JACK comes back from the telephone a shocking color. "Janice Angstrom has accidentally drowned their baby."

Lucy asks, "How could she?"

"I don't know. I'm afraid she was drunk. She's unconscious now."

"Where was he?"

"Nobody knows. I'm supposed to find out. That was Mrs. Springer. "

He sits down in the great walnut?armed chair that had been his father's and Lucy realizes with resentment that her husband is middle?aged. His hair is thinning, his skin is dry, he looks ex-hausted. She cries, "Why must you spend your life chasing after that worthless heel?"

"He's not worthless. I love him."

"You love him. That's sickening. Oh I think that's sickening, Jack. Why don't you try loving me, or your children?"

"I do."

"You don't, Jack. Let's face it, you don't. You couldn't bear to love anybody who might return it. You're afraid of that, aren't you? Aren't you afraid?"

They had been drinking tea in the library when the phone rang and he picks his empty cup off the floor between his feet and looks into the center. "Don't be clever, Lucy," he says. "I feel too sick."

"You feel sick, yes, and I feel sick. I've felt sick ever since you got involved with that animal. He's not even in your church."

"Any Christian is in my church."

"Christian! If he's a Christian thank God I'm not one. Christian. Kills his baby and that's what you call him."

"He didn't kill the baby. He wasn't there, it was an accident."

"Well he as good as did. Runs off and sends his idiot wife on a bender. You never should have brought them back together. The woman had adjusted and something like this never would have happened."

Eccles blinks; shock has put a great analytic distance between him and things. He's rather impressed by the way she has recon-structed what must have happened. He wonders a little why her speech is so vengeful. "Heel" was a strange word for her to have used. "So you're saying I really killed the baby," he says.

"Of course not. I didn't mean to say that at all."

"No. I think you're probably right," he says, and lifts himself out of the chair. He goes into the hall to the telephone and again draws out of his wallet the number written in pencil below the faint name, Ruth Leonard. The number worked once but this time the mouse of electricity gnaws at the remote membrane of metal in vain. He lets it ring twelve times, hangs up, dials the number again, and hangs up after seven rings. When he returns to the study Lucy is ready for him.

"Jack, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest you were respon-sible at all. Of course you're not. Don't be silly."

&nb............