The Chapters

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Let me get last night on to the cylinder before the day’s work drives it out of my head, for it did me good, and I want to keep it. Quincey’s dinner came off at his rooms, and we were three only, as he promised: Art, Quincey, and I. Quincey had got from somewhere a wine that we three had drunk on the shore of Titicaca, and would tell neither how nor at what cost; and with the cloth drawn we went over the old ground--the landing at the Marquesas, when the boat was stove in and Art sewed up my shoulder by the light of a burning spar; the Korea; the prairies. Then Quincey stood up with his glass and said, in that quiet way of his which is more moving than eloquence:--

“Boys, there’s no sort of use in two of us going about like a wet Fourth of July. We backed the wrong horses, but it was the right race, and the best horse won. Art, here’s to you; and here’s to a certain pair of eyes, and may God keep them from ever knowing a tear that you can’t kiss away.”

We drank it standing, and no one of us was ashamed that his own eyes were not quite dry. Then Arthur gave us the messages that he had promised should make our ears tingle. What mine was I shall not put even here; but I am a richer man to-night than I was yesterday, and if ever the time comes when she wants a friend, that message is my commission. She has a great heart. Art, honest fellow, was for being humble over his luck, but Quincey clapped him on the shoulder and told him that a man who is loved by such a woman has no call to be humble, but only to be good, “which is a deal harder, and a deal longer a job.” We broke up at one o’clock, better friends, if that may be, than ever. The empty feeling I spoke of two days ago has been, if not filled, at least furnished. And now to work; it is the true anodyne.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*30 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Your letter made me cry, and then laugh, and then cry again, and I have read it three times. I am so glad, dear; so glad that I can hardly write it. Mr. Holmwood--I suppose I must learn to say ‘Arthur,’ since you are determined to make him almost a brother to me--is the luckiest man in England, and I hope he knows it, and I think from what you tell me that he does. You are to write me every single thing: when it is to be, and what you will wear, and whether your mother cried, for I know you will tell me she did not and I shall not believe you.

“And now, dear, I am going to be selfish and pour out my own little trouble, for I have nobody else to pour it to. You remember I told you that I had had a few hurried lines from Jonathan, and that he expected to be starting for home in about a week. Lucy, that was on the 9th of May, and this is the 30th, and there has not come one word since. Every morning I hear the postman come up the road, and every morning I am ashamed of myself afterwards. I know it is foolish. I wrote to Mr. Hawkins--Jonathan’s employer, who has been like a father to him--and he answered at once, so kindly: he has heard nothing either, but he says that where there is land to be bought the law is slow in England and slower abroad, and that in the wild country where Jonathan has gone letters must wait upon carriers and I don’t know how many posts, and any one of them may miscarry. He begged me not to fret; but, Lucy, between his lines I could see that he wondered a little too. So yesterday I did a bold thing: I wrote to the landlord of the hotel at Bistritz, the town that Jonathan’s last letter was sent from, and asked him if he could tell me anything of the English gentleman who stayed in his house at the beginning of May. Jonathan may laugh at me for it when he comes home--and oh, how gladly I will be laughed at!

“Term ends in July, and I go on with my shorthand and my typewriting harder than ever, for work is a good friend when one is anxious. When Jonathan is home, you and I shall have our time by the sea after all, and build our castles in the air, and there shall be nothing in them but happy people. Write to me often, dear; your letters are like open windows.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street,*

“*3 June.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“You dear, foolish thing, of *course* you are to be laughed at, and I shall begin at once, so that Jonathan may find the work half done. Solicitors are *always* late; Arthur says that if a lawyer promised to be home in a week, only his creditors would look for him under a month. There, that is Arthur’s joke and not mine, so you cannot scold me. Depend upon it, your Jonathan is sitting this very minute in some outlandish inn with papers up to his chin, grumbling at foreign pens and thinking of you between every signature.

“We are to be married in the autumn, and mamma is so pleased that she has almost taken the whole affair away from me, which they say is what mammas are for. Arthur came to us straight from Mr. Morris’s dinner, and though he was very grand and secret about it I had it all out of him in ten minutes: how they drank my health standing, and how Mr. Morris made a speech about horses which was really about hearts, and how the three of them are better friends than ever. Mina, is it very wicked of me to be pleased that two such men are sorry? I cried about it afterwards, so perhaps that made it right again.

“When your term is over you are to come to us, and we shall find some quiet place with sea air, and you shall hear me practise being an old married woman. Send me word the very hour you hear from him.

“Your loving

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Have you *really* had no word at all? It is a little strange--no, it is not strange, and I never said it, and you are not to fret. Mamma sends her love.

“L.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*8 June.*--Renfield grows on me as a study. He has now his fixed pursuits: he catches flies, and has coaxed me into indulging him in the matter of sugar to lure them, so that his window-ledge is spread with it, and he keeps already a colony in a box which he tends like a stockman with his herd. He keeps also a little note-book, in which whole pages are filled with masses of figures, added and again added, as though he were focussing some account. So far, the small economy of madness. But to-day he gave me a turn. I had been with him some ten minutes, on his flies and his figures, and as I rose to go he said, in as ordinary a voice as a man asks you the time of day:--

“Doctor, when is Miss Westenra to be married?”

I do not know what I answered; something, I suppose, to the effect that patients do best to mind their flies. He looked at me with a quiet, sly amusement and said: “One hears. A house like this is all ears, doctor; it is only the tongues that are mad.” When I had got outside I set myself to run the thing down, for I confess it had jarred me--that name, in that place, out of that mouth. The explanation, when found, was small enough, as explanations mostly are. The announcement of the engagement was in the “Morning Post”; the attendants have their papers, and Renfield begs them when they are done with, and Simmons tells me he reads every line, advertisements and all; and I dare say the attendants’ hall has long since coupled my name with Chatham Street, for servants know everything. So there is no mystery once the box is opened: a madman with sharp ears and a newspaper. Yet I shall not soon forget the small shock of it. (*Mem.*, why did it jar so? Because I keep that name in a locked room of my own, and it startled me to hear another hand try the door.) It is worth setting down as bearing on his case that nothing which passes in this house is lost on him. His madness sits in the porter’s lodge and takes note of all that comes and goes. A dangerous man, if ever his fixed idea should have need of a fact; happily, his facts are flies.

*Letter, Johann Schuller, Landlord of the Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

(Written in German; put into English for Miss Murray by the German master of her school.)

“*Bistritz, 9 June.*

“Honoured Lady,--

“I have received the letter of the honoured lady, and I hasten that I answer it. The young English Herr, Mr. Harker, came to my house on the 3 May and slept, and went from us on the evening of the next day by the diligence which goes to the Bukovina, having business of the law in the country beyond the forest. He was in good health and good spirits, and all my house wished him well, for he was a most amiable young Herr. Since that day he has not come again to Bistritz; but let not the honoured lady be uneasy. Some ten days after his going there was brought to me word, by a carrier who trades between this town and the mountain country, that the business of the English Herr holds him longer than was thought, it may be for some weeks still, and that if any of his friends should ask for him, they were to be told that he is delayed and that all is well with him. More than this I do not know. In that country the posts are few and letters go as God pleases, wherefore the honoured lady must not think evil if none come. When the young Herr shall pass again through Bistritz I will tell him with what care his lady has asked after him, and I will speed him home. My wife, who remembers the young Herr kindly, bids that I say she commends him to the good God. That the honoured lady may soon have a great joy is the wish of

“Her obedient servant,

“JOHANN SCHULLER.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*17 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I send you, copied out fair--it is good practice, so you are not to praise my industry--the answer to my bold letter to Bistritz. It came yesterday, in a crabbed German hand, and Herr Steinkopf, our German master, put it into English for me, and was so gentle over it that I nearly cried into the irregular verbs. There, now you have read it; and you shall tell me, dear, whether I am to be comforted or not, for I have read it I do not know how many times, and each time I settle it a different way. It is good news: he is well, he is delayed, it is only the business. Mr. Hawkins says it is exactly what he looked for, and that I am to sleep soundly. And yet--Lucy, why could not Jonathan send, by that same carrier, one little line to me? Three words in his own dear hand would have been worth all the spoken messages in the world. I tell myself that a scribbled note is easily lost on a mountain road, and that a message goes safer in a man’s memory; that is sensible, is it not? So I am sensible all day, and then at night I am not. Mr. Hawkins has promised that if July comes and there is still nothing he will write to the Consul at Klausenburgh and have proper inquiry made; so you see I am in earnest hands, and you are not to fret about my fretting. And by the time we are by the sea together I mean to have Jonathan home, brown and travelled and full of stories, and we will make him tell every one of them twice.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Telegram, Peter Hawkins, Exeter, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*26 June.*

“Letter from Jonathan dated nineteenth. Starts for home next morning. All well. Expect him within the week.

“HAWKINS.”

Mr Shepherd was a civil, careful man of business, who understood Sir Walter far too well to be forward in the offering of unpalatable counsel, and who had privately resolved that whatever was harshest in the approaching consultation should come, if it possibly could, from Lady Russell’s lips rather than from his own. Lady Russell, on her side, entered on the affair with all the earnestness of true friendship and exact integrity, joined to a value for rank and consequence which made her tenderer of Sir Walter’s feelings than the case quite deserved. She had passed the intervening hours in calculation; she had drawn up schemes of economy, consulted her own steward, and covered several sheets of paper with figures; and when, on the following morning, her carriage and Mr Shepherd’s gig arrived at Kellynch Hall within a quarter of an hour of each other, she carried her plan in her reticule with as much anxiety as if it had been a treaty between contending powers.

The whole party were soon assembled in the library, where the Baronetage, lying open upon its accustomed table, might be supposed to preside over the deliberations of the family whose history it recorded. Lady Russell spoke first, and spoke well. Her plan was moderate, gradual, and, as she flattered herself, scarcely to be felt: the table somewhat simplified, two of the carriage-horses given up, the number of servants a little reduced, the annual journey to London exchanged, for a few years only, for the quieter pleasures of home; and by these means, with the strictest attention, every creditor might be satisfied within seven years. “And after all,” she concluded, “what will Sir Walter Elliot have sacrificed? The true consequence of Kellynch Hall does not lie in its pair of carriages; and Sir Walter will not be less Sir Walter for owing no man any thing. He will have done what very few heads of ancient families have resolution enough to do; and where he leads, the best company in the country may be proud to follow.”

She had reserved this last consideration as her strongest, and it failed like all the rest. Sir Walter had listened with the countenance of a man enduring an operation. “Seven years!” he repeated. “Seven years of ponies and cold mutton! Every comfort of life to be struck off at a blow—journeys, horses, table, servants—and the neighbourhood to look on! A Sir Walter Elliot who kept neither a good stable nor a good dinner would be a spectacle, Lady Russell—a sight for the county. Half the pleasure of being visited at Kellynch, I will venture to say, has always lain in the style of the thing; and I am to receive Sir Basil Morley with two footmen and a leg of pork! No; whatever is done, it shall not be *that*.”

Mr Shepherd now advanced his own scheme, with many bows and much preamble, as one merely throwing out what wiser heads might improve upon. His notion was of reductions so gentle that they should escape all observation; a horse sold now and then under colour of its age; a dinner or two the fewer each winter, which a scanty neighbourhood would set down to the weather; the London weeks a little shortened, the gardens a little pinched; much might be done, he hinted, in a quiet way, and nothing be suspected. But Sir Walter found the quiet way as intolerable as the public one. It came to the same thing in the end; his horses were touched, his table was touched; and he had, besides, a very reasonable conviction that nothing was ever done at Kellynch in a quiet way, the whole county being, as he believed, in the habit of looking towards the Hall as towards the weather-cock on its own church tower. Mr Shepherd’s plan was set aside with rather less ceremony than Lady Russell’s, and with the same completeness.

There was a silence of some minutes; and then Anne, who had sat a little apart with her work, and whose colour had been gradually rising through the last half hour, laid it down and spoke.

“It appears to me,” said she, in a voice which surprised them all by its steadiness, “that neither plan goes far enough. If the debts are just, they must be paid; and they cannot be paid by measures which are contrived chiefly not to be perceived. I would give up London altogether, and at once; I would lay down the carriage, and keep no horses beyond what the place requires; I would reduce the establishment in earnest, and the table with it; and I would let the whole neighbourhood know why. What we owe, we owe; and the claims of the tradespeople are prior to every claim of our own comfort. In two years, or three at most, my father might be clear of the world; and I can see no dignity in owing money, and no degradation whatever in paying it.”

She had never in her life made so long a speech in that room, and the sensation it produced was proportionate. Sir Walter stared at her as at some natural curiosity; Mr Shepherd examined the carpet; Lady Russell, though every word was after her own heart, looked almost alarmed at hearing her own principles carried so much higher than she had ventured to carry them. But the astonishment of all was completed by Elizabeth.

“I declare,” said Elizabeth, “I think Anne is right.”

Had the Baronetage itself spoken from its table, the effect could hardly have been greater. Elizabeth, however, went on with perfect composure. “If we are to retrench, let it be done as becomes us. There is nothing so pitiful as little economies; they are found out, and laughed at. Half-measures would make us talked of; a great reform may be admired. If the Elliots give up London, it will be a nine days’ wonder, and then it will be called magnificence; but if we are seen creeping about with one footman the less every winter, we shall be pitied, and I could not bear to be pitied.” The truth was, that Elizabeth had caught, from a certain lengthening of Mr Shepherd’s face during the last half hour, an apprehension of something worse than economy being in contemplation—some scheme which might strike at Kellynch itself; and against such a possibility, the surrender of every horse in the stable seemed cheap. But of this she said nothing, and had the full credit of her disinterestedness.

Sir Walter looked from one daughter to the other with the sensations of a man betrayed in his own citadel. “Elizabeth too!” was all he could at first articulate; and when he had recovered himself, it was to reject the whole with more decision than ever. Quit London, lay down the carriage, proclaim his debts to the county—he wondered what he should be asked to give up next; his name, perhaps, or his place in the Baronetage. He had sooner be dead. And Mr Shepherd, perceiving that every scheme of remaining at Kellynch upon a narrowed footing was thus disposed of, was unhappily emboldened to hazard the only resource remaining in his budget.

“There is one measure, Sir Walter,” he began, “which I have not yet presumed to name, and which I mention merely as a thing that has been done—done by very good families—and always, I believe, with advantage. Kellynch Hall is a house that would be sought after; and were it ever to be thought of—I say merely *were* it—a tenant, a most responsible, unexceptionable tenant, might be had on terms—”

He got no further. Sir Walter rose from his chair. “A *tenant!*” he repeated, in a voice which carried beyond the library door. “A tenant in Kellynch Hall! The house shewn like a booth at a fair; strangers walking my shrubberies, and handling my pictures, and giving their opinion of my mirrors! Mr Shepherd, I am obliged to you for your zeal, but you will oblige me further by never pronouncing that word again in my presence. It is a word I do not permit. Let me hear no more of it.”

Mr Shepherd had never intended—had spoken purely in the abstract—entreated pardon with all the fluency of his profession; and the conference broke up soon afterwards, having settled nothing whatever, and leaving Sir Walter in the highest good humour of the day, from the consciousness of having repelled every attack upon his dignity with complete success. Lady Russell could only look at Anne; and Anne, gathering up her work, could only look at the floor.

Lady Russell was prevailed on to remain to dinner, in the faint hope of the evening producing what the morning had not; and it was while the ladies were still sitting together that the post was brought in, with a letter for Anne in Mary’s hand. Anne opened it, and read:—

“My dear Anne,—I make no apology for writing, though I know how little anybody at Kellynch cares to hear from me, for I am so unwell that I cannot help it. I have not been free of headache these three days, and my throat is so sore that I can scarcely swallow, and nobody in this house thinks any thing of it. Charles is out from morning till night; I told him at breakfast how ill I was, and he only said he hoped I should be better by dinner. The Musgroves take no more notice of me than if I were nobody, though I am sure, if Mrs Musgrove had a finger-ache, the whole parish would hear of it. If I grow worse, no one here will send word till it is too late. I wish you would come to me as soon as you possibly can. You can certainly be spared; I am sure you can be of no use at Kellynch.—Yours affectionately, Mary M.”

“Mary’s sore throats,” observed Elizabeth, when the material parts had been read aloud, “always come on when she has been a fortnight without company. She is never ill but when she is dull.” Sir Walter’s only contribution was a general remark on the air of Uppercross, which he had always understood to be bad for the complexion, and a gracious admission that Anne might go whenever she pleased, as nobody would want her at Kellynch. Lady Russell said what was kind; she should feel the loss of her; but she could not deny that Anne would be of use at Uppercross, and to be of use was, after all, Anne’s element. It was settled within the half hour that she should go the next day.

The evening passed as such evenings did. Sir Walter’s spirits, restored by victory, were quite equal to a rubber; and Elizabeth’s zeal for reform, which at noon had embraced the surrender of London itself, had by candle-light so far moderated as to acknowledge that nothing could reasonably be attempted before winter, and that, whatever else were given up, the new hangings for the drawing-room had been half promised to the upholsterer, and could hardly with honour be receded from now.

Anne left them at the card-table and went up early. Her window looked down the avenue, where the last light was going; and there she stood some time, with sensations in which regret and relief were not easily divided. Nothing had been done; nothing, she well knew, would be done. The debts were as heavy that night as they had been in the morning, the schemes as numerous, the resolution as entirely wanting; her own plan had lived two hours, and been buried with the rest; and the word which Mr Shepherd was forbidden to pronounce would, she suspected, be pronounced again before long, whether in that library or elsewhere. But these were cares which she could not remedy, and to-morrow she should be at Uppercross. Mary’s ailments were seldom serious, and Mary’s affection was seldom flattering; she was sent for as a remedy is sent for, and would be laid aside as easily; yet, weighing her sister’s claims against her home’s, she could not think the exchange a loss. If she was of too little consequence to be missed at Kellynch, it was something, she thought, as she closed the shutter on the darkened avenue, to be wanted anywhere; and she went to bed resolved on an early departure, and slept better than her father’s creditors deserved.

Then came the night of the first falling star.

I had sat up late over my papers, and it was past midnight when, finding myself indisposed for sleep, I went out into the garden to smoke a pipe before going up. My wife was long since abed, and there was no light in the house behind me but the glow of the study lamp through the blind. It was a fine, still night, with a touch of chill in it after the warm day; the moon had not risen, and the stars were extraordinarily bright. Out of the habit that those weeks of excitement had bred in me I looked first, I remember, for Mars, and found it—a hard red point of light hanging above the black mass of the pines towards Ottershaw.

And even as I looked, the star fell.

It came out of the north-east, moving with a stately swiftness quite unlike the wink and vanish of common shooting stars—a line of greenish flame, drawing itself across a quarter of the sky, and leaving behind it a luminous streak that glowed for some seconds after the head of it had gone. It passed high over the house with a thin hissing sound, which I could almost have persuaded myself afterwards I had imagined, sank down the sky beyond the Ottershaw pines, and was extinguished. A moment later came a dull concussion, less a report than one great soft blow upon the earth, and I felt, or fancied I felt, the ground under my feet give the slightest of shudders. Somewhere across the fields a dog began barking, and would not stop.

I stood for a long time watching the place where it had gone down, expecting I scarcely know what—a glare of fire above the trees, perhaps—but the night remained serene. A meteorite, I told myself, and a big one; the biggest fall, likely enough, for many years. I remember thinking that Ogilvy would be out with his theodolite in the morning, happy as a boy, and that I would walk over and see the hole it had made. Then I knocked out my pipe against the sundial and went in to bed. It is strange to me now to recall how tranquilly I did so.

For all that, I slept ill, and was up and dressed before six. It was a sweet, sunlit morning, full of the singing of birds. On the Chertsey road I met the milk cart, and the man, instead of going about his business, had stopped it athwart the way and was talking to a couple of labourers. From him I had the first news: that the shooting star had come down in the night, not in open ground, but slap into the old sand pits this side of Ottershaw—the deep workings, disused these ten years, which the floods of the spring had filled and made a pool of.

“And the water’s fair boiling,” said the man, with relish. “Boiling like a copper, and steam coming off it you can see from Chertsey Lock. There’s a gentleman from the observatory there already.”

I sent word home by a boy that I should be back for breakfast, and went on at once across the fields. Long before I came to the pits I saw the steam—a slanting white column above the hedgerow elms, such as a lime kiln might make, or a locomotive standing with its safety valve open—and I heard presently a thin, sustained hissing, like nothing so much as an immense kettle. Then I came through the furze to the lip of the workings, and saw the Thing itself.

The pool that had gathered in the deepest of the pits was perhaps eighty yards across, fringed on the farther side with sallows and a bed of sedge where the moorhens used to nest. The willows at the north end were snapped off short and stripped white, and sand and gravel had been flung out in a great fan across the turf, so that the grass for fifty yards was buried as if by a tip-cart of monstrous size. And in the middle of the pool, canted over and half sunken, with its farther end driven in under the broken bank, lay the star.

What showed above the water was the rounded shoulder of a vast cylinder, caked over with a dun-coloured, scaly incrustation, and of a diameter, as we afterwards found, of near thirty yards. The water hissed and smoked all along its flanks, breaking perpetually into steam where it lapped the metal, so that the Thing stood in a drifting bank of vapour through which its outline came and went; and about it on the simmering surface floated the white bellies of dead roach and perch, and boiled weed, and a scum of scalded mud. Even on the rim of the pit, fifty yards away, the heat of it came against my face like the breath of an oven, and there was a smell in the air of steamed earth and of something else, faintly metallic, that I have never met before or since.

Ogilvy was already there, as the milkman had said, standing on the sandy rim with a labouring man beside him. He was hatless, his coat was whitened with sand, and he had plainly not been to bed at all; he had seen the fall from the observatory, it seemed, and had been at the pit since half past four, prowling round it and making what measurements the heat allowed. He was in a state of the liveliest exultation.

“The biggest aerolite that has come down in Europe in the memory of man,” he said, gripping my arm. “There’s nothing at Vienna, nothing in the Yorkshire falls, to set beside it. And into water, of all conceivable luck! It will cool the mass, it has kept it from burying itself—we shall have the whole thing out entire, my dear fellow, entire!”

I looked at it for some time before I answered him. The vapour thinned and shifted, and I could see, along the exposed shoulder, that beneath its charred and blistered incrustation the Thing had a form of a most singular regularity—the sides of it true, so far as the eye could judge, as the sides of a boiler, and marked with faint circumferential lines, evenly spaced, as if the mass had been turned in some inconceivable lathe.

“Ogilvy,” I said, “did ever an aerolite fall in the shape of a cylinder?”

“Shape!” said he. “You are seeing a twentieth part of it, and that part fused, caked, and smoking. The flight through the air will round off anything—give a body rotation and half a minute of incandescence, and it will come to you shaped like a shell or shaped like a pear, as chance will have it.”

“And those rings upon it? They are as regular as the hoops of a cask. And is it not a strange chance,” I said, “that after ten flashes upon Mars, night for night, and every wiseacre in England asking what they might be, this should arrive? Suppose it to be a shot, Ogilvy. Suppose that gun of theirs—”

He turned on me quite fiercely for so gentle a man. “I told you at the telescope,” he said, “that the chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one, and I tell you so again over this lump of iron. The flashes are volcanic. The rings are cooling cracks, contraction marks—you shall see a hundred like them on any casting. If that sort of talk once gets into the papers—signals, projectiles, men in the moon—there will be a silly season such as never was, and no sober observation out of Ottershaw will be believed again for ten years. It is a meteorite, an unusually big one, and I mean to have it for science before the souvenir-hunters chip it into watch-charms.”

It need not be manlike, I said, to make a projectile; but he waved that away, and fell to planning telegrams—to Stent, the Astronomer Royal, among others—and to instructing his labourer, who took it all very stolidly, that no one was on any account to go down to the water. I could not shake him, and, to be honest, I did not greatly try; his certainty was a comfortable thing, and the sunlight lay warm and ordinary on the heather. It is strange to remember how stoutly he held his ground, and how nearly he persuaded me.

I walked home to breakfast about eight, and told my wife over the eggs and coffee what had fallen out of the sky in the night. She heard me at first with the incredulity I had expected and then with a mounting curiosity, and nothing would satisfy her but that she should come and see the Thing for herself. So a little before eleven we set out together, taking the field path to be out of the dust.

By that hour the news had run through the district as fire runs through stubble. There were bicycles lying in heaps against the hedge by the pit gate, and a wagonette from Chertsey drawn up in the lane; boys from Ottershaw were swarming on the sand heaps; there were two golfers from the links, a party of excursionists diverted from the towpath, half a dozen women with sunshades, and a knot of labourers who should by rights have been in the hay. There must have been sixty or seventy people about the rim when we came to it, and more arriving along every path, and Ogilvy going to and fro among them like a sheepdog, keeping them—with only partial success—back from the water’s edge. The Thing steamed and hissed exactly as before, though the violence of the boiling had somewhat abated, and along the western end, where a spit of firm sand ran out towards it, the water seemed hardly to stir at all.

It was that deceitful stillness which brought about the one accident of the morning. A young man in his Sunday clothes—a shopman from Chertsey, as it afterwards appeared, who had been laying wagers with his fellows that he would touch the star and tell of it—went suddenly out along the spit, before Ogilvy could do more than shout, and laid his open hand flat upon the incrustation. His scream cut across the general chatter and stopped it dead. He came staggering and splashing back with his hand doubled into his armpit, and when they got his arm out and looked at it the palm was seared white, as if it had been pressed upon a flat-iron, and blistering while we watched. For all the steam had gone out of the water thereabouts, the shell of the Thing held its heat like a furnace door. They did what could be done with sweet oil and a handkerchief, and the wagonette that had brought sightseers out took him back to Chertsey to be dressed; and for perhaps ten minutes the crowd was hushed and stood well back, and then—so is our species made—pressed nearer than ever.

It was in one of the quiet moments after this that I heard, or thought I heard, another sound beneath the perpetual hissing: a dull, deliberate thudding, deep within the mass, once, twice, and again, like a great pulse muffled under water. My wife heard it too—her hand tightened on my arm—and I saw one or two in the crowd glance at each other. Ogilvy, appealed to, said it was the contraction of the cooling shell, and that a kettle on the hob will tick in the same fashion; and no doubt most of those present were satisfied. I said nothing, but from that moment a disquiet sat upon me that all his mineralogy could not lift.

By noon the sun was blazing down upon two or three hundred people; a man had come out from Chertsey with a barrow of ginger beer and green apples, and was doing a brisk trade; the dust hung over the lane, and the crowd about the rim thickened every minute. My wife had grown pale and silent under her sunshade. She was not, I think, afraid of anything she could have named; but she said at last, in a low voice, that the Thing had a wicked look—that it lay there in the water like something lying in wait—and that she wished I would come home. I told her what Ogilvy had told me, that the mass must cool for days before anything could be learned of it, and that nothing whatever would happen; and I urged the heat, and the roughness of the growing crowd, and promised faithfully to follow her by tea-time. In the end, reluctantly, she was persuaded. I walked with her as far as the stile, and watched her go up the field path towards the road; at the crest she turned once and looked back, not at me, but at the leaning column of steam, and then went on and was hidden by the hedge.

I did not follow her. For the life of me I could not have gone. Nothing had come out of the cylinder; nothing about it had so much as visibly stirred; and yet it held us there, a couple of hundred idle souls about a smoking hulk in a pond, as a candle flame holds moths. I got a place on a sand heap with my back to the furze, and watched the steam rise and the crowd shift and Ogilvy fuss about his measurements, and thought, in a lazy noontide fashion, of the flashes upon the little silver planet, and of how strangely the world goes on. And all the while, within that scaled and steaming shell, not a hundred yards from where I sat—but I must not anticipate my story. The Thing lay hissing in the water, and we watched it, and the day drew on.

When Mary wakened the train was standing still and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm.

"Rouse yourself!" she was saying. "This is Thwaite Station, and we've a long drive before us yet."

Mary stood up and tried to keep her eyes open while Mrs. Medlock collected her parcels. The rain had worn itself out somewhere on the journey, but when the door of the railway carriage was opened a great damp wind rushed in and made the lamps of the little platform flicker and swing on their posts. It was a small station, and nobody but themselves seemed to be getting out of the train.

The station-master was speaking to some one—a tall man in a long coat with a fur collar turned up about his ears, who stood quite still at the edge of the lamplight with his back half turned. Mrs. Medlock caught sight of him and Mary heard her draw in her breath.

"Bless us and save us!" she said under it. "It's Mr. Craven himself!"

She became at once so flurried, twitching Mary's black coat straight and pushing the crêpe hat down upon her limp hair, that Mary understood something quite out of the common had happened. Mrs. Medlock had said "ten to one you won't see him," and here he was, standing on a windy platform in the middle of the night, waiting for the train to come in.

He turned as they came near, and Mary looked up at him. She could not help it. His shoulders were high and crooked, one higher than the other, so that he seemed always to be lifting them against something; but he was not in the least like the hunchback in "Riquet à la Houppe." He was tall and thin, with a dark face, and black hair streaked with white, and his eyes were the kind which seem to look at you from a long way off, as if you were much farther from them than you really are.

He looked down at her for what seemed to Mary a long time. She gave him back her stony little stare because she did not know what else to do, and neither of them smiled.

"You are Mary Lennox," he said at last. It did not seem to be a question, so Mary made no answer, and he did not appear to expect one.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, dropping a curtsy as if it had been asked of her. "I've brought her safe, sir."

"The carriage is waiting," he said, and turned and walked down the platform; and that was all.

The carriage was a closed one, roomy and old, and it smelled of leather and damp. Mr. Craven put himself into the farthest corner of it, drew a rug over his knees, and shut his eyes; and Mrs. Medlock sat up as stiff and straight as her stoutness would allow, holding her parcels on her lap and never saying one word. Mary thought this the queerest thing of all, because on the train Mrs. Medlock had talked exactly as much as she chose. It seemed that people did not talk when Mr. Craven was near them.

They drove through a village street where the lights were out in the cottage windows, and past a church with a squat tower, and then there was nothing more to be seen at all. Mary pressed her forehead against the glass. Blackness went by on either side—no houses, no trees, no hedges—nothing but blackness; and presently a sound began, low and wild and rushing, which seemed to come from everywhere at once, as if the darkness itself were making it.

"What is that noise?" she could not help whispering.

"It's th' wind on the moor," Mrs. Medlock whispered back, because of the still figure in the corner. "We're on it now. It's miles and miles of wild land with naught growing on it but heather and gorse, and naught living on it but wild ponies and sheep. Go to sleep."

Mary did not go to sleep. She listened to the rushing sound and looked at the blackness, and wondered how anything so empty could make so much noise.

They had been driving a long time when the horses stopped, so suddenly that Mrs. Medlock was nearly thrown from her seat and her bonnet with the purple flowers tipped over one eye. The driver was calling out to something in the road, and the footman climbed down from the box, and there was a stamping and a slow, soft scuffling in the dark ahead.

"What is it, Weston?" Mrs. Medlock cried, letting down the glass.

"Sheep, ma'am," the footman called back. "Lying all across t' road for th' warmth of it. They'll not shift for th' horses. We'll have 'em off in a minute."

And then Mary did a thing she had never done before and could not in the least have explained. Before Mrs. Medlock could put out a hand she had turned the handle of the door on her own side and stepped down into the dark.

The wind took hold of her at once. It pressed against her as if it were something alive, and pulled at her black skirts and her hat, and it was full of a strange keen scent—rain, and earth, and something else, something rough and sweet at the same time, which she had never smelled in her life. In the shine of the carriage lamps she could see gray woolly backs heaving up out of the road one by one; and when she took a step or two beyond the lamplight she felt rough, springy stuff under her feet which was not road at all. Beyond that there was nothing—no light, no shape, no end—only the enormous dark going on and on, and the wild rushing sound sweeping over it. It was not like anything she had known in India, where the nights had been hot and heavy and full of servants' voices. Nobody in the world seemed awake but herself. She stood quite still with the wind pushing her, and she was not exactly frightened, though she felt she ought to have been. She felt very small, and very queer, and very wide awake.

"Mercy on us! Come in! Come in this minute!" cried Mrs. Medlock from the carriage, in a voice which was trying to scold and to whisper at the same time.

Mary climbed back, and the door was shut; and as she settled into her corner she saw that Mr. Craven's eyes were open and that he was looking at her. The lamp outside made a bar of light across his dark face.

"She is not afraid of it," he said, in a low voice, as if to himself and not to either of them; and then he turned his face to the window and did not speak again for the rest of the drive.

Mrs. Medlock pinched Mary's arm and breathed at her that she was a young madam and might have been trampled or lost on the moor and never found, and what next, she should like to know. Mary scarcely listened. She was thinking that she could still feel the wind on her hands, and that the moor went on making its sound whether any one heard it or not, and that this was somehow an interesting thing to know.

After a long while they passed through great iron gates and drove up an avenue where the branches of old trees nearly met overhead, so that it was like driving up a long dark vault. At the end of it the carriage stopped before an enormously long house, built low and rambling about a stone court. Most of its windows were dark, but a few in an upper story showed a dull glow.

The entrance door was a huge one of massive oak studded with big iron nails, and it opened into a hall so big and dim that the faces in the portraits on the walls, and the suits of armor standing between them, made Mary feel like a small black speck that had been swept in by the wind. An old man, neat and wrinkled, stood holding the door, and Mary guessed that he must be Pitcher.

Mr. Craven crossed the hall without a word to any one. At the foot of the wide staircase he stopped, with his hand on the stone rail, and half turned; and for a moment Mary thought he was going to speak to her after all. But he only looked at her once more in his far-off way, over his crooked shoulder, and then went up the stairs and was swallowed by the darkness at the top of them.

"You're to take her to her room," Pitcher said to Mrs. Medlock in a husky voice. "He'll see nobody more tonight."

"Very good, Mr. Pitcher," Mrs. Medlock answered. "So long as I know what's expected of me, I can manage."

"What's expected of you, Mrs. Medlock," said Pitcher, "is that he's not disturbed, and that he doesn't see what he doesn't want to see."

And then Mary Lennox was led up a broad staircase, and down a long corridor, and up a short flight of steps, and through another corridor and another, until a door opened and she found herself in a room with a fire in it and a lamp lit upon the table.

"Well, here you are!" Mrs. Medlock said unceremoniously. "This room and the one next to it are where you'll live—and you must keep to them. Don't you forget that! There's no maid can be spared to wait on you tonight, with the house all at sixes and sevens; one of the men will bring your supper up."

She went away, and Mary sat down on a stool by the fire, feeling stiff and yellow and small. Presently there came a knock at the door, and a tall young manservant came in carrying a tray, which he set upon the table. He was big and raw-boned, with a round face reddened by weather, and he looked at Mary with a frank curiosity which nobody had shown her since she landed.

"Here's thy supper, then," he said. "Mrs. Medlock said I mun bring it up, as there's no lass to do it. Tha mun eat it while it's hot. There's chicken, an' bread an' butter, an' some hot milk. Eh, it's a rough neet outside—th' wind's wutherin' round th' house fit to lift th' roof off."

Mary sat and looked at him. She had understood perhaps half of it.

"I cannot understand what you say," she said, slowly and stiffly. "You do not talk as people talked in India."

He laughed, and nobody could have thought him rude.

"Eh, I ax thy pardon," he said. "That's Yorkshire, that is—broadest Yorkshire, my mother says. Happen tha'll learn a bit of it thysen if tha stops here."

"What is wuthering?" asked Mary, pronouncing the word carefully. It was one of the words she had caught.

"That's th' sound th' wind makes when it comes rushin' round a house on th' moor," he said, "moanin' an' roarin' like. Listen to it now."

Mary listened, and heard it—a hollow, shuddering sort of roar going round and round the walls outside, as if a giant were walking round the house and could not get in.

"Aye, that's wutherin'," said the young man with satisfaction, and took himself off.

Mary ate a little of the chicken and drank some of the hot milk, because she found she was hungrier than she had thought; and then Mrs. Medlock came back and saw her put into her nightgown and into a big carved four-post bed with hangings round it.

"Now then, go to sleep," she said, taking up the lamp. "You've had a long day of it."

And it was at that moment, when the room had grown dim and Mrs. Medlock had her hand upon the door, that Mary heard the sound.

It did not come from outside, where the wind was wuthering. It came from somewhere far away inside the house, muffled by walls and long corridors: a heavy door shutting, and after it footsteps—quick, light footsteps hurrying along some passage a long way off—and then another door, farther still, and then nothing at all.

Mary sat straight up in the big bed.

"What is that?" she said. "Some one is walking about."

"It's th' wind," said Mrs. Medlock, so quickly that she had almost said it before Mary finished. "A house this size, and this old, is full of noises on a windy night. It gets into th' empty corridors and rattles th' doors and moans in th' chimneys. It's th' wind and nothing else, and you're to lie down and go to sleep."

And she went out and shut the door behind her with a firm click, and took the light with her.

The room was quite dark then, except for a dull red breathing from the fire. Mary lay in the big bed and listened. Outside, the wind went wuthering round and round the house, moaning and roaring exactly as the young man had said; and the longer she listened to it the surer she became of one thing. The wind was outside, and the sound she had heard had been inside. The wind might rattle doors, but it did not shut one door heavily and another door softly; and whatever it might do in empty corridors, it did not hurry along them with quick, light footsteps. Wind does not walk.

Perhaps if Mrs. Medlock had said nothing at all, Mary would have thought no more about it and would have gone to sleep, tired as she was. But Mistress Mary was contrary, and being told a thing in that quick, firm voice made her at once entirely certain that the thing was not true.

"It was not the wind," she said to herself in the dark, with her lips pinched together. "She knew it was not, too. I shall find out what it was. I shall find it out my own self."

And she lay awake in the black room, with the moor wuthering outside, listening, having quite made up her mind.

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick was one of those men who ask but little of life. Give him three meals a day, a comfortable chair at the Drones Club, an occasional afternoon at a race-meeting, something to put on his head and something to keep the rain off it when he went abroad, and he was content. At twenty minutes to two that afternoon, descending to the cloak-room of the club with the intention of collecting the two last-named necessities and proceeding to Sandown Park, he sustained a shock at the very foundations of this modest edifice. His hat was in its place. His umbrella had vanished.

It is a tribute to the stern code of honesty which prevails among club cloak-room attendants that the man in charge, when questioned, made no attempt to soften or conceal the truth.

"Mr. Psmith took it, sir. This morning. He asked me whose it was, and I told him, and he said 'Ah!' and took it."

The Hon. Hugo mounted the stairs two at a time, breathing heavily through the nose. He found Psmith in the smoking-room, seated in the very window from which he had earlier surveyed the premises of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, gazing down upon Dover Street with the benevolent air of a man at peace with his world.

"I say, Psmith, dash it all!"

"Comrade Walderwick!" said Psmith cordially. "Take a seat. You find me in reflective mood."

"Did you take my umbrella?"

"I did."

"Well, I mean to say, dash it--*why?*" The Hon. Hugo's was not a swift mind, and it groped for solid ground. "You can't go about the place taking a fellow's umbrella."

"On the contrary," said Psmith, "it is precisely what I can do, and this morning did. The facts, I fear, must remain for ever shrouded. Some day, possibly, when we are two old grey men sunning ourselves on the terrace of some hydro, I may tell you the story, and you will be astounded that you could ever have grudged the sacrifice. Till then it stays locked in my bosom. But I recognise the justice of your claim. What did the umbrella cost you?"

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Everything, Comrade Walderwick. We are about to do business."

"About thirty bob, if you want to know," said the Hon. Hugo, and was proceeding to add that this was not the point, when Psmith raised a restraining hand.

"Then I will give you ten pounds," he said. "The just price. Umbrellas, like poets, are never properly valued in their lifetime."

And, drawing out a note-case whose contents, though slender, were dedicated wholeheartedly to the great causes, he extracted two five-pound notes and pressed them upon his companion. The historian, who knows that Psmith's entire capital at this moment amounted to a little over fifteen pounds, may find the gesture reckless. Psmith did not. There was a soft light in his eye, as of one performing a sacrament.

The Hon. Hugo gazed at the notes. He was dazed, but he came of a family which for generations had known what to do with a tenner when it saw one. His fingers closed.

"But look here," he said, a final scruple asserting itself, "where *is* the bally thing?"

"I have not," said Psmith, "the remotest idea. But wherever it may be, it is mine. Bought and paid for."

He escorted his guest to the door, and on his way back paused at the hall-porter's desk.

"At some point in the near future," he said, "an umbrella may be delivered at this club for me. You will know it by a certain quiet distinction of manner. See that it is kept safe."

"Very good, sir," said the hall-porter, who had been at the Drones eleven years and had ceased to be surprised by anything.

* * * * *

At half-past two, in obedience to a typewritten letter signed R. Baxter, Eve Halliday presented herself at the Senior Conservative Club and was shown into the large, dim apartment to the left of the main entrance where members of that institution are permitted to entertain lady visitors. It is a room decorated in the taste of a superior mausoleum, and Eve, alone in it with a marble clock and a portrait of the late Lord Beaconsfield, had ample leisure to study both; for it was ten minutes past three before the door opened and the Earl of Emsworth pottered in, carrying a large sheaf of roses in white paper and peering about him in a mild, dazed manner, like a sheep that has wandered into a strange field.

"Miss--er--" said Lord Emsworth. "Ah yes. Quite so. My dear young lady, I must apologise. I have had a most exhausting day. I was obliged to attend a luncheon in honour of a literary man--a poet, I understand, from Canada--and afterwards, feeling the need of--er--restoration, I looked in at a florist's in the Haymarket, and the time slipped by, as it does, as it does. You have not been waiting long, I hope, Miss--er--"

"Halliday," said Eve.

"Precisely. Halliday. Baxter told me. Baxter tells me everything." His lordship deposited the roses on a table, sat down, and began to search his pockets with growing agitation. "Now, Baxter--a most efficient young fellow, my secretary, you will like him--Baxter wrote out for me a list of the questions I was to ask you. I had it in my hand when I left the hotel. This," he said, producing in turn a ball of string, a seedsman's catalogue, and a letter from a rose-grower in Hertfordshire, "is very extraordinary. Most disturbing." He gave the matter up and looked at her with a sudden gleam of hope, as one who substitutes for a lost programme a better of his own devising. "Tell me, Miss Halliday, are you fond of flowers?"

"Very," said Eve. "But, Lord Emsworth, about the library--"

"The gardens at Blandings," said his lordship, "are considered among the finest in England. I do not say it boastfully; it is a simple fact. Though I am bound to tell you that my head-gardener, McAllister--a Scotsman, and obstinate beyond anything you could readily imagine--holds views on the subject of hollyhocks which no reasonable man could share. I have argued with him. I have reasoned with him. I might as well have reasoned with Beaconsfield there."

"I've never done any work of this sort before," said Eve, seizing on a momentary pause with the courage of desperation, "and I feel I ought to tell you so. I've never catalogued a library in my life."

Unhappily, at this precise moment Lord Emsworth, leaning forward to give emphasis to some fresh point about the hollyhocks, dislodged his pince-nez, which leaped from his nose and swung on their cord into the recesses of his waistcoat. By the time he had recovered them, breathing hard, and restored them to office, Eve's confession had gone whistling down the wind.

"Exactly what I said to McAllister," he replied warmly. "The very words. You are a most sensible and intelligent young lady, and I am sure my sister Constance will be delighted with you. The library, yes, quite so, the library. Baxter attends to all that. You will find everything most comfortable. Well," he said, rising with the air of a man who has conducted a searching examination and is satisfied with its results, "I must be off. I have a train--the five o'clock from Paddington. Baxter will write to you about the arrangements. We shall expect you at Blandings on--on whenever it was. Good-bye, Miss--good-bye."

He gathered up his roses, beamed at her, and had reached the door before Eve perceived that among his gleanings was the umbrella which had been leaning against her chair.

"Lord Emsworth! I'm so sorry--that's my umbrella."

"Eh?" His lordship examined it with mild astonishment. "Bless my soul, so it is. So it is. I must have left mine somewhere. I am always leaving mine somewhere. Good-bye."

The door closed. Eve sat for a moment, then began to laugh helplessly, as she had laughed that morning under the awning. She had been interviewed by her employer, and the only question he had asked her was whether she was fond of flowers. Her single attempt at honesty had been received as a criticism of Angus McAllister. Her conscience gave a faint twinge, turned over, and went to sleep. The job, it seemed, was hers; and Phyllis was at Blandings' gates, waiting to be helped.

* * * * *

The English summer shower is nothing if not persevering. At a quarter-past four, just as Psmith emerged from the Drones and set out eastward--his purpose being to lay his future before Miss Ada Clarkson of Shaftesbury Avenue, his connection with the fish business having been formally severed at eleven o'clock on the previous night--the sky darkened, and by the time he reached Piccadilly the rain was coming down with all its morning's heartiness. The only umbrella in which Psmith now held a proprietary interest being elsewhere, he stepped into a shop doorway; and it was there, a moment later, that a girl in a black frock and a supreme hat, moving dry and serene beneath a canopy of silk, caught sight of him, stopped, and came back.

"I think," said Eve, "this is yours."

Psmith adjusted his monocle and inspected the umbrella through it with grave attention.

"No," he said at length. "No. A handsome umbrella--I have rarely seen a handsomer--but not mine."

"You gave it to me this morning. Outside a club in Dover Street. In the rain."

"Impossible, I fear. I never give people umbrellas. It is a hardness in my character which has been widely commented upon. Friends have pleaded with me at street corners in the most inclement weather, and I have merely buttoned my coat and passed by."

"I recognised you the moment I saw you," said Eve. "There can't be two people in London with an eyeglass like that."

"London," said Psmith, "is stiff with eyeglassed men. We are a numerous and thriving guild. No, the man you seek is evidently some rash, impulsive fellow of generous exterior--a public benefactor of the most dangerous type. I am sorry not to be able to claim the honour. If I should ever meet him, I will tell him that his umbrella did well by you, and that you were asking after him."

Eve looked at him. There was nothing whatever to be read in the solemn face; but there was something in the eye behind the monocle that was not solemn at all.

"You're really not going to admit it?"

"There is nothing to admit."

"Then what am I to do with the umbrella? I can't simply keep it."

"If I might advise," said Psmith, "purely as a disinterested stranger--you mentioned a club in Dover Street. Hand it to the hall-porter. These hall-porters are remarkable men. They know everything. He will restore it to its owner within the hour."

The rain, with the caprice of its kind, chose this moment to slacken and stop. Psmith raised his hat with stately courtesy, expressed a hope that the summer would treat her kindly, and walked off towards Shaftesbury Avenue, leaving Eve standing on the pavement, divided, as she had been that morning, between indignation and a strong disposition to laugh.

* * * * *

The laugh won. Half an hour later, having turned into a stationer's and expended a penny of her small store on notepaper and the loan of a pen, Eve presented herself at the door of the gloomy building in Dover Street and handed the hall-porter the umbrella and an envelope.

"I wonder if you would give these to one of your members," she said. "I don't know his name. He's very tall and thin, and he wears an eyeglass, and he went in here at about half-past ten this morning without a hat."

"I fancy I know the member you mean, miss," said the hall-porter, whose eleven years had not been wasted. "I will see that he gets them."

"Thank you," said Eve, and turned to go.

"What name shall I say, miss, if the gentleman should inquire?"

Eve hesitated for a moment.

"Eve Halliday," she said.

* * * * *

The long summer evening had faded, and the lamps were lit in the smoking-room of the Drones, which at half-past nine was empty but for a single figure. Psmith, extended in an arm-chair, was musing not unpleasantly upon the day. His interview with Miss Clarkson had been, he felt, a success. That lady, dazed but respectful, had entered his requirements--which excluded fish but very little else--in her books, and had promised to bear him in mind. His capital had shrunk to five pounds and some silver, but a man cannot have everything.

The door opened, and the hall-porter approached, bearing an umbrella and an envelope.

"The umbrella arrived, sir," he said, with the quiet pride of a prophecy fulfilled. "A young lady left it, and this note with it."

Psmith opened the envelope. The note within was brief, and unsigned.

"I am sending the umbrella back to the club, because the man who lent it to me this morning went into it, whatever he may choose to say. He denied it to my face in Piccadilly this afternoon, looking me straight in the eye through his eyeglass, which I thought showed great strength of character. Please thank him for me. The umbrella saved my hat's life, and my hat is more important to me just now than I can possibly explain."

Psmith read this composition twice, with the closest attention.

"Did the young lady leave a name?" he asked.

"Miss Eve Halliday, sir. I asked, thinking you might wish to know."

"You did well," said Psmith warmly. "You have a great future before you. Good night."

The hall-porter withdrew. Psmith rose and stood the umbrella against the arm of his chair, where the light fell upon it. Across the road the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe had been furled for the night, and Dover Street glistened, washed and empty, under the lamps. He looked at it for some time.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith thoughtfully.

He picked up the umbrella and examined it once more through the monocle, point by point, from ferrule to handle, as a connoisseur examines a masterpiece whose merits the world has been slow to perceive.

"Ten pounds," he murmured. "Practically given away."

Madame Ratignolle, leaning upon Robert's arm, went with dragging steps along the sandy path, complaining softly of the sun, of the distance, of the cramp which had settled in her limbs. Robert accommodated his gait to hers, and for a while said nothing, seeming to find sufficient occupation in guiding her past the tangled growth that reached out over the borders of the path.

"Do you know," he said at last, breaking a silence which Madame Ratignolle had been too languid to fill, "Mrs. Pontellier makes me think of a woman who is asleep. Not dull—I don't mean that. But asleep, the way one is asleep walking through a dream that pleases one. Have you watched her when she looks at the water? She forgets that any of us are alive. Some morning that lady is going to wake up, and then, ma foi! we shall all have to look out for ourselves."

"What an idea!" laughed Madame Ratignolle. "She is a most sensible woman. It is only that she is not a Creole, and does not chatter as we do. You are romantic, Robert; it comes of reading."

"Perhaps," he admitted, and he said no more about it. Madame Ratignolle's thoughts had already gone forward to a bottle of eau sédative which stood upon her dressing-table, and to the composing properties of a darkened room. But the remark stayed with her, as trifles will stay with a woman through the heat of a summer day, waiting their occasion.

Edna remained with the children under the awning until the sun stood high and the little ones grew fretful and were carried off by the nurse-maids to their dinners and their naps. She walked back alone, swinging her big straw hat by its ribbons, and reached the cottage a little before the midday meal.

It was while they were at table that a boy from the wharf brought her a telegram. She opened it with no misgiving; a telegram from Mr. Pontellier was among the ordinary occurrences of her married life. He would not come out to Grand Isle on Saturday. A matter of business held him in the city; he was desolated; a letter would follow; she was not to expect him before the Saturday after, at the earliest.

"How provoking!" said Madame Lebrun, who had paused by the table, and who felt any defection from her dinner-list as a personal affront. "And the week-end, too, when everybody comes!"

Edna folded the telegram and slipped it into her pocket. She said, "Yes, it is too bad," because the words were expected of her, and she said them with an amiable countenance. But sounding herself inwardly, as she had lately fallen into the habit of doing, she could discover no disappointment anywhere within her. What she found instead was a small, quiet sense of space, such as she had felt that morning long ago in the Kentucky meadow, when the green stretched before her without end and there was no one to call her in. The discovery did not distress her. She did not examine it. She ate her dinner and afterward sat a while on the gallery with a book which she did not read.

The afternoon laid its heavy hand upon the island. Madame Ratignolle slept behind closed shutters with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne across her brow. The children slept. The nurse-maids drowsed over them. Robert had gone with two or three of the men across to Klein's hotel. The very chickens had withdrawn under the houses, and the yellow camomile blazed untended in the sun.

It was then that Edna took her bathing suit from its peg and walked down alone to the beach. No one bathed at that hour; the water was held to be treacherous in the heat of the day, and the fashion of the place reserved it for the morning and the evening. The long path was empty. The beach, when she reached it, was empty too, save for the lady in black, who sat upon the little gallery of the neighboring bath-house with her prayer-beads moving through her fingers.

Edna dressed in her own compartment and went down to the water. It was warm at the edge, like a hand laid open; farther out it freshened and pushed against her with a live insistence. She waded until it reached her waist, and stood there, feeling the pull and release of it, watching the light break and gather on the surface as far as she could see. The sails she had watched in the morning were gone. There was nothing between her and the sky.

She had made the effort to swim a dozen times that summer, always with some one near to reassure her, and always with the result of a child who splashes and clutches and is lifted, humiliated, to her feet. Now, with no one by, she remembered the little girl in the meadow who had thrown out her arms as if swimming when she walked. She threw out her arms in the same way, leaned forward upon the water as one leans upon a promise, and struck out.

The water bore her up.

It could not have been more than a few strokes—five, six, before her courage broke and her feet went down and found the sand. But for the length of those strokes she had been carried; the water had held her as securely as the earth had ever done, and more sweetly. She stood breast-deep, her heart going, and laughed aloud, once, a short laugh that surprised her own ears in all that stillness. Then she looked quickly toward the beach, as a child looks who has taken something and does not mean to give it back. The lady in black had not lifted her head.

Edna did not try again. Some instinct of thrift, which she could not have explained, made her hoard what she had gained, as though to spend more of it that afternoon would be to squander it. She came out of the water slowly and went up the sand.

As she passed the neighboring gallery the lady in black raised her eyes from her beads and spoke to her. In all the weeks of the summer she had never before been heard to address a word to any living soul.

"You should not go into the water alone, madame," she said. Her voice was low and even, a voice worn smooth with devotions. "The water is not to be trusted at this hour. It gives, and it takes back." And she returned to her beads, her lips moving, as though she had said nothing at all.

"Thank you," said Edna. "I was only wading." It was the first lie she could remember telling in years, and it came from her with an ease that gave her, walking up the path afterward, something further to wonder at. She told no one of the swimming—not at supper, not after. The secret lay inside her all evening like a coin sewn into a hem.

After supper, when the lamps were lighted and a little air had begun to move in from the water, Madame Ratignolle came across to the Pontellier cottage with her needlework, entirely restored, luminous in a white peignoir, and established herself in the rocker with the contented sigh of a woman who has slept well and dined well and has news to tell.

"Chérie," she said, threading her needle and looking at Edna over it with eyes full of amusement, "do you know what was said of you this morning? Robert said—wait, let me have it exactly—he said that you made him think of a woman asleep; that you forget, when you look at the water, that any of the rest of us are alive; and that some morning you are going to wake up, and then, ma foi! we must all look out for ourselves. Did you ever hear such a thing! I told him he was romantic, and that it came of reading."

Edna laughed with her, and asked what else had been said, and the talk went on to other matters—to Madame Ratignolle's children, to the pattern of the little night-drawers she was making, to the sewing machine at the main house that wanted oiling. Robert did not come; the men stayed late at Klein's, and now and again the click of billiard balls seemed to reach her across the water, though it could only have been fancy.

Madame Ratignolle went home at ten, admonishing Edna against the night air. The quadroon had long since put the boys to bed; Edna went in once and stood over them, listening to their breathing, and laid her hand a moment on Raoul's damp hair. Then she came out again upon the gallery and sat alone in the wicker rocker in the dark.

There was no moon. The sea was a sound rather than a sight, a ceaseless, unhurried murmur that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Edna rocked a little, and did not weep, as she had wept in that same chair on another night without knowing why. She stretched her bare arm out along the railing and looked at it, pale in the darkness, and remembered how the water had lain under it and held it up.

Asleep, was she? She turned the words over as one turns a shell found on the beach, examining its whorls. Some morning she is going to wake up. She sat there a long time after the lights had gone out in the other cottages, hearing the sea, and the words went on softly in the dark beside it, the two sounds keeping company, until she could no longer tell which of them it was that she was listening to.

The First National Bank did its business on the ground floor of a gray stone building in Broadway, behind bronze grille-work that could have used polishing. Like the mine and the newspapers and nearly everything else in Personville worth owning, the bank belonged to Elihu Willsson.

I told a teller I wanted somebody who could answer questions about Donald Willsson's account, and gave him a card to carry away. He came back with a nice-looking blond boy of not more than twenty-five, who took me around the end of the counter to a desk in a corner. His name was Albury, he said, and he was an assistant cashier.

"You're the detective the family sent for?" he asked when we had sat down.

"The family didn't send for anybody," I said. "Donald Willsson sent for me, the day before he was killed. He paid for a job and I'm trying to earn the money. What I want is simple enough. Yesterday afternoon, a little before three o'clock, he wrote a check for five thousand dollars against his account here. I want to know what became of it."

Albury had one of those young faces that show things before their owners remember not to let them. Just then it showed nothing at all, which took a little doing.

"Five thousand," he said. "Wait, please."

He was gone ten minutes. When he came back he sat down and laid his hands flat on the desk, like a man being careful with them.

"There's nothing," he said. "No check of Mr. Willsson's for five thousand dollars, or for anywhere near it, has been presented. Nothing yesterday, nothing this morning."

"Could he have had it certified?"

"Not here. Certifications pass through my hands. If he'd had it certified there would be a record of it whether it had come back or not. There's no record."

"Was he in the bank at all yesterday afternoon?"

"No. My cage faces the door and I knew him by sight. I asked the other men to be sure. He hadn't been in since Monday."

"Suppose the check turned up tomorrow. Would it be good?"

The boy looked pained, the way bank men do when you walk too near a depositor's balance.

"I'm not asking for figures," I said. "Yes or no."

"It would be good," he said.

I thanked him and got up. He got up too, and his face stopped being careful long enough to be earnest.

"If there's anything else we can do," he said, "I hope you'll ask. Everybody here—we'd all like to see whoever did it caught."

I said that was nice, and went out. So Donald Willsson had written a five-thousand-dollar check at three o'clock, had gone out with it for twenty minutes, and hadn't gone near the bank with it. Nobody else had gone near the bank with it either. That gave me something to carry around, though I couldn't tell yet which pocket to carry it in.

Mrs. Donald Willsson was sitting in the lobby of the Great Western Hotel when I got back there in the middle of the afternoon.

She was in black. Against the black her face had less color than it needed. She saw me come in, stood up, and came across the lobby to me without hurrying.

"You are the man who was at my house," she said. It wasn't a question. "I should like to talk to you."

There was a writing room off the lobby, empty at that hour except for stationery nobody ever used. We went in there and sat down on opposite sides of a table.

"My father-in-law telephoned me at one o'clock," she said. Her chin was steady. Her gloved fingers weren't. "He told me what you had told him. He said other things too. He believes I killed my husband."

"He believed that before I ever saw him," I said. "What I gave him was what I had: you went out at ten-twenty, you came back at eleven-five, and there was blood on your slipper. If those things mean something innocent, you're the one who can tell me what. If they don't, I'll find that out without your help."

She looked at me for most of a minute. I let her look. Then she put her hands together in her lap and told it.

"At a quarter past ten the telephone rang. A man's voice—no one I knew—asked was I Mrs. Willsson. Then he said: 'Your husband has taken a check for five thousand dollars to a woman in Hurricane Street. If you go quickly you may catch him there.' He gave me a number—twelve-thirty-two. Then he hung up before I could ask anything."

"Nothing about who the woman was?"

"Nothing."

"And you went."

"I went." Her accent thickened a little, but her voice stayed level. "I drove there. I stopped the car near the end of the block, away from the number, and put out the lights. There was a light in the house. I waited. It was perhaps twenty-five minutes. Then Donald came out. I knew his walk before I could see his face. He came down the street, on the other sidewalk. Then there were the shots—from across the street from him, from between two houses. He fell."

"You saw anybody? Flashes?"

"I saw nothing. I heard the shots, and he fell. I got out and ran to him. When I reached him a man was already there, bending over him. A small man. He stood up when I came, and we looked at each other across Donald, and then he walked away. He did not run. He simply walked away. I knelt down." Her voice went flat, like a machine reciting. "Donald was dead. I got his blood on my hands and on my slipper, kneeling in it. Windows were opening. People were calling out. I was afraid. I went back to the car and drove home."

"Afraid of what? A wife's got a right to be kneeling over her husband."

"I was there because a voice had told me my husband was taking five thousand dollars to a woman. His father hates me. You saw his father this morning. Do you need to ask why I was afraid?"

I didn't answer that. I asked:

"The small man. What did he look like?"

"It was dark. Small, slender. Dark, I think. Well dressed, I think."

"You'd know him if you saw him again?"

"Perhaps." The word came out slowly, with cracks in it.

"You did see him again," I said. "He was at your house at nine o'clock this morning."

Her face got whiter, and then she stopped bothering with it.

"Mr. Thaler came this morning," she said. "He wished to know what I had seen that night and what I had told the police. He said he had not killed Donald."

"Did you believe him?"

"I believed him. If you had seen his face over my husband's body—he was surprised. One does not look like that at what one has done oneself."

"Surprised men have pulled triggers before this. What else did he want?"

"That the police should not learn either of us had been there. He said that in this city it would be convenient for certain people to hang it on him, guilty or not."

"He's likely right about that much. What was your husband doing in that house?"

"I don't know."

"What the voice on the phone said he was doing?"

Her mouth got thin. "If he took money to a woman, it was not for what that voice wished me to think. Donald was not—" She stopped, and then said again, "I don't know."

"Did you see anything in his hands, anything on the sidewalk? The check?"

"I was not looking for checks," she said.

"Have you told the police any of this?"

"No."

"Then don't, till they ask you, and maybe not then without a lawyer sitting beside you. Why bring it to me instead?"

"Because you are working for Donald." She stood up, pulling her gloves tighter. "The police here work for the men Donald was fighting. You are the only person in Personville who is paid to care who killed him."

She went out through the lobby, straight-backed, not hurrying. I sat in the writing room a while longer. Her story fitted everything the newspapers had printed, which was one thing in its favor and one thing against it, since the newspapers had been on the street since seven that morning.

The Evening Herald gave the murder its front page again, with nothing new in it except the coroner's inquest, set for Thursday, and an inventory of what had been found in the dead man's pockets: a watch, keys, a fountain pen, a handkerchief, a cigar case, letters, and a wallet holding a little over two hundred dollars. No check for five thousand dollars. If the check had been on him when he died, either the murderer had it now or the police had it. In Poisonville you could take your choice.

I read all that over dinner in the hotel dining room, went upstairs, and had my coat half off when the telephone rang.

"This the Continental man?" a voice asked. It was a smooth voice, a comfortable voice, nobody's voice I knew.

"Yes."

"Message for you from a friend. Whisper says he never had anything against Donald Willsson, that he didn't kill him, and that he doesn't know who did. Whisper says whoever's been telling old Elihu different is starting freight that somebody will have to take delivery on. Whisper says Frisco is nice this time of year. That's all, brother."

"Tell Whisper—" I began, but the line was already dead.

I hung up and put my coat back on. It was interesting news, though not the way the smooth voice meant it to be. I had done my telling in Elihu Willsson's bedroom, with the door shut and the secretary chased out of the room, and Thaler had every word of it inside of twelve hours. A house that leaked that fast could leak in both directions, and a message like that one could mean Thaler was innocent, or could mean he had five thousand reasons for wanting to look it. Messages are cheap.

The Western Union office was a block and a half from the hotel. I walked down there through Broadway's arc lights, past pool rooms doing good business and a picture house letting out, and printed a wire to the Old Man on one of their blanks:

DONALD WILLSSON KILLED TEN FORTY NIGHT OF ARRIVAL BEFORE I SAW HIM STOP SHOT FROM AMBUSH KILLER UNKNOWN POLICE IDLE STOP DECEASED DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK PAYEE UNKNOWN AFTERNOON OF DEATH STOP CHECK NEVER PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED FIRST NATIONAL STOP FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS CITY WITH PARTNERS HE WANTS RID OF MAY EMPLOY AGENCY STOP STAYING PENDING INSTRUCTIONS DETAILED REPORT MAILED

The clerk counted the words with a pencil, took my money, and told me it would go right out. I bought a newspaper I had already read, because his rack was under my elbow, and walked back to the hotel.

Up in my room I opened the window and sat beside it with a cigarette. What was left of the smelter smoke hung under the stars and gave them a dirty yellow look, like everything else the city touched.

Somewhere in Personville there was a slip of paper with Donald Willsson's signature on it, good for five thousand dollars at the First National Bank any hour anybody cared to walk in with it. Nobody had cared to walk in with it. It hadn't been in his pockets when the police went through them, or if it had, the police weren't saying so, and in this town that was a possibility all by itself. He had written it at three o'clock, carried it somewhere in a twenty-minute errand or held on to it, and at ten o'clock he had gone to a house in Hurricane Street—the same ten o'clock he had given me. A woman's voice on the phone had fixed that hour with him, and a man's voice on another phone had made sure his wife would be standing in the dark watching him keep it. Whatever the five thousand was supposed to buy, it had mattered more to him than his man from San Francisco, and it had bought him four bullets out of an alley, and the paper itself had gone wherever it had gone.

Until I knew where that was, I was just a fat middle-aged man a long way from home, sitting at a window in a dirty city with a dead client.

I threw the cigarette at the smoke it came from, shut the window, and went to bed.

The account I read there did nothing to reassure me. The symptoms of strychnine poisoning, as the book described them—the convulsions of a peculiar violence, the body arched backwards until it rested upon head and heels—reproduced, detail by detail, the terrible scene I had witnessed only an hour before. I replaced the volume upon its shelf with hands that were not quite steady, and let myself quietly out of the house.

It was a little after six o’clock. The storm that had hung over us all the evening had grumbled away towards the sea without breaking, and the morning was clear, with the promise of another sweltering day. The park had never looked more peaceful. The dew lay heavy on the grass, and a thrush was singing somewhere with an unconcern that seemed to me almost indecent. It was hard to believe that, in the house behind me, death had passed in the night.

I went down the drive at a good pace, out through the lodge gates, and so to the village. Leastways Cottage, where Mrs. Inglethorp’s charity had established Poirot and his compatriots, stood a little back from the street behind a strip of garden. I had my hand raised to knock when the door opened, and Poirot himself stood on the threshold. He was, as always, dressed with a neatness that was almost miraculous at such an hour, but his face was grave and drawn.

“You come from Styles, my friend,” he said quietly. “It is true, then?”

I fairly gaped at him.

“Poirot! How on earth did you know?”

“Baily told me—he who drove the car to fetch Dr. Wilkins. I sleep little, *mon ami*. I was at my window before five when the car went down the road; when it returned, Baily saw me and called up the news. Mrs. Inglethorp is dead.”

“She is,” I said soberly. “And Poirot—there is worse. The doctors will not certify the death. There is to be a post-mortem, an inquest. John Cavendish has given me a free hand—I have come to fetch you.”

Poirot did not answer at once. When he spoke, his voice was not quite steady.

“She was very good to us Belgians here, Hastings. She was my benefactress. I owe it to her that I am not now herded in some camp, eating the bread of strangers. Yes—I will come, and I will spare nothing.” He drew himself up. “Tell me only this. The room—it has been disturbed?”

“No. Dr. Bauerstein locked both rooms and gave the keys to John.”

“Ah, that was well done. Good. Return, my friend. I follow you in twenty minutes—not one moment more.”

“Twenty minutes?” I protested, glancing at his immaculate person. “But you are dressed already.”

“One does not present oneself to a house of mourning,” said Poirot with dignity, “in boots that are dusty. Go, Hastings.”

I went. And even in the midst of my agitation I found time to reflect that nothing short of the Last Trump would induce Hercule Poirot to cross a threshold with his moustaches unwaxed.

It was close upon seven when I came again into the hall at Styles, and the first thing I saw brought me up short. Alfred Inglethorp was standing by the table, talking to John. Lawrence leaned against the mantelpiece, his face turned away. I had forgotten, in the events of the last hour, that the man must return some time; yet the sight of him, composed and correct in his grief, his black beard trim as ever, roused in me a repugnance I could scarcely conceal.

“This is a terrible home-coming, Mr. Hastings,” he said to me, in his soft voice. “My poor Emily! And I not here—not even here!”

“Where were you?” I asked bluntly. John looked at the carpet.

“I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein last night, as you know. We sat late at his lodgings over a matter that interested us both, and it was past one o’clock before I left him. Then I discovered that I had come away without my latch-key. I did not care to rouse the whole household at such an hour, so I went along to the Stylites Arms and knocked them up, and they gave me a bed. They brought me the news this morning, and I came at once.” He passed his hand across his eyes. “If I had only been here——”

It was at this moment that Dorcas, who had come in to draw the curtains, turned round. Her old face was blotched with crying, but she spoke out with the steadiness of a servant of forty years’ standing.

“I ask your pardon, sir, but you took the key. When you went out with the doctor last night, I saw you take it up off the hall table with my own eyes.”

There was a moment’s silence. It seemed to me that everyone in the room was very careful not to look at anyone else.

“You are mistaken, Dorcas,” said Inglethorp smoothly.

“No, sir. Begging your pardon, I am not.”

“Then no doubt it will be found in some pocket of mine. What does it matter now?” He spread out his hands. “What does anything matter now?”

“It matters nothing at all,” said John, in a voice like ice, and the little scene closed. But it left its mark on me. As I turned away, there rang again in my ears the dying woman’s strangled cry: “Alfred—Alfred——”

Inglethorp went up to his dressing-room—the other one, along the gallery, that had been prepared for him—and it was perhaps ten minutes later that Annie announced “Mr. Poirot,” with the awed air of one announcing the police themselves. My friend’s condolences to John were brief and evidently sincere; his request was briefer still.

“I ask only this, monsieur: that no one shall enter the two rooms upstairs until I have seen them, and that afterwards you permit me to ask my little questions of the household.”

“Anything you wish,” said John wearily, and gave me the keys. “Hastings will take you up. I confess it is all a nightmare to me.”

As we mounted the stairs I gave Poirot, in a low voice, a rapid account of all that I have here set down, including Inglethorp’s return and the affair of the latch-key. He listened, nodding, asking nothing, but at the last item his eyes turned momentarily green, like a cat’s.

I unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room and we passed in, and I locked it again behind us at Poirot’s murmured word. They had laid the poor lady straight upon the bed and drawn the sheet over her. Poirot stood a moment beside her, his head bowed; then he crossed to the windows and drew back the curtains, and the pitiless morning light streamed in.

The room told its own story of that dreadful night. The little table that had stood by the bed lay overturned where it had fallen, and about it were strewn a reading-lamp, some books, a box of matches, and a candlestick. Near the window a coffee-cup lay smashed upon the floor—not merely broken, but ground almost to powder, as though a heel had been deliberately turned upon it.

“*Tiens!*” said Poirot softly, kneeling above the fragments.

“She carried her coffee up herself last night,” I volunteered. “She had not tasted it when she left us.”

Poirot said nothing whatever. He gathered no fragment. He touched with one finger a dark, stiffened patch on the carpet by the overturned table, examined the finger, and made a small grimace. Then, rising, he began to move about the room in that quick, methodical way of his, examining everything: the door into Alfred Inglethorp’s room, which I had seen bolted with my own eyes; the lock of the corridor door; the grate, with its handful of dead ashes; the writing-table, on which stood the purple despatch-case Cynthia had carried up, its key in the lock. Over this last he lingered, frowning, trying the lid delicately with one finger, but he did not open it.

“Later,” he murmured, as though to himself. “Later, that.”

By the mantelpiece he stopped again. There was a round spot of candle-grease on the carpet there, trodden well in.

“Lawrence’s candle,” I explained. “I saw it sputtering onto the floor when we broke in. He was standing just there—staring at the mantelpiece as though he had seen a ghost. I never saw such a look on a man’s face.”

“At the mantelpiece?” repeated Poirot. “At what upon it?”

“That is just it—there was nothing. Only the ornaments you see.”

Poirot stood a long minute before the row of prim china figures; and then, in a gesture so characteristic that at any other time I should have laughed, he put out his hands and straightened them, twitching each one until the whole row stood mathematically level.

“It offends the eye,” he said absently, “a thing that is crooked.”

Last of all he came to the door communicating with Cynthia’s room. The bolt was shot home. He drew from his pocket the little lens he carries, and went over the bolt with minute care, his nose an inch from the metal. Suddenly he uttered a small exclamation, and his fingers, delicate as a surgeon’s, picked at something caught in the socket of the bolt. He turned to me, holding out his open palm.

“Regard, Hastings.”

Upon his palm lay a tiny wisp of dark-green stuff—a few threads only, torn from some fabric.

“What is it?” I asked, peering at it.

“That, my friend, is precisely what I ask myself.”

“But—a scrap of material? From a dress? A curtain? It might be anything.”

“It might, as you say, be anything.” From his pocket-book he took a small envelope, coaxed the threads into it, sealed it, and wrote a line upon it in his neat, sloping hand.

“Poirot,” I said, exasperated, “what does it mean? Whose is it? How did it come there?”

“To those three questions I reply, *mon ami*: I do not know; I do not know; and I do not know. And until I do know, I say nothing—not even to you. It is a fault of mine. I permit myself only to observe that the bolt of a door which, according to the excellent Dorcas, ‘has never been undone,’ is an odd place for a morsel of green to be caught, is it not? No—do not ask me more.”

And not another word could I get out of him. He slipped the envelope into his pocket and stood a moment in thought, twisting his moustache. Then:

“The other side of this door interests me. Come.”

We went out into the corridor—I locked the door scrupulously behind us, for he watched me do it—and along to the door of Cynthia’s room. Poirot knocked gently. After a pause it opened, and Cynthia herself stood there, still in her dressing-gown, her auburn hair loose about her shoulders. She looked heavy-eyed and bewildered, utterly unlike the radiant creature of every day.

“Mademoiselle,” said Poirot, with a bow that took every particle of intrusion out of the proceeding, “I ask pardon for deranging you at such a time. I ask of you one thing only: how did you sleep last night?”

The girl flushed painfully.

“Terribly heavily—that is the awful part of it. Mary shook me and shook me before I woke, and they say the breaking of the door made a noise like the end of the world, and I never heard it—I never heard anything at all. And I’m usually the lightest sleeper imaginable; the least creak of the stairs wakes me. I shall never forgive myself—never!” Her voice broke.

“Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all I wished to know.” He bowed again, and drew the door softly to upon her tears.

I looked at him expectantly as we went back along the corridor, but his face told me nothing. Once more I unlocked the door of the death-chamber; once more, at his nod, I turned the key behind us. Down below, faint and far away, the stable clock chimed the half-hour. Half-past eleven! I realized with a start how the morning had gone; we had been more than three hours over that silent room.

Poirot drew the little envelope from his pocket and laid it in the middle of the round table by the window. Then he sat down opposite it, motioning me to the other chair, and for a long time he said nothing at all, but sat regarding that small square of paper between us as though it were a person who might presently be persuaded to speak. The sunlight fell across the sheeted figure on the bed; outside, the thrush was still singing.

“See you, my friend,” he said at last, tapping the envelope gently with one finger, “when we know how this little morsel came where it came, we shall know a great deal. For the whole affair arranges itself into one sentence—no more. Last night, in this house, there was one person too many asleep—and one too few.”

I stared at him across the table; but for the life of me I could make nothing of it.

Being helped up on to my legs by Mr. Franklin (my age gets a man down on a beach easily enough; it is the getting up again that finds him out), I took a good long look at our young gentleman. The last time I had seen him he was a boy in a jacket, with a talent for borrowing my money and forgetting to pay it back—witness the seven-and-sixpence, which he now put into my hand with interest at five per cent., counted out on his fingers in the foreign way. The lapse of years had made a fine bright gentleman of him; but I am bound to own there was less of English beef in his face than I could have wished, and more of the outlandish finish that comes of being educated abroad. However, his eye was the boy's eye still; and when he laughed, it was the boy's laugh; and I forgave him the foreign varnish on the spot.

“Betteredge,” he says, tucking my arm under his, and walking me away from the quicksand towards the sandhills, “I have not come at the time I was expected, and I have come by the morning train instead of the afternoon train. Before we get within reach of the house, I want a word with you in private. What is your opinion of this?”

He took out of his pocket-book a letter, and put it into my hand. It had been posted in London the day before; and it ran, word for word, as follows:

“To Franklin Blake, Esq.

“SIR,—Take the advice of one who wishes you well, and who can serve you in no other way than by writing these lines. You were followed yesterday from your father’s house of business to your hotel; and inquiry was afterwards made at the hotel of the hour at which you proposed to travel into Yorkshire on Thursday, and of the train by which you meant to go. The man who made the inquiry was an Englishman of respectable appearance. The persons in whose interest he made it are not Englishmen. If the thing which has been given into your keeping is of value to you, or to those to whom you carry it, change the hour of your journey; take the morning train in place of the afternoon; and breathe no word of the change to any living creature until the change is made.—Your friend and servant, UNKNOWN.”

I read it twice over, and gave it him back.

“Well, sir,” I said, “and what may your opinion be?”

“My opinion, Betteredge, is that I have taken the letter’s advice, and here I am—four good hours before my time, with my luggage sent round by the road, and my own legs brought over the hills. Now let me hear yours.”

My opinion (which I gave him) was that the letter was a hoax, got up by some facetious friend of his in London. Young gentlemen, in my experience, are for ever playing off their jokes on one another; and the joke of frightening a man out of one train into another seemed to me cheap enough to suit the purse of any of them. Mr. Franklin heard me out; and then, instead of laughing, as I had expected, put a question to me which fairly took the ground from under my feet.

“Betteredge,” he says, “have any strangers been seen about the house to-day? Foreigners, I mean. Indians, for example?”

You may fancy how I stared at him. Out came the whole story, on my side, of the three jugglers and the little English boy; of the ink poured into the palm of the boy’s hand; and of the words the boy had spoken with his eyes shut—that the English gentleman from foreign parts would travel to this house to-day, and that he had got It about him. When I had done, Mr. Franklin stood stock-still among the sandhills, and looked at me.

“The boy was right about the day,” he said, “and wrong about the hour—thanks to my unknown friend. Betteredge, the letter is no hoax. Those three men waited for me on the road, in the innocent character of jugglers; and my arrival by the earlier train is the one thing that has baulked them.”

“And what may ‘It’ be, sir?” I inquired.

Mr. Franklin looked back over his shoulder at the Shivering Sand, which lay quivering below us in the afternoon light, and then all round him at the emptiness of the hills, as if the very rabbit-holes might have ears.

“Not here,” he says. “What ‘It’ is, Betteredge, is partly my uncle’s secret, and partly not mine to tell until I have slept a night on it, and seen how the land lies at the house. Wait till to-morrow morning, and you shall hear as much as I am free to say. For to-night, old friend, I want two things of you: the safest lock-up place under my aunt’s roof, and a quiet tongue in your head. Have you got both about you?”

“I have got both about me, sir,” I answered, “or I have been fifty years in this family for nothing.”

Upon that, we went on together through the plantation of firs; and not another word did he say on the subject till we had the house before us.

The servants, it appeared, had seen him already; his portmanteaus having come round by the road from the station while he crossed the hills on foot; and it was Samuel, the footman, shouting my name among the sandhills, who had told him where I was to be found. My lady and Miss Rachel being still away at their luncheon-party, Mr. Franklin had the place, as you may say, to himself. He took me straight up to his bedroom, bolted the door (a proceeding which I thought foreign, but let pass), and took out of the breast-pocket of his coat a little packet, no bigger than the palm of my hand, done up in white paper, and sealed at every fold—four seals in all, and every seal bearing the same device. Something small and hard was inside it; a box, as I judged, by the feel; but what was inside the box, neither then nor that night did I know, and I ask you to bear witness, good friend, as we go on, that I have set down nothing here but what I knew at the time.

“Where does the plate sleep at night, Betteredge?” says Mr. Franklin.

“In the plate-room, sir,” I says; “next door to my own sitting-room; in a cupboard with a patent lock, put up by the late Sir John in the year the Bank was broken into at Frizinghall; and the key never leaves my pocket by day, nor my watch-chain by night.”

“Then the packet sleeps with the spoons,” says he, and put it into my hand. “Lock it up before you do anything else; keep the key as you keep your character; and ask me nothing about it till breakfast-time to-morrow.”

I went down, then and there, and locked the packet in the strong cupboard, between the tea-pot my lady’s mother left her and the great salver we only use when the county dines with us; and I turned the key on it, and tried the door twice, and put the key in my pocket. You will ask, naturally enough, whether I was not consumed with curiosity to know what I had got in my keeping. I answer you honestly: I was. My fingers itched at the seals like a boy’s fingers at a jam-pot. But a servant who has been trusted for fifty years learns to carry other people’s secrets as a pillar carries the roof—without asking what the weight is; and, moreover, I had my suspicions already, if the plain truth must be told. Put this and that together, as I did—the wizard’s boy on the terrace, saying the gentleman had got It about him; the letter of warning; the sealed packet; and Mr. Franklin’s own words, that the thing was partly his uncle’s secret—and remember what family it is that owns the Honourable John Herncastle for a brother and an uncle, and I think you will suspect what I suspected, without any further help from me. My mother used to say that guessing was the mother-wit of fools; but my mother, mind you, never had a sealed packet locked up with her spoons.

I had barely got my key pocketed, and my mind composed, when in came my daughter Penelope, with her cap-ribbons at half-cock, as I call it, which is her way of showing that she carries news.

“Father,” she says, “Rosanna has never come back!”

“Never come back?” says I. “Why, I left the girl on the beach not two hours since, within a quarter of a mile of her own dinner!”

“She never came near her dinner,” says Penelope. “One of the fisher-lads from Cobb’s Hole has just been up to the kitchen-door with a message. Rosanna has gone on along the shore to Cobb’s Hole, to Mrs. Yolland’s—her that is the only friend the girl has in these parts—and she begs that her absence may be excused, and says she will be back before the house is shut up for the night.”

There was nothing in it, you will say; a servant-girl gone to drink tea with a fisherman’s wife. So I said, too. But Penelope stood twisting her apron-strings, and looking at me in a manner I did not accustom myself to receive from my own daughter.

“Well?” says I. “Out with the rest of it.”

“The rest of it, father,” says Penelope, “is that I saw Rosanna’s face when she came off the beach and slipped round by the shrubbery instead of coming in; and if you had seen it too, you would have let her go to Cobb’s Hole, or to the world’s end, sooner than have asked her a question about it.” And off went my girl, leaving her meaning behind her (if she had one) for me to pick up. I mention this small matter, trifling as it looks, for a reason you will come to in its own place. At the time, I set the whole thing down to the fainting fits and the unquiet mind, and went about my business, with the packet safe on the one side of my thoughts, and the girl not quite off the other.

Towards evening, back came the carriage; and my lady in it, alone. Miss Rachel—so Samuel had it from the coachman—had been kept by the young ladies of the house where they had lunched, to stay the evening over some grand rummaging of dresses against her birthday, and was to be sent home late, with her maid to fetch her. So the meeting of the two cousins stood over, willy-nilly, till the morrow; and Mr. Franklin was received by my lady alone, in the small drawing-room, with me in attendance to light the candles, the evening drawing in grey from the sea.

It did my old heart good to see how my lady took him by both hands, and how our young gentleman kissed her on both cheeks, foreign fashion, and made her laugh in spite of herself. But the laugh was not long in her face. She put him back from her at arm’s length, and looked at him steadily, and spoke to him—I being then at the far end of the room with my taper, and hearing what I could not help but hear.

“One thing, Franklin, before you and I say a word more to each other,” says my lady. “You have come from London; and you may have come charged with a message, or a gift, or an errand of some sort, from my brother Herncastle. I ask nothing about it. I only tell you this: my brother’s name is a name I have not suffered to be spoken in this house for years past, and it is not to be spoken now. Whatever you please, and as long as you please—but not one word of the Colonel, under my roof, in my hearing, or in my daughter’s. Do you promise me that?”

Mr. Franklin looked, for one moment, as grave as ever I saw him look; and, for another moment (as my own belief is), he looked at the door of the room, as if he had half a mind to say something that would out. Then he took my lady’s hand, and bowed over it in his best foreign manner.

“I promise, aunt,” he says. “The Colonel’s name shall no more cross my lips in this house than if I had never heard it.”

“That is all I ask,” says my lady; and rang for tea, and was as gay with him afterwards, over his travels and his Frenchified notions, as if there had never been such a person as her wicked brother in the world. What I thought of it, keeping my own counsel at the far end of the room, with the key of the plate-room lying like a hot coal in my pocket, I leave you to imagine.

The rest of the evening slipped by quietly enough. At the accustomed hour I went my rounds; saw the house barred and bolted; tried the plate-room door last of all, and found it fast; and so came back to my own sitting-room, where my beehive chair stands of an evening in the corner by the hearth, and where ROBINSON CRUSOE lies always ready on the table at my elbow. Being a little shaken, if the truth must be owned, by the day’s work—what with wizards’ boys, and letters from Unknown friends, and sealed packets, and names that are not to be mentioned—I did what I always do in such straits: I opened the book, and let it speak to me. It opened of its own accord (as that miraculous book will) at the place where I have marked it: “Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.” The man who doesn’t believe in Robinson Crusoe after that, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit.

Composed by them blessed words, I lit my pipe, and sat on, with the book open on my knee, and my ears—do what I would with them—turned towards the gravel walk outside, listening for a woman’s footstep coming up from the direction of Cobb’s Hole. It was past ten; it was going on for eleven; and Rosanna Spearman was not yet back in the house.

"What have you got to be miserable about?"

"Everything, darling. Everything and everybody. Don't let's talk about it."

The taxi went along in the dark under the trees. The street lamps went by, one after another, and between the lamps it was dark inside the cab. Brett had her head back in the corner with her eyes shut, and she had taken my hand again and held it, and we did not talk for a while.

"Where's he taking us?" she said finally.

"The Parc Montsouris. You said drive around."

"I don't want any Parc Montsouris. Trees and a black lake and those awful swans asleep on the bank. Tell him the Select. I want lights and a drink and people I don't know."

I leaned forward and told the driver, and he swung the cab around at the next corner, and we went down a long street of shuttered shops and came out onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel where it was bright and nearly empty, and down past the closed grille of the Luxembourg, and around by the Closerie des Lilas, where a few people were still sitting out under the trees, and along the Boulevard du Montparnasse toward the lights. Brett sat up and looked out at it going by.

"I did rather a rotten thing, chucking that lot," she said. "They'd counted on me for Montmartre."

"They'll get on."

"Of course they'll get on. Everybody gets on marvellously." She let go of my hand to find a cigarette, and I lit it for her, and over the match she looked at me. "You're a bad influence, Jake. I only ever leave people when you're about."

"Leave them oftener."

"That's your idea of being nice to a chap."

"It's my idea of being nice to you."

The taxi stopped in front of the Select. On the terrace three or four people sat at the little tables, not talking, and inside the barman stood reading a paper spread on the zinc. Brett went in and got up on one of the high stools and pulled off her hat and shook her head.

"Brandy and soda," she said.

"A *fine à l'eau*," I said. The barman folded the paper away and made the drinks.

"I've acquired an admirer," Brett said. "Did I tell you?"

"No."

"Count Mippipopolous. Do you know him?"

"Never heard of him."

"Nobody's heard of him. He's Greek, or at any rate the title's Greek. He has heaps of money."

"Where did you get him?"

"Zelli's. Last week. He kept sending champagne over, quantities of it, and then he came over himself. Very correct about it, too. He owns a chain of something in the States. Sweetshops, I believe."

"A count with sweetshops."

"You can laugh. It's damned good money, sweets. He wants to take me to Biarritz. After Biarritz he wants to take me to Cannes. After Cannes, Monte Carlo. All I'm to do is come along and be charming."

"Are you going?"

"Don't be an ass, darling." She turned her glass slowly on the zinc and watched it. "Though I can't think why not. Nothing bothers him. He told me nothing had bothered him in thirty years, and I believe it. That's rather a gift, don't you think? Having nothing bother you?"

"It's a gift."

"You'd like him. You'd like him better than my crowd, anyhow."

"I couldn't like anybody better than your crowd."

"Don't be nasty. They're good boys. They don't do anybody any harm."

"No," I said. "They don't do anybody any harm."

She drank half the brandy and soda and put it down, and then she remembered and laughed.

"I say. What about your fifty francs?"

"What about them?"

"The envelope, you ass. For your fiancée. You don't suppose the girl will ever see it? The patronne has it tucked into her stocking by this time, and your girl's gone off to supper with Lett."

"Maybe."

"Not maybe at all. Fifty francs is fifty francs, Jake. Go back and get it."

"You want me to drive across Paris in the middle of the night to take fifty francs away from a patronne."

"I want to watch you do it. Do let's, darling. It's the first thing I've really wanted to do all night."

I paid for the drinks and we went out and got a taxi at the corner and went back through the empty streets and across the river and up the hill. Where the street got steep and narrow the driver put the cab into low gear and ground up it, and Brett looked at the doorway of the Bal with the light over it and shook her head.

"I'll stop here," she said. "If I go in I'll be in it till noon. One always is. Go get your fifty francs off the patronne, and I want to see your face when you come out."

Inside it was as hot as when we had left, and the accordion was still going, and the proprietor was up on his stool with the string of bells jingling on his ankle, beating time with his foot. The floor was crowded. Georgette was dancing with the wavy blond one. He carried his head on one side, with his eyes lifted, and Georgette looked straight over his shoulder at nothing at all. The patronne saw me from behind the bar and reached under the zinc.

"Monsieur has come back," she said, and laid the envelope on the bar. "It is all as Monsieur left it."

"Was there any trouble?"

"No trouble. The little one asked once where Monsieur had gone. I told her Monsieur was a serious man, gone away on affairs."

"That was right."

The music stopped and Georgette came off the floor fanning herself with her hat, and saw me at the bar.

"You," she said. "Where did you go, with your affairs?"

"I had to see a friend."

"A friend. I saw your friend. The one with the hair cut like a boy's."

"You've been getting on all right."

"Oh, yes. They dance well, and they buy champagne, and they ask nothing of a woman. It's a funny kind of gentlemen you have for friends."

"They're not my friends."

"No," she said. "I saw that too."

I tore the envelope open and took out the fifty-franc note and gave it to her.

"Here," I said. "Take a taxi when you go home."

She looked at the note and then at me, and put it away in her bag, and grinned with her mouth shut, the way she was pretty.

"You're a good type, Jacob," she said. "It's a shame you're sick."

"Everybody's sick."

"That's it. Everybody's sick." She put out her hand and we shook hands. "We're all going up to Montmartre to eat supper. You don't come?"

"I can't. Good night, Georgette."

"Good night, my little one. Amuse yourself well with your affairs."

The patronne called good night after me, and I went out. Brett was leaning forward in the cab watching the door.

"Well?" she said. "Did you get it?"

"I got the envelope."

"And the fifty?"

"I gave it to the girl. She was still there."

Brett lay back in the corner and laughed. She laughed until she had to hold her nose to stop.

"Of course you did," she said. "Of course you did. And I came all the way up this filthy hill to watch a hard man do a hard thing."

"It was her money."

"It was not her money, and that's the whole beauty of you, darling. You pay it out before it's owed. Get in."

I got in. "Now where?"

"I'm starving. Is anything open?"

"The Halles are open. They're always open."

"Soup," Brett said. "Darling, soup. Tell him."

We went down the hill and along the river past the dark bulk of Notre-Dame and crossed, and even before you could see the market you could hear it, and then the streets were full of it, the big two-wheeled carts coming in behind the big grey horses, loaded high with cabbages and carrots and leeks with the dirt still on them, and men calling to each other under the electric lights, and the smell of vegetables and trampled leaves everywhere. We left the taxi and went into a bistro across from the pavilions, full of men in blouses drinking marc and hot rum, and had onion soup with cheese grated over it, and bread, and a bottle of white wine. Brett ate the soup carefully, like a child being good, with her hat off and her elbows on the marble.

"This is the part of Paris I could love," she said. "The horses and the cabbages and everybody with something to do at four in the morning. Isn't it grand?"

"It's grand."

"We do have fun, don't we, you and I? No counts. No crowd. Nobody to be charming for. We're having a lovely time."

"A lovely time."

"Say it as though you meant it."

"We're having a lovely time."

"That's it. That's much better."

It was fine talk and neither of us meant a word of it. What I felt, sitting there while the market roared away outside, was that I loved her and that I was very miserable.

Brett put down her spoon and looked past me at the window. The glass had gone grey, and while we sat there it went white, and the electric lights over the carts began to look sick and yellow the way they do when the daylight comes in under them.

"It's to-morrow," she said. "It's already to-morrow."

"It's to-day."

"Whatever it is, I must go. Get me a taxi, darling, there's a good chap."

I paid, and we went out into the morning. It was cold now and fine, and the carts were still coming in, and a man went by wheeling a barrow of roses and carnations for the flower market, all of it smelling wet and sweet in the cold air. There was a taxi standing at the rank by the corner, the driver asleep with his collar up. I woke him and put Brett in and told him the name of her hotel.

She sat forward and held my hand through the open window.

"Don't look like that, darling."

"Like what?"

"Like that. It's been a lovely evening."

"Priceless," I said.

"Don't, Jake." She pressed my hand hard, the way she had pressed it standing at the zinc bar earlier in the night. "Come around about five. We'll be very nice to each other."

"All right. About five."

The taxi pulled out around a cart and went up the street, and she did not look back. I stood a minute and watched it go, and then I turned down toward the river.

I did not want another taxi. The whole town was washed and cold and new in the early light, and I came out on the quai by the Pont Neuf with the mist just lifting off the water. The river was smooth and grey-green and running full, and a tug came up under the bridge towing a line of barges, the tug's funnel folding back to go under the arch, and the wash from the barges slapped along the stone below me for a long time after they had gone by. On the far bank the sun was just getting to the tops of the towers of Notre-Dame, though the quais were still in shadow. The booksellers' boxes were all locked shut along the parapet, and one man was already fishing in the shadow under the bridge, sitting very still, watching his float. Nothing bothered him, either. Perhaps he had thirty years of it too.

The chestnut trees along the quai were in bloom, and the sweepers were out with their brooms, and the water was running along the gutters from up the side streets, carrying the night down into the river. A market cart crossed the bridge, the horse's shoes very loud in the empty street. I thought about Brett going up in the taxi with her eyes shut, and about the Count Mippipopolous, whom I had never heard of, and his sweetshops, and Biarritz, and then I quit thinking about it. It did no good to think about it. It was a fine morning, cold and early and clean, and I had the whole river to myself, and I walked along it, on the shady side, all the long way home.