The Chapters

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Last night dined with Quincey Morris in his rooms. Art was there, and never did I see a man so wholesomely happy, nor did I ever grudge a man his happiness less, though God knows the sight of it went through me like the east wind. Quincey had ordered all things in his own large fashion; there was canvas-back duck, which he swore no cook in London could ruin so utterly but that a Texan palate might forgive it, and a wine that he said had crossed the line twice and was the better for its travels. We three have faced ugly things together in odd corners of the world, and it is strange how the memory of shared danger makes an evening's talk. Quincey rose at the last with his glass and said:--

"Art, we two have loved where you have won, and I reckon that gives us the right to love you the more. Jack and I have agreed to drink the health of the happiest man between the two oceans, and of a lady that we don't either of us name without standing up." So we stood, and Art tried to answer us and could not for a while, and when he did his voice was not quite steady, and no one of us thought the worse of him for it. He gave us his messages--which were that Lucy holds us both her true friends for life, and bade him tell us so. It made the tingle in the ears that he promised, and something in the eyes too, I fancy, though the cigar smoke was thick and no man looked too closely at his neighbour. Quincey said at parting, "We three have dressed one another's wounds before now; this makes a clean job of the last of them." A good fellow, Quincey; the very grit of the earth.

To work again to-day, and glad of it. Renfield grows more interesting hourly. He has now a whole colony of flies which he tends at his window with sugar, and pleads for them with a gravity that would befit a chancellor arguing a great cause. There is a method in his madness that is rudimentary but growing, and I mean to watch its growth as a gardener watches a graft.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

"*30 May.*

"My dearest Lucy,--

"You must forgive me if this letter is dull and anxious, and not full of your happiness as it ought to be, for indeed, dear, I am full of it too, and think of you and Arthur every day. But I am uneasy about Jonathan, and I must tell somebody or I shall not sleep, and who should it be but you? He wrote to me from Transylvania that he would be returning in about a week, and that is now three weeks gone, and I have had nothing from him in his own hand since--not so much as a line, though he knows how I watch for the post. He is the most punctual of men in such things; it is part of his profession to be exact, and he is exact in his love too, which is better. Then, three days ago, there came a letter with a foreign stamp, and my heart jumped, for I thought it was from him; but it was not his hand, and I copy it out for you entire, for I have read it so often that I could write it with my eyes shut:--

"'*Bistritz, 22 May.*

"'Honoured Madam,--

"'I write at the desire of Herr Jonathan Harker, English gentleman, who is at present in the mountains beyond the Borgo Pass upon the affairs of his client, a nobleman of that district. He asks that I make known to you that this business is of greater length than was thought, and that he is detained until it shall be complete, which may be some weeks yet. He is in good health. The posts from that country are few and not to be trusted, so that the honoured lady must not have anxiety if letters do not come. Herr Harker will himself write when he is again where the post is sure. I have the honour to be, with much respect, the honoured lady's obedient servant,

"'FRANZ VENCZ,

"'*Commissionaire.*'

"Now, Lucy dear, tell me honestly what you think, for I have argued with myself till I am tired. On one side, it is all most reasonable. Mr. Hawkins himself told me, when I asked him, that the business was of an unusual kind, an estate purchased by a foreign gentleman, and that such matters are often slower abroad than at home, and that I was not to fret; he was so kind that I nearly cried. And Jonathan wrote in his last letter of wild country and bad roads, so the part about the posts may be true enough. But on the other side--and here is what keeps me awake--why should Jonathan ask a stranger to write to me at all? If he could send a message down to Bistritz for this Herr Vencz to put into a letter, why could he not send three words of his own with it? He knows that his own 'all well' in his own dear untidy hand would be worth pages from any commissionaire in Europe. And there is another thing which is small and perhaps silly, but I will set it down, because you and I promised to tell each other everything: the letter calls me 'Madam' and 'the honoured lady,' but nowhere my name, though it was directed to me rightly enough on the cover; and it tells me not to be anxious in a way that makes me more anxious than ever I was before it came. Is it foolish of me to feel that a letter written to quiet one's fears should not read as if the writer had learned my fears by heart before ever I had them? There, I have written it, and I feel better already, as one does. Write to me soon, dearest, and scold me well if I deserve it.

"Your loving

"MINA.

"P.S.--Do not say a word of this to Arthur or to any one; it may be nothing at all, and I would not have Jonathan come home to find that his goose of a Mina had made a nine days' wonder of a slow Hungarian post."

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

"*1 June.*

"My dearest Mina,--

"I do scold you, and I kiss you too, both in one, which is the way mothers do, and I feel quite motherly towards you to-day, for it is a new thing for me to see my wise Mina in a fret and to be the calm one myself. My dear, I think your letter from Bistritz is exactly what it says it is, and no more. Men never understand that a message sent by another hand is worse than none; Arthur is just the same, for he once sent word by his man that he could not come to tea, and I was quite huffy about it, and he was astonished, poor fellow, and said the message was delivered, wasn't it? Depend upon it, your Jonathan is up some dreadful mountain with mud to his knees and papers to his chin, and he caught a messenger going down to the town and said, 'Here, write to the lady and say all is well,' never dreaming but that it was the tenderest thing in the world to do. Lawyers are like that even when they are lovers. When he comes home you shall have it all out with him, and he will be so penitent that you will end by begging his pardon, which is what always happens to us.

"For the rest, I am so happy that I am almost ashamed. Mamma and Arthur have settled everything between them, and I am hardly consulted at all, which they say is the proper way; we are to be married in the autumn. Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris have sent me, through Arthur, the two kindest messages that ever a girl had from two men she has used badly, and I cried over both, and Arthur pretended not to see. Come to me the very day your term ends; I want you so, and we shall talk of everything, and by then you will have had a fat letter from Jonathan and will laugh at all this.

"Your loving

"LUCY."

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

*3 June.*--A curious thing to-day, which I set down exactly, as I wish to keep this record clean of after-thoughts. I was with Renfield in his room. He had been very docile, busy with his flies, of which he has now so many that I must shortly interfere, and he had not spoken for some minutes. Then, without turning from the window, and in the flat voice of a man asking the time of day, he said:--

"When is Miss Westenra to be married?"

I was, I confess, fairly startled, and my first care was that he should not see it, for with such patients an advantage once given is never got back. I asked him quietly what he knew of any Miss Westenra. He turned round then and looked at me with that up-glance of his, half cunning and half something that is not cunning at all, and said that a bird in a cage hears what the house is saying, and went back to his flies, and no word more could I get from him on it, question as I might.

The explanation is doubtless simple and humiliating. The attendants gossip; my own recent history is, I dare say, common-room property here, and Hardy admits that the men have talked among themselves of my going up to town and of the engagement, which was in the newspapers with both names in full. A pointed word from a madman is like a fortune-teller's guess: we forget the hundred that miss and remember the one that hits. So I write it down, label it, and refuse to be impressed by it. And yet I record also, for completeness, that the thing I minded was not his knowing the name, but his choosing this day, of all days, to hand it back to me--as if he kept accounts of what each man about him carries in his breast, against some settling-day of his own. *Mem.*, keep Hardy from talking; and keep myself from listening.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

"*5 June.*

"Dearest Lucy,--

"Only a line, for I have made up my mind and feel the better for it. Still nothing from Jonathan, and Herr Vencz's some weeks may mean anything or nothing, so I have done what I ought to have done at first: I have telegraphed to the hotel at Bistritz where Jonathan stayed--the Golden Krone; he wrote me such a funny account of it, and of a dish called *paprika hendl* that he means me to learn--asking simply whether Herr Harker is there or in the district, and when he was last heard of, and I have paid for the reply. It may be days coming, they tell me at the post-office, but it will be something real at the end of it, and it is the waiting on nothing that wears one out. When it comes I shall wire to you at once, and you shall laugh at me by telegraph, which will be a new pleasure for you.

"Your loving

"MINA."

*Telegram, Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

"*9 June.*

"Herr Harker left here fifth May for castle. No letter written from this house. Know nothing of Franz Vencz."

Mr Shepherd and Lady Russell were accordingly summoned to Kellynch Hall, and appointed to meet there on the Tuesday following; and each came furnished with a scheme, drawn up with all the care that friendship or professional habit could supply, for the relief of a gentleman who desired above every thing to be relieved, provided only that nothing were altered.

Lady Russell was the first to speak. She had considered the matter most seriously; she had consulted with Anne, who, though nobody thought of consulting her, had in fact supplied the greater part of the calculations; and she laid before Sir Walter a paper of very sensible provisions. There were to be fewer horses, fewer servants, a general abridgement of the table, the London journey given up for a year or two, and a strict regulation of all those articles of expenditure in which a gentleman might retrench without any real loss of respectability. “If Sir Walter would consent to these,” she said, with all the mildness that a real anxiety could assume, “in seven years he would be clear; and I hope we may be able to convince him and Elizabeth, that Kellynch Hall has a respectability in itself which cannot be affected by these reductions; and that the true dignity of Sir Walter Elliot will be very far from lessened, in the eyes of sensible people, by his acting like a man of principle. What will he be doing, in fact, but what very many of our first families have done, or ought to do? There will be nothing singular in his case; and it is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.”

Sir Walter heard her to an end with tolerable civility, for he had a great regard for Lady Russell; but he heard her with no other effect. Give up the journey to London! Reduce his table! Part with his horses! A pair, perhaps, might have been spared, had any body else proposed it; but to travel like a private gentleman of two or three thousand a year, to have it said in the neighbourhood that Sir Walter Elliot kept neither the equipage nor the establishment of his father — “No, madam,” said he, “I would sooner quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such degrading terms. What! every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table — contractions and restrictions every where! To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, I will never consent to it.”

Mr Shepherd, who had listened to Lady Russell’s plan with the countenance of a man who foresaw its fate, now produced his own; and it must be confessed that his was of a gentler nature, for Mr Shepherd was a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his hold or his views on Sir Walter, would rather have the disagreeable prompted by any body else. His scheme spared the horses entirely, said nothing of London, and confined itself chiefly to the gardens, the plantations, and certain improvements of the grounds then in contemplation, which might, he hinted, without any observation from the world, be suspended; together with a quiet reduction of the number of men kept about the place, to be effected so gradually that nobody should perceive it. He begged leave to observe that he proposed nothing, absolutely nothing, which the strictest notions of what was due to Sir Walter Elliot’s situation could disapprove; his sole object was that Sir Walter should be beforehand with the world, instead of the world — he would not finish the sentence.

But Sir Walter was not to be caught by gentleness any more than by sense. The improvements of the grounds had been his own thought; the shrubbery was to have been carried down to the water; and to suspend a plan of his own devising was, of all the modes of retrenchment, the most intolerable. As for the men, every one of them was wanted; the place could not be kept up with a man fewer; and he concluded by observing that Mr Shepherd’s scheme and Lady Russell’s were alike founded on a misapprehension of the whole nature of the case, and that what was wanted was not a reduction of expense, but an improvement of income, if Mr Shepherd would but exert himself to find one.

There was a silence of some moments; and then Anne, who had sat by, as usual, unregarded, and who felt that the moment was come when a stronger measure than either might be ventured, since the milder had failed, spoke — with a colour a little heightened, but with a steadiness which surprised herself.

“I cannot help thinking,” said she, “that we should do better to attempt more, rather than less. Half-measures will only prolong the evil, and give us the pain of economy without its reward. If we are to retrench at all, let it be to some purpose. I would give up the horses altogether, and the London house-taking, and the new plantations, and half the establishment at once; I would have every debt cleared in half Lady Russell’s seven years; and I believe that honesty, in this as in every thing, will be found the truest dignity. He who owes money to his tradespeople, and drives four horses past their doors, is not respected by them, whatever he may believe; and the claims of a creditor are prior to those of any elegance whatever.”

She had expected nothing from this but what she was used to — to be unheard, or heard with a slight surprise that she should speak at all; and the astonishment of the whole room was accordingly great, when Elizabeth, after a moment’s pause, said that she thought Anne was right.

Whether it were that the mention of tradespeople had touched her — for Elizabeth had lately had the misfortune of being looked at, in a shop in Taunton, by a person to whom money was owing, in a manner which she could not forget; or whether the failure of two schemes had disposed her to a third merely as being a novelty; or whether, as is most probable, she felt that a great and complete reformation had something of the heroic in it, which paring and paltering had not, and that the world would talk more respectfully of Miss Elliot presiding over a noble system of economy, than of Miss Elliot going without a second course; certain it is that she declared, with great decision, that if any thing were to be done, it should be done handsomely; that she hated shabby doings; and that for her part she would engage to give up whatever Anne gave up, and to think no more about it.

Lady Russell looked at Anne with a glow of pleasure which repaid her for much; and Mr Shepherd bowed, and said that Miss Anne Elliot’s plan did honour to her head and heart, and Miss Elliot’s concurrence still more to both hers, and that nothing now was wanting but Sir Walter’s sanction to a scheme which — but Sir Walter’s countenance had been growing darker through the whole; and he now rose from his chair, and walked to the window, and observed that he found himself in a minority in his own house, which was a new circumstance; that he was much obliged to his daughter Anne for disposing so freely of his horses and his servants; and that when he wanted to live like Mr Shepherd, he would send for Mr Shepherd to teach him how.

Mr Shepherd received this with the smile of a man whose profession had long inured him to worse; and after a pause of sufficient respect, ventured, with many prefaces, upon the suggestion which he had held in reserve, and which he had, perhaps, foreseen from the first would be the end of all. Since Sir Walter could not bring himself — and who should wonder at it? — to alter his style of living at Kellynch, might not the difficulty be best met another way? A house of that consequence, in these times, would let at almost any rent; there were men of large fortune — he would say nothing of who or whence — who would think it a privilege to be admitted, on any terms, into such a mansion; and Sir Walter, quitting it for a while with all the honours of choice, might live where and how he pleased, with his income clear, and return to Kellynch whenever it suited him, to find every thing maintained, by a responsible tenant, in the highest —

He got no farther. Sir Walter turned from the window. “A tenant!” he repeated. “A tenant in Kellynch Hall! Mr Shepherd, I am obliged to you, but you will oblige me farther by never letting me hear that word again. A tenant! Some Bristol dealer, I suppose, walking my grounds, and sitting at the head of my table, and shewing my picture-gallery to his acquaintance for half-a-crown! Sir, the Elliots have held Kellynch from the reign of Charles the Second, and no money-lender’s clerk shall hold it under me. Let there be an end of the subject. I desire that the word ‘tenant’ may never be spoken in my presence again.”

Mr Shepherd bowed himself into silence; Lady Russell looked grave; Elizabeth, who had no more idea of quitting Kellynch than her father, looked all the approbation which she had lately withdrawn from him; and the conference was at an end, having settled nothing but that nothing could be settled. Sir Walter would not reduce, and would not remove; the debts remained precisely where they were; and Mr Shepherd, taking his leave with the observation that these things required time, and that a night’s reflection often did more than a morning’s argument, went back to his market town with, it may be suspected, no very desponding heart; for he was a man who could wait, and who had generally found that what Sir Walter would never consent to in June, he might be brought to think his own idea by Michaelmas.

Lady Russell staid another half hour, chiefly for the pleasure of telling Anne, apart, how well she had spoken, and how much good her plan must do whenever it should be adopted, which she did not despair of; for Lady Russell was of a sanguine temper, and had, moreover, a value for rank and consequence which made her tender even of the follies they produced, and inclined her always to believe that Sir Walter would end by doing right, if only right could be put before him in a sufficiently dignified shape. Anne said what she could, and believed less.

The letters were brought in before Lady Russell went; and among them was one for Anne, from Uppercross, in Mary’s hand. Mary’s hand was always to be known, and generally to be dreaded, for she never wrote but when she was ill or ill-used, and commonly when she was both. So it proved now. She was very unwell; she was always unwell, but nobody minded it; Charles was out shooting from morning to night; the little boys were more than she could manage in her present state; the Musgroves at the Great House took no more notice of her than if she had been nobody; and she could not possibly go on without somebody with her. If Anne had any regard left for her, she would come to Uppercross directly, and stay a good while; she was sure Anne could be nothing at Kellynch, and at Uppercross she was really wanted.

“There, Anne may go, I am sure,” said Elizabeth, when the substance of the letter was told; “nobody will want her here;” and Sir Walter, recalled by the address to a milder humour, observed that Uppercross Cottage was a very fit place for her, and that she might give his compliments to Mary, and say that he should certainly call upon Mrs Musgrove in the course of the autumn, if his engagements permitted.

And so, in the evening of that day, when Lady Russell was gone home, and her father and sister, their harmony quite restored by the common danger they had repelled, were talking over the improprieties of Mr Shepherd, Anne sat alone in the small room that was called hers because nobody else wanted it, and looked out at the July twilight upon the lawns and groves of Kellynch, and made up her mind to go. To be wanted, even querulously, was something; to be of use, though only to Mary, was more than she could be at home; and if she carried with her a heavier heart than either her father or her sister could have imagined a removal to Uppercross to warrant, it was not wholly on Mary’s account, nor yet on account of the debts, which she left behind her as unprovided for, as unacknowledged, and as sure of increase, as ever.

Robert walked beside Madame Ratignolle with the little girl’s cheek pressed warm against his shoulder, suiting his step to the dragging pace which the lady found agreeable. She had abandoned herself entirely to his arm, and complained at intervals of her joints, of the length of the path, of the sun, which had grown insolent since morning.

“You are always ailing, and you are always the picture of health,” said Robert. “It is a gift. I have never learned it.”

“You have learned others, *mon ami*, that will serve you as ill,” returned Madame Ratignolle placidly, and for a while they said nothing more. The camomile brushed their skirts and trousers, and the child fell asleep against Robert’s collar.

“Did you notice Mrs. Pontellier this morning?” he asked suddenly, as if the question had been walking with them the whole way and had only then found its tongue. “Down at the water, before you left the beach. She was looking at the Gulf as if it had said something to her and she were trying to remember what it was. Do you know what she makes me think of? Of some one walking in her sleep who is just on the point of waking. One is half afraid to speak to her; one is half afraid not to.”

“What extravagance!” said Madame Ratignolle. “She was thinking of her children, no doubt, or of the heat, as we all were.”

“No,” said Robert; “she was not thinking of her children.” And as they had come to the Ratignolle cottage, and the child was heavy, and Madame Ratignolle’s stiffness required immediate attention, nothing further was said upon the subject.

The telegram came up from the wharf a little before the midday dinner. Edna read it standing on her own gallery, with the quadroon holding the smaller of the boys by the hand and looking on with the frank interest which the arrival of any paper whatever excited among the household. Mr. Pontellier regretted that pressing matters of business would keep him in the city over Sunday; the Saturday boat would come without him; he trusted that she and the children were well; a second box, he added, had been despatched by Friday’s steamer. It was a kind message, and it had cost him something at so much a word.

Edna folded the paper and put it into her pocket, where it lay against Madame Ratignolle’s roll of needlework, which the lady had forgotten upon the rug that morning and which Edna had gathered up with her cushions. She was conscious of no disappointment. She looked for the disappointment somewhere within her, as one gropes along a shelf in the dark for an object which has always stood there, and could not find it. This discovery occupied her, off and on, throughout the dinner, so that Madame Lebrun twice asked her whether the court-bouillon were not to her taste.

The afternoon settled down hot and white over Grand Isle. The children were made to lie down; the ladies disposed themselves in hammocks and darkened rooms; Robert had gone over to the Chênière with a fisherman upon some errand of his mother’s, and would not be back before evening. About four o’clock, when the whole pension seemed given over to sleep, Edna took down the big straw hat from its peg and walked alone down the long, sandy path to the beach.

The wind had fallen since morning. The water lay stretching away, blue and unbroken, with a slow swell that came in and spent itself in a ruffle of foam along the sand. There was no one bathing. Edna went into the Pontellier compartment and put on her bathing suit, deliberately, listening the while to the small dry sounds of the empty bath-house, and came out and walked down and into the water as she had done a hundred times that summer, with a hand stretched vaguely out, as though the sea were a crowded room through which she must make her way.

All summer she had splashed and struggled and clutched at Robert’s sustaining arm, or at any arm, with the terror of the water full upon her, like a child who tumbles and clings. Now there was no arm within call, and, curiously, the terror was not there either; it seemed to have stayed behind upon the beach with her clothing. She let herself go forward. For a moment the old panic rose and took her by the throat; then her body remembered something which her mind had never taught it. She struck out—once, twice, half a dozen strokes—and the water bore her up.

It was nothing; it was a few feet of the Gulf, and a shallow bottom under her the whole way. But a feeling of exultation swept through her as if some power of significant import had been given to her soul. She stood up, gasping and laughing to herself, and looked back at the empty beach, at the bath-houses, at the line of cottages beyond, all blind and sleeping in the sun. She might have cried out. She did not. She waded ashore, and dressed, and smoothed her heavy hair before the small mirror in the compartment with hands that trembled a little; and she resolved, without asking herself why, that she would say nothing about it to any one—not to Robert, not to Madame Ratignolle, not to the children. It was hers. It was the first thing in a long time that had been altogether hers.

Coming up from the beach she met the lady in black, who was returning from the wharf with her prayer-beads wound about her wrist. The lady in black had been at Grand Isle three summers, and no one could remember having heard her voice. She stopped now, directly in the path, so that Edna must stop also.

“You have been in the water alone, madame,” she said. Her voice was gray and even, like a voice that has been kept a long while folded away. “Alone, it is not safe. The Gulf gives nothing back.” Then she inclined her head with an old-fashioned civility and went on toward the *pension*, her beads swinging, leaving Edna standing in the yellow camomile with her wet hair heavy under the straw hat.

In the evening, after the six o’clock supper, Madame Ratignolle came across to the Pontellier cottage for her needlework, which she remembered as suddenly as she had forgotten it. She stayed to sit awhile upon the gallery, her white skirts spreading about her in the dusk, and they talked of the telegram, and of Janet’s engagement, and of a sleeve pattern which Madame Ratignolle had promised and once more failed to bring.

“Oh! and I must tell you what Robert said of you this morning,” she said, when she had risen to go and stood drawing on her gloves. “Such a piece of extravagance—but he is a boy, you know, and means nothing by his speeches. He said you made him think of some one walking in her sleep who is just upon the point of waking; that one was half afraid to speak to you, and half afraid not to. Did you ever hear such nonsense? I told him you were thinking of the heat, as any sensible woman would be. *Bonne nuit, chérie*; cover the children well; the nights are treacherous.” And she went off through the darkness toward her own cottage, luminous and unhurried, like a ship’s sail passing.

Edna sat on alone. The quadroon had put the boys to bed, and their even breathing came out to her through the open window, mingled with the whisper of the water, which at that hour never lifted itself above a whisper. Down at the far end of the row some one was picking out an air upon a mandolin, over and over, never finishing it. The lovers went by in the dark, close together, without speaking. Later the lady in black went by, at a distance behind them, telling her beads.

Some one walking in her sleep, who is just upon the point of waking. Edna turned the words over as she had turned the telegram over at noon, seeking what was in them. She was not offended; she wondered a little that she was not. She thought of the meadow in Kentucky, of the green stretching away farther than she could see, and of the small figure beating the tall grass with its arms as one strikes out in the water; and she thought of the few strokes she had swum that afternoon, which nobody in the world knew of but herself, and, remembering them, she felt again, faintly, the exultation, like the far-off vibration of a struck bell. Half afraid to speak to her, and half afraid not to. The night was full of the smell of the sea. It was very late when she at last rose, and stood a moment with her hand upon the door, and went in.

The village of Styles St. Mary was not yet fully astir when I passed through it. The blinds were down in most of the cottage windows, and only a thin blue thread of smoke rising here and there showed that the day’s business had begun. Leastways Cottage, where the Belgians were lodged, stood a little apart from the rest, and I confess that my heart beat somewhat faster as I knocked upon its door. There is something in the early morning air, after a night of tragedy, that lends an unreal quality to the most familiar actions.

The door was opened by Poirot himself.

At the sight of me his face lit up, but before I could speak a word he raised his hand.

“Do not derange yourself, my friend. I know why you come. Madame Inglethorp is dead, and it is possible—it is even probable—that she did not die a natural death. Is it not so?”

I stared at him blankly.

“But how on earth did you know?”

“Baily, the chauffeur, stopped his car at the forge as he came back from fetching the good Dr. Wilkins. The whole village knew it before the milk was on the doorsteps. Ah, but it is not from Baily that one learns the important things. Come in, come in. You will take some coffee while I attire myself, and you shall tell me everything—everything, you comprehend—omitting nothing, however trivial it may appear to you.”

He drew me inside, established me in a chair, and vanished into the inner room, whence his voice continued to issue at intervals as he completed his toilet with the neat rapidity that never deserted him. I told my story as clearly as I could, striving to be orderly, though I fear I doubled back upon myself more than once. Poirot heard me out with only an occasional question—at what hour had the coffee been carried up, who had touched the door handles, had the window been open or shut—and once, when I described the peculiar arching of the poor lady’s body in her last convulsion, he came to the doorway, one half of his moustache waxed and the other not, and stood quite still for a moment.

“Tetanic,” he murmured. “Yes, the Dr. Bauerstein said well. Continue, my friend.”

When I had finished, he took up his hat, brushed an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve, and adjusted his moustache before the small mirror with extreme care.

“You find me frivolous, Hastings? It is that the mind works better when the exterior is in order. Symmetry, method—see you, they are everything. Come. Let us walk fast, but let us think slowly. The people who run, they arrive out of breath and with the ideas in disorder.”

Fast as we walked, it was past eight o’clock before the lodge gates of Styles came in sight, and as we turned up the drive I saw a figure ahead of us that brought me up short. Alfred Inglethorp was standing before the door of the house, in the black clothes he always wore, talking to John. His face was drawn and grey; but I searched it in vain for any sign of overwhelming grief.

“Ah,” said Poirot softly beside me. “The husband returns.”

We came up with them in time to hear John say, in a voice from which he could not quite keep the coldness:

“And you have been where, all this time?”

“My dear John,” said Alfred Inglethorp, spreading out his hands, “can you suppose I should have stayed away one instant if I had known? I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein last night, as you are aware. We fell into talk—he is a most interesting man—and it was very late before I thought of returning. Then I made a most vexatious discovery. I had come away without the latch-key. I did not wish to arouse the household at such an hour, so I knocked up Denby—we had, in any case, unfinished business over the Michaelmas accounts—and he gave me a bed. I heard the terrible news not twenty minutes ago, from the postman, and came at once. That I should have been absent on such a night——” He passed his hand across his eyes. “It is a thing I shall never forgive myself.”

There was a silence. Then Dorcas, who had come out upon the step behind John, and whose old face was blotched with weeping, spoke suddenly, with the freedom of an old servant:

“You’ll pardon me, sir, but you took the latch-key with you. I saw you take it off the hall table with my own eyes, as you went out with the doctor.”

Alfred Inglethorp turned his gaze upon her without any discomposure whatever.

“You are mistaken, Dorcas. If I had taken it, I should not have spent the night on Denby’s sofa.”

“I saw you take it, sir,” repeated Dorcas stubbornly.

“Then I must have dropped it on the road,” he replied smoothly, and turning to John, he began to speak in a low voice of the arrangements that must be made.

I glanced at Poirot. His face was quite expressionless, but I saw that his eyes had the green light in them that I remembered of old, like a cat’s.

John presented him briefly. Inglethorp bowed with that mournful courtesy of his which had always set my teeth on edge, expressed himself as grateful for any assistance in so terrible a matter, and went into the house. John, with visible relief at the departure of his stepfather, handed Poirot the two keys which Dr. Bauerstein had left with him.

“You will want to see the room, I suppose. Hastings will take you up. I—I don’t think I could stand it, just yet.”

In the hall we came upon Cynthia, sitting on the bottom stair with her chin in her hands. She was still pale, and there were smudges beneath her eyes, but she seemed more herself than she had been at five o’clock. Poirot stopped before her and made her a little bow.

“Mademoiselle, I ask your pardon. I have for you one question—one only. Do you sleep soundly, as a rule?”

Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.

“No, that’s the odd thing. I’m usually a fearfully light sleeper—the least noise wakes me. But last night I slept like the dead. Mary shook me and shook me, she says, and I simply couldn’t wake up. Even when I did, everything seemed to be happening a long way off. Wasn’t it horrid of me—with all that going on?”

“It is very natural, mademoiselle. The young, they sleep.” And with another little bow he passed on up the stairs, leaving Cynthia staring after him.

“What a quaint little man,” I heard her say to herself.

I unlocked the door of the death chamber, and we went in, Poirot locking it again carefully behind us on the inside.

The room was as we had left it, the blinds now drawn against the morning sun, which nevertheless struck through them and filled the place with a dim amber light. Mrs. Inglethorp’s body had been removed to await the post-mortem, but everything else remained: the tumbled bed, the overturned table by its side, the litter of the fallen things—a reading-lamp, some books, matches, a bunch of keys, and the crushed fragments of a coffee-cup ground into the carpet.

I had expected Poirot to fling himself upon these at once. Instead, he stood for quite a minute in the middle of the room, turning slowly on his heels, taking in every detail with those shrewd green eyes. Then he began.

I shall not soon forget the next three-quarters of an hour. He darted from point to point like a grasshopper, and I, who had been a little inclined to patronize my old friend, was speedily reduced to trotting after him in silence. He examined the door into the corridor, and the wrecked door by which we had entered from Alfred Inglethorp’s room, testing the bolts of each and murmuring to himself. He knelt by the fragments of the coffee-cup and studied them with his nose almost touching the carpet.

“The cup, it is not merely broken,” he observed. “It has been trampled to powder. Well, well. Six of us entered this room in confusion; it is perhaps not so remarkable.”

He examined the grate, in which a small fire had evidently been lighted, and now showed only a bed of grey ash; and here again he lingered, going down upon his knees regardless of his trousers, and touching the ashes with a delicate finger. But he took nothing from it, and said nothing, though his eyebrows mounted almost into his hair.

“A fire—on the seventeenth of July,” was all his comment. “And the night, you tell me, was of the hottest.”

He examined the washstand, the writing-table, a small purple despatch-case which stood upon it with a key in the lock, and the row of prim ornaments upon the mantelpiece—those same ornaments at which Lawrence had stared with so ghastly a face. Two of these, I noticed, he set straight with an air of abstraction, for their crookedness offended him; and there, before the mantelpiece, he stood so long, motionless, that I ventured at last to speak.

“Have you found anything?”

“Perhaps everything. Perhaps nothing. It is too soon to say.”

Last of all he crossed to the third door of the room—the door which led into Cynthia Murdoch’s chamber, and which Dorcas had declared was always bolted, and never undone. Poirot tried it. It was, in fact, bolted upon our side. He drew out a small pocket-lens, and bending down, examined the bolt itself with minute attention. Suddenly he uttered a little exclamation of satisfaction, and, taking from an inner pocket a pair of tiny forceps such as I imagine dentists use, he extracted something from the socket of the bolt with infinite care.

“Hastings! Come here.”

I came, and he held out the forceps to me. Gripped delicately between their points was a minute fragment of dark green material—a mere thread or two of frayed stuff, no bigger than my little fingernail.

“What do you make of that, my friend?”

I studied it, mystified.

“It looks like a scrap of cloth—torn from a dress, perhaps, or——”

“Precisely,” said Poirot, and taking from his pocket-book one of the small envelopes he always carried, he slid the fragment inside, sealed it, and pencilled something upon the outside.

“But what does it mean?” I demanded. “How did it come there—in the bolt of a door that is never opened? Is it important?”

“It may be of no importance whatever. On the other hand, it may be of the very first importance.”

“But what do you think——”

“My friend,” said Poirot, wagging an admonitory forefinger at me, “I never tell what I think until I know. When I say to you: this little scrap of green, it is such and such a thing, and it arrived here in such and such a manner—then it will be because there is no longer any possibility of my being wrong. Until then, it is my little secret. I permit you to look at it. I do not permit you to make me say what it is.”

“You are incorrigible,” I said, half laughing in spite of the horror of the room. “At least tell me this—was the door bolted on Cynthia’s side as well?”

“That, it is a question of intelligence,” he conceded approvingly. “Yes. Mademoiselle Cynthia’s side also was bolted; I verified it as we passed her door. Bolted on both sides, that door—and yet——” He did not finish the sentence.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half after eleven, and its silvery chime, in that shuttered and silent room, made me start. Poirot laid the little sealed envelope upon the round table by the window, and stood looking down at it, his head on one side, his hands behind his back. The strip of sunlight, creeping between the blinds, fell across it, and across nothing else in the room, so that the small white square seemed almost to have a light of its own between us.

“You are certain of your memory, Hastings?” he asked abruptly. “The coffee that Mademoiselle Cynthia carried—no, I mistake myself—the coffee that Madame carried up herself last night. It was untasted, you told me?”

“Yes. She took it up with her, and it was still full. I noticed it particularly.”

“And yet the cup upon the floor there is empty, and broken to powder. Well, well.” He was silent a moment, and then he said, very softly, as though to himself:

“It is not what is in this room that disquiets me, mon ami. It is what is not in it. When everything is accounted for, one may sleep; when one little thing is missing, one must stay awake. And me, I find that we have here one saucepan too many, and one flame too few.”

I stared at him.

“One saucepan too many? Poirot, there is no saucepan in the room at all!”

“Ah, my friend,” said Poirot, and his eyes rested on me with a curious gentleness, “you have said it better than I could myself.”

And what he meant by that, I could not for the life of me imagine.

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. It seemed to leave a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds, and Albin described it to me afterwards as having a hissing sound as it went. I myself was awake at the time, and I saw it. I had been restless that night, sleeping ill, and towards dawn I rose and went to the window of my study, which looks towards Ottershaw, and stood there awhile in my dressing-gown, watching the paling stars. And as I stood, the thing came—a line of greenish fire that slid down the sky as smoothly and silently as a lamp lowered upon a cord, growing as it came, until it passed behind the black mass of the pine trees to the north-west, and there was a glare beyond them, and then darkness again. I stood for perhaps a minute with my heart beating strangely, telling myself it was a meteorite and nothing more, and yet unable to shake off the impression of something deliberate in its descent, something aimed. Then, being cold, I went back to bed, and, curiously enough, to sleep.

But I woke early, and lay thinking of it, and could not rest until I had gone out to look for the thing. I dressed and left the house a little after six, and went by the road towards Ottershaw, meeting a milkman with his cans who had heard nothing of it, and a shepherd who had. It had come down, he thought, somewhere beyond the common, over towards the old sand pits by the river. He would not leave his sheep to go and see.

I found the place easily enough. There is a stretch of low meadow beyond the common where the winter floods had left a broad, shallow mere among the sand and heather—it had been a wet spring, and the pits there were brimmed with standing water—and it was into this that the Thing had fallen. I saw the steam first, rising in a white column against the morning blue, before ever I saw the object itself, and heard a faint, continuous sound like a kettle upon a vast hearth. The heather was scorched in a great blackened fan upon the eastward side, and the sand was flung about in ridges and heaps, and in the midst of the flooded pit, half sunken in the water, lay an enormous cylinder, its upper surface just breaking the flood like the back of some monstrous stranded fish. It was, I should judge, near thirty yards across at the part I could see. The water round about it boiled and bubbled perpetually, and the steam went up from it in wreaths and drifts, so that at times the whole mass was veiled, and at times one saw it plain—a dull grey-yellow hulk with a thick, scaly, ashen incrustation upon it, as of a body that had passed through fire.

I stood upon the lip of the pit for a long time, alone in that early sunlight, with the larks going up all about me and the steam hissing steadily below. I confess my chief feeling at that moment was one of exultation. I had seen the fall of a great meteorite—so I told myself—and here it lay, mine by right of discovery. I thought of the museums, of the learned societies; I did not think at all of the flames upon Mars, though heaven knows the association should have been plain enough.

Presently I became aware of a man coming across the common towards me at a shambling half-run, and as he drew near I saw it was Ogilvy. He had heard of the fall from a labourer who had seen the flash of it from Horsell way, and had come straight out without his breakfast. He was hot and dishevelled, and his delight when he saw the pit and its steaming occupant was almost boyish.

"It's a meteorite," he said, before I could speak. "A giant among meteorites. There's been nothing like it in England—nothing like it in the century."

I said something then—I hardly know what prompted me, unless it was the memory of that greenish fire sliding so smoothly down the sky—to the effect that it had come at a strange time, with Mars still fresh in everyone's mouth, and that its descent had seemed to me singularly gradual for a falling body.

He turned on me at that with all the impatience of the specialist for the amateur. "Gradual!" he said. "My dear fellow, the eye is no chronometer. A body entering our atmosphere at planetary speeds is checked and heated exactly as this has been checked and heated. And as for Mars—" he laughed. "You'll be telling me next the Martians have shot it at us. Ten flashes, ten cannon-balls, eh? The thing's a stony mass, a wanderer of space that has wandered these million years and happened at last upon the earth. It fell; it did not aim."

"It is very regular in its outline," I said, "for a stony mass."

"Fused," said Ogilvy. "Fused and rounded in its passage. The ablation of the surface would smooth it as a lozenge is smoothed in the mouth. When it cools, and the water is drained or pumped away, you will see it is nothing but iron and stone, and the learned world will quarrel over its analysis for a decade. That is all the wonder of it, and wonder enough."

Yet I noticed that he did not take his eyes from it as he spoke, and once, when the steam thinned and the grey bulk showed clear, with a curious circular seam or moulding visible near its upper end, he fell silent in the middle of a sentence and stared for a full minute. Then he said, with a touch of irritation, that the incrustation made it impossible to judge of anything, and that we must wait for the cooling. He was for going down to the water's edge, but the heat of the thing could be felt even where we stood, a soft pulsing warmth upon the face like the breath of an oven door, and the mud at the margin of the pit was steaming, and he thought better of it.

By eight o'clock a number of boys and unemployed men had already started for the common, and the news was going through Ottershaw and Chertsey. Ogilvy, having satisfied himself that nothing could be done until the mass was cooler, went off to telegraph to the Astronomical Exchange and, I believe, to Stent, the Astronomer Royal; and I walked home to breakfast full of the business, and told my wife of it over the eggs and bacon with, I dare say, an absurd air of proprietorship.

She was curious to see it, and I confess I was glad of her curiosity, for I wanted to look upon the thing again. So about ten we walked out together across the common, she with her sunshade, for the day was growing hot, and I talking, as we went, of meteorites and of the sizes and velocities of such bodies, and retailing Ogilvy at second hand with all the confidence of an hour's acquaintance with the subject.

By that time there was quite a crowd about the pit—some forty or fifty people, I should think, when we arrived, and more coming continually along the roads and over the heather: cyclists, a gardener or two, girls with children, butcher boys, loafers from the station, golf caddies from the links. There was very little talking. The steam had abated somewhat, though it still rose steadily from the water about the cylinder, and the hissing had sunk to a low simmer; and the people stood round the scorched rim of the pit in a broken ring, staring down at the great grey back of the thing where it broke the flood, and saying very little, as I say. Few of them had any conception of what a meteorite might be, and I heard all manner of notions—that it was a boiler fallen from a flying machine, that it was a thunderbolt, that it was something to do with the gasworks. An excursionist from Chertsey wanted to know whether it was hollow, and was answered by a sarcastic person that it was full of dead Frenchmen. My wife stood by me at the edge, looking down at it, and after a time she said, very quietly, that she did not like it, and asked me whether such things fell often. I told her, out of my new learning, that they fell frequently enough, but seldom so large; and she said no more, but I noticed she kept her hand upon my arm.

It was about this time that the accident happened which was, I suppose, the first hurt done by the Thing to any human being. Among the crowd was a fellow named Henderson's man—a groom or under-gardener, I never learned exactly which, in service at one of the houses along the Ottershaw road—a red-faced, sceptical young man who had been loudly of the boiler opinion, and who, growing bold as the steam abated, went slithering down the sandy side of the pit to the water's margin, in spite of the shouts of several of us, to settle the question by handling the thing. The water was shallow at that edge, scarce over his boot-tops, and hot, as he found at the first step, for he cried out at it; but he floundered on the two or three paces to the cylinder, and clapped his open hand upon the ashen incrustation of it.

He gave a cry that I hear still—a short, astonished scream, more of surprise than agony at the first instant—and sprang back, and fell full length in the steaming shallows, and scrambled up and came stumbling and splashing out, holding his right hand by the wrist and dancing with the pain of it. The incrustation, it seems, had flaked under his palm, and beneath its deceptive grey the metal was still hot enough to sear flesh at a touch. The skin of his palm and fingers was burnt white and puckered, and his boots and trousers were scalded through besides. Two men helped him up the slope, and a woman bound his hand with a handkerchief steeped in the ditch-water, and he sat upon the heather rocking himself and swearing in a low, monotonous, tearful voice until they took him off towards Ottershaw to the doctor. The crowd, I remember, was rather stimulated than sobered by the affair. It drew back a yard or so from the rim, and thereafter there was no more talk of going down; but the ring about the pit grew denser, and there was a buzz of talk now where there had been silence, and boys kept throwing stones at the cylinder to hear the flat, dead sound they made upon it, until an old fellow with a stick drove them off.

Ogilvy came back upon the scene towards half-past eleven, with Henderson, the London journalist, whom he had routed out of his garden at Chertsey, and the two of them stood a long while at the edge, Henderson with his notebook, asking questions of everyone and getting into his shorthand a very fair account of the night's fall. Ogilvy examined the burnt man's story with great interest—the fellow had come back, bandaged and important, to exhibit his hand—and said it showed how enormous the original heat must have been, and how slowly so great a mass must part with it; and he repeated to Henderson, for publication, his opinion that it was a meteorite, unusual only in its size, and that there was not the slightest occasion for any excitement beyond the scientific. Yet I saw him, when Henderson had done with him, standing apart and staring at that circular seam near the upper end, which the falling away of some of the incrustation had now made plainer, and rubbing his chin.

By noon the crowd had swollen to some hundreds, and there were hawkers already upon the outskirts of it, and a man with a barrow of ginger beer. The day had grown very hot, and there was no shade upon the common, and no more to be seen than had been seen at ten; and my wife, who had grown pale, I thought, with the sun and the standing, and who glanced continually at the grey bulk in the water as though she expected something of it, was easily persuaded that she had seen enough. I confess I was anxious she should go, though I could have given no reason for my anxiety beyond the heat and the press of people. I walked with her to the edge of the common, where the road begins, and she made me promise to come home to lunch, and to run no risks, and looked back once at the column of steam against the sky; and then she went on alone towards our house, and I turned back to the pit. And that, though I did not dream it then, was the last hour of the old life, the last morning of that long security which we none of us knew we possessed until it was gone. I stayed. The steam went up, thinner now, into the hot noon stillness, and the crowd thickened about the pit, and the Thing lay in the shallow water, cooling.

The first words I addressed to Mr. Franklin, when we had got upon our legs again, and had shaken the sand out of our clothes, were words of wonderment at his appearing among us a good four hours before any living soul at the house had looked for him. The gig had been ordered to meet the afternoon train; the spare bedroom had a fire laid in it, not yet lit; and my lady and Miss Rachel were away at their lunching-party, with no notion of finding him arrived before them. I said as much, in my plain way.

“That’s exactly why I came, Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin. “I wanted to slip into the house quietly, without the gig, and without the train that anybody could count on. Walk back with me through the plantation, and I’ll tell you what I mean.”

Now here, I am well aware, you will expect me to go straight on with what Mr. Franklin told me. And so I would, with all my heart, if it were in the nature of things—my things, at any rate—to go straight on with anything. But I must first mention (or I shall never be easy) that as we turned our backs on the Shivering Sand, I looked once over my shoulder for Rosanna, and saw no sign of her, near or far. The sandhills had swallowed her up as clean as the quicksand itself could have done. Bear that in mind, if you please, and let it lie quiet in a corner of your memory; we shall have occasion to fetch it out again before the evening is over.

Mr. Franklin took my arm—foreign fashion once more—and led me along at a pace which my legs (at my time of life) found more sociable than convenient.

“Betteredge,” he began, “before I say a word about myself, answer me a question. Has anything out of the common happened at the house today? Any strangers about the place? Any inquiries made for me?”

You may fancy how this took me aback, coming, as it did, on the top of the three Indians and the boy with the ink in his hand, and Penelope’s opinion thereon, all of which I had faithfully promised my daughter to lay before Mr. Franklin at the first opportunity. Here was the opportunity offering itself to me, unasked. I told him the whole of it, there and then, between the sandhills and the firs—the drums, the ink, the boy in the trance, and the words about the English gentleman who would travel from foreign parts to this house that day, and who “had got It about him.” I put in Penelope’s terrors, and I put in my own opinion (which was, and is, that the whole exhibition was a piece of hocus-pocus, rehearsed beforehand, like a conjurer’s trick at a fair), and I wound up by asking him to laugh at it along with me, and so set my daughter’s mind at rest.

Mr. Franklin never laughed. He stopped short among the fir trees, and looked at me as grave as a judge.

“Betteredge,” he says, “I am afraid the boy with the ink in his hand comes nearer the truth than you do. And I am afraid I know only too well what the Indians mean by ‘It.’ This will explain, at the same time, what I could not have explained to you five minutes since—my reason for being here four hours before my time. Read that.”

He took out his pocket-book, and produced from it a letter, which he put into my hand. I got out my spectacles (a thing not done in a moment, on a windy day, out of doors), and I read the letter, standing there in the plantation. It was in a lawyer’s clerk’s hand, dated from an office in Gray’s Inn, and it ran, word for word, as follows:

“Dear Sir,—Referring to the business which brought you to this office on Monday last, we think it right to inform you of a circumstance which has since come to our knowledge. Inquiries have twice been made at this office, by a person of foreign appearance, respecting the day and hour of your departure from London, and the address to which you were travelling. No information was, of course, given. We have since ascertained that the same person, or a companion of his, has been seen loitering in the neighbourhood of your hotel. We do not presume to advise you; but, having regard to the nature of the valuable committed to your charge, we would respectfully suggest that you should not defer your journey to Yorkshire, and that you should so arrange it as to leave London earlier, or by another route, than the one you may be supposed to take. We remain, dear sir, your faithful servants, Septimus Luker being in no way concerned in this,—BRUFF AND SON.”

(The words about Mr. Luker, I ought in fairness to say, I did not understand then, and do not rightly understand now; and if you are wiser than I am, you are welcome to your wisdom.)

“There, Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, taking the letter back, and folding it up. “You see how it is. I got that on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning—this morning—instead of leaving by the train I had named, and had been heard to name, I left two hours earlier, by another line, changed carriages twice, got out at a station ten miles down the coast from ours, and walked the rest of the way along the cliffs with my bag in my hand. Whether I have thrown the foreign-looking person off my scent, or whether he and his friends were here before me—which your three jugglers this morning would seem to say—I no more know than you do. But I know this: I have got something about me that I shall be heartily glad to have off my hands; and until I can put it where it ought to go, I mean to put it where nobody will think of looking for it. Have you got such a thing as a strong-room at the house?”

“There’s my lady’s plate-room, sir,” I said, “with a good lock to the door, and the key on my own bunch, and nobody but me to go near it from one week’s end to another.”

“The very thing,” says Mr. Franklin.

With that, he unbuttoned his beautiful fawn-coloured coat, and took from an inner pocket a small packet, done up in white paper, sealed at both ends, and sealed in the middle likewise, with a seal I didn’t know—no bigger, the whole of it, than a man’s two fingers, and light enough in my hand, when he gave it me, to have held nothing at all.

“Lock that up in the plate-room tonight,” he says, “and give it back to me tomorrow morning, when I have had time to speak to my aunt. Ask me no questions, Betteredge, and I shall tell you no lies; and neither of us will be a penny the worse.”

I own to you freely—for what is the use of writing a narrative at all, if a man is to sit hiding himself behind his own inkstand?—that my fingers itched to know what was inside that packet, and that my mind, running on Penelope’s story, and on the family scandals I had heard whispered in years gone by touching a certain uncle of Mr. Franklin’s, had made a guess at it before we were clear of the plantation. But a servant of the old school knows when to hold his tongue, whatever his fingers may do; and I put the packet into my breast pocket, and my questions along with it, and said no more.

We got back to the house by the shrubbery gate. I took Mr. Franklin up to his room the back way, sent him hot water, and left him to make himself fit to be seen; after which I went straight down, with my keys in one hand and the packet in the other, to the plate-room in the basement. There, having lit a candle (for the place is as dark as the inside of a hat at all seasons), I opened the door, and looked about me for a fit lodging for my trust. The plate-chests stood in their places, and behind them, in the corner, was a japanned box of Sir John’s, in which nothing had been kept, since his death, but a bundle of old receipted bills. I put the packet under the bills, shut the box, shut the door on the box, turned the key on the door, tried the door twice after locking it (which, at my age, I hold to be no more than common prudence), and went upstairs again with the comfortable feeling of a man who has done his duty, mixed—I won’t deny it—with the uncomfortable feeling of a man who doesn’t know what his duty may have let him in for.

At the top of the basement stairs I found Penelope waiting for me, with something on her mind, as I could see by the way she held her chin.

“Father,” says she, “Rosanna has never come in.”

“She’ll be in directly,” I said. “I left her at the sands not an hour since.”

“She has been at the sands and gone on,” says Penelope. “The baker’s boy met her on the path above Cobb’s Hole, walking away from home, not towards it, with her face as white as her apron. She has gone to the fisherman’s cottage, as sure as sure—and her dinner spoiling in the oven, and Nancy saying things about her downstairs that I wouldn’t soil my lips with repeating.”

The friend at Cobb’s Hole—the only friend the girl had, as I have told you—was one to whom she might go, and welcome, on her lawful day out. But this was no day out of hers; and to run off, without leave asked or word left, was as unlike our quiet, civil Rosanna as the Shivering Sand is unlike a bowling-green. I thought of the change I had seen in her face on the beach; and I thought about it, I own, to mighty little purpose. “Give her till nightfall,” I said to Penelope, “and keep Nancy’s tongue within bounds if you can, my dear. The girl has her fits, and her fancies, and her walks; and the less made of this in the servants’ hall, the sooner mended.” Which shows you, once again, how wise a man can sound when he knows nothing whatever of the matter in hand.

At past five, the carriage brought my lady home—Miss Rachel, I should tell you, having been carried off from the lunching-party by her cousins the Miss Ablewhites, to stay the evening at Frizinghall, so that the house saw nothing of her that night. My lady, hearing that Mr. Franklin had come, and come early, and come on foot, lifted her eyebrows at the news, and desired to see him in her own sitting-room before dinner. What passed between them, at the first, aunt and nephew kept to themselves, as they had every right to do. But the door of my lady’s room stood ajar when I went along the passage with the lamps; and, without any prying on my part (a thing I scorn), the last words of their talk came out to me as plain as print. I set them down here, because you have a right to them, and because they weighed on my mind all that evening like a stone in a pocket.

“One thing, Franklin,” says my lady, in the voice she kept for the few occasions when she meant to be obeyed. “Whatever business has brought you here before your time—and I can see in your face that there is business—understand this. Your uncle Herncastle’s name is not to be spoken under my roof. Not to me, not to Rachel, not to the servants. I broke with my brother while he was living, for reasons which I have never repented; and I won’t have him brought into my house, in talk or in any other way, now that he is dead. Do you promise me?”

There was a moment’s silence, in which I could all but hear Mr. Franklin thinking of the packet in my plate-room.

“I promise, aunt,” he says, “that his name shall never pass my lips in this house. What I may have to say to you touches Rachel’s birthday, and can very well be said without it. Will tomorrow morning do?”

“Tomorrow morning will do,” says my lady; and I heard her kiss him; and I went on with my lamps, as a man should, thinking my own thoughts and keeping them to myself—which last is a discipline I recommend to all persons engaged in writing narratives.

Dinner passed quietly; and a pleasanter gentleman at table than Mr. Franklin, when he chose, you couldn’t wish to see; though I noticed that he went twice to the window before the curtains were drawn, and looked out over the terrace into the dusk, in a manner that said London letters as plain as words could have said it. At ten, I went my rounds of the doors and windows, and made all fast, and tried the plate-room door once more for luck.

Last thing of all, I asked Penelope about Rosanna. Not come back. Word had been sent up from Cobb’s Hole, by a fisher-lad, that she was safe at the cottage, and would be home by breakfast-time, and begged that her absence might be excused to me. Safe, no doubt; but what had driven the girl there, on no day of hers, with a white face, was more than the message told, and more than I could fathom.

So there I was at the end of that long day—the twenty-fifth of May, one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight—settled in my beehive chair in my own room, with my pipe drawing sweetly, and my candle burning steady, and ROBINSON CRUSOE open on my knee. I had the key of the plate-room on the bunch at my side, and Mr. Franklin’s sealed packet safe behind the lock, and my mind running, in spite of me, on Indians, and lawyers’ letters, and my lady’s forbidden subject, and a plain girl in a grey cloak who was sleeping that night at Cobb’s Hole instead of under our roof. I opened the book, to compose myself, and I came—by the merest accident, mind—on this passage: “Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself.” If that is not prophecy, tell me what is! I smoked my pipe out upon it, and went to bed comforted. The man who isn’t satisfied with ROBINSON CRUSOE must have something wrong with his inside; that is my opinion, and I abide by it.

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett's hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, and then it was dark, and the street was dark and empty.

"Miserable how?" I said.

"Oh, don't ask me. Just miserable. Everything's a rot. Where are we going?"

"I told him to drive around."

"Tell him the Select. I want a drink. I want a lot of drinks."

I leaned forward and told the driver the Café Select, Boulevard Montparnasse, and sat back. Brett had her eyes shut again.

"Sorry about that lot at the dance," she said. "Had to bring them. They're quite safe, you know."

"I know."

"You were angry."

"Not at you."

"You've no right to be angry at anybody. What a lot of rot it all is."

We came out onto a boulevard and the cab went along fast under the trees. There were not many people out. It was late and the trees moved a little in the light from the arc-lamps.

"Don't sit so far away," Brett said. Then, when I moved: "No. Don't touch me. I can't stand it."

"All right."

"You understand, don't you?"

"Sure," I said. "I understand everything."

"You needn't be nasty."

"I wasn't being nasty."

"Oh, Jake." She put her hand flat on my arm and took it away again. "Let's not talk. Talking's all bilge. We'll go and drink and be with people and it will be fine."

"It will be splendid."

"Don't."

The cab crossed the Boulevard St. Michel and went along the Rue Vavin and pulled up in front of the Select. The terrace was still going. Inside at the bar there was a crowd, and the light was bright after the cab. We took a table on the terrace against the window. The waiter came.

"Brandy and soda," Brett said.

"Two."

The waiter went away and Brett looked out at the boulevard. A group came by from the Dôme, arguing, and one of the women waved at Brett and Brett waved back and did not ask them over. The brandies came. Brett drank half of hers straight off.

"That's better," she said. "That's much better. I say, do you know Count Mippipopolous?"

"No," I said. "Who's he?"

"You don't know him?"

"Never heard of him."

"He's quite extraordinary. Met him last week at Zelli's. Greek, I think, or he says he's Greek. Owns a chain of sweetshops in the States. Frightful lot of money."

"What does he do with it?"

"Buys champagne. He's mad about buying champagne. He wanted to give me ten thousand dollars to go to Biarritz with him."

"Are you going?"

"Don't be an ass. Of course not. Then he wanted it to be Cannes. Then Monte Carlo. I told him I knew too many people everywhere. He thought that was very funny. He's one of us, though. Absolutely one of us. No doubt about it. You can always tell."

"How can you tell?"

"Oh, one can. He's been through things, that man."

"What things?"

"Oh, I don't know. Things. He's got arrow wounds. Shows them to people. Isn't it amazing? Arrow wounds."

"Where did he get arrow wounds?"

"Some war of his. He's been in seven wars and four revolutions. He counts them up."

"You like him."

"I like him fine. He's damned nice about everything and he never wants anything back. He says that's the secret. Not to want anything back."

"It's a good secret."

"You'll meet him. You'll like him too. He's coming round to-morrow night with champagne."

She finished her brandy and looked into the glass and turned it around on the marble table-top.

"Give me another of these," she said to the waiter, who was passing. Then to me: "Hello. What's the matter with you now?"

"Nothing," I said. "I just remembered I left fifty francs at the dance."

"Fifty francs where?"

"With the patronne. For Georgette."

"Who on earth is Georgette?"

"The girl I brought."

"Your fiancée." Brett laughed. "Mademoiselle Leblanc. I heard about it. It's all over the Quarter already. What a Jake-like thing to do."

"I ought to go back for it."

"For the fifty francs?"

"She's probably gone off with your friends by now. That was the arrangement. If she went off with them the patronne saves it for me."

"You made an arrangement like that? You are a wonder. Go on, then. Go and get your fifty francs."

"Will you be here?"

"Where would I go?"

"Anywhere. You always might."

"I'll be here. Get me a taxi-driver who knows something and go and collect your money, and come back, and we'll drink it up."

I went out and got a taxi at the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and rode back up to the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The street was steep and dark and the Bal was still lighted. I told the driver to wait. Inside, the accordion was going and there were only a few couples left on the floor, working-people from the quarter who had come in late, and the daughter of the house was stacking saucers. The crowd of young men was gone. Georgette was sitting alone at a table by the wall with her hat on the table in front of her and a glass of beer half drunk beside it.

"Well," she said. "It's the fiancé."

"Hello," I said. "I thought you'd gone."

"They went to Montmartre. They wanted me to come."

"Why didn't you go?"

She shrugged. "They dance well," she said. "They don't buy anything."

"They're economical."

"Economical, my God. And your friend the tall one, the smiling one, she talked French at me again after you left. What did I ever do to her?"

"Nothing. She talks French at everybody."

The patronne came over from behind the zinc bar with the envelope in her hand. "Monsieur," she said. "The little one stayed, so I have kept it. You see I have kept it."

"Give it to her," I said.

The patronne handed the envelope to Georgette. Georgette opened it, looked at the fifty-franc note, and looked at me.

"And this?"

"That was for your dinner. In case."

"In case I went with those?"

"In case anything."

She folded the note and put it in her bag and snapped the bag shut. "You're a droll type, Jacob," she said. "You buy a dinner, you pay for going away. It's not everybody does it in that order."

"I'm a droll type."

"You could take me home now. It's included."

"I can't. I have to meet some one."

"The one you left with. The English one."

"Yes."

"You're sick, and she's sick too," Georgette said. "It's not my affair. Well, good night, monsieur the fiancé. Thanks for the dinner. The dinner was good."

"Good night, Georgette."

She grinned with her mouth closed, being pretty about it this time on purpose, and I shook hands with her and with the patronne and went out to the taxi. Going back down the hill I felt cheap the way you feel cheap when you have paid for something instead of doing something, and by the time we crossed the boulevard I had stopped thinking about it.

Brett was still at the table on the terrace. There were two saucers now in front of her place and somebody's empty glass across the table.

"Zizi was here," she said. "He went off. Did you get your fifty francs?"

"I gave it to the girl."

"Was she there?"

"She was there."

"You would give it to her." Brett looked at me. "You're a rum one, Jake. You do things like that and then you're beastly to everybody."

"When was I beastly?"

"You know when."

We had another brandy and soda and did not talk for a while. The terrace was emptying. A man came by selling copies of the morning papers, still damp, and I bought one and did not read it. Down the boulevard the arc-lights had that thin look they get when the sky is starting.

"Tell me about your count," I said.

"He's not my count."

"Tell me about him anyway."

"There's nothing to tell. He's fat and he's nice and he doesn't want anything back."

"You said he wanted you to go to Biarritz."

"That's not wanting anything back. That's just wanting something. It's not the same thing at all."

"No," I said. "I can see it wouldn't be."

"Don't be like that."

"I'm not being like anything. I think it's fine. I think it's all fine. I think you should go to Biarritz, and I think the ten thousand is fine, and I think it's fine we can all sit here and be so damned intelligent about it."

"Do you think I'd go?"

"No."

"Then why say it?"

"Because it's fine to say things," I said. "It's the saying season."

Brett looked away down the boulevard. "You're a lovely one to talk about the saying season," she said. "You never say anything at all. You just sit there being so bloody noble and quiet and it comes out of you like a fog."

"All right."

"Oh, don't say 'all right' at me."

"What should I say?"

"Nothing. There isn't anything to say. That's the hell of it, isn't it? There simply isn't anything."

"No," I said. "There isn't anything."

That was the way we talked, and none of it was what either of us meant. What I meant was that I loved her and that it was no good, and I had never once said it that way and I did not say it now.

"Michael's coming back, you know," Brett said after a while. "Some time next month. From Scotland."

"Good."

"He's got no money either. It'll be a lovely marriage. Two people without a bean between them and everybody's blessing."

"You'll be very happy."

"Chaps always are. I say, don't let's talk any more. Look, it's getting light."

It was getting light. Up over the houses across the boulevard the sky was gray and going white at the edges, and the street had that clean empty look. The waiters were taking in the chairs from the far end of the terrace and stacking them. A market-cart went by, high with carrots, the horse's hoofs sounding loud on the empty street, the driver asleep on top of the load.

"I love the carts going to market," Brett said. "Don't you love them?"

"Yes."

"I'd like to go along on one, some night. All night out to wherever they come from, and ride back in with the vegetables."

"Ask your count. He'd buy you the cart."

"He would, too. That's the devil of him." She stood up and pulled on her hat. "Get me a taxi, Jake, there's a dear. I'm dead."

I went to the curb and there was a taxi coming down from the Dôme corner and I stopped it. Brett came over. I opened the door and she got in and settled back in the corner.

"Come round to-morrow night," she said. "The Crillon at five. The count and his champagne. Do come."

"I'll come."

"Don't look like that."

"Like what?"

"Like that. Good night, darling. I'm sorry about everything. I'm always sorry about everything, and it never does a bit of good, does it?"

"No."

"Good night, Jake."

She put out her hand and I took it, and then the taxi started and her hand pulled out of mine, and I shut the door and the taxi went off up the boulevard toward the Observatoire and I watched the tail-light go and stood there. Then I started to walk.

I walked down the Boulevard Raspail and it was empty all the way, and at the river the light was coming flat along the water. The Seine looked gray and smooth and there was a tow of empty barges going down, riding high out of the water, a man at the sweep of the last one, and the water folding away white behind them. I stood on the bridge and watched them go under and come out the other side. The buildings along the quais were still dark but the sky behind Notre-Dame was yellow now, low down, and the towers stood up black against it. A fisherman was already out on the stone below the bridge, setting up his long bamboo pole, not hurrying, everything in its place. It was cold on the bridge with the small wind that comes along the river before the sun.

It is easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the evening, with the lights on and the drinks coming and everybody talking. In the early morning, walking home along the river with the carts going in to the markets and the city being washed down, it is another thing.

I walked along the quai in the gray light, past the boxes of the book-stalls all locked and covered, and turned up away from the river, and went home to sleep.

It was Psmith’s guest, an editor’s brief rather than any tool-based task, that occupied me here — the deliverable is the chapter itself, so here it is.

The rain, having done its worst, stopped shortly before eleven o’clock with the abruptness of a woman changing her mind, and by noon Dover Street lay bathed in that brilliant, apologetic sunshine which the English climate keeps in reserve for such occasions. It found Psmith in the smoking-room of the Drones, restoring his tissues with a thoughtful cigarette and reflecting not unpleasantly on the events of the morning. He had performed his good deed for the day; and, like all philanthropists, he was conscious of a warm glow about the heart. It is true that the philanthropy had been exercised at the expense of the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, but that, Psmith felt, was how these things should be managed. The secret of a successful life is to get some one else to pay for one’s generous impulses.

It was at half-past one, as he was proceeding through the hall on his way to lunch, that the first ripple disturbed the surface of his content. The Hon. Hugo Walderwick, a stout and vehement young man, came bounding from the direction of the cloak-room with the air of one who has been stung by wasps.

“I say!” said Mr. Walderwick. “I say, dash it!”

“Say on, Comrade Walderwick,” said Psmith kindly. “You have our ear.”

“Somebody’s taken my umbrella!”

“Ah,” said Psmith with quiet sympathy, “that is Life. We start out on our little journey full of hope, and what happens? Umbrellas are removed. It is what makes men of us.”

“The attendant chappie says *you* took it!”

Psmith adjusted his monocle and surveyed him with grave approval.

“Quite right,” he said. “I did. I am glad, Comrade Walderwick, that you have brought the matter up in this frank, straightforward way. It is thus that all business between gentlemen should be conducted. I did take your umbrella. And what an umbrella! I have inspected many in my time, but never one so wholly satisfying. It was needed, I may say, for a most sacred purpose.”

“But dash it, where is it?”

“I could not say. But wherever it is, it is doing good.”

Mr. Walderwick’s complexion, never pale, deepened to a rich mulberry.

“Of all the nerve! Of all the crust! You go swiping a fellow’s umbrella——”

“I was about,” said Psmith, gently raising a long hand, “to touch on that aspect of the affair. Ask what you will of me. The umbrella itself, alas, I cannot restore. It has gone out into the world, and who shall say where its mission may end? But if it is a question of mere sordid cash, name your figure. What did the thing cost you?”

Mr. Walderwick, somewhat sobered by this businesslike note, reflected.

“About a guinea, I suppose.”

“I will give you ten pounds for it.”

“Ten——!” Mr. Walderwick gaped.

“Make it fifteen,” said Psmith. “No man should be asked to sever himself from an umbrella like that for less.” He produced notes and pressed them into his companion’s unresisting hand. “You will doubtless wish to observe some form of ceremony at the passing of such an umbrella from your life. I would suggest a few moments of quiet meditation. And now, Comrade Walderwick, I must reluctantly tear myself away. I have to lunch.”

And with a courtly inclination of the head Psmith passed on towards the dining-room, leaving the Hon. Hugo staring at fifteen pounds and speculating dizzily on the mental condition of one who paid fifteen times its value for an umbrella which he was unable to produce.

* * * * *

Eve Halliday, meanwhile, was having a busy day. At three o’clock she presented herself at the Senior Conservative Club, that vast and grave establishment off St. James’s Street, where, in a small room reserved for such interviews as members might have with the outer world, she was to see her future employer, the Earl of Emsworth, on the subject of the cataloguing of the Blandings Castle library.

She had come armed with facts. She had spent an improving hour that morning, between the rain and the umbrella, rehearsing the little she knew of cataloguing, and she was prepared to speak with modest confidence of first editions, of folios and of the system of Dewey. She was not called upon to do so.

Lord Emsworth, when he pottered vaguely into the room some twenty minutes late, proved to be a long, lean, amiable-looking man of about sixty, whose clothes hung upon him like the drapery of a scarecrow at the end of a hard season. He was peering about him in a dazed manner, for he had left his pince-nez—as he supposed—in the hansom which had brought him from the flower show at Shepherd’s Bush, where he had passed a morning of almost unbearable ecstasy among the roses; and without his pince-nez the world was to him a pleasant but impenetrable mist.

“Ah,” he said, discovering Eve dimly, as one discovers a landmark in a fog. “Ah! Yes. Quite so. Capital. You are the young lady from the agency?”

“I am Miss Halliday,” said Eve. “I think Mr. Baxter wrote to me——”

“Baxter,” said his lordship with feeling, “is always writing to somebody. A most indefatigable young man. Yes, yes, to be sure. You have come about the letters. Sit down, my dear, sit down. Now, take this down, if you please. To Messrs. Cheesewright and Cheesewright, Rose Growers, Chertsey. Dear Sirs. With reference to your advertisement in the current number of the *Gardeners’ Chronicle*, I should be glad if you would forward me particulars of the new hybrid perpetual to which you allude, together with your terms for——”

“I’m afraid,” said Eve gently, “there’s some mistake. I haven’t come to take letters. I’ve come about cataloguing the library.”

Lord Emsworth stopped in mid-flight and blinked at her with the pained bewilderment of a sheep interrupted in the act of grazing.

“The library?” he said. “Bless my soul, yes. The library. Baxter said something about it this morning. Or was it yesterday? You are sure you are not the young woman about the typewriting?”

“Quite sure.”

“How very confusing all this is,” sighed his lordship. “In London everything is confusing. Nobody should ever come to London. A foul city. Full of poets,” he added darkly, for the shadow of the morrow’s luncheon lay upon him. “Well, well, so you are going to catalogue the library. I have never been able to understand why a library should be catalogued, but Baxter assures me it is essential, and Baxter is always right. Are you fond of gardens?”

“Very,” said Eve, truthfully.

“The gardens at Blandings,” said Lord Emsworth, kindling, “are unquestionably the finest in England. I say it without fear of contradiction. My head gardener, Angus McAllister, is a man with whom I do not invariably see eye to eye—notably in the matter of hollyhocks, on which his views border on the criminal—but of the gardens as a whole I speak with the utmost confidence . . .”

He spoke of them, with the utmost confidence, for twenty-five minutes. Eve listened with the flattering attention which, whatever her other failings, she was always able to give to enthusiasm, and it was only when his lordship, groping in an absent moment for his pince-nez, was reminded of their loss and became suddenly overcast, that the flow was checked.

“I had them at the flower show,” he mourned. “I distinctly remember having them at the flower show.”

“Are those they,” asked Eve, “hanging down your back?”

They were. The cord had slipped over his collar, and the pince-nez, after the fashion of pince-nez the world over, had gone to earth between his lordship’s shoulder-blades. Eve retrieved them; and Lord Emsworth, having placed them on his nose and verified through them the fact that his companion was a singularly pretty girl of engaging manners, beamed upon her with a wholehearted approval which no examination of testimonials could have produced.

“My dear,” he said, “I am infinitely obliged. Infinitely. You are a most capable young lady. I can see it at once. The library is in excellent hands. Come down to Blandings—Baxter will tell you the train—yes, yes, Baxter will arrange everything. Baxter,” he repeated, with the air of a man soothed by the very sound of the name, “will see to it all.”

And thus it came about that Eve Halliday was engaged to catalogue the library of Blandings Castle without having been asked a single question bearing however remotely upon libraries, catalogues, or any subject connected with them; and left the Senior Conservative Club with the not unjustifiable feeling that hers had been the strangest interview ever accorded to an employee since employment began.

* * * * *

It was close upon five o’clock when Eve, the umbrella still in her hand, made her way up Dover Street. Her conscience, an active organ, had been troubling her on the subject of that umbrella all the afternoon. It was, she felt, the sort of umbrella that must be missed; and simple honesty demanded its return to the club into which its late custodian had vanished. She had, moreover, composed in her mind a graceful little note of thanks.

She was not ten yards from the club’s entrance when the swing-door revolved and her hatless benefactor of the morning came out on to the pavement, now hatted, gloved, and swinging a slim ebony cane. There was no mistaking him. London holds many tall young men, and not a few thin ones, but only one, Eve was certain, who combined those qualities with an eyeglass of such serene effulgence and an air of such benevolent solemnity. She went to meet him with a friendly smile.

“Oh, I’m so glad I’ve caught you,” she said. “I was just bringing back your umbrella.”

The young man halted, and having examined the umbrella through his monocle with courteous interest, transferred his gaze to its bearer.

“A handsome umbrella,” he said. “But not, alas, mine.”

“But—you gave it to me this morning. Outside the coal place across the road there. In the rain.”

“Impossible,” said the young man gently. “At the hour you name I was, if memory serves, deep in the perusal of the morning paper. It is a lifelong rule of mine never to give umbrellas to anybody before lunch. The doctors are unanimous against it.”

Eve looked at him, wavering between indignation and a strong desire to laugh.

“I know it was you. You had no hat.”

“There,” said the young man, “you touch the vital spot. I am never without a hat. My relatives have frequently commented on it. ‘Whatever his faults,’ they say, ‘he always wears a hat.’ No, you are thinking of some other and worthier man—some radiant being who, I do not doubt, is at this moment scanning the streets for you with an umbrella-less and aching heart. I can only regret that I am not he.”

“Well, of all——!” said Eve, and stopped for want of material.

“Precisely,” said the young man, with sympathy. He raised his hat, restored it with care to his head, as though to emphasise his earlier point, and proceeded down Dover Street at the same long, unhurried stride with which he had crossed it that morning.

Eve stood looking after him for a moment; then, her chin at a militant angle, she walked to the club door and addressed herself to the hall-porter.

“Will you please,” she said, “give this umbrella to the tall gentleman with the eyeglass who has just gone out? And this note with it.”

The porter, a man of ripe experience, took both without visible emotion.

“What name shall I say, miss?”

Eve hesitated. Then it occurred to her that anonymous benefactions, however attractive in theory, lose something of their force when the beneficiary has just denied the whole transaction to one’s face.

“Miss Halliday,” she said with decision. “Miss Eve Halliday.”

And she walked off towards Piccadilly with the agreeable sensation of having had the last word.

* * * * *

The smoking-room of the Drones Club at half-past nine of a summer evening is a peaceful spot, and Psmith, who had dined alone and dined well, was occupying his favourite chair by the window when the attendant approached bearing an umbrella and a small envelope.

“Left for you at the hall-door, sir, this evening.”

“For me?” said Psmith. “Are you sure?”

“The young lady said the tall gentleman with the eyeglass, sir. Begging your pardon, sir, there isn’t another in the club at the moment answering to that.”

“Reason,” admitted Psmith, “is on your side. The young lady left no name, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir. A Miss Halliday, sir. Miss Eve Halliday.”

“Thank you,” said Psmith. “Thank you. That will be all.”

The attendant withdrew, and Psmith, laying the umbrella—his umbrella, bought and paid for at a figure which had staggered the Hon. Hugo Walderwick to his foundations—across his knees, opened the envelope. The note within was brief, but he read it several times.

“Returned with thanks,” it ran, “to the gentleman who did *not* lend it. It kept off every drop of the rain, and I hope that whoever the tall young man with the eyeglass really was, he did not get wet. —E. H.”

Psmith folded the note and placed it with some care in his breast pocket. Then, breathing a soft and contented sigh, he lit a cigarette and gazed out of the window at the spot across the road where the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe drooped in the evening light, its work for the day done.

“Eve Halliday,” he murmured. “Eve Halliday!”

It seemed to him a singularly pleasant name; and it occurred to him, as he sat there while the summer dusk deepened over Dover Street, that a man of enterprise, holding as security both an umbrella and a name, could scarcely be said to have lost touch with the situation.

The First National Bank was a gray stone box on lower Broadway with a lobby that had been polished until it hurt your eyes. I went into it a little after noon and asked a floorwalker in a cutaway coat where I could learn something about a dead man’s account. He handed me along to an assistant cashier, a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so whose name, according to the brass plate on his cage, was Albury.

“I’m working on the Willsson killing,” I told him, and put one of the Continental Detective Agency’s cards on the marble in front of him. “Yesterday afternoon, somewhere around three o’clock, Donald Willsson wrote a check for five thousand dollars on this bank. I want to know what became of it.”

The boy’s face was smooth and pleasant and it stayed that way, but his hands did some unnecessary straightening of papers before he answered.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you saw Mr. Dritton? He’s the cashier.”

“Is he the man who’d know?”

“The records would know. I could look, but I don’t think⁠—”

“Look,” I said.

He looked. He was gone ten minutes and came back with a face that was trying not to show it had found anything interesting.

“No check of Mr. Willsson’s for five thousand dollars has come through,” he said. “Nothing near that size. Nothing since a hundred and fifty dollars to a tailor, ten days ago.”

“Was he in the bank yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes. I waited on him myself. It was around three o’clock, or a little before.”

“What did he want?”

Albury’s ears got pink. He looked past me at the lobby, at a fat woman arguing with a teller two cages down, and then back at me.

“He asked me whether a check would be⁠—whether the bank would certify a check of his for five thousand, if it were presented. I told him certainly, his balance was well over that. He thanked me and went out. That’s all.”

“Did he have anybody with him?”

“No.”

“Did he say who the check was for?”

“No.”

“And nobody’s brought it in? Nobody’s asked to have it certified?”

“Nobody.”

“So somebody in Personville is walking around with five thousand dollars of a dead man’s money in his pocket and being shy about spending it,” I said.

Albury didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. His mouth had a strained look at the corners, as if talking about Donald Willsson pained him somewhere, but that could have been good manners. I asked him whether he had known Willsson well.

“Not well. He’d been in a few times. He was always very pleasant.” The boy said it stiffly, the way you recite something you’ve decided on ahead of time.

I thanked him, told him the police would probably want the same information, and went out. I put in the early afternoon making the rounds of the other banks on the off chance that Willsson had carried an account somewhere else. He hadn’t, or if he had it was under a name nobody would give me. Then I went up to the city hall, spent half an hour learning that the police department’s idea of investigating the murder was to say “we are following several promising leads” to reporters, and walked back to the Great Western through streets that smelled of smelter smoke.

There was a woman sitting in one of the leather chairs in a corner of the lobby, and when I came through the door she got up and came toward me. She was Donald Willsson’s widow.

She wore black, and black made her more slender than ever. Her face under the small black hat was composed, but it was the sort of composure that takes work.

“You are the man who was at my house night before last,” she said. Her voice was low, with that faint accent riding the edges of it.

“Yes.”

“I should like to talk to you.”

There was a writing room off the lobby, empty except for the desks and the stationery nobody ever uses. We went in there and I shut the door and we sat down facing each other across a corner of a desk.

“You went to see my father-in-law this morning,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“News travels in Personville,” I said.

“What did you tell him?”

“What I saw. That you went out at ten-twenty and came back at eleven-five looking sick, with blood on your slipper. That your husband was shot at ten-forty.”

She took that without flinching, but her gloved hands tightened together in her lap.

“And what did he say?”

“He said you killed him.”

“Do you think I killed him?”

“I don’t know who killed him. I know you were somewhere near it when it happened. If you want to tell me about that, I’ll listen. If you’d rather tell it to the police first, that’s your right, though I don’t know what it’s worth in this town.”

She looked at her hands for a while. When she raised her eyes they were steady.

“I will tell you. That night, after you came, the telephone rang. A woman’s voice. She said⁠—” the accent thickened a little, and she slowed down to keep her words in order⁠—“she said that my husband had drawn a check for five thousand dollars, and that if I wished to know where it and he were going that night, I should be in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street a little before eleven. She did not give a name. I thought it was a lie, and then I thought that if it were a lie I should know it by going, and if it were not a lie I should know that too. So I went. I drove there and stopped my car at the corner, under the trees, with the lights out.

“At perhaps twenty minutes before eleven a car came down the street and stopped in front of a house across from where I was, and my husband got out of it and went into the house. The car went away. I sat there. I do not know how long⁠—fifteen minutes, perhaps a little more. Then he came out of the house. He came down the walk and along the sidewalk, toward the corner. Then there were shots⁠—I did not see from where⁠—and he fell.

“I ran to him. He was lying on his face. When I turned him over he was dead. I had his blood on my hands and on my shoe. There was a man there⁠—he came from somewhere⁠—I do not know from where. He said to me: ‘Get away from here, quick.’ I was⁠—I was not brave. I got away. I drove home. You saw me come in.”

“What did the man look like?”

“It was dark. Small, I think. I did not truly see him.”

“Which house did your husband come out of?”

“I did not notice the number. A gray house, wooden, with a porch, in the middle of the block, on the north side.”

“Did he have anything in his hands when he came out? Papers? An envelope?”

She wrinkled her forehead over that, honestly, I thought.

“I don’t know. He may have. I was watching his face.”

“Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

Her mouth twisted.

“The police of Personville? Chief Noonan? My husband was killed because of what he was printing about them. To whom should I have told it⁠—so that they could arrange the story to suit themselves, with me in the middle of it?”

“Max Thaler came to see you yesterday morning,” I said. “I saw him go in.”

That reached her. Her chin came up and some color came into the white face.

“You watch a great deal.”

“It’s my trade. What did he want?”

For a moment I thought she was going to freeze up. Then she shrugged, a small European shrug.

“He came to tell me that he did not kill my husband, and that his⁠—his people did not. He said that if the police tried to put it on him he would make it⁠—unpleasant⁠—for whoever had arranged it. He asked me what I had seen. I told him I had seen nothing. I do not think he believed me.”

“Do you believe him? That he didn’t do it?”

“I believe nobody in this city,” she said. “That is why I have come to you. You are from outside. My father-in-law hates me and will spend money to have me hanged. The police will take his money, or Thaler’s, or anyone’s. You were employed by my husband. I wish you to find who killed him. I can pay.”

“I’ve already got a client of sorts,” I said. “The Agency was hired by your husband, and there’s his death to be accounted for on the books. I’m going to find out who killed him whether anybody pays for it or not, because I don’t like being brought eight hundred miles to have my client shot out from under me before I’ve even seen him. If it turns out you did it, that won’t help you. If you didn’t, you’ve got nothing to buy.”

She studied me for a long moment with those eyes that were neither quite blue nor quite gray, and then she stood up and pulled her gloves smooth.

“You are honest, I think, or a very good actor. In Personville one cannot tell the difference.” At the door she turned. “The woman on the telephone⁠—her voice was young. And she laughed once, at the end, before she hung up. I have been hearing that laugh ever since.”

She went out through the lobby, straight and slim in her black clothes, and the loafers in the leather chairs watched her all the way to the street.

I went up to my room, hung up my coat, and had got as far as taking off one shoe when knuckles hit the door. It was a bellhop, a freckled boy with an envelope.

“Man left this at the desk for you,” he said. “Just now.”

“What kind of man?”

“Just a fella. Gray cap. I never seen him before.”

I gave the boy a dime and shut the door. The envelope was a cheap one, unsealed, with nothing written on it. Inside was a half-sheet of paper with printing on it in pencil, small careful block letters:

YOU ARE ASKING ABOUT A CHECK. KEEP ON. ASK WHO WAS TO GET IT AND WHY IT WAS NEVER CASHED. WILLSSON WAS NOT KILLED BY ANYBODY YOU HAVE TALKED TO YET. WHEN YOU KNOW ENOUGH TO BE WORTH TALKING TO YOU WILL BE SENT FOR.

There was no signature. There didn’t need to be one. A man who talks in a whisper because his throat won’t let him do anything else learns other quiet ways of saying things, and this one had walked into the Willsson house the morning after the murder as if he owned a key. I read the thing three times, decided that the most interesting word in it was “sent,” as if being sent for by Max Thaler were an appointment a man kept whether he wanted to or not, and put it in my pocket.

I ate dinner in the hotel grill and afterward went down the street to the Western Union office and sent a wire to the Old Man in San Francisco:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD TEN FORTY NIGHT OF MY ARRIVAL BEFORE I HAD SEEN HIM STOP AFTERNOON OF DEATH HE DREW CHECK FIVE THOUSAND PAYEE UNKNOWN AND ASKED FIRST NATIONAL WOULD IT CERTIFY STOP CHECK NEVER PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED STOP DEAD MAN WAS RUNNING REFORM CAMPAIGN AGAINST CROWD CONTROLLING CITY INCLUDING POLICE STOP FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS CITY AND CROWD BOTH SAYS WIDOW DID IT AND OFFERS NOTHING ELSE STOP WIDOW ADMITS BEING AT SCENE SAYS DECOYED THERE BY WOMANS PHONE CALL STOP NO CLIENT AT PRESENT BUT EXPECT ONE STOP WILL STAY WITH IT MEANWHILE STOP DETAILS BY MAIL

The clerk counted the words, told me it would have been cheaper to write a letter, and took my money.

I walked back to the hotel through streets that had put on their evening dress: lighted poolroom fronts, drug stores doing more business in flasks than in drugs, men standing on corners not waiting for streetcars. Nobody followed me that I could see, which in Personville probably only meant they were good at it.

Up in my room I turned on the light, pulled the shade down, and sat on the bed with my shoes off, doing my arithmetic. A woman with a young voice and a laugh had known about the five thousand dollars an hour or two after the check was written, and had used the knowledge to pull the wife down to Hurricane Street to watch her husband die. A gray wooden house in the middle of the block had held Donald Willsson for fifteen minutes on the last night of his life. Six shots had come out of an alley across the street, and four of them had gone into him. And somewhere in this smoky city was a slip of blue paper worth five thousand dollars that nobody had tried to turn into money.

Checks are written to be cashed. When one for that much stays in hiding, either the payee is dead, or scared, or was never after money at all. I lay back on the bed with my hands under my head and tried the three of them on, one after another, until the smelter whistles blew midnight across Poisonville. None of them fit yet. The check was still out, and so was I.