About this story
He comes home early one afternoon with an inherited title and no curiosity about the manuscript you just finished. A caller arrives with gossip about a supper he took with a dancer named Marina, and once the room empties, your friend Paul Valdis stays behind, angry enough to say you are protected from things your happiness has hidden, then leaves without naming one of them.
How it opens
Spring sunlight crossed your study and reached the final page of a novel completed after four months of work.
You were Delicia Vaughan, a celebrated author whose earnings maintained every comfort in the house.
Spartan, those hoofbeats sound like Wilfred, though he never returns this early.
Lord CarlyonI have news worth interrupting even the last page of one of your books.
Choose
Close the manuscript and give him the attention he plainly came home to claim.
Ask whether some new expense has brought him back before luncheon.