There was the same
lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters ...
_Tissonier_ ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my stock! How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine baronial
envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it gave
to the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of what an
envelope should carry. “It’s my envelope! It’s one of my envelopes!”

I faced Mildred’s eyes: and I was whole again, for in her own there was
no withdrawal, no banal suspicion marring their bestowal. She spoke,
and lightly:

“Could there be some simple explanation?”

“There must be.”

She smiled: for she knew that my response proved I had understood
the caress of her own thoughts. Oh, Mildred, how I loved you at that
moment, how unbelievably pure stood your spirit in my mind, and how I
quailed to think that these mists of blindness and blood should mar
your dwelling in my life and the sweet entrance of my life in yours. “Let me see,” she was saying while I longed for peace ... peace with
my love: “Let’s put our heads together.... It is my writing, forged. It is your envelope, stolen. We can dismiss the possibility of someone
else just within our circle having my hand, and having gone to just
that _papeterie_ in Paris for his correspondence paper. I suppose your
stationery is accessible enough?”

“It stands in an open pigeonhole in the base of my table.”

“John, do you know anyone who knows both me and Philip ... some
possible person?”

I had to be equal to her coolness: this was the very wine of my love
that she was perpetually in her moods and acts inspiring me to a new
height of conduct. “I can think of no one. Of course, that remark is worthless: there
might be such a person without my knowing it. But where would the
motive be in stealing my envelope and forging your script upon it? The
whole complex act strikes me as stupid: a gratuitous elaboration in no
way fitting the simplicity of the murder. Just look, Mildred. A man
announces, when he knows Mr. LaMotte to be alone, that he is the bearer
of a message. He does not say, from whom. He would not be expected to
say: for if the message is confidential, the name of the sender will
not be transmitted over the telephone. What comes next? He is in the
presence of his victim; if he has a letter at all, its purpose is
already fulfilled in the act of handing it over. At that moment must
come the blow. I can see a reason in his having forged your hand. Mr. LaMotte’s interest would be greater, opening the note. In his
engrossment, the assassin would have an easier field for his work.”

“More than engrossment. Amazement. Philip finds in the envelope no note
at all. He finds a word from me in such strange hands ... and no note.”

“That is true. It would be enough to bewilder: to stun. That is
important. But why my envelope?”

“Well, it _is_ your envelope?” she smiled again. “I feel certain of it.”

“There must be a reason. Possibly to attach suspicion to yourself?”

“A clumsy way, Mildred. A clumsy thing to do since I never met the man. Besides, the envelope lies on the floor of a passage where the police
failed even to find it. The murderer would not have bungled there after
his perfect blow. The envelope would have been in the victim’s hand if
it was to serve as a false clew.”

“You are assuming perfection in the murderer, John. That does not
strike me as correct. If he’d been perfect he’d have left no clew at
all ... and he was seen, seen clearly. Therefore, he is not perfect. Therefore, illogic might enter in: even contradiction--even absurd
elaboration.”

“Yes.” I was thinking of my talk with Doctor Stein. Where had my sudden
words sprung from?--Perfection ... illogic ... contradiction: Mildred
went on:

“You can’t assume that this act is a perfect single whole, with no
excrescence, no alien details.”

I marveled at her. “A man so perfect as to murder perfectly would not murder at all.”

“Go on.”

“Not murder Philip LaMotte.”

“Go on.”

“The fact that he needed to destroy a person so noble, so great, proves
his own imperfection: proves that there was a flaw in him; a flaw of
bad thinking, a flaw of impure action. By that flaw you will find him.”

“Mildred, you mean that it is precisely in some act of his which we who
are not murderers would reason could not have been committed, that we
will find him?”

“That you will find him, John.”

“I?”

“I think you will look for him, John.”

“Not we?”

“I cannot look for him, John. But I feel that you will look for him ...
and you are going to find him.”

So quietly she spoke: almost so pleasantly: again I knew how in her
perfection there could be room not alone for no fear, even for no
emphasis. She had the ruthlessness of purity. And I was caught in it:
held now forever in the white fierce light of her exaction. Would I
burn in it? or grow luminous? Would I grow luminous first, and burn at
last? So quietly she spoke: “I feel that you will find him.”

And I was quiet, too. I had resolved to tell my whole experience: in
the street at the hour of Philip LaMotte’s death, in his room this
morning where his wound had told so mysterious a tale. Her way silenced
me. She did not want to enter, in her own person, this dark threshold. Was she commanding me to proceed for her, or was she expressing her
impersonal knowledge of what I was going to do? It mattered little. I
knew the event chained me. I knew that she knew what I was going to do. Perhaps when I saw light I might know also why. But she was sitting near, and this was real. In her face lay a warm
flush: the glamor of her mouth and of her skin and hair was heightened
by a dark suffusion from her eyes. Mildred was nearer to maturity. A
new reticence held her within herself. There upon her face I saw what
I had seen before upon the face of a woman newly loving, or of a woman
pregnant: a secret pride darkling her glory from the world and giving
to her beauty, whose like I knew not, the magic of apartness. So full I was of forbidden questioning that I sat silent and watched
her. What in her flesh was this dawn-like pregnancy? Was it love? love
then for whom? If it was love for me would her new fending off have
been against myself? If it was love for Philip--murdered Philip--would
it not glow like sunset rather than like dawn?--You are a mystery, too,
sitting so graciously apart in this harsh public place with its angular
colors and its shallow shapes. Mystery mothers me: I must be born once
more from a mysterious womb. --I cannot even say: Mildred, I love you. You do not dismiss me but you
hold me off.... Now she chatted. She was in no way broken. And I saw
how great her confidence in me, since she looked with her candid eyes
in mine that would have quailed, had hers found falsehood there. --No, you believe in me. And chatting here so bright within this
whirling social dust, you sheathe for me a knowing that is tender! Mildred gives me her hand on the street steps. “Good-by, John.