The Chapters

"You would have thought us fugitives from justice," said Robert, as they went up the path together, "the way they were hunting you both. Madame Lebrun sent me, and the nurses sent the children, and the children sent themselves."

"You should have left us in peace," said Madame Ratignolle. "We were not thinking of any of you." She stopped to take breath under the shade of a water-oak, and stood pressing her hand against her side.

"I know it," he said. "Mrs. Pontellier never looks as if she were thinking of us; that is the difficulty." He shifted the child to his other arm. "Have you noticed how she sits and looks at the water, Madame? As if it were a door that some one had left open, and she had only that moment discovered it. She is not one of us, you know. She is like a person who has been asleep and has waked in a strange house, and is walking about touching the walls."

Madame Ratignolle laughed a little, and said he talked like a book; but she turned the phrase over in her mind as they went on toward the cottages, and it stayed with her in the way that idle things sometimes do. Robert set down the little girl at the Ratignolle door and went off whistling to the main house, where his mother wanted him for the sewing-machine.

Edna remained on the beach with the children until the sun grew too high for the tent to shelter them. She was in one of her humors of tenderness that morning; she let Raoul bury her feet in the sand and dig them out again a dozen times, and did not once glance toward the water. Only when the quadroon had gathered up the pails and the little shovels, and the procession had started up the sandy path, did she turn and look back at it, lying broad and blue and idle behind her, with the lateen sail no nearer than before.

There was a telegram waiting for her on the table in the cottage, propped against the vase of jessamine. Madame Lebrun had brought it over herself and left it, with many apologies for not having found her at home. Edna tore it open standing. It was from Léonce. He would not come out on Saturday; a matter had arisen with the cotton people from the North which would keep him in the city over Sunday, perhaps into the week; she was not to be uneasy; he was sending oysters and a case of the Rhine wine by the Thursday boat. She read it twice, and then laid it upon the mantel-shelf under the clock, where it stood the rest of the day with its yellow edge showing.

She was aware of a small, cool sensation which she did not examine. It was not disappointment. She had looked forward to Saturday only as one looks forward to a fixed point in the week, a peg upon which the days are hung. Now the peg was withdrawn, and the days ran on together toward the end of the season with nothing to divide them. She said as much to no one. At dinner she told Madame Lebrun that Mr. Pontellier was detained, and Madame Lebrun said "Ah!" with a great deal of sympathy, and the lady in black, at the next table, looked up from her plate with her still, dark eyes and looked down again.

The heat that afternoon was a heavy, white heat that drove every one indoors. The gallery of the main house was deserted except for the two lovers, who did not count. Robert had gone across to Klein's on some errand of his mother's, and the children slept in the darkened cottage with the quadroon nodding over them. Edna lay down for an hour and could not sleep. The blinds threw their bars across the ceiling and the sound of the surf came in through them, slow and regular, like breathing. At three o'clock she rose, put on her bathing dress under a loose wrapper, took the key from its nail and went down the path alone.

She had never gone down alone. All summer there had been Robert to walk beside her, and afterward Robert standing waist-deep in the water, patient and a little amused, while she clutched at his hands and could not be persuaded to lift her feet from the bottom. Every one at Grand Isle had tried to teach her: Madame Ratignolle, the Farival twins, Monsieur Farival himself, who was seventy and swam like a fish. She had felt a certain ungovernable dread in the water, and a certain shame at the dread, and had ended by declaring that she did not care to learn.

The beach was empty. The tide was low and the water lay flat and colorless, with the froth of the morning quite gone out of it. Edna undressed in the bath-house and walked down into the sea, and the sea was warm, as warm as the air, so that there seemed to be no dividing line where one left off and the other began. She went out until it reached her breast and stood there a long while, feeling the slight lift and drop of it against her body. Then, without deciding to, she leaned forward and let herself go.

For an instant there was nothing under her, and the old dread rose up. But her arms had already gone out before her in the way that Robert had shown her, and she struck the water once, and twice, and a third time, and the water held her. It was over almost before she understood that it had happened. Her foot came down and found the sand, and she stood up gasping and laughing aloud, with the water running off her hair, and looked about her as a child looks about after some feat, for a witness. There was no one. The lovers had gone; the bath-houses stood with their doors shut; the beach ran away white and glaring on either hand.

She tried it again, and managed four strokes. Then she came in and sat down on the wet sand at the edge of the water, with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, and did not think of anything at all. A feeling of exultation had got hold of her which she did not care to spend in words. When she had dressed and locked the bath-house, and was going up the path, she found that she had already resolved to say nothing about it, though she could not have told why. It was as if she had been given something which would be worth less if it were shown.

Half way to the cottages she met the lady in black coming down. The lady walked slowly, with her beads in her hand and her eyes on the ground, and Edna would have passed her with the usual silent inclination of the head. But the lady stopped.

"You have been in the water," she said. Her voice was low and rather harsh, as if from disuse. "Alone, at this hour. You should not. There is an undertow beyond the second bar; the fishermen know it. A Mr. Baptiste drowned there, before your time, the summer that I first came."

"I did not go out far," said Edna, surprised into an answer.

"No one goes out far who drowns," said the lady in black. "They go out a little way, and then a little way more." She looked at Edna a moment with her heavy, patient eyes, said "*Bonjour, Madame*," and went on down the path toward the beach, telling her beads.

Edna found Madame Ratignolle on her own gallery in the cool of the evening, with the needlework out of her pocket at last and the little girl asleep across her lap. She sat down on the step below her, and Adèle, after asking whether it were really true about Mr. Pontellier and Saturday, and saying that it was a shame, and that men in business were all alike, fell to talking of Robert.

"He is a foolish boy," she said, "with his Mexico and his talk. But he says things. Do you know what he said of you this morning, going up? That you sit and look at the sea as if it were a door somebody had left open and you had just found it. And that you are like a person who has been asleep and waked up in a strange house, and goes about touching the walls." She laughed, and bit her thread. "I told him he talked like a book."

Edna said nothing. She sat with her chin in her hand and looked out through the dusk toward the water, which she could not see.

Later, when the children had been put to bed and the quadroon had gone to her own quarters, and the lights had begun to go out one by one in the main house, she came out and sat alone upon the gallery of the cottage. The night was very still. The wind had dropped altogether. Far off down the beach some one was singing, and then was not; a dog barked at Klein's and left off. Through the open door behind her she could hear the breathing of the boys and the small creak of the mosquito-bar when one of them turned.

She thought of the telegram lying under the clock, and of the water holding her up, and of the lady in black going down to the empty beach with her beads. But it was Robert's words, in Adèle's laughing repetition, that came back and stayed and would not be dismissed. A person asleep, who had waked in a strange house. She put her hand out in the dark and laid it flat against the post of the gallery, as if to see whether it were really there.

Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. I saw it myself, for I had sat late over my papers in the study, and had gone out upon the lawn to cool my head before bed. The night was very still, and there was a faint mist over the meadows towards the Wey. I was looking, I remember, at the pale smear of the Milky Way, when this thing came over. It was not like the falling stars one sees on any August night. It was greenish, and it came slowly—or seemed to come slowly, though that must have been the effect of its height—and it left behind it a streak that hung in the sky for some seconds, glowing like a wire drawn out of a furnace. There was no sound. It passed over the trees to the north and was gone, and after a little while the streak faded, and there was only the mist and the stars again.

I stood watching for perhaps a minute longer, and then I went in and locked the door and went to bed, thinking of nothing more than that Ogilvy would be pleased to have another meteor for his notebook. It did not occur to me, nor, I think, to anyone in England that night, to connect this streak of green fire with the flashes upon Mars that had been so much in the papers. A great many things that seem obvious now were not obvious then. The habit of security is very strong.

I was up early. My wife was still asleep, and I went out without breakfast, meaning to walk over the common and back before the heat of the day, for it promised to be hot. I did not think of the meteor until I was well out upon the sandy road towards Ottershaw and saw, beyond the pines, a column of vapour going up into the still air. It was not smoke. It was too white and too dense for smoke, and it rose straight and was lost against the brightness of the morning. I took it at first for the steam of some engine at the gravel workings, and then I remembered that the workings had been abandoned two years before and had long since filled with water.

I quickened my pace. I passed a man going the other way who told me, without my asking, that “something had come down in the night into the old pit,” and that Mr. Ogilvy from the observatory was already there. He seemed more amused than alarmed, and I think that was my own feeling as I went on down the slope among the heather.

The old pit lay in a hollow of the common, a broad excavation from which sand and gravel had been dug for many years, and which had since filled to within a few feet of its rim with water of a curious green clearness. On a summer morning it was commonly a very pleasant place, with the sand martins going in and out of the banks and the reflections of the pines lying still upon it. It was not a pleasant place that morning. The water was in turmoil. Something huge and dark lay in the shallower end of it, and the water about this thing was boiling, fairly boiling, throwing up a great steam that drifted and thinned and thickened again, so that at one moment I could see the object plainly and at the next only a vague bulk through the whiteness. The heather along the bank nearest it was blackened and still smouldering. There was a smell of scorched earth, and another smell, sharper, that I could not name. The sand of the bank had been thrown up in a great ridge, as if a ploughshare of enormous size had been driven through it, and a scatter of gravel lay for fifty yards over the heather.

Ogilvy was standing on the ridge of thrown sand with his coat off and his hat pushed back, and beside him was a man I did not know, a gamekeeper or labourer of some kind, holding a long pole. Ogilvy saw me and waved, and I went down to him.

“You saw it come?” he said, before I had reached him. “I saw it. I was up. I saw it come over and I heard it strike—a sound like a great door slammed. It came down at a slant, just there, into the water. Extraordinary luck. If it had struck the dry sand there would have been nothing to see for a week; the heat would have set the whole common afire.”

I asked him what it was.

“A meteorite,” he said. “What else? A big one—the biggest that has fallen in England in my time, or in anyone’s. There is a great deal of it under water still. I make it thirty yards long at least, and I am probably wrong on the short side.”

The steam thinned a little as he spoke, and I had my first clear sight of the thing. It lay at an angle in the water, one end buried in the bank and the other, the nearer, rising out of the pit like the back of some drowned beast. It was cylindrical, or nearly so, and very dark, and the whole visible surface was covered with a thick scaly crust, greyish and burnt, that here and there had cracked and flaked away. Where it had flaked I could see something beneath that was not stone. It had a dull glint in it. The water hissed and bubbled about the sides of it, and every now and then a great gout of steam went up with a sound like a kettle boiling over.

“It is very regular,” I said.

“Meteorites are frequently regular,” said Ogilvy. “They come in with a spin, and the spin trues them. I have seen drawings of one from Siberia that was as round as a cannon ball.”

“It is not round. It is a cylinder.”

“It is a cylinder because it came in end-on and the crust has built up along the line of flight. That is all.” He was quite emphatic. He had, I think, already decided upon the paper he would read before the Society, and did not intend to have it spoiled.

I said nothing more for a moment. The labourer with the pole had gone down to the water’s edge and was prodding at the bank where the heather still smouldered. I said presently that the thing beneath the crust looked to me like metal.

“Iron,” said Ogilvy. “Meteoric iron. Nickel-iron. They are commonly full of it.”

“It does not look like iron,” I said. “Iron rusts. That looks—I do not know what it looks like.”

“You have never seen a fresh fall,” said Ogilvy. “No one has, or scarcely anyone. I daresay it looks strange. I daresay it will look a great deal less strange when it has cooled and we can get a hammer to it.” And then, seeing that I was still looking at the flaked places: “My dear fellow, you have been reading the papers. Because a few volcanoes on Mars happen to be in eruption, you would have this a—what? A shell? A message? I told you the chances a fortnight ago.”

I had, indeed, been half thinking of the flashes, and I was a little ashamed to have been found out. I said that I had suggested nothing of the kind, only that the thing was very regular and that the metal did not rust. Ogilvy laughed at me, not unkindly, and began to tell the labourer where to drive stakes so that the length of the object could be measured when the water went down. He was entirely happy. He said the pit would drain itself into the sand in a day or two, or could be pumped, and that meanwhile the thing would be safe from the curious, for no one would care to wade into boiling water for a piece of rock.

I stayed an hour. Two or three people came down from Ottershaw in that time and stood upon the ridge and looked, and went away. A boy threw a stone at the thing, and it made a dull, flat sound, quite unlike a stone against stone, and Ogilvy sent him off. Then I remembered that I had had no breakfast, and that my wife would be wondering, and I went home across the common.

I told her over the breakfast table, and I am afraid I made rather much of it, for I had by then decided that the thing in the pit was the most remarkable object I had ever seen, whatever Ogilvy might say. She was curious and a little alarmed. She asked whether it was safe, and I said that Ogilvy had been standing within twenty yards of it all the morning and had taken no harm; and then she said she would like to see it, and I was glad, for I wanted to go back. We set out about ten. It was already very hot, and the road over the common was white with dust.

By that time the news had spread. There were perhaps forty people about the pit when we came down to it, and more coming across the heather from the direction of Chertsey and along the road from Ottershaw—cyclists, women with children, a couple of golfers with their clubs, and a knot of men from the brickworks who had evidently left their work to come. Henderson, the London journalist who lived at Ottershaw, was there with a notebook, standing beside Ogilvy and looking as though the whole affair had been arranged for his convenience. The steam had lessened. The water still boiled about the object, but more quietly, and one could see the thing plainly now, its scaled and blackened back rising out of the green water, and the flaked places showing that dull, pale gleam.

My wife looked at it for a long time and said nothing. Then she said, in a low voice, that it looked as if it had been made.

I said that Ogilvy would not hear of that.

“I know,” she said. “But it does.”

The crowd had by now established itself along the ridge of sand and along the higher ground behind, and had begun to behave as crowds do. The boys had found the scatter of gravel on the heather and were picking through it for pieces of the crust. Henderson went about asking questions. A man had brought a dog, which would not go near the water and stood with its hair up, growling, until it was taken away. There was a good deal of laughter and speculation. One man said it was a boiler from an airship. Another, who had been reading of the Martian flashes, said it was “one of them,” and was laughed at, and defended himself, and was laughed at again. I do not think anyone believed him, least of all himself.

It was a little before noon that the accident happened. A young man from the brickworks, a big, red-faced fellow in his shirt sleeves, had been boasting to his companions that the water was not so hot as all that, and that he would fetch them a piece of the thing to take back. Ogilvy called out to him to keep off, but he was already at the water’s edge, and he went in. The bank shelved gently there, and the water was not above his knees. He waded out a few steps, cursing at the heat of it, and reached up and laid his open hand flat upon the crusted surface of the thing.

He did not cry out at once. There was a moment in which he simply stood, with his hand upon it, and his face changing; and then he snatched his hand away and screamed, a high, absurd sound for so big a man, and came floundering back through the water and fell on his knees on the sand. The skin of his palm had gone white and puckered, and there was a smell of it. Two of his companions got him by the shoulders and dragged him up the bank, and a woman in the crowd began to cry. Someone ran for water from the cottage on the road, though there was water enough in the pit if it had been fit to touch. The man sat rocking with his hand held out before him and would not let anyone come near it, and after a little while they got him up and led him away towards Ottershaw and the doctor. The crowd watched him go with that curious silence of people who have been entertained and have suddenly been reminded that they are not at a play.

“It is hotter than I thought,” said Ogilvy to me, quite gravely. “It has not begun to cool at all. That is odd. The water should have taken the heat out of the surface by now.”

I said that it did not seem to me to be cooling. If anything, I said, the boiling had grown more violent in the last half hour.

He looked at me, and for the first time that morning he did not answer at once.

My wife had gone very pale. She had seen the man’s hand. I took her arm and drew her a little way back up the slope, out of the press, and told her that I thought she had better go home. She did not want to leave me. She said, quite reasonably, that if it was not safe for her it was not safe for me, and I had no very good answer to that, except that Ogilvy would want me and that I would keep well back from the water, which I promised. I think what persuaded her in the end was not anything I said, but the crowd, which was growing every minute and pressing closer along the ridge, so that there was scarcely room to stand. It was very hot, and the air over the pit was full of steam and that sharp, strange smell, and the noise of the water did not stop.

She went at last. I walked with her to the edge of the common and watched her go up the road towards our house, a small figure in a white dress with a parasol against the glare, until the pines hid her. Then I went back down the slope to the pit, where the people were still gathering, and where the thing lay in the boiling water with the sunlight on its blackened back, and Ogilvy stood on the ridge of sand, no longer talking, looking at it.

I went from the Herald to the First National Bank.

It was a granite box on Broadway with a lot of bronze in front and a lot of marble inside. The paying tellers stood in a row of cages down the left side. I picked the one whose window had the shortest line, waited my turn, and asked the young man behind the grille if he could tell me whether a check drawn by Donald Willsson had come through the day before.

He was a clean-looking lad of twenty-five or so, with a nice haircut and a nicer manner. A brass plate on the marble said his name was Albury. He looked at me with the polite blankness that bank clerks keep for people who ask questions, and said the bank didn’t give out information about its depositors’ accounts.

“The depositor’s dead,” I said. “I’m working for the family.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t exactly a lie either, and it took some of the blankness out of his face. He glanced up and down the row of cages, then leaned a little closer to the grille.

“I read about it,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing. He used to come in here. He was⁠—everybody liked him.”

“The check was for five thousand dollars. He wrote it a little before three yesterday afternoon.”

Albury didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he excused himself, went back through a door behind the cages, and was gone five minutes. When he came back he had a slip of paper in his hand and a puzzled look under the nice haircut.

“No check for that amount has been presented,” he said. “Nothing at all on Mr. Willsson’s account yesterday, or today so far.”

“Would you know if it had been certified?”

“Certifications go through the cashier, but they’re charged against the account at once. There’s nothing.” He turned the slip of paper over as if there might be something on the back. “The last item was a check for a hundred and twelve dollars to the Personville Paper Company, on Monday.”

“So he wrote a five-thousand-dollar check, went out with it, and it never got here.”

“Not here. Unless”⁠—he hesitated⁠—“unless it was deposited in another bank. It wouldn’t reach us through the clearing house until tomorrow at the earliest.”

“Are there other banks?”

“The Miners’ Savings, and the Farmers and Merchants’.”

I thanked him. He put his hand up to the grille, then took it down again, and said in a lower voice:

“If it’s any help, Mr. Willsson didn’t come in yesterday afternoon. I’d have seen him. My window is the one nearest the door.”

I said it was a help, and went out.

The Miners’ Savings and the Farmers and Merchants’ were both within three blocks. I tried them. Neither had heard of any check of Donald Willsson’s, and neither wanted to hear of me. I didn’t press it. A man who is going to be shot at ten-forty that night doesn’t generally spend the afternoon opening accounts in strange banks.

It was past one. I ate lunch in a place where the waitresses wore red neckties and the chili was worse than the coffee, and thought about a check that had gone out of a newspaper office in a dead man’s pocket and hadn’t gone into a bank. The stub said five thousand. It didn’t say who. A check book doesn’t usually leave a name off its stub unless the man writing it doesn’t want a name on it. That fit with what the Lewis girl had told me about Willsson keeping things to himself. It didn’t fit with anything else I knew, because I didn’t know anything else.

The police had his effects. I could have gone to Noonan and asked to see them. I decided to wait until I had a better reason for meeting the chief than curiosity, and went back to the Great Western.

There was nothing in my box. I went up to my room, took off my coat, and had got as far as the second page of the Evening Herald⁠—it hadn’t anything the Morning Herald hadn’t had, except that the language was a little hotter⁠—when the telephone rang. The clerk downstairs said there was a lady to see me. I said to send her up, and put my coat on again.

It was Donald Willsson’s widow.

She wore black now, and a small black hat that came down over her fair hair, and she looked a good deal better than she had looked at five minutes past eleven the night before, though she still didn’t look well. Her face was thin and very white, and the blue eyes were as steady as they could be made. She stood inside the door until I had shut it, and then she said:

“You didn’t come to see me this morning.”

“I started to.”

“I know. I saw you from the window. You turned around at the corner.” She sat down in the chair I moved for her without looking at it. “You saw Mr. Thaler go in.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why I’ve come. I didn’t want you thinking⁠—” She stopped, put her black gloved hands together in her lap, and started again in a flatter voice, the accent a little heavier. “Mr. Thaler came to tell me that he had nothing to do with my husband’s death. He wished me to know it. He said he thought I might be told otherwise.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know him. I had never seen him before this morning. I know his name. Everyone in Personville knows his name.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I listened. He was very polite.” She took a breath. “He is a strange man to be so polite.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and waited. She had come to say something, and it wasn’t that Whisper Thaler had good manners.

“You told my father-in-law about my going out last night,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He has sent word that I am to leave the house. That I am to leave Personville.” Her mouth twitched, but she kept it from being anything worse than a twitch. “He thinks I killed Donald. You think so too. You saw my slipper.”

“I saw something on your slipper.”

“It was blood.” She said it evenly, looking straight at me. “I went to him. He was on the sidewalk. I got down beside him. It was too late. He was dead already. Then I heard people, windows, and I⁠—I ran back to the car and drove home. I didn’t know what else to do. I was not thinking.”

“How did you know where to find him?”

“The telephone call. You were there. A woman told me that if I wanted to know where my husband went at night I should go to Hurricane Street⁠—she gave the number. I asked who she was. She laughed and hung up.” Her hands came apart and went together again. “I was jealous. You may as well know it. Everyone will tell you. I went. There was a house. I sat in the car across the street and waited, because I was ashamed to go up to the door. Then he came out. He came down the steps and along the sidewalk toward the corner, and I got out to speak to him, and the shots⁠—”

She stopped there. I let her stop.

“Where was the man?” I asked after a while.

“What man?”

“The Herald says a man and a woman were bending over him.”

Her eyes went blank for a second, then came back.

“I saw no man. There may have been. I saw nothing but Donald. I have told you I was not thinking.”

“How long were you at the house before he came out?”

“Ten minutes. Perhaps fifteen.”

“See anybody go in? Come out?”

“No.”

“What number was it?”

She gave it to me. I wrote it on the back of the Evening Herald. It was in the eleven-hundred block.

“Did your husband have five thousand dollars in cash on him last night?”

The question surprised her out of her stiffness. She said, “No⁠—I don’t know⁠—why?” all at once.

“He wrote a check for that much yesterday afternoon. It hasn’t been cashed. Know who it might have been for?”

She shook her head slowly. Then she said, with the bitterness that had been under everything else she had said:

“I did not know very much of what Donald did. I have told you I was jealous. One is not jealous when one knows.”

“Whose house was it?”

“I don’t know. The woman on the telephone didn’t tell me that.” She stood up. “I have told you what I came to tell you. I would rather you heard it from me than from Mr. Elihu Willsson. You may believe it or not.”

“Told the police?”

“No.”

“Going to?”

“I don’t know.” She pulled her gloves tighter. “Do you advise it?”

“I’d wait,” I said. “Noonan’s got a lot of people to please, and you’re not one of them.”

She thought that over, nodded once, and went to the door. With her hand on the knob she turned around and said in a different voice, a younger one:

“Donald wrote to you because he trusted you. I would like to think that means something.”

“He didn’t know me,” I said. “He wrote to the Agency.”

She went out.

I sat where I was for a while, looking at the number on the back of the newspaper. Then I got up and put my hat on. I hadn’t reached the door when somebody knocked on it.

It was a bellhop, a freckled kid with a cap too big for him. He had an envelope. He said a man had left it at the desk for me, and no, he hadn’t seen the man, the clerk had taken it, and no, there wasn’t any answer wanted. I gave him a quarter and shut the door.

The envelope was cheap and gray. My name wasn’t on it. It said Room 519, and that was all. Inside was a half sheet of the same gray paper. On it, in a small careful hand that leaned backward, somebody had written:

I saw you on Mountain Boulevard this morning. You did not see me, but I saw you. I had nothing to do with it. I told her so and I am telling you. If you want to know about it you can ask me, but don’t go asking about me. Stay out of the way and you will be all right.

There was no signature. There didn’t need to be one. A man who whispers because something happened to his throat doesn’t write big.

I read it twice and put it in my pocket. It was a nice note. It said he knew where I lived and what number my room was, and it said he had been standing somewhere on Mountain Boulevard where he could watch me turn around and go back to Broadway. It also said he wanted me to think he was worried about being blamed. Maybe he was. A man who has just had a reform newspaper’s publisher shot has plenty to be worried about, and so has a man who hasn’t and knows everybody thinks he has.

I went downstairs, out into the afternoon, and walked to Hurricane Street.

The eleven-hundred block was a row of frame houses that had been somebody’s idea of comfortable twenty years ago. The number Mrs. Willsson had given me was a two-story one with a porch and drawn shades. Across from it was the mouth of an alley, narrow and dirty. I stood in the alley for a minute and looked at the front of the house on the other side, and found the two bullet holes in its wall without any trouble. Then I looked at the house with the drawn shades. Nobody came out of it. I didn’t go up on the porch. A man who has been told twice in one day to stay out of the way can afford to think it over before he starts ringing doorbells.

I walked around the block instead, and asked a woman hanging out clothes in a back yard who lived in the house with the porch. She said a woman did, a big good-looking piece, and that she didn’t know her name and didn’t want to, and that plenty of men knew it. I asked if the police had been around. She said they had, once, and hadn’t stayed long.

It was getting dark when I got back downtown. I ate dinner, went to the Western Union office on Broadway, and sent a night letter to the Old Man in San Francisco:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT BEFORE KEEPING APPOINTMENT WITH ME STOP SIX SHOTS THIRTY TWO FROM ALLEY STOP WIDOW ADMITS WAS ON SCENE SAYS SENT THERE BY ANONYMOUS WOMAN PHONE CALL STOP HAS NOT TOLD POLICE STOP WILLSSON WROTE FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK PAYEE UNKNOWN AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH STOP CHECK NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED ANY LOCAL BANK STOP FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON REFUSES COOPERATE BLAMES WIDOW STOP LOCAL GAMBLER THALER DENIES CONNECTION IN WRITING STOP POLICE CHIEF NOONAN NOT SEEN YET STOP NO CLIENT NOW UNLESS FATHER CHANGES MIND STOP INSTRUCTIONS

I read it over. It didn’t say much, but it said all I knew, and the Old Man liked his reports that way. He would probably wire back that the Agency didn’t work for corpses and to catch the next train. He would probably be right. I paid for it and went back to the hotel.

There was nothing in my box. There was nothing under my door. I locked it, took off my coat and shoes, turned out the light, and lay down on the bed with the gray note in one pocket and the Evening Herald with a house number on it in another.

Down in the street a car went by slowly, then another. It was a good town for cars that went by slowly.

I thought about the check. A man writes it, goes out with it, is gone twenty minutes. He doesn’t go to his bank. He doesn’t go to any bank. He comes back, dictates a letter to a senator about post office regulations, has dinner with his father’s secretary, and at ten-forty is dead on a sidewalk in front of a house where a big good-looking woman lives whose name everybody knows and nobody says. The police have what was in his pockets. Either the check was in them or it wasn’t. If it was, Noonan had it. If it wasn’t, somebody had five thousand dollars of Donald Willsson’s money on a piece of paper they couldn’t use without going through Albury’s window, and hadn’t.

I hadn’t got any further than that when I went to sleep.

Mr. Franklin was the first to get on his legs, and the first to give me a hand up—which, considering that the sand had got into every joint of me, was no more than my due. When I was fairly upright, and had shaken myself, and got my stick, the first question that came into my head was the natural one under the circumstances.

“You’re very welcome, sir,” I said. “But how, in the name of wonder, do you come to be here at two o’clock in the afternoon, when my lady’s carriage is ordered to meet the six o’clock train?”

“I came by the morning train instead, Betteredge, and I walked over from the station, and left my luggage to follow. As for why I did it—” here he stopped, and looked about him among the sandhills, very much as a man looks who thinks there may be a listener at his elbow, “—as for why I did it, I don’t mind telling you. I did it because of a letter.”

“A letter, sir?”

“A letter which came to my lodgings in London last night, and which brought me out of bed this morning three hours before my time. Here it is. Read it, old friend—you will read it a good deal sooner than I shall be able to explain it.”

He took a folded paper out of the breast of his fawn-coloured coat, and gave it to me. I am a slow reader when there is anything the matter with the light, and the sun was full in my eyes, so I turned my back on the sea and the quicksand, which I was glad enough to do, and made out the letter as follows. It bore a London date, and was written in a lawyer’s hand, which is to say, in a hand that leaves nothing behind it but the plain meaning of the words:

“*Dear Sir*,—Since you left my office yesterday, a circumstance has come to my knowledge which I think it right you should hear of without delay. A person of dark complexion, dressed like an Englishman, but (as the clerk who noticed him believes) not an Englishman, made inquiry at the bank, on the very afternoon of your visit, respecting the business which had taken you there. He obtained nothing, the clerk being a discreet young man. But the inquiry was made; and I confess I do not like it. Under these circumstances, I take the liberty of advising you to alter the hour of your journey into Yorkshire, and to say nothing of the alteration to anybody beforehand. If you are followed, you will thus be followed by nobody who knows where to look for you; and if you are not followed, you will have lost nothing but a morning’s sleep. I need hardly add that the object of which we spoke yesterday should not be trusted to the luggage, nor to any hands but your own, until you can place it under lock and key in your aunt’s house.—I remain, dear sir, your faithful servant, MATHEW BRUFF.”

I read this twice through, and then gave it back to Mr. Franklin, and looked at him, and he looked at me.

“Well?” says he.

“Well, sir,” says I, “Mr. Bruff is a lawyer, and a lawyer sees a rogue behind every hedge; it’s his business. But I’ll not deny that I have had a little matter on my own mind this last hour or two, which I should be glad to put alongside of this letter, and see how the two of them look together.”

Upon that I told him—as shortly as a man can tell anything who has got the habit of taking his time—what my daughter Penelope had seen at the gate that morning: the three Indians with their drums, the little English boy, the ink in the palm of his hand, and the words the boy had spoken while he was under the spell, as Penelope called it, or while he was playing his part, as I called it. I told him particularly that the boy had said the English gentleman would travel to this house today, and had got It about him.

I had made up my mind beforehand that Mr. Franklin would laugh. He didn’t laugh. He walked on a step or two in silence, with his hands behind him, and then stopped.

“Betteredge,” he said, “you called it a trick. So it may be. But if it is a trick, it is a trick that was rehearsed in London, at the bank door, before it was played in Yorkshire, at my aunt’s gate—and I don’t much like the rehearsal. I know what ‘It’ means. I am afraid I know very well.”

I waited to hear more, but he had said his say for the present, and turned it off in his easy way with a question about the road home and whether the plantation of firs was still as dismal as ever. I should be a poor sort of servant, and a worse sort of historian, if I set down here the guesses that went through my own head as we walked back together through the trees. You shall have the facts as I got them, and you shall put your guesses alongside of mine, at your own convenience, when the time comes.

We came out at the back of the house, and I took Mr. Franklin in by my own door, as the shortest way, and as the way least likely to set the whole establishment running out into the passages to look at him. Once inside my sitting-room, with the door shut, he did a thing which I have thought of many times since, and which I set down exactly as it happened.

He put his hand into the inner pocket of his coat, and brought out a small packet, done up in brown paper, and sealed at both ends and across the middle with a red seal. It was about the size of a man’s two fingers laid together, and it lay in his palm as if it weighed nothing at all.

“You have the charge of the plate-room, Betteredge?” he asked.

“I have the keys of it, sir, night and day, and nobody else in the house has, or ever had.”

“Then lock this away in it for me until tomorrow. Put it where the plate is, and turn the key on it, and give me your word that nobody shall know it is there but you and I. I am bound in honour to give it into certain hands tomorrow, and not before; and after Mr. Bruff’s letter I should sleep a great deal easier with it behind your bars than under my pillow.”

“Am I to know what it is, sir?” I asked—not out of curiosity, understand, but because a man who takes charge of a thing likes, as a rule, to know what he is taking charge of.

“You are not,” says Mr. Franklin, with his pleasant smile. “Not tonight, at any rate. Tomorrow, I hope, everybody in the house will know—and then you will have the satisfaction of being able to say that you knew it first, and held your tongue about it. Will that do for you, old friend?”

It had to do for me, whether I liked it or not. I took the packet, and I took my keys, and I went along the passage to the plate-room, and opened it, and put the packet down inside on the shelf between the tea-urn and the great salver that was given to the late Sir John by the county gentlemen, and locked the door on it, and tried the lock twice over, and came back. From first to last I never so much as turned the packet over to look at the seal. If you think that a hard thing to believe of an old man left alone in a passage with a mystery in his hand, I can only answer that I was fifty years in service before that afternoon, and that a thing which is not your business gets to be, at last, a thing that your fingers know better than to meddle with. There are people, I am aware, who would have held the packet up to the light. I am not one of them—and if you are, I would recommend you to give up reading this narrative, for it will only aggravate you.

Mr. Franklin, meanwhile, had made himself at home in my room, as he had a way of doing anywhere, and had found my pipe, and had found my Robinson Crusoe, and was reading the last with the first between his teeth, when I came back. I told him the packet was safe. He nodded, and said no more about it; and, my lady and Miss Rachel being both still out, I took him upstairs to the room that had been got ready for him, and sent a boy off to the station for his luggage, and left him to wash the railway off himself in peace.

It was while I was on my way down again that Penelope caught me on the stairs. There is no getting away from that girl when she has news; and this time, to do her justice, the news was worth catching me for.

“Father,” she says, “Rosanna hasn’t come in.”

“Not come in?” I said. “She left the sands a good half-hour before I did.”

“She hasn’t come to the house at all,” says Penelope. “Nancy has been asking for her, and the cook has been asking for her, and I went out to the plantation to look. I met one of the Yollands’ boys coming up from the shore, and he told me he had passed her on the path to Cobb’s Hole, walking fast, with her cloak pulled about her, and she never so much as answered when he gave her good day. She’s gone to Cobb’s Hole, father—that’s where she’s gone—and her dinner spoiling on the hob all the while.”

I had a word to say about the dinner, and I said it; but I own the girl’s going to Cobb’s Hole puzzled me. It was not her turn out. She had leave for a breath of air, after her fainting-fit, and no more; and Rosanna Spearman, whatever else she was, was a servant who kept to her leave, as a rule, to the very minute. I remembered the colour that had come into her face on the sands, and the way she had gone off without her curtsey; and I put the two things together—and could make nothing of them. So I did what an old man does in such a case. I told Penelope that Rosanna would have her scolding when she came back, and that in the meantime the young woman was likely enough sitting with her friend the fisherman’s daughter, and that there was no sense in making a fuss. Penelope tossed her head, as much as to say that there was a great deal of sense in it if her father would only see it, and went off about her business.

My lady’s carriage came round the sweep a little before five o’clock. My lady got out of it alone. Miss Rachel, it appeared, had been persuaded to stay on where they had been lunching, and to come home later in the evening in a neighbour’s carriage; which I mention, not because it matters much in itself, but because it is a fact, and because it meant that her cousin’s first meeting with her was put off, in the event, to another day than the one he had reckoned on.

I met my lady in the hall with the news that Mr. Franklin was in the house before his time. She raised her eyebrows a little—she was a woman who could do more with her eyebrows than most women can with their whole tongues—and said, “Then Franklin has learned to be beforehand with the world. That is something new in the family. Send him to me in the library, Gabriel, and bring the tea.”

I sent him, and I brought the tea. And here I must ask you, for the second time in one chapter, to take my word for something that I cannot prove—that I stayed in the library no longer than the pouring out of two cups required, and that what I am now going to set down I heard in the way of my duty, and not in the way of a listener.

They had got over the first greetings before I came in. My lady was sitting in her own chair by the window, and Mr. Franklin was standing at the hearth, looking down at her, with the rose still in his coat, and, I thought, something less than his usual easiness in his face. Whatever he had begun to say to her, she had cut it short; for the first words I heard were hers.

“No, Franklin. I will hear anything else you like. But that name is not to be spoken in this house. It was not spoken while my husband was alive, and it shall not be spoken now that he is gone. The Colonel was my brother; and I have done with him. Whatever business of his has brought you here—and I can see in your face that there is business—you will keep his name out of it under my roof. I ask this of you as a favour. I might put it more strongly, if I chose.”

Mr. Franklin bowed, in his foreign way, with his hand on his heart—a way that would have looked like play-acting in another man, and looked like nothing but good manners in him.

“You shall not hear it from me, aunt,” he said. “I have my instructions; but I give you my word that I can carry them out without once offending you in that particular. There is a name I would sooner keep off my own tongue, if it comes to that. Say no more about it. Betteredge, that cup is for my aunt, not for the fire-irons.”

Which was true; I had let the cup go a trifle wide. I set it right, and I went out, and I shut the door on the two of them; and what more passed between them I did not hear, and do not know to this day.

The rest of that evening I can put in a very few words. Mr. Franklin dined with my lady, and was as gay at dinner, by the account of the footman who waited, as if there was no such thing as a lawyer in London, or a sealed packet in Yorkshire, or an Indian on the face of the earth. Miss Rachel’s carriage was heard on the drive a little after ten. Mr. Franklin, I was told, had gone up to his room by that time, being tired with his early rising. And the house shut itself up for the night, one door after another, in the usual way.

All but one door. When I made my last round, at half-past eleven, I came into the servants’ passage and found Nancy sitting up, with a face like a thunder-cloud, and Penelope with her; and Penelope said, before I could ask, “She’s not back, father.” Rosanna Spearman had not come home from Cobb’s Hole. The side door was to be left on the latch for her, which was against my rules, and which I permitted, God forgive me, because I could not for the life of me think of anything else to do at that hour of the night.

I went out into the back court, and looked up at the sky, which was fine and clear, with a young moon in it; and then I sat myself down in my beehive chair, with my pipe, and with Robinson Crusoe open on my knee at the place where Mr. Franklin had left it. It happened to be the place where poor Robinson, finding the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, was terrified to the last degree, and went home to his castle, as he calls it, looking behind him at every two or three steps. I have said before, and I say again, that there never was such a book. I had my keys in my pocket, and the packet was lying behind three inches of oak, between the tea-urn and Sir John’s salver, where nobody but I could get at it; and yet, do what I would, I could not read three lines of Robinson together without lifting my eyes from the page and listening for the girl’s step on the gravel. It did not come. The moon went round to the other side of the house. The pipe went out. And I sat on, in the dark, with my hand on the book, an old man on a summer night with a queer feeling on him that something had come into the house that day which was not going to be got out of it again by turning a key.

I left Styles by the side gate, and struck out across the fields towards the village. The storm which had threatened all night had passed over without breaking, and the morning was fresh and grey, with a heavy dew on the grass that soaked my boots before I had gone a hundred yards. I remember being absurdly conscious of these small things—the wet grass, a blackbird on the hedge, the smell of the hay—as though my mind, shrinking from the horror behind me, was glad to fix itself on anything that was ordinary.

The house where the Belgians were lodged stood at the end of the village street, a little apart from the rest, with a strip of garden before it. I had expected to find it still asleep, and had already composed in my mind the apology with which I should rouse Poirot from his bed. But as I opened the gate the front door opened also, and my friend himself came out to meet me, fully dressed, his boots gleaming, his moustache trained to its most perfect points.

“Ah, my friend,” he said, before I could speak, “you come from Styles. I have been expecting you this half-hour.”

I stared at him.

“Expecting me? But how—— Then you know?”

“That Madame Inglethorp is dead? Yes, I know it.” He laid a hand on my arm, and his voice softened. “She was very good to us, that poor lady. I am grieved, Hastings—truly grieved.”

“But who on earth told you? It is not yet half past six.”

“It was Baily, your chauffeur. Dr. Wilkins, you comprehend, lives in the house next to this one. When the car came for him at five o’clock, with the horn sounding and the poor man hammering upon the door, the whole street was awake. I put my head from the window, and Baily called up to me, ‘It is the mistress, Mr. Poirot—taken terrible bad—they think she is dying.’ Afterwards, when the car returned past this house, going slowly, I did not need to be told the rest.” He shook his head. “No, my friend, I did not go back to bed. I have been sitting here, at the window, waiting. I said to myself, ‘If there is nothing—if it is a sudden illness only—Hastings will not come. But if he comes——’” He spread out his hands. “And you have come.”

I told him then, as briefly and as clearly as I could, everything that had happened: the locked doors, the convulsions, the arrival of Dr. Bauerstein, the dying woman’s cry of “Alfred,” the two doctors’ refusal of a certificate, and Alfred Inglethorp’s unaccountable absence from the house. I added what I had gathered from the medical book in the library, and I am afraid that I laid a good deal of stress upon it.

Poirot heard me out in silence, only once or twice putting a question—at what hour Mrs. Inglethorp had gone up to bed, whether the coffee had been carried up with her, which of the doors had been broken and which merely unbolted. When I had finished he nodded gravely.

“Good. You have told it well, Hastings. You have the gift of observation, though you do not always know what it is that you have observed. Now, listen. Return you to the house. I follow in ten minutes—I must arrange one or two little affairs here. Say to Mr. Cavendish that I come, and that I beg of him that nothing in the two rooms is touched.”

“Bauerstein has locked them both. John has the keys.”

“That is well—that is very well.” He seemed about to say something more, and then checked himself. “Go, my friend. And Hastings—you will observe everything. Everything, you understand? Not only what seems to you important. The little things—the small things which are of no significance—it is those that I shall want.”

I went back by the road, being anxious to lose no time, and it was barely a quarter past seven when I came up the drive. The house looked strangely peaceful in the morning sun, with its blinds drawn; and it was only as I came round to the front that I saw, standing at the foot of the steps, the figure of a man in a dark overcoat, with a black beard.

It was Alfred Inglethorp.

He had evidently only just arrived, for Dorcas was in the open doorway, and I saw at once from her face that she had told him. He stood quite still, with one hand on the stone balustrade, and it struck me even then that he did not look like a man who had received a great shock. He looked, if anything, thoughtful. Then he saw me, and came a step or two towards me.

“Mr. Hastings—this is terrible. Dorcas has just told me. I can hardly believe it. Emily—my poor Emily——”

His voice was low and grave, and, I was bound to admit, perfectly steady. He passed a hand over his forehead.

“If only I had been here! To think that I was not with her——”

John had come out into the hall behind Dorcas. His face was set and hard.

“Where were you, Inglethorp?” he said. He did not raise his voice, but there was something in the tone of it that made the question sound, in that quiet hall, almost like an accusation.

Inglethorp turned to him with dignity.

“I was in the village, John. Surely you know that? I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein last night, and afterwards I went on to Denby’s to settle the matter of the estate accounts—it was late, but he had promised to sit up for me, and there were a good many papers to go through. When we had finished it was past one o’clock. I put my hand in my pocket for the latch-key, and found that I had not got it. I must have left it on the hall table when I went out. I did not care to rouse the house at that hour, and Denby very kindly gave me a bed. I came away as soon as I was up. That is the whole story.”

There was a moment’s pause. Then Dorcas spoke from the doorway. Her voice trembled, but she spoke out plainly.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but you had the latch-key. I saw you take it off the table and put it in your pocket, when you went out with the doctor. You said to me, ‘I have the key, Dorcas, don’t sit up.’ Those were your very words, sir.”

Alfred Inglethorp looked at her. For a second—no more—I thought I saw his eyes flicker. Then he said, quite gently:

“You are mistaken, Dorcas. I dare say I meant to take it. But it was not in my pocket at one o’clock, I can assure you of that.”

“I saw you take it, sir,” repeated Dorcas obstinately, and her eyes went past him to John.

John said nothing. He turned on his heel and went into the dining-room, and after a moment Inglethorp followed him, still murmuring that he must go up to Emily, that he could not yet believe it. I heard John’s voice, curt and cold, saying that the rooms were locked, and that the doctors had desired them to remain so.

I was still standing in the hall when Poirot arrived. He had, I think, run part of the way, for he was a little out of breath; but his appearance was as immaculate as ever, and he removed his hat and bowed to Dorcas with a ceremony which, in the circumstances, I found faintly absurd. I do not think Dorcas found it so. She dropped him a curtsey, and I saw that her eyes filled with tears.

“You are Dorcas,” said Poirot. “Madame Inglethorp has spoken to me of you. She said, ‘My Dorcas has been with me twenty years. I would trust her with my life.’” He paused. “She was right, I think.”

Dorcas could not answer him. She put her apron to her eyes and went away towards the kitchen. Poirot looked after her, and then turned to me.

“Mr. Inglethorp has returned,” I said in a low voice. “He is in the dining-room with John. He says he spent the night at Denby’s in the village, and that he had forgotten the latch-key. Dorcas says she saw him take it.”

“Ah!” said Poirot. That was all. But he stood for a moment quite still, and I fancied that his eyes, which were fixed on the closed door of the dining-room, had grown very green.

John came out to us then, and I introduced them. Poirot was brief and businesslike. He asked for the keys, which John gave him, and for permission to see the rooms and, afterwards, to speak to one or two members of the household. John assented to everything with a kind of weary indifference. I think he was past caring what was done, so long as he was not required to do it himself.

We went up together, Poirot and I. He unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room, and we went in, and he locked it again behind us.

I had thought that I should never wish to see that room again, and yet, as I stood beside Poirot in the grey light that came through the drawn curtains, I found that horror had given place to a kind of intense curiosity. It looked very much as we had left it. The body of the poor lady lay on the bed, covered now with a sheet. The small table beside the bed still lay overturned where it had fallen, with a broken lamp, a shattered coffee-cup, and a litter of small objects on the carpet around it. The door to Inglethorp’s room stood ajar, its lock burst and hanging by a single screw.

Poirot did not go to the bed. He stood for a full minute just inside the door, his head a little on one side, looking. Then he began to move about the room, slowly and methodically, and I understood for the first time what people meant when they spoke of him as a great detective. He touched nothing without first looking at it. He knelt on the carpet by the overturned table, and examined the broken cup, and the stains, and the little pool of spilt coffee which had soaked into the rug and dried. He looked at the candle on the mantelpiece, at the ashes in the grate, at the ornaments—it was, I remembered with a sudden chill, the mantelpiece at which Lawrence had stared with such terror. He examined the bolt of the door into the corridor, which I had drawn back myself, and the burst lock of the connecting door.

Then he went to the third door—the door into Cynthia’s room—and it was there that he stayed longest.

It was still bolted, as Dorcas had said. Poirot did not draw the bolt. He bent close to it, and then closer still, so that his nose was almost touching the wood, and made a little sound of satisfaction. From his waistcoat pocket he produced a pair of tweezers, and with these he drew something from the crevice between the bolt and its socket.

He came across to me, and held it out on the palm of his hand.

It was a tiny scrap of stuff—a thread or two only—of a dark green colour. It was so small that I could barely see it against his hand.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You see for yourself what it is, my friend.”

“I see that it is a bit of green thread. But what does it mean? What is it doing there?”

Poirot took a small envelope from his pocket-book, dropped the fragment into it, sealed it, and wrote something on the outside. Then he put it away.

“That,” he said, “I do not tell you.”

“But, Poirot——”

“No. Not yet. It is, as you say, a bit of green thread. Very well—it is a bit of green thread. When I know why it is a bit of green thread, then, perhaps, I tell you. Not before.” He surveyed me with a twinkle. “You are annoyed, Hastings. You think that I am playing at the mystery. But no—it is that I am not sure. I have an idea, and it is a little idea only, and if I tell it to you now you will build upon it a great edifice, and the whole thing will fall down upon both our heads. Patience.”

I was obliged to be content with that.

He went next into Inglethorp’s room, and spent some time there, though as far as I could see there was nothing whatever to be found—a bed which had not been slept in, a dressing-table set in perfect order, a chair with nothing on it. He opened the wardrobe and looked at the clothes, and shut it again. He looked at the window. He looked at the carpet. He came out with his face perfectly expressionless.

“And now,” he said, “I should like, if she is able to see me, to speak with Mademoiselle Cynthia.”

I went to find her. She was in the morning-room with Mary Cavendish, and she came out to us at once, though she was very pale, and her eyes were red. Mary followed her as far as the door, and stood there, and I noticed—it was one of the small things—that she did not come in.

Poirot bowed to Cynthia with great gentleness, and did not keep her standing. He put her in a chair in the corridor, and stood before her, and I thought he was going to ask her a great many things—about the despatch-case, about the coffee, about the door between the two rooms. He asked her only one.

“Mademoiselle, one little question, and then I let you go. Do you always sleep so soundly as you slept last night?”

Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. That’s the queer part of it. I usually sleep like a cat—the least thing wakes me. Mary says she shook me for ages last night before I knew anything at all, and even then I couldn’t seem to get properly awake. My head was like lead. It’s only just gone off now.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “That is all.”

She went back to Mary, and the two of them went away together down the corridor, and Poirot stood looking after them until they had turned the corner. Then he took me by the arm and drew me once more into the locked room, and locked the door.

The morning was well advanced by now. The sun had come round to the windows, and lay in a long bright bar across the carpet where the curtains did not quite meet; and outside, somewhere in the garden, I could hear the click of Manning’s shears, going on as though nothing had happened in all the world. Poirot took the little envelope from his pocket-book and laid it on the corner of the dressing-table between us. We both looked at it.

“Well?” I said at last. I could bear the silence no longer. “You have seen everything. You have found your bit of thread. What do you make of it?”

Poirot did not answer for a moment. Then he said, very softly, and as it seemed to me not to me at all:

“It is the wrong door, Hastings. That is what troubles me. It is the wrong door, and it is bolted.”

*Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Hon. Arthur Holmwood.*

“*27 May.*

“My dear Art,--

“You were gone before the lamps were out, and Jack and I sat on over the tobacco till the milk-carts were rattling, so I take my pen to finish what the three of us began, for I don’t reckon you heard the half of it. First, you are a lucky dog, and we told you so about forty times, and mean to go on telling you till you are sick of it. Second, the camp-fire did its work. When you went down the stairs with your hat on the back of your head, singing something I would not repeat to a lady, Jack turned round to me and said, ‘Quincey, I never in my life felt so mean and so glad in the same minute,’ and I told him that was about the size of it with me too. So we shook hands on it, and it is settled between us. There is to be no more weeping over the wine-cup on that account. The lady has chosen the best man of the three, and the other two have a right to be proud of her for her good sense.

“You will remember that we drank one health standing, without any words at all. That was Jack’s notion, and a good one; the words were all inside. And you will remember, too, what you said afterwards about the three of us being like the three legs of a stool, and that if ever one of us was in trouble the other two must bear up under him. I put that down here so that you cannot go back on it when you are a sober married man with a wife to look after your promises. I hold you to it, and I hold Jack to it, and if either of you ever wants a hand or a horse or a rifle, or a bank-book, you have only to wire the word.

“Jack is not so easy as he lets on. He laughed all through supper, and told that yarn about the alligator at Titicaca better than I ever heard him tell it, but I have seen men laugh that way before, on the night before a hard march. He says the cure is work, and I dare say it is, and he has a whole houseful of it at Purfleet. But keep an eye on him, Art; he has not got a Miss Lucy to write to, nor a prairie to ride himself quiet on, only a lot of poor crazy folk and that talking-machine of his.

“The messages you brought made both our ears tingle right enough. Tell Miss Lucy that the Texan friend is as good as his word, and that she may count on him, standing up.

“Yours, as ever and always,

“QUINCEY P. MORRIS.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*31 May.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Only a line, for mamma is waiting to take me to the Pop. and I am already dressed. Arthur dined with his two friends on Tuesday, and came here next day looking, I am ashamed to say, rather pale, though he swears it was the fog. He would not tell me much of what passed, except that they drank my health, and that Mr. Morris made a speech about horses which no one understood, and that Dr. Seward was ‘the best fellow in the world.’ Men are very close about these things; I suppose they think we should laugh at them, and I suppose we should. Mamma is calling. Write and tell me when Jonathan comes home, and whether he has brought you anything strange and foreign, and whether he is very brown. I want to see him so much.

“Your loving

“LUCY.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*2 June.*--I have begun my journal at last, as I told Lucy I would, though there is nothing to put in it but the same thing over and over: no letter from Jonathan. It is more than three weeks since his last, and that was only a few hurried lines, written, he said, in haste from the Count’s house, saying he was well and would be starting home in about a week. I have gone over the dates a dozen times, as if arithmetic could bring him nearer. Even allowing for the slow posts in those parts, and the long journey, and the business with the estate at Purfleet, he should have been in Exeter by now, or at least have written. The girls have noticed that I go to the hall every time the postman’s knock sounds, and I have had to invent an aunt in Bath who is very ill.

I must not be foolish. Jonathan is a solicitor, and solicitors are kept waiting on their clients; he told me himself, laughing, that the Count was an old gentleman who would very likely want every deed read to him twice. And I have work of my own. I have taken down the whole of the Vicar’s sermon this morning in shorthand, and shall write it out on the typewriter to-night, so that when Jonathan does come he shall find I have not been idle.

*4 June.*--A letter at last, but not from Jonathan. It came by the second post, in a foreign envelope, addressed in a hand I did not know, and the girls all watched me open it. I copy it here exactly, for I have read it so many times that I no longer know what it says:--

“*Hotel Golden Krone, Bistritz, Transylvania.*

“*23 May.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“You will forgive that a stranger writes to you. I am proprietor of the Golden Krone, in which hotel the English gentleman, Herr Jonathan Harker, solicitor, has lodged the fourth May, going onward next day by the coach to the Borgo Pass, where the carriage of his client did wait for him. He has said to me on going that he did return in a week or ten days, and would take again his room, and so a small portmanteau of his has remained here, and some letters which he did ask my wife to give him on his return.

“Now there is come to me by a carrier of the mountains a paper, written in his hand and signed by his name, which says that his business with his client is not finished, and will hold him some weeks yet in the mountains, and that the portmanteau is to be kept, and that if any should ask for him it is to be told that he is well and is detained on the affairs of his client. There is no more. The carrier could not say from what house it came, only that it was given him at the Pass by a man who paid him.

“Your address I have from a letter of yours which lay with the others, and which I have not opened, but only read the outside. I write to you because my wife would have it so; she says that a lady in England will be anxious, and that it is a Christian thing to do. I write also so that you may know that the Golden Krone has done its duty, and that the effects of the Herr are safe with us, and that we ask nothing for the room.

“With every respect, I am, honoured Miss, your servant,

“JOSEF GRUBER.

“(The English is of my nephew, who was at Vienna.)”

That is the whole of it. I have read it, and read it, and I cannot make it say anything but what it says. Jonathan is well; Jonathan is detained; the business is not finished. Why, then, has he not written to me himself? A man who can send a paper to the innkeeper by a carrier can send a letter to the woman he is going to marry. Unless the paper *was* the letter, and it was thought enough. Perhaps in those wild places one cannot be always at a post-office, and one gives a note to whoever is going down the mountain. Perhaps he did write, and it lies with the others at the Golden Krone, waiting for him to come and claim it. I shall write to Mr. Hawkins to-night. He will know what is usual in such matters, and he will not laugh at me.

Later.--I have written to Mr. Hawkins and to Lucy. I told Lucy only that Jonathan is delayed on business and that I shall not, after all, be able to say when he comes home. I did not send her a copy of the innkeeper’s letter; I do not know why. It is a perfectly kind, sensible letter, and there is nothing in it to frighten anybody.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*5 June.*--Renfield again. I had determined, after my note of the 25th, to leave him alone for a while, lest the cruelty I detected in myself should get the better of the physician; but the man will not let me leave him alone. He has taken to collecting flies. He has a box for them, and feeds them, and I let him, for it keeps him quiet and there is a certain method in it that I want to see the end of.

This morning, however, he did something quite outside his usual line. I had gone in as usual, and had said nothing but ‘Good morning,’ and was looking at his box, when he said, without turning round from the window:--

‘Doctor, is it true that Miss Westenra is to be married?’

I confess it took me aback. I had the sense to say nothing for a moment, and then to ask him, as carelessly as I could, who Miss Westenra might be. He turned then and looked at me with that curious sly gravity of his, and said only: ‘I thought you would know, sir.’ Then he went back to his flies, and not another word could I get out of him on the subject, though I stayed a full quarter of an hour longer than I meant to.

Now, how did he come by that name? I have never spoken it in this house, to my knowledge. Yet I cannot be sure. On the night of the 24th I came back late and went through the wards; I may have muttered something. Or an attendant may have gossiped: men will talk, and I am told there is a paragraph in one of the society papers about Lord Godalming’s son. Renfield reads the papers when he can get them. That is the rational explanation, and I set it down as such. What troubles me is not the fact but the *manner*: the question was put not as a madman puts a question, at random, but as a man puts it who has been waiting for the right moment, and knows that it will hurt. There is intelligence there, and it is turned upon me. I must watch myself with him more than I watch him.

(*Mem.*, ask Simmons who has been in and out of that room.)

I ought to note, since I have made this diary a confessional, that the question did hurt; and that it hurt less than it would have done a week ago. Quincey’s supper did that. It is a strange thing that two men should be able to talk a third out of a wound by drinking to the man who dealt it; but so it was. Art was very noble about it, and Quincey was very funny, and I laughed till I could not see, and somewhere between the laughing and the walk home along the Embankment I found that I had accepted the thing. I set it down so that if the empty feeling comes back I may read this and know that it has been got over once, and can be got over again.

*Letter, Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Exeter, 6 June.*

“My dear Miss Murray,--

“Your letter has just reached me, and I hasten to relieve your mind as far as I am able. You need have no uneasiness at all on the score of the innkeeper’s communication. It is very much what I should have expected. The Count, as I gathered from his correspondence, is a gentleman of the old school who does his business slowly, and there was a great deal of business to do: the conveyance of Carfax, the inventory, the matter of the shipping of his effects, and I know not what besides. Jonathan will have had his hands full, and posts from those regions are, I am told, uncertain, and are carried down to the towns only when somebody happens to be going. That his note reached the hotel at all is a proof that he is looking after his affairs like a good man of business, which is what I sent him out to be.

“I have myself had nothing from him since a short letter written from the Count’s house early in May, but I did not look for more. I told him before he went that he was to stay as long as the client required, and he is doing it.

“I have written to Bistritz to thank the good people there, and to ask that anything further be sent to me here as well as to you. Do not vex yourself, my dear. He will come home brown and full of stories, and you will both laugh at this letter. You may depend that the moment I hear anything I will telegraph.

“Believe me, yours very faithfully,

“PETER HAWKINS.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*7 June.*--Mr. Hawkins’s letter came this morning, and I have been almost happy all day. He is so sensible, and he knows so much more of the world than I do; and it is true that I did not know how much business there was. I have put the innkeeper’s letter away in the drawer with Jonathan’s, and I shall not take it out again. I have written to Lucy quite cheerfully, and told her that I shall very likely be able to come to her at the end of July after all, Jonathan or no Jonathan, and that she is to tell me *all* about the wedding-clothes, and not pretend that dress is a bore.

*24 June.*--Nothing. Seventeen days, and nothing. I have kept my resolution and not opened the drawer; but I have counted the days on the calendar, and I am afraid Mr. Hawkins’s ‘some weeks’ has become a very long time. Midsummer; the term ends on Friday.

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

“*30 June.*

“Letter from Jonathan dated Bistritz twelfth June says he starts for home at once. Nothing since. HAWKINS.”

The Honourable Hugo Walderwick was a young man who took his umbrellas seriously. He was not, as a rule, a man of strong emotions; he went through life with a placid rotundity, asking little of the world beyond a good lunch and the absence of anything that might be called a fuss. But at twenty minutes past one that day, when he came out of the dining-room of the Drones Club with the intention of walking down to Bond Street and found the rack in the cloak-room bereft of the one object which gave meaning to the rack, something stirred within him. He stood for a moment looking at the vacant peg. Then he went in search of the attendant, and from the attendant, who was a truthful man, he learned the worst.

He found Psmith in the smoking-room, reclining in an arm-chair with a cigarette and an expression of gentle benevolence, and he advanced upon him with the sombre tread of a man who has been wronged.

“I say, Smith.”

“Comrade Walderwick! Sit down. Have a cigarette. Tell me your troubles.”

“You took my umbrella.”

Psmith considered the statement.

“I did,” he agreed.

“Well, dash it, where is it?”

“Ah, that,” said Psmith, “is a question which I have been asking myself on and off all through lunch. Speaking as one who has given some study to the matter, I should say that it is at present either in Shaftesbury Avenue or somewhere in its immediate neighbourhood. But I would not care to be bound by that. Umbrellas move in mysterious ways.”

The Hon. Hugo breathed heavily.

“It was a jolly good umbrella.”

“It was. I say it without hesitation. I went through the entire rack, Comrade Walderwick, discarding one after another, and yours stood out among its fellows like a lily among the thorns. I was proud to be associated with it. You should have seen it in action. It rose to the occasion.”

“But what did you want it for?”

Psmith raised a hand.

“There we touch on delicate ground. Let it suffice to say that the umbrella has done more good in the world this morning than it would have done in a month of hanging on a peg. And now to business. What did you pay for it?”

“A pound,” said the Hon. Hugo, and then, feeling that this sounded meagre, “about a pound.”

“I will give you five.”

“What?”

“Five pounds. I make the offer freely and without pressure. It is, I admit, a great deal of money for an umbrella, and no doubt you will wish to point out that with five pounds a man could buy a small forest of umbrellas. That is true, but beside the point. I do not want a forest of umbrellas. I want this particular umbrella, and I want it to be mine. One cannot go on for ever cherishing another man’s umbrella. It is not seemly.”

The Hon. Hugo, who had come to make a scene and found himself unexpectedly being made an offer which he did not understand, wavered.

“Look here, you haven’t gone and lost the thing?”

“Not lost. Loaned. And I have every confidence that it will return to us, as the swallow returns to Capistrano. In which event it will be mine, Comrade Walderwick, and you will be five pounds to the good. And if,” said Psmith, producing a note-case, “it does not return, you will still be five pounds to the good, and I shall have had an interesting morning. It seems to me a happy arrangement all round.”

He counted out five one-pound notes and laid them on the arm of the chair. The Hon. Hugo looked at them. His indignation, never robust, died away entirely. He had known Smith for some years, and it had long been his opinion that the fellow was potty, but there was nothing potty about five pounds.

“Well, of course, if you put it like that . . .”

“I do,” said Psmith. “I put it exactly like that.”

* * * * *

Eve, meanwhile, having lunched frugally at a tea-shop on the strength of her borrowed splendour, presented herself at half-past two at the Senior Conservative Club in Northumberland Avenue, to which grim fortress Lord Emsworth had directed her to come. She had never been inside a club before, and she was interested to note that the hall porter, having taken her name and vanished into the interior, came back with the air of one who has had a difficult time.

“His lordship will see you in the small writing-room, miss.”

Lord Emsworth, when she was shown in to him, was standing at the window peering down into the street with a look of mild distress. He was a long, thin, amiable-looking man of about sixty, with a bald head, a straggling moustache, and a general air of having been assembled rather hastily and not quite finished. He turned as she entered and regarded her benevolently through a pair of pince-nez.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Come in, come in. You are Miss----”

“Halliday.”

“Halliday. Quite so. Halliday. My son Frederick spoke of you. At least I think it was Frederick. It may have been Baxter. Somebody spoke of you. Sit down, Miss Halliday.”

Eve sat down. Lord Emsworth remained standing, gazing at her with an expression of growing interest.

“Tell me,” he said, “are you the young lady who is coming to do something about the library?”

“Yes. I was hoping you would tell me exactly what you wanted done. I understand it is to be catalogued.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes. Catalogued. Baxter said catalogued. My secretary, you know. A most capable fellow.” He removed his pince-nez, polished them, and put them back, and the operation appeared to open a new line of thought. “Have you had much experience of this sort of thing, Miss Halliday?”

Eve, who had had none whatever, had prepared herself for this question and was about to deal with it as truthfully as circumstances permitted, when Lord Emsworth, who had drifted back to the window, uttered an exclamation.

“Bless my soul! Look at that!”

Eve looked. The rain had cleared and the sun was shining, and across the way, in the strip of gardens between the club and the river, a man in a green apron was doing something to a flower-bed.

“Antirrhinums,” said Lord Emsworth, with deep feeling. “In July! He has put in antirrhinums in July. Now what, I ask you, Miss Halliday, is the good of that? What can the man expect? Do you know anything about antirrhinums?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid.”

“Nobody does. Nobody in London does. Angus McAllister, my head gardener--a Scotsman, and as obstinate as a mule--has ideas on the subject that I cannot think are sound. Now, my view. . . .”

His view took some time. It embraced antirrhinums, and proceeded by way of the proper treatment of hollyhocks to the question of whether or not Angus McAllister was to be permitted to gravel the path under the yew alley, a question on which Lord Emsworth felt strongly and on which, it became clear, he had not yet felt able to make his feelings sufficiently plain to Angus McAllister. Eve listened. She had a kind heart, and she liked this vague, amiable old man; but she was conscious that the interview was not proceeding along the lines she had expected. She had come prepared to be questioned about her qualifications, and instead she was being asked to agree that nothing was more pernicious than gravel where there had once been grass. She agreed. It seemed the least she could do.

“Exactly!” said Lord Emsworth, warmly. “Exactly what I say. You have a great deal of sense, Miss Halliday. A great deal. Now, what were we----? Ah, yes. The library.”

“Yes,” said Eve, brightening.

“A great many books,” said Lord Emsworth. “Thousands. My grandfather collected them, I believe. Or somebody did. Nobody has ever done anything about them. Baxter says they should be catalogued, and I daresay he is right. Baxter generally is right. It is one of the things I find most trying about him.” He peered at her again, and a doubt appeared to enter his mind. “You are quite sure you are the young lady about the library? Not the--er--not the other one?”

“What other one?”

“There was a young woman,” said Lord Emsworth, frowning with the effort of memory, “whom my sister wished me to see about--now what was it?--I think it was a cook. Or possibly it was a poet. No, the poet is a man. I am lunching with him to-morrow. At least I think it is to-morrow. Frederick will know.” He seemed to lose the thread, and found it again with a visible effort. “You are not a cook, Miss Halliday?”

“No,” said Eve, laughing. “I’m not a cook.”

“No, no, of course not. I did not really think so. You would not be wearing that hat.” He looked at the hat for a moment with respectful bewilderment. “Well, well. I am sure it will be all right. Baxter will tell you everything you want to know. He will write to you. He writes a great many letters. You had better come down--let me see--on Wednesday. Or is Wednesday the day Constance----? No. Wednesday will do admirably. Or Thursday. Baxter will let you know. Good-bye, Miss Halliday. It has been a great pleasure. Antirrhinums! In July!”

And, having shaken her hand with every appearance of cordiality and walked half-way to the door before discovering that it was he and not she who was leaving, he wandered out, and Eve, a good deal later than she had intended, found herself once more in Northumberland Avenue, engaged, apparently, to catalogue the library of Blandings Castle, and quite unable to say whether she had been interviewed or not.

* * * * *

It was a little after four, and she was walking up the Haymarket with the umbrella under her arm and a feeling that the day, having begun so badly, was beginning to improve, when she saw him.

He was coming down the other side of the street, tall, thin, and immaculate, with his hat now restored to him and a rolled umbrella of quite ordinary aspect swinging from his hand, and he was in the act of turning into a hatter’s. Eve did not hesitate. She was a girl of prompt decision, and it seemed to her that Providence, having taken the trouble to produce this young man twice in one day, plainly intended something to be done about him. She crossed the road and arrived in the doorway of the hatter’s at the same moment as he did.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He removed his hat and regarded her with grave courtesy through his monocle. There was nothing in his face to suggest that he had ever seen her before.

“I think,” said Eve, “this is your umbrella.”

He looked at the umbrella. He looked at it thoughtfully and with attention, as a man might look at an interesting stranger.

“A very fine umbrella,” he said. “A superb umbrella. But not, I fear, mine.”

“But you gave it to me. This morning. In Dover Street, in the rain.”

“Ah!” He shook his head regretfully. “I see what has happened. You have been the victim of a coincidence. It is a thing that occurs. There is a man in London--I have never met him, but I have heard him spoken of--who bears, I am told, a quite remarkable resemblance to myself. Tall. Thin. Distinguished. He wears, I believe, an eyeglass. Some one is always mistaking me for him. It has been the great sorrow of my life. I have never been able to feel that I was wholly my own man.”

Eve looked at him. She was now perfectly certain, and she was also perfectly certain that he knew she was certain.

“Then you didn’t give me an umbrella?”

“I am not,” he said, “an umbrella-giving man. I have my faults, but that is not among them. Had I given you an umbrella I should remember it. It is not the sort of thing one forgets. I should be sorry, however, to see you at a loss. If this umbrella is in truth a stray, I would suggest that you take it to whatever club or institution the fellow is likely to frequent and leave it there with a stern note. That is what I should do. Good afternoon.”

He bowed, replaced his hat, and went into the hatter’s, and the door closed behind him. Eve stood on the pavement for a moment. Then she began to laugh, and, still laughing, she turned and walked briskly in the direction of Dover Street.

* * * * *

The hall porter of the Drones Club had, in the course of a long career, received a good many things at the hands of a good many people, but he had never before been presented, by a young lady of striking appearance and a hat that even he could see was something out of the ordinary, with an umbrella and a folded note addressed simply “To the gentleman with the eyeglass.”

“I don’t know his name,” said Eve. “But he’s tall and thin and he was here this morning at about half-past ten, and he lent me this. Will you see that he gets them?”

The porter said he would.

“And may I ask what name, miss? In case the gentleman should inquire.”

Eve hesitated for an instant. Then she smiled.

“Miss Halliday,” she said, and went down the steps into the sunshine.

* * * * *

At a quarter to seven that evening Psmith, returning to the club from a visit to a nephew of his uncle’s fish business at which certain frank things had been said on both sides, was met in the hall.

“A young lady left these for you, sir. This afternoon.”

Psmith took the umbrella. He took the note, opened it, and read it. It was short.

“Thank you for the umbrella,” it ran, “and for the loan of the club, which I stood and stared at for quite ten minutes. I am returning the first. I am afraid I cannot return the second. I hope the man who looks so like you does not get into trouble.”

There was no signature. Psmith read it twice, folded it, and put it away in his pocket. Then he looked at the porter.

“Did she,” he asked, “leave any name?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Halliday, sir.”

“Halliday,” said Psmith.

He went slowly up the stairs to the smoking-room, which at this hour was empty, and, sitting down in his arm-chair by the window, laid the umbrella across his knees. Outside, Dover Street lay golden in the evening light, and the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe had been rolled away, and there was nothing whatever to look at. He looked at it for some time.

“Halliday,” he said again, thoughtfully, and, putting up his monocle, examined the umbrella with the air of a man who feels that five pounds was, if anything, a bargain.

The cab went slowly up the hill and Brett kept her eyes shut and I looked at her. The street lights came through the window and went across her face and off again.

“Miserable about what?”

“Oh, everything. Don’t ask me. Just let me sit.”

“All right.”

We went along past the Luxembourg, the gardens black behind the railings, and the driver turned down toward the Boulevard Montparnasse as though he had decided himself where we were going.

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t take me to the Parc. Take me to the Select.”

“I told him the Parc Montsouris.”

“I know what you told him. Tell him the Select.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He said something about the meter and I said never mind the meter and he shrugged and turned around in the Rue Vavin. Brett had opened her eyes and was sitting up and looking out at the street.

“Why the Select?” I said.

“I want to see people.”

“You’ve been seeing people all evening.”

“Not people. Those aren’t people. I want to sit somewhere with a lot of light and a lot of people and drink something and not think.”

“You said you weren’t going to get tight any more.”

“I’m not. I said drink something. One can drink something without getting tight. Oh, don’t look at me like that, darling.”

“I wasn’t looking like anything.”

“You were. You have a look. You know you have.”

The cab stopped in front of the Select and the terrace was full and bright and we could hear the noise before I had paid the driver. The waiter found us a table at the edge of the terrace. Brett sat down and took off her hat and put it on the chair beside her and ran her hand back over her hair.

“There,” she said. “That’s better. Give me a cigarette.”

I gave her one and lit it and lit one for myself. The waiter came and Brett ordered a brandy and soda and I had a *fine*. Across the street the Rotonde was lit up too, and there were people going back and forth between the two cafés the way they did every night, as though they were going to find something on the other side of the street that was not on this side.

“Do you know who was there to-night?” Brett said.

“Where?”

“At the Bal. Well, no, not at the Bal. Earlier. I dined with a chap. A Greek. At least he says he’s a Greek. Zizi brought him round last week. Mippipopolous. Count Mippipopolous.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Nobody has. He’s got pots of money. He owns a chain of sweetshops in America, or he says he does. He’s a dear, really. He sat all through dinner telling me about the seven wars he’s been in and never once got sentimental about a single one of them.”

“That’s something.”

“It is something. You’d like him. You would, Jake.”

“I don’t know him.”

“No. You don’t know anybody I know. That’s your trouble.”

“Is it?”

“Part of it.”

The drinks came and she drank half of hers straight off and set the glass down and looked at it.

“He wants me to go to Biarritz with him,” she said.

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He offered me ten thousand dollars to go. Just like that. Over the fish.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I couldn’t possibly. I said I knew far too many people in Biarritz.” She laughed. “He didn’t mind a bit. He said we could go to Cannes then, and I said I knew too many people in Cannes, and he said Monte Carlo, and I said I knew too many people everywhere. Which is true, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Then he said in that case we might just as well stop in Paris and drink, and I thought that was rather intelligent of him.”

“Very.”

“You don’t have to say it like that.”

“I didn’t say it like anything.”

She looked at me and then she looked away at the street.

“You’re being beastly,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Well, don’t. I can’t stand it to-night. I truly can’t.”

“All right.”

I finished the *fine* and the waiter came and I had another. Brett had another brandy and soda. A man I knew a little came over to the table and said hello and asked Brett to dance somewhere later and she said she might and he went away.

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know. Somebody. Everybody comes over. I wish they wouldn’t.”

“You wanted people.”

“I wanted to look at them. I didn’t want them to talk to me.”

We sat there. It was still warm, and the terrace was warm with all the people in it, and there was the smell of the trees along the Boulevard that comes only a few weeks in the year.

“It’s a nice night,” I said.

“Isn’t it? Lovely night. I’ve been miserable all through it.”

“You said.”

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Then don’t.”

“You know why, anyway. Don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then it’s silly to talk about it.”

“Yes.”

“Everything’s silly to talk about.”

“Nearly everything.”

She put her hand on the table and I put my hand on it and we sat like that a minute, not saying anything, and then she took her hand away to pick up her glass.

“Michael’s coming over,” she said.

“When?”

“Some time. He’s in Scotland now. He writes me letters about salmon.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“Oh, I expect so. Some time. When his divorce comes through, and mine, and all that. It takes forever, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’d like Michael.”

“Everybody I’d like.”

“You would, though. He’s a dear. He’s an absolute dear. He’s never sober, but he’s a dear.”

“That’s fine.”

“Now you’re doing it again.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”

“I know you don’t. That’s the awful part of it.”

I asked the waiter for the saucers and paid and we sat on a little while longer anyway. Then Brett said she was going. She put her hat on without looking in a glass and got it right.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. Back to the hotel. I told Zizi and the count I’d meet them at Zelli’s after, but I shan’t. I can’t face Montmartre.”

“I thought you had a date.”

“I did have. I’ve changed my mind. I’m allowed to change my mind.”

“Sure.”

“Are you coming along?”

“I have to go back and get my fifty francs.”

“You are a fool. You won’t find it.”

“I might.”

“You won’t. She’ll have gone off with one of those lovelies and taken it with her.”

“The patronne has it. It’s in an envelope.”

“You put it in an envelope?” She began to laugh. “Oh, Jake. You are the most extraordinary chap. You put it in an envelope.”

“It seemed like the thing to do.”

“It’s the most romantic thing I ever heard of.”

“It’s fifty francs.”

“Come on, then. We’ll go and get your envelope. I want to see this.”

We walked down toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel to find a taxi and there was one at the corner. In the taxi Brett leaned back in the corner again and was quiet.

“Do you mind?” she said after a while.

“Mind what?”

“About the count. About any of it.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Say something.”

“Well, then, no. I don’t mind.”

“That’s a lie.”

“You asked me to say something.”

“I did, didn’t I.” She looked out the window. “It’s all right. I don’t mind either. Nobody minds anything. That’s the great thing about all of us.”

“That’s it.”

It was a lie, and she knew it, and I did mind, and it had been hurting all night like something in a tooth.

The cab stopped at the Bal and I told the driver to wait. Inside it was as hot as before and the accordion was going and the proprietor with the bells on his ankle was beating time. The floor was full. The young men in the jerseys were all still there. I did not see Braddocks or any of the others. The patronne was behind the zinc and when she saw me she reached under the bar and brought out the envelope.

“She did not ask, Monsieur,” she said. “She is still here. She has been dancing all the time.”

“Thanks.”

“You want it back?”

“No. Hold it a minute.”

Brett had come in behind me and was standing in the door with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, looking at the dancers. One of the young men saw her and waved and called out, and she waved back and did not go over.

“There she is,” Brett said. “Look. She’s having the time of her life.”

Georgette was dancing with the tall dark one called Lett. She had taken her hat off and her hair was down over her forehead and she was hot and she was laughing with her mouth open and she did not mind about her teeth any more. Lett danced very well. He held her off a little and looked at her as though she were something quite wonderful that he had found. When the music stopped she saw me and came across the floor, breathing hard, pushing her hair back.

“Well, you,” she said. “You went off.”

“I came back.”

“You didn’t come back for me.”

“No.”

“That’s all right. I don’t care. These are very funny types, your friends.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“Whoever they are. They dance well. They don’t try anything. It’s restful.” She looked at Brett and then at me. “That’s the one, is it?”

“What one?”

“Never mind what one. I know what one.” She grinned. “It’s all the same to me. Are you going to stay?”

“No. I only came for something.”

“For that.” She nodded at the envelope on the zinc. The patronne had put it down and left it there. “She told me. Fifty francs in an envelope. It made me laugh.”

“Everybody laughs at it.”

“It is funny. You’re a funny type, Jacob. You’re sick and you’re funny. Well, go on, give it to me then. I’ve earned it, dancing in this oven.”

I gave her the envelope. She put it in her bag without opening it and snapped the bag shut.

“Good night,” she said. “Good night, Madame,” to Brett, who had never been presented, and she went back to the floor, where the wavy blond one was waiting to dance with her, and the accordion started again.

“That’s the end of your fifty francs,” Brett said outside.

“I guess so.”

“I told you.”

“You told me.”

“I rather liked her. She was decent about it.”

“She was all right.”

We got into the taxi and I gave the driver the name of Brett’s hotel and we went down the hill and across the river. It was after two by then and the streets on the other side were empty and the driver went fast. Brett sat up in the corner and did not lean back.

“Don’t come up,” she said. “Just drop me.”

“I wasn’t going to come up.”

“I know. I only said so.”

At the hotel she got out and stood on the pavement and I got out too, to pay the driver.

“No,” she said. “Keep him. Go on home in him.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“At this hour?”

“It’s a nice night.”

“It’s nearly morning.” She put her hand up and touched my face, just once, the way you would touch something to see if it were still there, and took it away. “Good night, darling. Don’t be miserable.”

“I’m not.”

“Liar. Good night.”

She went in through the door and the door swung shut behind her and I stood a minute and then I paid the driver after all and told him I did not want him and he drove off along the empty street.

I walked down to the river. It was getting light by then, not really light but the grey that comes before it, and the sky over the Île was going from black to the color of pewter. There was nobody on the quai. The book-stalls were all shut up in their boxes and locked, and the trees along the wall were very still and very green in that light, and below on the water a barge was going slowly up with its lamps still lit and looking foolish, the way lamps do when it is light enough to see without them. A man was fishing already, down on the stones by the water, with a long pole and a little tin of bait beside him, and he did not look up. The river went by grey and flat and quiet and the bridges stood in it one after the other, and far down the Notre-Dame came out of the grey and stood there, and I walked along and looked at it and thought about nothing at all, and then thought about Brett, and then made myself stop and look at the river again.

It was going to be a fine day. You could tell that already. The light came up behind the towers and the pewter went yellow and the water took the yellow and held it, and a street-sweeper came along the quai with his broom and his cart and said good morning as though it were the most natural thing in the world to meet a man there at that hour, and I said good morning too, and went on up the river toward the bridge and home.

Lady Russell was the first to be consulted, and she came to Kellynch Hall on the morning appointed with a paper in her reticule and a great deal of resolution in her heart. She was a woman of sound abilities and steady principles, but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry, and a value for rank and consequence which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. Sir Walter was to her a baronet, and the father of Anne; and she had rather have suffered any inconvenience herself than have seen him lose the respect of the neighbourhood by a public embarrassment of his affairs. She had, therefore, drawn up her plan with the greatest care, consulting Anne upon every article of it, and softening every article in the transcribing, till she was persuaded that no reasonable man could object to it.

Sir Walter received her in the library, with Elizabeth at his side and the Baronetage, by an accident which surprised nobody, lying open upon the table between them. Anne had been sent for likewise, not as one whose opinion could be of any use, but because Lady Russell had particularly desired it; and she sat a little apart, near the window, with her work in her hands, and her eyes upon it more often than the occasion required.

“I have been thinking a great deal, Sir Walter,” Lady Russell began, “upon what you were so good as to confide to me, and I have ventured to put down on paper a few of the measures which occur to me as possible. You will see that I have proposed nothing violent. The horses, I think, might be reduced to a pair, and the second carriage laid down; the establishment of servants brought within what the house really requires; the journey to London given up for a year or two, which need not be talked of, since it can be very naturally accounted for by the state of the times; and the expenses of the table and the garden brought somewhat nearer to what they were in poor Lady Elliot’s time. If you would submit to all this for seven years, Mr Shepherd assures me that you would be clear.”

Sir Walter heard her to the end with the countenance of a man who is being read his own sentence by a friend, and who is determined to bear it handsomely. When she had done, he looked at Elizabeth, and Elizabeth looked at the fire.

“Seven years,” said he at last. “My dear Lady Russell, you have taken a great deal of trouble, and I am much obliged to you; but you do not consider what Kellynch is, or what the neighbourhood has a right to expect of it. Two horses! The Elliots have never gone with two horses in my memory. And as for London, I should like to know what is to be said in Somersetshire, if Sir Walter Elliot and his daughter are not seen in town in the spring. It would be understood directly. No, no; I could not think of it. If we are to be reduced to two horses and no London, we had better shut up the house at once, and be done.”

Lady Russell, who had not expected to prevail without a struggle, was proceeding to argue the matter, when Mr Shepherd was announced. He had ridden over from the town with a paper of his own, and he came in bowing, civil, and cautious, as a man who has a disagreeable duty and a valuable client, and means to lose neither. Sir Walter, glad of any interruption to Lady Russell, desired to hear at once what he had to propose.

Mr Shepherd’s plan was considerably gentler than Lady Russell’s, for Mr Shepherd knew Sir Walter better. It preserved the four horses and the London journey; it touched nothing which could be seen from the road; it aimed, as he expressed it, at “a certain judicious moderation in the less conspicuous articles,” and it promised, with a good deal of hesitation, a clearance in fifteen years, or perhaps twenty, if nothing unforeseen should occur.

“Twenty years!” said Sir Walter. “I should be seventy-four. And what is it that you would have me give up? Hot-house fruit! The second gardener! The plate to be put away, and the drawing-room fires to be lighted an hour later! Mr Shepherd, I am astonished at you. What is the use of an income at all, if a man is to sit in the dark and eat no pines? I have not run into debt by any extravagance. I have done nothing but what my situation called for. If the tradespeople cannot wait, they should not have given credit to a gentleman; and I am sure there is not one of them but would rather be owed money by Sir Walter Elliot than paid by half the people in Somersetshire.”

There was a silence after this, in which Lady Russell folded up her paper, and Mr Shepherd looked at his boots. It was in this silence that Anne Elliot spoke; and if her father and sister were surprised to hear her voice at all, they were a great deal more surprised by what it said.

“I think, sir,” said she, colouring, but not faltering, “that neither plan goes far enough.”

Sir Walter turned round upon her as if the window-curtain had made an observation.

“Neither of them goes far enough,” she repeated, more steadily. “Lady Russell has been very kind, and Mr Shepherd very considerate; but I believe that if we are to do the thing at all, it had better be done thoroughly. I would give up the London journey altogether, not for a year or two but until we are clear. I would lay down both carriages but one, and keep no more horses than that one requires. I would reduce the servants at once, and not by degrees. I would take no more of Mr Shepherd’s time in devising how the retrenchment may be hidden, for I do not think it can be hidden, and I do not think it need be. Every creditor should be paid within five years. I would rather be known to be paying my debts than be suspected of not paying them; and I cannot think that a name which has been respected for two hundred years will be the worse for the neighbourhood’s seeing that it means to be honest.”

She stopped, a good deal out of breath, and returned to her work; and the room, for a moment, had nothing to say.

Lady Russell was the first to recover, and she recovered with more feeling than she liked to shew; for every word had been her own opinion, spoken with a plainness she had not dared to use. Mr Shepherd looked from father to daughter and said nothing, which was the wisest thing he could do. Sir Walter had drawn himself up, and was preparing an answer of great dignity, when a voice which nobody in the room expected to hear on that side spoke before him.

“I think Anne is right,” said Elizabeth.

Her father stared. Lady Russell put down her paper. Anne herself looked up, with a doubt upon her face whether she had heard aright; for in three-and-twenty years she could not remember that Elizabeth had ever found her right about anything more important than the colour of a ribbon.

“I think she is right,” Elizabeth repeated, with a very high colour and a very cold manner, “and I wonder that nobody else has had the sense to say it. If we are to be talked of, I would rather be talked of for a year than for twenty. Lady Russell’s scheme would keep us in two horses and an old drawing-room till I am six-and-thirty, and Mr Shepherd’s till I am nine-and-forty; and I am sure I do not see what is to be gained by being uncomfortable for ever, when one might be uncomfortable for five years and have done with it. If it must be done, let it be done, and let us not have Mr Shepherd riding over every month with a new paper.”

It will be perceived that Elizabeth’s reasons were not exactly Anne’s; but the conclusion was the same, and Anne was too much astonished, and too much touched, to examine the road by which her sister had arrived at it. Lady Russell, who had never in her life expected to find herself outvoted on the side of prudence by Miss Elliot, began to think that the morning might yet end well.

She had not allowed enough for Sir Walter.

“Five years,” said he, rising, and walking to the fire, and turning his back upon it, so as to give the whole party the benefit of his figure. “One carriage. No London. The servants dismissed like so many labourers, and the whole county invited to come and see how Sir Walter Elliot pays his butcher. Elizabeth, I am surprised at you. Anne, I am not surprised at anything from you; but I should have thought that even you might have known better than to talk of honesty as if there were any question of it. Nobody has ever doubted the honesty of an Elliot. I will not be cleared in five years upon such terms; I had rather not be cleared at all. Lady Russell, I am obliged to you. Mr Shepherd, you will oblige me by putting your paper in your pocket. I will hear no more of it to-day.”

Mr Shepherd put his paper in his pocket, but he did not immediately hold his tongue. He had another expedient, which he had kept back for the last, as a prudent man keeps his strongest medicine; and seeing that everything else had failed, he ventured, with many apologies for the freedom, to produce it.

“There is one other course, Sir Walter,” said he, “which I mention only because I should not be doing my duty in leaving it unmentioned. It has been adopted, of late, by more than one family of the first consideration, and it has this great advantage, that it removes the whole difficulty at a stroke. A house such as Kellynch would let, in the present state of the country, for a very handsome rent; and were you and the young ladies disposed, for a few years only, to reside elsewhere, the income of the estate, added to the rent from a good tenant—”

“A what, sir?”

Mr Shepherd, who had gone too far to go back, said it again, though in a lower voice.

“A tenant, Sir Walter.”

Sir Walter did not raise his voice. He had never in his life been so angry as to lose the sense of his own appearance, and he did not lose it now; but his face grew a shade redder than was becoming, and he spoke with a deliberation which his daughters knew.

“Mr Shepherd,” said he, “I have known you a great many years, and I have never before had occasion to tell you that you have forgotten yourself. You have forgotten yourself now. A tenant at Kellynch! A stranger in my father’s house, sleeping in my father’s bed, and walking my grounds, and shewing my pictures to his friends, and being called Kellynch by the tradespeople! I would sooner see it burned. You will do me the favour never to use that word again in my presence, in this house or in any other; and if you have no better advice to give me than that, I think we may consider your business for to-day as concluded.”

Mr Shepherd, who had been a country attorney for thirty years and had been forbidden to say a great many words in his time, bowed and was silent; and shortly afterwards he took his leave, with the cheerful reflection that what could not be said to-day might be said to-morrow, and that a man who would sooner see his house burned than let would probably, in six months, sooner see it let than sold.

Lady Russell went soon after him, and Anne walked with her to the carriage. Neither of them spoke of what had passed till they were out of hearing of the house; and then Lady Russell only pressed her hand, and said, “My dear Anne, I did not know you could,”—and Anne, who did not know it either, could only answer that it had done no good.

It had done no good. Sir Walter spent the rest of the morning with the Baronetage, and Elizabeth, having been on Anne’s side for a quarter of an hour, appeared to think that she had done enough for one year, and was rather colder to her sister than usual all the afternoon, as if to make it clear that no precedent had been established.

Such was the state of things when the post came in, and brought a letter for Anne, in the large, hurried hand of Mrs Charles Musgrove.

Mary wrote from Uppercross to say that she was very unwell; that she had been so for several days, though nobody seemed to think anything of it; that Charles had gone out shooting as if she were perfectly well, and that Mrs Musgrove had sent over some jelly which was not what she liked; that the children were so noisy she could not bear them in the room, and so troublesome she could not bear them out of it; that she was sure she had a return of the sore throat she had had at Easter, and that if it went to her chest she did not know what would become of her; and that she did not see why Anne should not come to her for a few weeks, since Anne had nothing to do at Kellynch, and it was very hard that a person in her state of health should have nobody to sit with her. She hoped Anne would not put her off with excuses. She was so poorly that she could hardly hold her pen, and she remained, with love to everybody, very affectionately hers.

Anne read it twice, and carried it to her sister.

Elizabeth read it once, and gave it back. “I suppose you had better go,” said she. “There is nothing to keep you here; and if Mary is really ill, it is quite as well that she should send for you as for me. You may take the chaise on Thursday, if my father does not want it. I dare say he will not; I dare say nobody will be going anywhere.”

Sir Walter, being informed of Mary’s illness, observed that Mary had never had a good complexion, and that people with bad complexions were always ill, and that Anne might certainly go if she liked, as it made no difference to anybody; and with this permission the matter was settled.

It was a still, warm evening in the beginning of August, and the windows of the small back parlour which Anne generally had to herself stood open upon the shrubbery. She sat there alone, after the others had gone up, with Mary’s letter in her lap and her candle unsnuffed, and tried to arrange her thoughts, which had been a good deal disordered by the day.

She would go to Uppercross. She had already decided it before Elizabeth had told her she might; for whatever Mary’s complaints were worth, Mary wanted her, and it was something, at three-and-twenty, to be wanted by anybody. She would be of use there. She would be no use here. She had spoken that morning as she had never spoken before, and she had been answered as she had always been answered; and she knew, without any bitterness, but with a very clear knowledge, that it would be exactly the same whether she stayed or went. Her father would take up the Baronetage, and Elizabeth would take up her own consequence, and Mr Shepherd would come again with his papers, and Lady Russell with hers; and the debts would remain, and grow, and be talked of, and nothing would be done.

She did not know how it would end. She could not see what there was to prevent its ending very badly indeed; and yet she found, with some surprise, that she was less afraid of the ending than of the interval, which seemed likely to be long, and dull, and full of consultations from which she would be excused. Uppercross, at least, was three miles off. The children would be noisy, and Mary would be fretful, and there would be nobody to talk to who had ever read anything; but she would be somewhere where her opinion was asked, if only about jelly.

The clock in the hall struck eleven. Anne folded the letter, snuffed her candle, and went up to bed, having settled in her own mind the only question of the day which had been left to her to settle, and leaving every other exactly as she had found it.