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the car started up beneath them.
    “I reckon you must feel like you were being kidnaped, Mr. Young,” the girl said, smiling.
    It took him a while to realize that she had addressed him by his rightful name.

Chapter Three
    He awoke gradually to the sound of a phone ringing somewhere in the house to which he had been brought. They had given him something when they put him to bed here and it had not quite worn off yet; he lay drowsily with his eyes closed, unready to move, but listening. Somebody came out of a room not far away and went downstairs to answer. The door to his room was apparently open; he could hear the quick, light footsteps receding down the stairs — the sound dulled by a carpet — and then the girl’s voice speaking with the soft Georgia accent he remembered. He could not make out what she was saying to the person who had called.
    The window of his room was also open. He could feel the breeze from it against the minor portions of his face not covered by bandages; and he could hear the sound of the occasional cars on the highway some distance away, and the faint field and woods noises that came quite clearly into the room although he knew himself to be on the second floor of the house. There was the buzz of an outboard motor on a bodyof water not too far away. My wife... is staying at our place over on the Bay, Lawrence Wilson had said. He had also said, We haven’t been getting along lately.
    Mrs. Wilson came back upstairs, entered Young’s room, went past the foot of the bed to the window, and raised the Venetian blind. He opened his eyes.
    “That isn’t too bright, is it?”
    He had the remote feeling of looking at someone on a distant stage; it took him a moment to realize that the girl was addressing a question to him.
    “No,” he whispered, “no, it’s fine.”
    He watched from behind the shelter of the bandages as she came to the foot of the bed to look at him. He saw a slender, quite graceful, dark-haired girl apparently somewhat younger than his own age of twenty-nine. This morning she was wearing a long gold satin negligee that gave her a regal air; the effect was faintly marred, however, by the fact that her face was shiny and that her dark hair — somewhat longer than they usually wore it these days — was loose and a little untidy about her shoulders. It was clear that the telephone had awakened her, too. The lack of lipstick gave her face an unsophisticated and defenseless look.
    “I declare, you haven’t been lying here awake for hours?” she said quickly. “There’s a bell right beside you, if you need anything, hear?”
    There were at least two people in the house besidehimself, he decided; she, in the room with him, and somebody below, apparently in the kitchen. The dark-haired girl, clearly feeling his attention wandering, tried again.
    “How do you feel this morning, Mr. Young?”
    “Swell,” Young said mechanically. “I feel fine.”
    “Bob — Dr. Henshaw says you can eat anything you like. Shall I have Beverly fix you some breakfast?” She laughed quickly. “I forget you don’t know us. Beverly’s the cook. Dr. Henshaw — well, you met him yesterday. He’s the family doctor. I’m Elizabeth Wilson. We’re all real respectable folks, and this is our” — she hesitated, and tried a smile that did not succeed — “our first kidnaping.”
    He was watching her hands, long and slender, gripping each other tightly as she faced him. The indirect sunlight from the window glinted on the rings — one displaying an impressive diamond — that would have reminded him, had he forgotten, who she was: the wife of a man who had tried to kill him; a girl who, knowing him not to be her husband, had nevertheless smuggled him out of the hospital and brought him here; a girl who knew his name. There was only one person from whom she could have learned it.
    “Where is he?” Young whispered.
    She glanced at him, startled. “Where is—?”
    “Your husband.”
    She was