Inaudibly, Abrahams sighed. Well, he told himself for the last time, the truth was in the open. He had done what had to be done, in a manner most repugnant to him, but there had been no other choice for one who believed his cause was just.

And now, he could see, he had accomplished something else, also. He had won the eyes and ears of the Senate, the House, the galleries, the entire nation. He had them even as Zeke Miller had not.

Satisfied with this one victory, Nat Abrahams, relieved to be able to resume the role of attorney once more, quietly began to address his audience again.

AT approximately a quarter to three in the afternoon, Edna Foster had suddenly turned off her television set, blotted the loathsome spectacle from her screen if not from her mind, impulsively changed into a severe suit, set a hat on her bunned brown hair, pulled on her transparent olive-colored raincoat, telephoned for a taxicab, snatched up her umbrella, and gone downstairs to wait for it.

Now, at a quarter after three, she walked purposefully through the puddles of rainwater gathering across the circular driveway leading from the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the West Wing lobby of the White House. What she had relived, during the short taxi ride, she continued to relive intensely, unmindful of the steady drizzle spattering upon her umbrella overhead.

It had been a horrible week of lies, lies and indecisiveness, and she was glad she had finally brought it to an end.

She had seen George Murdock only once after her return from Paris and his belated return from the extended visit to New York City.

Their meeting had taken place during the early evening of the day that the President’s impeachment had been introduced into the House of Representatives. It had not been her best evening, from the moment George had picked her up to the moment he had left her at her apartment door after dinner, because her mood had been at such odds with his. She had been stunned and unhappy over the fantastic attack on Dilman. George had been alive and gay because of his new high-paying job with the Zeke Miller chain of newspapers, which he had announced to her that night. She had hated his taking the job, somehow equating it with her misery over the threatened impeachment, and not even George’s naming an actual marriage date had improved her mood. She had desperately tried to evince some pretense of pleasure, but she had failed. She had hoped that a long evening together-she was relatively at liberty, with the President off on his tour of the Midwest, Far West, and Atlantic Coast-would work its miracle, restore her joy in the knowledge that she would soon be Mrs. Murdock, but then George had had time for only a short evening. He was, he had apologized, toiling nights as well as days now, to impress his new employers, anxious to get off on the right foot. Then, after he had hastened away to the Washington Citizen-American Building, and she had wearily returned to her living room, the orderly, well-regulated, promising personal world around her (which excluded the Dilman part of her world) had disintegrated completely (because Dilman could not be excluded from it, after all), and since that time, by choice, she had not seen George again.

The events of that unforgettable night still haunted and possessed her like a recurring hallucination. She had been too occupied with the last of her work during the hours before seeing George to inquire into every detail of the impeachment charges, to watch and hear the indictments read on television and radio, or read them in the newspapers. During her incessant typing, and hectic taking of telephone calls, she had become aware of several of the general charges. Something incomprehensible about the President having broken the law in his firing of Eaton, she had heard. Something ridiculous about his having frequent bouts of intoxication. Something utterly absurd about his having made improper advances toward that stupid, spoiled Sally Watson. But not until George had left her so early, and she had been able to kick off her shoes and be alone with the day’s newspapers, had she fully read all four of the Articles of Impeachment.

Then, before they had made their full impact upon her, her privacy had been invaded, and her apartment had teemed with officious and threatening men. She had found herself cornered, with warrants and subpoenas thrust under her nose. She had found herself being questioned by the stuttering Casper Wine and two other attorneys or investigators sent by the House Judiciary Committee, and she had protested against the Federal Marshal turning her premises inside out.

In desperation, she had tried to locate someone, anyone, to advise her during the barrage of questions, but there had been no one. Curiously, her first thought of succor had been the President, but he was traveling and out of reach. Then she had sought to reach George by telephone, but he was nowhere to be found. A last gasp had been a telephone call to her accountant, the one who made out her annual income tax, but neither his office nor residence number had brought an answer.

And when the inquisitors had departed at midnight, they had left her with the extra copy of the shocking confession or affidavit or whatever it was called that she had been forced to sign (for everything in it was true, and could not be denied under oath). They had left her with a subpoena to appear (if needed) for the prosecution against the President. They had left her without her precious diary (located, impounded, carried away by them over her tearful protests). Worst of all, they had left her with the wreckage of herself, her shattered self, and the first full realization of her unintended perfidy and disloyalty to the persecuted man who was her boss before he was her President.

It had been a horror night, with a more dreadful week to follow it, because then the self-questioning had come, and for a long time she had refused to face the one unacceptable answer. How had they known that she had once inadvertently monitored a private telephone call from the President to his son? How had they known that she alone, among outsiders, had knowledge that the President possessed a daughter who was passing for white? How had they known that the President’s wife had once been a patient in a sanitarium for alcoholics? How had they known-no one, no one on earth knew-that she kept a private diary and had recorded every event and bit of knowledge on its lined pages?

All of this information had been hers alone, unshared, as private as the date of her last menstrual period and the petite electric razor she used to remove the unattractive hair from her legs, and yet it had been known by someone, and now it would be known to the world. And then searching, searching, rummaging through the attic of memory, she had discovered the traitor, and first was disbelieving, and then unwilling to believe, unwilling to fasten the blame fully upon him.

Her dreadful sin had burned her with shame, until she was nearly mad. For, and there was no avoiding it any longer, she had committed the only real wickedness a confidential secretary could commit. She had committed Indiscretion.

And so she had exiled herself to her lonely apartment. For, difficult as it had been to face herself, it would have been completely impossible to face anyone else, either the one she had betrayed or the one who had betrayed her. She had lived her week of lies, and sent a message to the White House that she was unwell and would have to rest in bed for some time, and left a message for George not to call because her mother had fallen ill in Wisconsin and she was flying home to be at the bedside, and she would write.

Only one human being, and then it was by accident, had even had a peek into her private inferno. Late during the fifth afternoon of her absence from work, there had been a knock on the door. She had expected the grocer’s boy with some cold cuts, bread, and milk. Instead, to her dismay, she had found herself confronted by the solicitous Tim Flannery. He had apologized for dropping by unannounced, but he had been concerned, he said, as the President had been concerned, about her health. It amazed her that anyone decent, let alone the harassed President, gave a damn about her, now that her disloyalty to her boss was known.