compassion in eyes as dark as the purpose that sent him moving, furtive and silent, into the west wing of the house.
    The knob of the child’s door turned noiselessly under a hand now protected by a thin cotton glove. The door opened, and closed again behind him.
    A tiny night-light, which he himself had installed, showed him blue curtains, patterned with white lambs, billowing softly on a gentle night breeze; a flaxen-haired doll at rest on a blue carpet; a small pink dressing-gown hung over the back of a small chair; small pink bedroom slippers side by