Good God, no! It was impossible. It could not be. Such treachery, such criminality was unthinkable by a loyal man like Beekman. There was no motive for it. The business affairs of the firm were prosperous. At his partner’s insistence an expert had gone over the books on his return from Hawaii. There was not a thing wrong. He would have trusted Harnash with everything he owned, and with right. He could not have wanted to get him out of the way, unless--
Why had Harnash looked so haggard and miserable? Why had Stephanie presented the same countenance? Could those two-- He would not think it. Yet what could Woywod have meant?
Suddenly Beekman remembered that he had heard Harnash had a sailor friend, who at infrequent intervals was accustomed to visit him. There had been some reference to it. Beekman had never heard the man’s name, and he never chanced to have met him. Woywod had never referred to Harnash in Beekman’s hearing on that cruise until those faltered words as he died. Could it be Woywod? It must. Was it merely chance that Beekman had fallen into the hands of Harnash’s friend on the very night before his wedding, when his last companion had been Harnash himself? Now, Beekman was an intensely loyal man and he resolutely put these suspicions out of his mind, but they would not stay out. Why should Woywod stare up at him with fast closing eyes as he spoke? Did Woywod know who Beekman was? Were those muttered words an admission? By heaven, could it be that Harnash was in love with Stephanie and she with him?
When Beekman asked himself that question he began to go over the times in which he had seen the two together. Little things, unnoticed and unmarked before now, grew strangely significant. Beekman loathed himself for entertaining the suspicions. It was not possible, yet-- Could Stephanie herself be a party to it? That, too, was unthinkable. So it was that Harnash-- Yet those words! Well, if he could get out of this horrible situation now, so much worse than it had been, he certainly would tell Harnash and Harnash should tell him. Meanwhile, there was added to his horror and regret the fact that Woywod was dead and that he had killed him.
A strange and terrible reality, that, to this sometime dilettante in life.