"Son, I'd hoped to sing Fair Harvard at your graduation and greet you as a fellow alumnus," Mr. Atwood told Eric, "but in the circumstances I think it best you matriculate at UCLA." He broke off with a chuckle. "There are scads of pretty girls in Los Angeles. Before the first semester's over you'll have forgotten there ever was an Alice Holmes."
***
Alice and Eric were virtual prisoners for the next two weeks. If Eric telephoned Alice he was curtly told she wasn't home. If she called him, she received the same treatment. They wrote each other, and their letters were intercepted.
But finally, just as September had begun to tint the dogwood leaves, they managed a meeting. A little after nine o'clock that evening their father received identical telegrams:
"YOU WILL FIND IT HARDER TO FOLLOW US THIS TIME."
A highway patrolman brought the news to the Atwood and Holmes houses and broke it as tactfully as possible. Somewhere Eric had procured some photographic developer, a compound more than fifty per cent potas. sium cyanide. The children had been found dead in Eric's parked car, and there was ample evidence that, in their case, at least, the popular belief that cyanide of potassium causes quick and painless death was untrue.
***
It was pure chance that brought the the Holmes and Atwood families to my place at the same time. For a moment they glared at each other, then in the twinkling of an eye the two women were in each other's arms, sobbing heart-brokenly. The two men exchanged a silent handclasp.
"Will it be possible--can you make it possible for them to be seen?" Mrs. Holmes asked me through her tears.
"Of course," I promised. "There will be no trace of what the poor child suffered to be seen."
"Oh, thank you Mr. Burke," she sobbed.
At the door of the display room the bereaved parents paused for a whispered conference, then Mr. Atwood told me. "We've decided to have a joint funeral with identical caskets, Mr. Burke."
A rosewood case attracted Mrs. Holmes, but I dissuaded her. "I believe blond mahogany would be preferable," I told her. "It would not be too effeminate for Eric nor too masculine for Alice." And so it was agreed.
***
The funeral was one of the most largely attended we had ever conducted. But the turn-out did not mislead me. The dramatic manner of the youngsters' going and the way the press played it up brought out a horde of morbid curiosity-seekers none of whom knew either Alice or Eric by sight in life.
As the strains of the organ died away and the mourning party prepared to enter the waiting cars, Mr. Atwood held out his hand to Mr. Holmes. "Bill," he said, and his voice trembled, "we played this thing all wrong. We should have let them have each other. We've been two old fools."
'Two damned old fools," Mr. Holmes agreed."
Copyright 1964 by the Dodge Chemical Company, Boston, Mass