The Chapters

The train did not stop until it was quite dark, and by that time the rain had stopped also, though the wind had not. Mrs. Medlock shook Mary by the shoulder to wake her, and gathered up her own bundles and Mary's small bag, and when they stepped down on to the platform of the little station the wind came at them round the corner of the building as if it had been waiting there.

There was one lamp, and it swung and flickered, and under it stood a man in a long black coat. Mary thought at first that he was the station-master, because there seemed to be nobody else, and then she saw that Mrs. Medlock had stopped short and made a queer little sound and put her hand to her bonnet.

"Mr. Craven, sir!" she said. "I never expected--I thought Pitcher would send the carriage--"

"I was passing," said the man. "Is this the child?"

He did not look at Mary when he said it. He looked at Mrs. Medlock, and then at the lamp, and then at nothing. He was not so very tall, but his shoulders were high and crooked, and the collar of his coat was turned up, so that his face seemed to be sunk down between them like a face at the bottom of a well. He had black hair streaked with white, and Mary could not see his eyes at all.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock. "This is Miss Mary."

Mary waited to be spoken to. She had made up her mind in the train that she would not speak first to anybody, and she stood quite still with her black-gloved hands folded in front of her and her chin up, in the way which had made Mrs. Crawford say she had unattractive manners. But Mr. Archibald Craven did not speak to her at all. He turned round and walked out of the station, and his walk was lop-sided, and a boy with a lantern ran before him, and Mrs. Medlock caught Mary by the arm and hurried her after.

"Not a word, now," she said under her breath, "not a word, and mind your feet."

There was a carriage waiting in the road with two horses and a man on the box, and Mr. Craven got into it and sat down in the far corner and drew a rug over his knees. Mrs. Medlock pushed Mary in after him and got in herself, breathing hard, and the door was shut and the horses started. So Mary sat in the dark with her uncle, and he said nothing whatever, and she said nothing whatever, and Mrs. Medlock, who was a talkative woman, held her tongue so tightly that she seemed to be holding her breath as well.

It was a very strange drive. First there were a few lights and the shapes of houses, and then a long road with a wall on one side of it and trees which tossed about, and then nothing. Mary pressed her face to the glass and could see nothing at all but a great blackness on either hand, which was not like the blackness of a room, but seemed to go on and on. The wind rushed over it and made a low, rushing, wild sound, and the carriage lamps threw two little yellow patches on the road ahead and no farther.

"Is this the moor?" Mary said at last. She had not meant to speak, but the question came out of her.

"Yes," said Mrs. Medlock, very low, and she gave a quick glance at the corner where Mr. Craven sat.

He had not moved. Mary could just make out the pale blur of his face turned toward his own window, and she thought that perhaps he was asleep, or perhaps he was one of those people who cared so little about anybody that they did not even hear them. She decided that she did not like him and did not care whether he liked her, and having decided it she felt rather better and went on staring out at the dark.

They had been driving for what seemed a long time when the horses were pulled up so suddenly that Mary was thrown against Mrs. Medlock's black silk mantle, and the carriage stood still, rocking a little in the wind.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Medlock sharply.

The man on the box called down something which the wind took away, and then he got down, and they heard his boots on the road. Mr. Craven leaned forward and let down the glass, and the cold came in like water.

"Summat i' th' road, sir," the man's voice said. "A ewe, I think, or a bit o' th' bank come down. Cannot see for th' lamps."

Mr. Craven said something short, and opened the door on his side and got out. He did not say anything to Mrs. Medlock, and she sat where she was, holding her bundles, and said "Well!" in a whisper to herself.

Mary put her hand on the handle of the door on her own side. She did not know why she did it. Perhaps it was because no one had told her not to, and she had had nothing to do for so many days but sit still. She pressed the handle down and the door swung outward, and before Mrs. Medlock could catch at her she had stepped down on to the road, and off the road, and her feet were in something rough and wet and springing.

It was not like anything she had ever stood on. It was not grass and it was not earth. It was tussocky and full of little bushes, and it gave under her boots, and the wind came across it so strongly that she had to lean against it to stand. There was no roof over her and no wall near her, and the darkness was enormous, and somewhere quite close a sheep gave a sudden hoarse cry and went blundering away. Mary stood with her thin black skirts blown flat against her legs and her hat held on with both hands and looked out into the blackness, and the wild rushing sound was all round her and above her and seemed to be inside her head. She was not frightened. She was something else which she had no name for. She thought that if the moor was like this in the dark she would like to see it in the light, and it was the first thing she had wanted to see since she left India.

"Miss Mary! Come back this minute!" Mrs. Medlock's voice was quite shrill. "Do you want to be lost on th' moor in th' pitch dark? Get in--get in!"

A hand took hold of her arm from behind and it was not Mrs. Medlock's. It was a man's hand, thin and hard, and it turned her round and put her back in at the carriage door without any roughness, and without any gentleness either, exactly as if she had been a parcel that had fallen off the seat. Then Mr. Craven got in on his own side and shut the door.

"It was a ewe," he said to Mrs. Medlock. "Dead. They have moved it."

That was the longest thing he said in the whole of the drive, and it was not said to Mary. The horses went on. Mary sat with her feet wet through and bits of heather sticking to her stockings and did not say she was sorry, because she was not sorry. Mrs. Medlock breathed at her in the dark like a kettle.

At last there were trees again, and a gate which somebody opened, and a long, long avenue, and then a great low mass of building with only two or three lights in it, and the carriage stopped. A door stood open with a lamp inside it, and an old man with a bent back came down the steps. Mr. Craven got out and passed him and went into the house without turning his head, and the old man followed him, and that was the last Mary saw of her uncle.

"That's Pitcher," said Mrs. Medlock, getting down stiffly. "Now come along. You're to have your supper and go straight to bed and give no trouble, and I'll take you up myself."

They went through an enormous hall which was almost dark, with pictures on the walls that Mary could not see and a staircase that went up into blackness, and along a passage, and up some stairs, and along another passage, and through a door, and there was a room with a fire in it and a table set for one. It was a big room with dark old furniture and a great bed with curtains, and the fire was the only cheerful thing in it.

"This is your room, and the one next it," said Mrs. Medlock. "You'll be brought your supper here. Sit down by the fire and get your feet dry, and don't go out of these two rooms, and I'll be back to see you into bed."

She went away, and Mary sat down on a stool by the fire and held out her wet boots to it and looked round her. She did not think it a nice room. She thought it a room in which somebody might have died a long time ago and been forgotten. And then the door opened and a man came in with a tray.

She had expected a maid. In India there had been men-servants everywhere, but she had never seen one who looked like this. He was young and very tall and had a red face and big red hands, and his hair stood up at the back, and he set the tray down on the table and took the covers off the dishes as if he were rather afraid of them.

"Theer, now," he said. "Mrs. Medlock says tha'rt to sup this while it's hot, an' she'll be up when she's seen to th' maister. Tha'd best set thysen to it. Tha looks fair clemmed."

Mary stared at him.

"What did you say?" she asked.

He looked at her, and then at the tray, and scratched the back of his neck, and said it all over again, only rather louder and slower, as if she were deaf. "Tha'rt to sup this. It's nobbut broth an' a bit o' cold fowl, but it'll warm thee. Tha'd best get it down thee afore it goes cold."

"I don't understand you," said Mary. She said it quite crossly, because she did not like to be made to feel stupid, and she was not used to servants she could not understand. "I can't tell what you are saying at all. Why don't you talk properly?"

The young man's red face grew redder, but he grinned as well, which she thought impudent.

"It's Yorkshire I'm talkin'," he said. "Tha'll hear plenty of it here. I'm sayin' eat thy supper, that's all. Eat--thy--supper." He pointed at the broth with one big finger, and then he went out and shut the door.

Mary ate her supper. She was hungry, and the broth was hot, and she was too tired to be as cross as she wished to be. When Mrs. Medlock came back she was undressed and put into the big bed, and the fire was raked together, and the candle was taken away.

"Now go to sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, "and remember what I told you. Your two rooms, and no poking about."

She had her hand on the door when the sound came.

It came from somewhere far away in the house, and it was not loud, but it was so unlike anything Mary had ever heard that she sat up in bed. It was a long, thin, rising sound, and then a fall, and then a sort of hollow knocking, three or four times, as if a door somewhere were being swung and let go, and then the thin sound again, wandering up and down. It did not sound like a person, and it did not sound like an animal. It sounded like something that did not know what it was itself.

"What is that?" said Mary.

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still with her hand on the door. Her face, in the last of the firelight, looked for a moment as if she had not expected to be asked anything at all.

"That?" she said. "That's the wind. It gets into the passages in th' old part o' th' house and wuthers round th' chimneys. You'll get used to it. Lie down."

"It didn't sound like the wind," said Mary.

"It's the wind," said Mrs. Medlock, in the voice which stood no nonsense from young ones. "There's nothing else it could be. Lie down and go to sleep."

She went out and shut the door, and Mary heard her feet go away down the passage, quicker than they had come.

The room was quite dark now except for a red glow where the fire had been. Mary lay on her back and listened. The wind was there, certainly; she could hear it outside the window, rushing across the moor exactly as it had rushed across her when she stood in the heather, and she knew that sound now and it did not trouble her. But the other sound had come from inside the house, and it did not come again, and the more she lay and thought about it the less it seemed to her to be the wind at all.

She had been told a great many things that day which she did not believe. She had been told that she would get used to it. She had been told to lie down. She lay down, and pulled the heavy old quilt up to her chin, and looked at the darkness where the ceiling was, and she was not in the least sleepy.

Mrs. Medlock had said it was the wind. Very well, then; Mary would find out for herself whether it was the wind or not. She did not know when, and she did not know how, but she made up her mind to it as stubbornly as she had ever made up her mind to anything, and having made it up she folded her thin hands on the quilt and lay in the dark, wide awake, listening.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*27 May.*--Quincey’s camp-fire is out and I am home again, and as I cannot sleep I may as well put the evening on record, for it has done me more good than any drug in the pharmacopœia. We three met at his rooms at seven. He had a fire of logs lit though the night was warm, and would have it that we sat on the floor beside it as we used to sit on the prairie, with the wine on the hearth-stone. Art came in last, glowing all over, and before he had his coat off Quincey had him by both hands and said: “Now, Art, out with it. Jack and I have been sitting in sackcloth since noon, and we would as soon have the whole of our punishment at once.” So Art told us, standing up, that she had accepted him, and that Mrs. Westenra had given her blessing, and that it was to be in the autumn. I do not think I have ever seen a man so happy. I gave him my hand and told him honestly that he had won the best woman in England, and that I meant it; and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I did mean it, and that the saying of it was easier than I had feared.

Quincey filled the glasses and made a speech which I shall not attempt to set down, for the phonograph would not do justice to his idiom. The gist of it was that he and I had each “drawn a blank in the same lottery,” and that there was no shame in losing to the man who held all the winning numbers; and that we would drink to the lady, and to the man, and then to each other, and after that to nobody, for fear of drinking to the wrong one. Art laughed till he had to wipe his eyes, and said that we were a pair of good fellows, and that he would not have had it otherwise for all the world, for now he could have his friends and his wife too. Then Quincey told the story of the night at the Marquesas when Art was hit in the shoulder and I stitched him by the light of a burning hut, and how Art swore all the while in three languages, and we were boys again for an hour. It was near midnight when we parted. Quincey walked with me to the corner and said, “Jack, you took it like a man; I saw your face when he told us, and I thought the better of you for it.” I said nothing, for there was nothing to be said, but I shook his hand hard.

I am glad of it all. There is a kind of clean pain that is better than any comfort. And now to work, for I have a patient who wants watching.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*28 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have read your letter three times, and I cried over it twice, and I am not ashamed to say so. Oh, my dear, my dear, I am so glad! I could not have wished anything better for you than that number Three should come as he did, and I am only sorry for the other two, though I think from what you tell me that they are both men who will bear it well. You must not be too sorry yourself, dear. A woman cannot help being loved, and she cannot help loving; the only sin would be in pretending. And you did not pretend. I am very proud of you.

“Tell me everything about Mr. Holmwood. Is he as tall as they say? Does his mother approve? (I suppose you must call him Arthur now, and I shall have to learn to do so too.) I want to know what he said and how he looked, and I want to know it all before I come to you, because when we are together we shall have so much to say that we shall never get to the beginning of anything.

“I have had no word from Jonathan since the few lines I told you of, and I confess that I have been counting the days a little. He said he would be back in about a week, and it is now nearly three; but he is such a careful man that I dare say he has been kept by some tiresome formality of the law, and Mr. Hawkins says that foreign business is always slower than one expects. I am not anxious--or I tell myself that I am not--only I should like to hear. I keep the map of his journey pinned above my desk, and I have traced his road with a pencil as far as the last place he wrote from, and there the pencil stops, and I find that I look at it oftener than I need.

“The school breaks up on the 24th of July, and then I am yours. Write to me soon, and be happy, and give my kind regards to your mother.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*1 June.*--A strange thing to-day, which I set down exactly because I do not understand it, and things one does not understand are the only ones worth recording.

I went into Renfield’s room at the usual hour. He was quiet, sitting on his bed with his hands folded, and he did not look up when I came in. I asked him how he had slept, and he said, “Well enough, sir,” and then, before I had put another question, he said in the same even voice, looking at the floor:--

“Is Miss Westenra to be married soon?”

I confess that for a moment I could not answer him. I had said nothing of the kind to any one in the house, and I had certainly said nothing to him; and the name came from his lips as naturally as though we had been discussing the weather. I asked him what he knew of Miss Westenra. He said, “Nothing, sir. I asked you.” I asked him where he had heard the name. He looked up at me then, and there was in his face that mild, patient reasonableness which is more disquieting in him than any violence, and he said: “The attendants talk in the corridor, sir. The walls are thin. I hear a great deal that is not meant for me.” Then he folded his hands again and would say no more.

I have since made inquiry. It appears that Art called here on the 29th to see me, and, finding me out, waited a quarter of an hour in the hall, and that he told Simmons, the porter, in the fulness of his heart, that he was to be married, and to whom, and Simmons told the attendants, and the attendants, as Renfield says, talk in the corridor. So there is nothing in it. And yet I do not like that a name which is to me what that name is should be in the mouth of a madman, and I like less the way in which he asked it, as a man might ask the day of the month--as though it were a thing that concerned him.

*Mem.*--Renfield has begun again to catch flies, and keeps them in a box. I have not yet asked him why.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*6 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I must write to you at once, though it is late and I have a class at eight, for I have had a letter which I do not know what to make of, and there is no one but you to whom I can show it. It came this morning, with a foreign stamp, and I thought it was from Jonathan and tore it open in the passage; and it was not from Jonathan at all. I copy it out for you exactly, spelling and all, for I think you will see what I mean better than if I tried to tell you.

“‘*Hotel Golden Krone, Bistritz.*

“‘*30 May.*

“‘*Honoured Miss*,--

“‘You will pardon that I write to you, whom I have not the honour to know. Your name and your direction I have from the paper which the English gentleman, Herr Jonathan Harker, did leave with me when he lodged in my house in the month of May, with request that if he should be delayed beyond his intention I should write to you that you might not be in anxiety. I have waited that he should come again, and he has not come again, and therefore I write.

“‘He went from here on the fifth of May by the diligence towards the Bukovina, to do business with a gentleman who lives in the mountains beyond the Pass. It was his intention to return by this road in some days and to take up here his box, which is still in my house and is safe. There has come to me by a carrier of that country a message, in the German tongue and not in his hand, that the business of Herr Harker is not yet done and that he stays until it is finished, and that he will himself write to England. More than this the carrier could not tell me, and he is gone again to his own place.

“‘I beg you will not be troubled. The roads in the mountains are bad in the spring, and the gentlemen of that country do their affairs slowly, and a stranger who does not know the language is easily kept. My wife, who saw your gentleman, bids me say that she prays for him and that he is a good young man and will surely come safe. If you desire it I will keep the box until he comes, or send it to you, as you shall direct.

“‘I am, honoured Miss, with much respect,

“‘*Your obedient servant,*

“‘*ANTON KLAUS, Wirth.*’

“There, Lucy. Now you know as much as I do. I have read it until I know it by heart, and I cannot tell whether it is a kind letter or a frightening one. Jonathan did not tell me he had left my name with an innkeeper--though it is exactly like him to have done so, and to have thought of my anxiety before his own convenience. And it is a natural thing, surely, that he should have written a word to the man to say he was delayed. But why in German, and why not in his own hand, when he writes a better German than most of the Germans? And why has he not written to *me*? I keep saying to myself that the innkeeper has it right, and that the roads are bad and the gentlemen are slow; and then I look at the map, and at the place where my pencil stopped, and it seems very far away.

“I took the letter to Mr. Hawkins this afternoon. He is such a dear old man, and he was very kind, and told me that the business was of a kind that might easily take a month, and that a solicitor who came home leaving a purchase half-completed would not be a solicitor for very long. He has himself had no letter later than mine, but he says he expects one every day, and that he will telegraph to me the moment it comes. He made me drink a glass of wine before I went, and told me that I was a sensible girl, and that I must not let my imagination run away with me, for I should have Jonathan’s imagination to manage as well as my own for the rest of my life. I laughed, and felt better, and I do feel better. But I have written down the innkeeper’s name and the name of his hotel in the back of my exercise book, in case.

“Forgive me for filling a letter with my troubles when I ought to be filling it with your happiness. I *am* happy about you, my dear; I am happier about you than about anything, and I want to hear that Arthur has been to see you again and that he has said all the things which you would not tell me in your last letter because they were too new. Write soon. I shall be counting the posts.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“P.S.--I have decided about the box. I shall write to Herr Klaus and tell him to keep it. It would seem like giving up, to have it sent home.”

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

“*7 June.*

“Letter from Jonathan this morning. He is well. Says he remains abroad at his own wish. Do not write.

“HAWKINS.”

Robert did not at once perceive that Madame Ratignolle leaned upon him more heavily than her cramp warranted, nor that she was looking at him with a certain speculative attention out of the corners of her eyes. He was in high good humor. He carried his hat in his hand and let the wind do what it liked with his hair, and he talked, as was his habit, of a dozen things at once, of the children, of his mother's new cook, of a boat that had come in that morning with a broken spar.

"You found us very easily," said Madame Ratignolle. "We had thought ourselves well hidden."

"One does not hide from me at Grand Isle," he returned. "I know every path on the island. Besides, I asked the quadroon which way you had gone, and she pointed with her chin. It is a gift the quadroon has; she can say more with her chin than most people with their whole faces."

"And what did you want with us?"

"Nothing at all. That is to say, the children wanted their mothers, and I wanted—" he broke off and laughed. "I wanted to see what two women find to talk about for a whole morning with no man to listen."

"We talked about the heat."

"Naturally. And Mrs. Pontellier?" He kicked a shell out of the path. "Do you know, I never saw her look as she looked when we came up. She was sitting there with her head on your shoulder, and her face—" He sought the word and did not find it. "She had the look of some one who has been asleep a very long time and has just opened her eyes. She did not know where she was. It made me want to walk on tiptoe."

Madame Ratignolle made no reply. She was thinking, perhaps, that she had seen the same look, and that it had not made her want to walk on tiptoe.

"She is not one of us," Robert went on, more soberly. "One forgets it, and then one is reminded. When she said 'How stupid!' this morning I thought she was going to cry; and then, you see, she was laughing. I never know which it is going to be. With you, *chère* Madame, one always knows."

"That is because I am a very simple woman," said Madame Ratignolle, "and have three children."

They had reached the house. She thanked him gravely for his arm, and he went off whistling in the direction of the main building, where his mother sat at the sewing machine and the little black girl worked the treadle.

It was toward the middle of the day, when the heat lay upon the island like a hand, that the telegram came. Mrs. Pontellier was on her own gallery with her hair loosened, having sent the boys off to their dinner with the quadroon. The messenger, one of the Lebrun boys who ran errands to and from the wharf, held out the yellow envelope and waited to be told there was no answer.

Léonce found it impossible to come out on Saturday. Affairs kept him in the city; he would come the following week if he could; she was to want for nothing; she was to see that the boys did not go too long in the sun. The whole of it did not exceed the limits of a very economical man's dispatch.

Edna read it twice and laid it on the little table beside her. She sat looking at it for some time. It is difficult to say what she felt. Certainly she felt no disappointment; she was too honest to pretend that to herself, though she might have pretended it to any one who asked. What she felt was something more like the sensation of one who, expecting a step upon the stair, hears the front door close instead, and finds the house very quiet. The week, which had already a shape—Saturday at the end of it like a wall—had lost its shape. The days lay before her all alike, without the wall.

She folded the telegram and put it in her pocket, and later she forgot that it was there.

In the afternoon, at the bathing hour, she did not go down with the others. She let Madame Lebrun's party go by—the Farival twins in their blue and white, Mademoiselle Reisz with her artificial violets, the Ratignolle children shrieking—and when they had passed she sat a little longer, and then took her hat from the peg and went down alone by a path which skirted the camomile and came out upon the beach some distance below the bath-houses.

The wind had fallen since morning. The water was smoother, and the light lay upon it in a long, even glare that made her narrow her eyes. There was no one at that end of the beach. She could hear the bathers, but they were a great way off, and their voices reached her thinned and unimportant, like voices in another room.

She went into the water as she had gone into it all summer, with a kind of resignation. She had been taught a dozen times; Robert had held her, and Monsieur Farival had shouted instructions from the shallows, and Adèle had told her it was only a matter of confidence. She had not believed any of them. Her body in the water was a thing that would not be persuaded; it wanted the bottom under its feet and would have it.

But this afternoon there was no one to hold her and no one to shout. She stood waist-deep and let the small waves lift her and set her down. Then, without deciding to do it, she pushed off from the sand as she had pushed off a hundred times, and struck out with her arms, and for a moment—for the space of three or four strokes—the water held her up.

It was over almost before she knew it. Her feet went down of themselves and found the bottom, and she stood gasping, with her hair in her eyes, staring at the piece of water she had crossed. It could not have been more than a few yards. It looked to her like a great distance.

She tried again, and could not do it; the water let her down at once, as if the first time had been a mistake. She did not mind. She stood a long while up to her shoulders, feeling the pull of the tide about her knees, and she was aware of an absurd desire to laugh aloud, which she did not indulge. When she came out and dressed and went back up the beach, she walked slowly, and her face was composed. She met the Farival twins coming from their bath-house and nodded to them, and they did not see anything in her face at all.

She told no one. She did not tell Adèle, whom she found on the Ratignolle gallery with the roll of needlework and the youngest child asleep across her knees; she did not tell Robert, who came by presently to say that there would be music that evening at the house. It seemed to her that if she spoke of it she would be asked to do it again, before people, and that she would not be able to, and that something would be spoiled. So she kept it, as she had kept a good many things in her life, within herself; only this was the first of them that had been a pleasure.

It was Adèle who told her what Robert had said. She told it laughing, as one repeats a compliment that is a little too clever, smoothing the child's hair as she talked. "He said you looked as if you had been asleep a long time and had just opened your eyes. And that you are not one of us, and that he never knows whether you are going to cry or to laugh. What do you think of that, *ma chère*? Is it very impertinent?"

"It is very like Robert," said Edna.

"He said it made him want to walk on tiptoe." Madame Ratignolle looked at her friend for a moment with the same speculative attention she had turned upon Robert in the morning. Then she laughed again and let it go.

Edna walked back to her cottage by the long way, past the house where Madame Lebrun's machine had ceased its clatter for the day. On the gallery of the cottage next but one to her own the lady in black sat with her beads, as she sat every evening, and Edna would have passed her with the small inclination of the head which was all that had ever passed between them, had the lady not spoken.

"You were in the water alone this afternoon, Madame."

Edna stopped. The voice was low and rather pleasant, and a little rusty, like a thing not often used.

"Yes," she said.

"I saw you from the point. I walk there sometimes when the others are bathing." The beads went on moving through the thin fingers. "You should not go in alone. There is a current at that end. My brother—" She did not finish, and after a moment she said, as if it had been the end of the sentence, "God keep you, Madame," and bent her head again to her devotions.

Edna thanked her, and went on. She did not know what to make of it, and she did not try. It was one more thing that belonged to the day, which had been full of things.

That night there was music at the house, and she went, and Robert brought her a chair and sat on the steps at her feet, and one of the twins played *Zampa*. Afterward she walked back alone across the grass, and looked in at the boys, who were asleep, Raoul with his arm thrown over his face and the other with the sheet kicked off, and she covered him and came out again on to the gallery.

The moon had not yet risen. The Gulf was a sound rather than a sight, a long soft breathing off in the dark. She sat down in the rocker and did not rock. The telegram was still in her pocket; she felt the edge of it when she moved. Somewhere on the island a dog barked and was answered.

She was thinking, without wishing to, of what Robert had said—not of the words, which were nothing, but of his having said them at all, and to Adèle, and of Adèle's having thought them worth repeating. *As if you had been asleep a long time and had just opened your eyes.* It was foolish. It was the kind of thing Robert said about everybody. Yet she found she could not put it down, and she sat there in the dark turning it over, as she had stood that afternoon up to her shoulders in the water, looking back at the little distance she had crossed and wondering how she had come to cross it.

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. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about a hundred miles east of him.

I was at home at that hour and writing in my study; and although my French windows face towards Ottershaw and the blind was up (for I loved in those days to look up at the night sky), I saw nothing of it. Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it passed. Some of those who saw its flight say it travelled with a hissing sound. I myself heard nothing of that. Many people in Berkshire, Surrey, and Middlesex must have seen the fall of it, and, at most, have thought that another meteorite had descended. No one seems to have troubled to look for the fallen mass that night.

I did, however, see something. I had risen from my writing and gone to the window to rest my eyes, and I remember standing there a moment with my hands in my pockets, thinking, I suppose, of nothing in particular, when a light that was not a star swept down the eastern sky beyond the trees. It was over in a breath. It seemed to me a very bright and a very low meteor, lower than any I had ever seen, and I fancied that after it had gone the sky along the edge of the common held a faint green pallor, like the fading of a lamp. I called to my wife, but she was already in bed and did not hear me, and I went back to my papers. It is odd to me now to think of the few lines I added to my discussion of moral ideas after that, and the composure with which I blew out my candle.

But very early in the morning poor Ogilvy, who had seen the shooting star and who was persuaded that a meteorite lay somewhere on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, rose early with the idea of finding it. Find it he did, soon after dawn, and not far from the old sand pits. The thing had come down with terrific force, but it had not fallen upon the dry heather as he had expected. There is, or was, a great flooded hollow at the eastern end of the pits, where the sand had been dug out below the level of the springs and the winter had left a broad sheet of brown water among the gorse. Into this pool the projectile had plunged. It lay half-buried in the mud and half-drowned in the water, with the water still lapping and shuddering about it as though the shock of its coming had not yet quite passed, and from the whole surface of the pool a dense white steam went up into the grey of the morning.

I did not learn of this from Ogilvy himself. He was still upon the common when I heard of it. It was the milkman who told me, standing at the gate with his cans and looking towards Horsell as though he expected to see the thing from where he stood.

"They say it's a meteor, sir," he said. "Gone into the pit pond and boiled all the water. There's a mist over it like a copper on washing day."

I confess that my first thought was of the flames I had seen with Ogilvy, and I felt a curious stirring, half of curiosity and half of something I could not then name. I told my wife of it at breakfast, and she was for going at once. I remember I argued a little against it, saying that there would be a crowd and that the ground about the pits was rough and wet, but she laughed at me and put on her walking boots, and we set out together along the road towards Horsell.

It was a warm and very still morning, with the sun coming through a thin haze, and the common when we reached it was almost deserted. A few people were making their way across the heather in the same direction as ourselves, and I saw a knot of figures standing on the rim of the pits with the steam drifting up behind them. As we came nearer the steam thinned in the growing heat of the sun, and I saw the thing itself.

The pool was perhaps forty yards across. At the farther side, where the bank was steepest, the water had been flung up over the sand in a great wet fan, and the gorse bushes there were blackened and shrivelled as though a fire had passed over them. In the middle of the pool, tilted a little towards us, lay the object. Only a part of it was visible. What showed above the water was a rounded end, some yards in breadth, of a dull colour like tarnished lead or old iron, and crusted with a scaly deposit that the steam had streaked with white. The water immediately about it bubbled and simmered, and every now and then a great slow gout of vapour would roll off its surface and go climbing into the air. The mud of the bank had been thrown up in a ridge all round the pool, and the heather along the near edge was scorched and grey.

Ogilvy was standing at the very brink, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled up, and a stick in his hand. He had made a place for himself on a lump of sand, and had evidently been there for some hours. His face was flushed, and there was a look about him of a man who has had a great deal of pleasure and means to have more. He greeted me eagerly.

"Here you are!" he said. "Here's your flaming gas come to earth at last! I said a meteorite, and a meteorite it is. Look at the size of it! There's nothing in the British Museum to touch it."

I looked at the thing in the water for some time without answering him. There was a regularity about it that I did not like. The end that showed was not merely rounded but smoothly and evenly rounded, and where the scale had flaked away I fancied I saw beneath it a surface that was not the rough, pitted skin of the meteoric irons I had seen in cases, but something with a finish to it. I said as much.

"Finish!" cried Ogilvy. "My dear fellow, that's the fusion. The outer layer melts as it comes through the air. It is a well-known thing. I have seen a dozen specimens with a glaze on them you could see your face in. And as for the shape, what would you have a body do that has been spinning through the atmosphere at forty miles a second? It planes itself. It is like a stone in a river."

"It is very large to have come down so entire," I said.

"It is very large," he agreed, with the utmost satisfaction. "It is the largest ever recorded. I have been at it since five o'clock."

I asked him whether he had thought of the light we had seen upon Mars, and he laughed at me.

"Mars is forty million miles off," he said. "This has come out of the sky, and nothing has come out of the sky in the whole history of the world but stones and iron. It's a coincidence. I grant you it is a remarkable coincidence. But there is nothing else it could be."

"Unless it were a thing that was made," I said.

He looked at me, and then he looked at the thing in the water, and for a moment I thought I saw a shadow of doubt cross his face. But he shook his head.

"Made by whom?" he said. "No, no. It's a meteorite. I'll stake my reputation on it. I only wish the water would go down so that one could get at it."

My wife had come up beside me and was looking at the object with a curious steadiness. She had said nothing while Ogilvy talked, but now she put her hand upon my arm.

"It is very hot still," she said. "Look how the water boils."

That was true. The water about the thing had been simmering all the while we stood there, and I have heard since that the fall had thrown up a column of steam that was seen from the Woking road before it was light. Ogilvy said that a mass of that size would hold its heat for a day or more, and that in his opinion the water had saved the common from a fire. He was, I think, a little disappointed that it had not fallen upon dry ground where he could have laid his hands upon it; but he consoled himself with the prospect of digging it out.

By this time a number of people had gathered upon the rim of the pits. There was Henderson, the journalist, who had come over from Woking on his bicycle and stood with his notebook out, questioning Ogilvy and getting, I fancy, a good deal more than he wanted; and a couple of golfers from the links, and a man with a dog, and a few labourers who had heard the talk in the village and come to look. Two or three boys were already down on the wet sand of the near bank, as near to the water as they dared, and the crowd on the edge above kept telling them to come away and kept coming nearer itself.

It was one of these boys who was burned. I did not see exactly how it happened. The water on our side had fallen a little as the morning went on, and had left a strip of mud along which a lump of the scaly deposit, blown or flung off from the surface of the thing, lay steaming in the sun. It was about as big as a man's two hands, and dull grey, and looked, I suppose, like any stone. One of the boys, a red-headed lad in his shirt sleeves, dared another to pick it up, and, being dared back, stooped and took it in his fingers. He dropped it instantly with a cry, and stood looking at his hand, and then began to howl. A labourer went down and brought him up the bank, and I saw that the palm and the tips of the fingers were white and puckered, and that the skin had risen in blisters even in that little time. Ogilvy was very much upset. He gave the boy a shilling and told him he was a fool, and went down himself with a stick and a handkerchief to try the fragment, and came back saying that it was hot enough to have cooked an egg.

"That will teach them," he said. "It will be hours before anyone can touch it."

After that the crowd kept its distance for a while, but it grew. People came up from Horsell and Ottershaw, and a few from Chertsey who had heard the news in the town, and by eleven there must have been fifty or sixty of us upon the rim of the pits. There was a good deal of talk about the meteorite, and a good deal more about the boy's hand. Somebody said that a man had been killed by it, which was not true, and somebody else that it had been seen falling as far off as Reading. Ogilvy explained to everybody who would listen that the thing was of extraterrestrial origin, and that he had telegraphed to a friend at Greenwich, and that the Astronomer Royal would certainly wish to see it before it was moved. He was entirely happy. Henderson wrote it all down.

I stayed by the edge of the pool, and I found that I did not want to leave it. The sun was now high and hot, and the steam from the water had thinned to a shimmer, so that one could see the surface of the thing more plainly. The scale upon it was cracking and falling away in the heat, and I could see beneath it a dull metallic sheen, and once, when the water fell a little more, a line, straight and even, running round the exposed end, as a lid might be marked upon a canister. I pointed it out to Ogilvy, and he said it was a fracture, and went on talking to Henderson.

My wife had grown quiet. She had been standing beside me a long while, and I noticed that she had gone rather pale, and that she kept her eyes upon the thing in the water as though she found it hard to look away.

"I do not like it," she said at last, very low. "Why does it not cool?"

I told her that Ogilvy had said a mass of that size would hold its heat for a day, and that there was nothing to be afraid of. I said it more confidently than I felt. The truth was that the longer I looked at the thing the less I was able to think of it as a stone, and the less I liked the straight line that ran round it under the water. But I did not say so. I told her that the sun was very hot, and that the ground was wet, and that there would be nothing more to see until the water went down and the crowd would only grow more disagreeable, and that she had far better go home to her lunch and let me come after her. She looked at me, and I think she understood a good deal more of what was in my mind than I had said.

"You will not go near it?" she said.

I promised her that I would not, and after a little more persuasion she consented to go. I walked with her to the edge of the common where the path turns down towards the Ottershaw road, and stood watching her until her figure had passed between the trees. Then I went back to the pits.

The crowd had thickened while I was gone. The boy with the burned hand had been taken away, and someone had brought a rope, and there was a plan of Ogilvy's, much discussed and not yet attempted, for getting a line across the pool and round the thing, so that when it had cooled a team of horses might draw it out. It was a little before noon. The sun beat down upon the common, and the heather smelt of it, and the water in the pit, that had seemed to be sinking, lay still and brown and shining, with the great rounded mass in the middle of it steaming very quietly under the sky.

The morning appointed for the consultation was fine, and Mr Shepherd arrived early from the market town, in a state of civil discomfort natural to a man who was about to say what he knew would not be liked, to a person whose good opinion was of some consequence to his business. Lady Russell walked up from the Lodge soon after, with a paper in her reticule and a resolution in her countenance which thirteen years of friendship with Sir Walter had taught her would be needed. Anne, who had spent the earlier part of the morning with her, and had helped her to draw up the paper, followed a little behind; and the whole party was assembled in the library by eleven o’clock, Elizabeth at the head of the table, her father in his own chair, the Baronetage lying closed but not far off, as if in readiness for any distress that might arise.

Lady Russell was heard first, by a courtesy which Mr Shepherd was very glad to allow her. She had written out her plan with the utmost care, and she read it with all the steadiness of one who believed it to be both reasonable and kind. It was, in truth, a very moderate scheme. She had considered, she said, what a person of Sir Walter’s consequence could relinquish without any real diminution of his dignity; she proposed the reduction of the establishment by two men-servants and a pair of horses, the giving up of the London spring, the closing of two of the smaller rooms which were seldom used, and a general lessening of the table, which, she was persuaded, no one but themselves would ever perceive. She had reckoned the savings, and she had reckoned the debts, and she shewed how, at the end of seven years, if these measures were steadily held to, the one might very nearly have swallowed the other.

Sir Walter heard her to the end with an expression of increasing suffering. He was too much the gentleman to interrupt Lady Russell, and too much Sir Walter Elliot to be moved by her.

“Two men-servants!” said he, when she had finished. “My dear Lady Russell, you cannot have considered. Two men-servants, and a pair of horses, and no London! Why, we should be the talk of the whole county in a month. I had rather quit Kellynch at once than live in it like a—like a curate. No, no. It cannot be. I am obliged to you, very much obliged to you, for the trouble you have taken; but it will not do.”

“Seven years is a long time,” observed Elizabeth, whose attention had fixed itself upon that term as the most objectionable of all.

Lady Russell would have replied, but Sir Walter had already turned to Mr Shepherd, with the air of a man who has been ill-used by one friend and looks for better treatment from the next.

Mr Shepherd’s plan was of a different character; less mortifying in its parts, and, he had hoped, more acceptable on that account. He said nothing of the servants or the table, having learnt by long practice that Sir Walter would bear a great deal in the gross which he would not bear in the detail. He spoke instead of the outlying farm, which might be let at a better rent if some money were laid out upon the buildings; of certain timber which was ripe for cutting and which it would be no sacrifice to sell; of a part of the plate, of which there was more than any family could use; and of the possibility of borrowing upon somewhat easier terms than at present, if Sir Walter would consent to place the whole of his affairs, for a term of years, in the hands of a person of business who should have authority to pay the tradespeople as their bills fell due.

Sir Walter liked the timber; he could bear the farm; but at the plate he grew grave, and at the notion of any person of business having authority over his affairs, he rose from his chair.

“I will have no steward set over me in my own house, Shepherd. Sell the timber if you like; I do not know that I object to the timber; but the plate is out of the question, and as to the rest, I must say I expected something more from you. This is not retrenchment, this is—this is being put into the hands of trustees. I am not a boy. I am not a bankrupt tradesman. I am Sir Walter Elliot.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said he had only thrown out the idea; he would not press it for the world; there were doubtless many other ways.

There was a silence. Lady Russell looked at her paper, and Mr Shepherd looked at his boots, and Elizabeth looked at the window; and it was in this pause that Anne, to the astonishment of everybody, and not least of herself, spoke.

She had not meant to speak. She had meant, as she always meant, to be silent, and to be useful afterwards in whatever way was left to her; but she had sat through two plans and two refusals, and she had heard her father say that he had rather quit Kellynch than live in it like a curate, and the thought of his quitting it—of the house of her mother, of every walk and every tree she had known from infancy, passing out of their hands because they would not part with a footman—had risen in her too strongly to be kept down.

“I think,” said she, in a low voice, but distinctly, “that neither of the plans goes far enough.”

Sir Walter turned his head, in some doubt as to who had spoken.

“I beg your pardon, Sir,” Anne continued, colouring, but not stopping; “but I have gone over the accounts with Lady Russell, and I cannot help seeing that if the debt is to be cleared at all, it must be cleared quickly, or it will not be cleared in our lifetime. If we are to retrench, I would have us retrench thoroughly and at once, and have it over. I would keep no carriage but one. I would give up the horses altogether for a year or two, and hire when we must go out. I would part with four servants, not two; there are a great many rooms in this house which nobody uses, and they need not be kept as they are. I would have no company at Kellynch but Lady Russell and the Musgroves. I would make no journey to London. I would live, in short, as a great many very good families live who are not in debt, and I believe that if we did so, five years would see us free, and not seven, nor seventeen.”

She stopped, quite out of breath, and very much frightened at the sound of her own voice in that room. Lady Russell looked at her with a mixture of surprise and approbation, and something which might have been a caution to say no more. Mr Shepherd, who had never before heard Miss Anne Elliot deliver so many sentences together, regarded her with the respectful attention of a man of business who suspects that the only sensible person in the family has at last been discovered. Sir Walter was for a moment so entirely astonished that he could find nothing to say; and before he had found it, a much greater astonishment was prepared for them all.

“I think Anne is right,” said Elizabeth.

Her father stared at her. Lady Russell, who had known Elizabeth from her cradle, and had never once in nine-and-twenty years heard her take her sister’s part in any thing, stared also.

“I think she is right,” repeated Elizabeth, with perfect composure. “If it is to be done, it had better be done thoroughly. I would rather part with four servants for five years, than with two for seven, and be talked of the whole time as people who were growing shabby by degrees. If we shut up half the house and see nobody, it will be understood that we are living retired by our own choice. Every body knows that great families do so from time to time. Nobody will suppose it is for want of money if it is done handsomely and all at once. And I confess,” she added, turning her fine eyes upon Mr Shepherd with a look which made him wish himself elsewhere, “that I had rather do any thing than have our affairs talked over in an attorney’s office in Crewkherne.”

It was not, perhaps, from any of the motives which had moved Anne, that Elizabeth supported her; it was pride, and the fear of being thought poor, and a very just dislike of Mr Shepherd’s plan, which had most to do with it; but the effect was the same, and Anne, who had never in her life before had her sister on her side, felt her heart beat with a hope which she had hardly dared to entertain for a twelvemonth.

It lasted about a minute.

“Four servants!” said Sir Walter. “No carriage—no horses—no London—no company! Upon my word, Elizabeth, I did not expect this of you. Anne may say what she pleases; Anne has never cared for any of these things, and would be as well pleased, I dare say, in a cottage as anywhere; but you! To live shut up in half our own house like people in a decline! To hire a pair of post-horses from the inn when we go to dine at Uppercross! I had rather be in my grave.”

“It need not be for ever, Sir,” said Anne.

“It shall not be at all,” said Sir Walter; and he sat down again, and drew the Baronetage a little nearer to him, though he did not open it.

Elizabeth said nothing more. She had made her effort, and it was over; she was not one to persevere against her father, when perseverance meant contradicting him; and having discharged her opinion, she resumed the contemplation of the window with an air of having done all that could be expected of her.

Mr Shepherd now judged that the moment had come for saying the thing which he had ridden over from Crewkherne to say, and which he had been putting off from one quarter of an hour to another in the hope of a better opening. He coughed; he moved his papers; he addressed himself, by a very natural instinct, rather to Lady Russell than to Sir Walter.

“There is,” said he, “one other resource, which I should not think it my duty to pass over, though I am far from recommending it. It has occurred to me—it has occurred, I believe, to others—that a house of this size, with its grounds and its consequence, would be very readily taken, for a term of years, by some person of fortune, at a rent which would very nearly clear off the whole of the incumbrances in a moderate time, and leave Sir Walter and the family at liberty to live in the interval, with every comfort, and with far less expense, at some place where there is more society and less—less establishment required. I say nothing of where. I only mention, as a possible thing, that a very respectable tenant—”

“A what, Sir?” said Sir Walter.

Mr Shepherd, who had gone too far to go back, said it again, though more faintly. “A tenant, Sir Walter.”

Sir Walter Elliot rose for the second time that morning; but on this occasion there was no colour in his face at all.

“I will thank you, Mr Shepherd,” said he, “never to use that word again in my presence. A tenant! A tenant at Kellynch Hall! Some—some person from I know not where, sitting in my chair, walking in my shrubbery, hanging his own hat in my hall! My father would have turned him out of doors for the very proposal. No, Sir. I have listened to a great deal this morning which I did not expect to hear, and I have borne it as well as I could; but that I will not bear. Let it never be mentioned again. Never. I had rather every acre were mortgaged to the last shilling.”

Mr Shepherd bowed very low, and said that he had not the least intention of pressing it; that it was mentioned only to be dismissed; that he perfectly understood Sir Walter’s feelings, and honoured them; and in this manner the consultation ended, as such consultations generally do, in nothing at all. Lady Russell gathered up her paper; Mr Shepherd gathered up his; Sir Walter, having recovered his colour, was gracious enough to hope that they would both stay to eat something; and the debts of the house of Elliot remained precisely what they had been at eleven o’clock.

It was while the party were still in the library, and Lady Russell was tying her bonnet with a very compressed mouth, that a servant brought in the letters from the post; and among them was one for Anne, in a hand which needed no seal to make it known. It was from Mary.

Anne read it standing by the window, while her father, with an air of much relief, described to Mr Shepherd a new gate he had thought of for the east lodge. Mary wrote from Uppercross Cottage, and she wrote, as she generally did, in the character of an injured woman. She had been very unwell for above a week; she had a sore throat which nobody minded, and a pain in her side which Mr Robinson said was nothing, but which she was sure was something; Charles was out shooting every day and left her entirely alone; his mother had not been near her for three days; the children were quite unmanageable; and she did not know how she was to get through the autumn if somebody did not come to her. Anne was the person. Anne had nothing to do at Kellynch, and Elizabeth could very well spare her; and she hoped Anne would not be so unkind as to refuse, when she knew how very ill her sister was, and how little any body else cared about it. The letter was closely written, crossed in two places, and ended with the assurance that Mary did not expect to live long, and that she remained her affectionate sister.

Anne folded it, and put it away, and said nothing of it till the visitors were gone.

When she did mention it, at dinner, it was received exactly as she had known it would be. Sir Walter thought Mary was very likely to have a sore throat, for Uppercross was a damp situation, and the Musgroves never took proper care of their throats; and Elizabeth said that she supposed Anne might as well go, as nobody wanted her at Kellynch this autumn, when there were to be, for reasons which she did not choose to enter upon, no engagements of any kind. This was said without unkindness; it was merely the truth, as Elizabeth saw it; and Anne, who had heard the same truth in the same voice for thirteen years, was able to hear it without pain.

The evening came on, warm and still. Elizabeth went early to her room; Sir Walter sat in the library, with candles and the Baronetage, and was not to be disturbed; and Anne, left alone in the drawing-room which was not to be new furnished, took up her sister’s letter again and read it through a second time.

There was nothing in it to alarm her. She knew Mary’s illnesses; she knew that a pain in the side at Uppercross was very apt to be cured by a visit from Kellynch and a little attention, and that a sore throat which Mr Robinson thought nothing of was, in all probability, nothing. But she knew also that Mary would be really unhappy till somebody came, that the children would be really the worse for it, and that Charles Musgrove, good-natured as he was, would go on shooting till Christmas rather than sit at home to be complained to. And she knew, which weighed more with her than all the rest, that she had that day done every thing which it was in her power to do at Kellynch, and that it had come to nothing.

She had spoken. She had said, before her father and her sister and Lady Russell and Mr Shepherd, the thing she had been thinking for a year; and for one minute, one strange, unhoped-for minute, Elizabeth had stood by her, and she had thought it might be done. It was not done. Nothing was done. The four servants would stay, and the carriage, and the horses; the London spring would come round as it always came; the bills would come with it; and some morning, not many years hence, the thing that could not be named would be named again by somebody, and her father would not be able to refuse it. She did not see how it was to be helped. Her word had no weight; it never had had; and the one moment in which it had seemed to have a little, had passed like the others.

At Uppercross, at least, she could be of use. Mary would be the better for her, and the children would be the better for her, and there would be nobody to remind her, every hour of the day, of what she had failed in. She would write to Mary in the morning, and go as soon as she could be spared, which would be immediately.

The house was very quiet. From the library came, now and then, the sound of a leaf turned over, and once the faint scrape of a chair as Sir Walter drew nearer to the light; and Anne, folding the letter for the last time, sat on a little longer in the summer dusk, with the debts of Kellynch as unsettled as they had been at breakfast, and her own small plan of going away from them the only one, of all that had been proposed that day, which was to be carried into effect.

The First National Bank was a gray stone building on Broadway that looked as if it had been built to stand a siege. I went through the revolving door at a quarter past twelve, worked my way past a couple of tellers who didn't want to know anything, and finally landed in the cage of an assistant cashier named Albury.

He was a young man, twenty-five at the most, with a good-looking pink face, thick fair hair and the kind of manners that come from being told regularly that the customer is always right. He gave me a chair on his side of the rail and asked what he could do for me.

I told him who I was and who had hired me. He had read the morning paper. He was properly shocked about Donald Willsson and said so.

"He kept his account here?" I asked.

"A personal account, yes. The Herald's accounts also, of course, but those are handled by Mr.—by the commercial department."

"Yesterday afternoon, a little before three, he drew a check for five thousand dollars. I want to know who it was made out to, and whether it's been cashed."

Albury looked at his desk blotter as if the answer might be printed on it. Then he looked at me.

"I'm afraid that's rather—the bank isn't supposed to give out information concerning depositors' transactions, Mr.—"

"The depositor is dead," I said. "He was killed a few hours after he wrote the check. If you'd rather I went to the chief of police and had him come around and ask you, I can do that. You know Noonan?"

He knew Noonan. His pink face got a shade pinker. He excused himself, went away through a door in the back of the cage and stayed away ten minutes. When he came back he had a clerk's memorandum slip in his hand and a puzzled look on his face.

"There's nothing," he said. "Nothing at all. No check of Mr. Willsson's for that amount, or anywhere near it, has come through. Not yesterday, not this morning. I had them go over the sheets twice."

"He didn't cash it here himself?"

"No. He was in the bank yesterday afternoon—I saw him myself, a little after three. But he didn't come to a window. He spoke to Mr.—to one of the officers for a moment and went out again."

"Which officer?"

Albury hesitated, and then decided the customer was still right.

"Mr. Elihu Willsson's account is handled personally by the cashier. Mr. Donald stopped at his desk. I don't know what was said. It wasn't more than a minute or two."

"Could he have had the check certified?"

"No, sir. A certification would go through my department. It wasn't presented for certification. I'm sure of that."

"Then where's the check?"

The young man spread his hands and let them fall on the blotter.

"Wherever he took it, I suppose. Or wherever the payee took it. It hasn't reached us. If it was made out to another bank's customer it might come through in a day or two. But there was nothing in this morning's clearings."

"You'll let me know if it turns up? I'm at the Great Western."

He said he would. He said it reluctantly, but he said it. I thanked him and went out through the revolving door, and didn't know a thing more than when I had gone in, except that a dead man had written a check for five thousand dollars, carried it out of his office, and gone somewhere with it that wasn't the bank. Twenty minutes. Time enough to walk to the bank and have a minute's talk with the cashier. Not much time for anything else.

I ate lunch in a Greek's place on the corner and went back to the hotel to think it over.

The Great Western's lobby had a dozen leather chairs, a rubber plant and a clerk who read racing forms. I got my key from him and had my foot on the first stair when a woman got up from one of the leather chairs and said:

"You are the man who was at my house last night."

It was young Mrs. Willsson. She wore black now, plain black with nothing on it, and a small black hat that came down over her fair hair. Her face was as white as it had been at five minutes past eleven the night before. The blood was gone from the green slipper because the green slipper was gone. She had black shoes on.

"Yes," I said. "I was looking for you this morning."

"I know. I saw you from the window." She said it flatly, without any accusation in it. "Is there some place we can talk? Not here."

There was a writing room off the lobby, empty except for two desks and a bad picture of a locomotive. I took her in there and shut the door. She didn't sit down. She stood with her back to the locomotive, her hands holding a black bag in front of her, and looked at me.

"You told his father about the shoe," she said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it was there. What did you want me to do with it?"

She thought that over. Her accent was a little heavier than it had been last night, as if she were too tired to keep it down.

"He hates me," she said. "You know that. He would like very much to see me hanged. You have done him a favor."

"I don't do favors," I said. "I found out things and told them to the man who's paying for them. Or would be paying for them if his son were alive. That's my job. If you want to tell me the rest of it, I'll listen to that too."

"The rest of it?"

"Where you went at ten-twenty. Whose phone call took you there. How the blood got on your shoe."

She turned her head and looked at the locomotive for a while. It didn't help her. She turned back to me.

"I went to Hurricane Street," she said. "The telephone call—I did not know the voice. It was a man. He said if I wished to know where my husband went at night, I should be at the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street before half past ten, and I should see for myself. He hung up before I could ask anything."

"And you went."

"I went." Her mouth twisted. "You heard his father this morning, I suppose. Jealous, he says. Suspicious. Very well. I was jealous. I had reason, or I thought I had. My husband had been—somewhere—many evenings. He would not tell me where. So when a stranger telephoned, I went. I am not proud of it."

"What did you see?"

"Nothing, at first. I parked the car at the end of the block and walked. The street was very dark. I saw a man come out of a house—a two-story house, brick, with the porch light off. I could not see him well, only that he was tall and walked like Donald. I stood in a doorway across the street. Then—" She stopped and pressed the bag against her body. "Then there were the shots. From behind me, or beside me. I did not see where. I heard them and I saw him fall. I ran to him. He was—it was Donald. I put my hands on him. That is how it was on my shoe. I did not know it was there until you looked at it."

"The paper says a man and a woman were bending over him."

"There was a man. He came from somewhere—I did not see. He knelt down on the other side. He said, 'He's dead. You'd better get out of here.' He said it very quietly. I was—I did what he said. I went back to the car and drove home. I did not think. I have thought since."

"What did the man look like?"

"Small. Dark. Well dressed. That is all. He kept his face turned from the light. There was almost no light."

"Max Thaler," I said.

She didn't answer. She didn't need to. Her face did it for her.

"He came to see you this morning," I said. "Why?"

"To tell me to say nothing. To tell me that if I said I had been there, it would go very badly for me, that the police would be glad to have a woman to hang it on, that his—that Mr. Elihu would see that they were glad. He was very polite." Her voice thinned. "He was also very frightening. He speaks so that you have to lean close to hear him."

"What did he want in return?"

"Nothing. That was the frightening part. He wanted nothing. He said he was doing me a kindness." She laughed once, not a good laugh. "Then I saw you from the window, and I saw you turn around and go away, and I understood that whatever I did, someone would know I had been there. So I have come to you. I would rather you had it from me."

"Did your husband ever mention five thousand dollars to you?"

The question surprised her out of whatever she had been about to say next.

"Five thousand? No. Why?"

"He wrote a check for that much yesterday afternoon. It hasn't been cashed."

"I know nothing of his money," she said, and I believed her. "His father saw to that."

She hadn't much more. She didn't know whose house it was on Hurricane Street. She didn't know why Donald should have been there. She didn't know who had telephoned her, though she had lain awake most of the night trying to fit the voice to somebody. She had told the police nothing yet because the police had asked her nothing yet, and she had been afraid to volunteer.

"Don't volunteer," I told her. "But if they ask, tell them what you've told me. Lying to Noonan is a bad bet. He's not bright enough to catch you in it, but he's mean enough to hang you for it when somebody else does."

"And you? What will you do?"

"Go on poking around."

She pulled on her gloves. At the door she stopped and said without turning:

"I did not kill him. I thought I hated him sometimes. But I did not kill him."

"I didn't say you did," I said. "I said maybe."

She went out. Through the writing room's glass door I watched her cross the lobby and go into the street, a slim straight black figure that didn't look back. The clerk looked up from his racing form long enough to watch her too, then went back to it.

I went upstairs. There was an envelope on the floor inside my door where somebody had pushed it under. It was a cheap white envelope with nothing on the outside. Inside was a half sheet of hotel stationery—my own hotel's—and on it, in pencil, in a small neat hand that looked as if it never hurried:

*You'd get along better in Personville if you stayed away from Hurricane Street and the people who were there. That's advice. It's free this time.*

*M. T.*

No threat you could take to a court. No threat you could take anywhere. Just a man letting me know he knew what I had been talking about downstairs, or guessed it, and didn't like it.

I went down to the desk. The clerk hadn't seen anybody. Nobody had asked for my room number. Nobody had come in that he'd noticed, except the lady, and a boy delivering something, and a couple of traveling men. He couldn't say what the boy had been delivering. He couldn't say much about the boy. He didn't like the questions and went back to the racing form to show me so.

I bought a couple of cigars at the stand and went back upstairs and sat down at the little table by the window and wrote out a wire to the Old Man in San Francisco. The Continental doesn't like flowery reports and the Old Man likes them least of anybody, so I kept it dry:

*DONALD WILLSSON CLIENT SHOT DEAD HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT BEFORE I SAW HIM STOP THIRTY TWO CALIBRE SIX SHOTS FROM ALLEY STOP WIFE ADMITS PRESENT WHEN SHOT DRAWN THERE BY ANONYMOUS PHONE CALL STOP MAX THALER GAMBLER KNOWN WHISPER ALSO PRESENT AND HAS SINCE WARNED WIFE AND ME TO KEEP OFF STOP ELIHU WILLSSON FATHER REFUSES COOPERATION INSISTS WIFE GUILTY STOP DECEASED DREW FIVE THOUSAND CHECK AFTERNOON OF DEATH FIRST NATIONAL REPORTS NOT PRESENTED NOT CERTIFIED PAYEE UNKNOWN STOP LOCAL POLITICS INVOLVED FATHER LOST CONTROL OF CITY TO THALER YARD FINN NOONAN STOP NO CLIENT NOW BUT CHECK CLEARED AND JOB HALF DONE STOP ADVISE WHETHER TO CONTINUE STOP HOLDING GREAT WESTERN HOTEL*

I read it over. It was true, which was something, and it didn't say anything Thaler didn't already know, which was something else. I took it down to the Western Union office two blocks away and sent it myself rather than trust it to the clerk, and walked back through streets that were beginning to fill up with the shift coming off at the smelter. Personville looked no better at dusk than it had in the morning. The smoke settled down over it as the light went.

It was dark when I got back to my room. I turned on the light, pulled the shade, and sat on the edge of the bed with the second cigar and Thaler's half sheet of paper.

A man writes a check for five thousand dollars and carries it out of his office. He walks to the bank and speaks for a minute to the cashier who handles his father's money, and doesn't cash it, and doesn't have it certified, and goes back to work. That night he goes to a dark house in Hurricane Street where somebody has taken the trouble to bring his wife to watch him, and somebody else has taken the trouble to wait in an alley with a .32. And the check is nowhere.

Not in the bank. Not in his desk. Not, so far as anybody had said, in his pockets when they picked him up off the sidewalk. Not mentioned by the wife, who didn't know his money. Not mentioned by the old man, who knew everybody's money in Personville and had spent the morning yelling about a French hussy instead.

Five thousand dollars was a lot of money to walk around with and then die. Somebody had it, or had had it, or had been supposed to have it. Whoever that was hadn't taken it to the First National Bank.

I put Thaler's note in my pocket with the wire's carbon and turned out the light. Below the window Broadway made its noises. Somewhere in them, I supposed, a man in three shades of brown was getting along fine in Personville, and would go on getting along fine as long as nobody found out where a dead man's check had gone.

I lay down on the bed with my clothes on and my cigar going and tried to guess.

Well, there we sat, the two of us, on the slope of the beach, with the Shivering Sand heaving and dimpling below us as if it had a stomach of its own, and had dined worse than I had that day. Mr. Franklin was the first to speak.

“Betteredge,” says he, “you look as if you had seen a ghost. Am I so much changed?”

“Changed, sir!” says I. “I left you a boy in a jacket, with a face all over jam, and I find you a gentleman in a fawn-coloured suit, with a rose in your button-hole. But that’s not what I was thinking of. My lady looked for you by the evening train. What has brought you down on us, sir, four good hours before your time?”

He took off his beautiful hat, and looked into it, as if the answer might be lying at the bottom.

“A letter,” says he. “Which I got in London last night, and which I have been thinking about ever since, in a first-class carriage all the way from King’s Cross. You are my aunt’s old servant, Betteredge, and my old friend, and the only man in the house I can talk to. Read it, and tell me what you make of it.”

He put his hand into the breast of his coat, and brought out a letter, and gave it to me. I have it by me now, the writer of these lines having asked Mr. Franklin (and got) leave to copy it, so that you may see it exactly as I saw it, sitting on the sand, with my spectacles on my nose, and the wind off the sea doing its best to take the paper out of my hands. It ran as follows:

“Dear Sir,—I think it my duty, before you leave town, to mention to you a circumstance which, trifling as it may appear, has made me uneasy on your account. Since the day on which you called here to make your arrangements with us, this office has been watched. A dark-complexioned man, in the dress of a respectable foreigner, has twice been observed loitering opposite our door; and on the second occasion our junior clerk, sent out by me to walk past him, saw him in conversation with two others of his own colour, at the corner of the street. Yesterday, after you had left us, the same man followed you, at a distance, as far as the Strand—my clerk, on my instructions, followed him. I say nothing of what this may mean. I only beg you to remember what passed between us in this room, and to allow me to advise you, as your father’s friend and your own, to leave London by an earlier train than the train you have named, and to let no one but ourselves know the hour of your departure. Your obedient servant, Septimus Luker, for Mr. Blake’s solicitors.”

“There, Betteredge!” says Mr. Franklin, when I had got to the end. “That is why I am four hours before my time. I took the first train this morning, at an hour when no respectable foreigner is out of his bed, and I have come across the moor in a hired fly, instead of by the road, and here I am. Now, what do you make of it?”

I gave him back the letter. I am an old man, and I am not fond of hurrying my opinions; but I will own that the word “foreigner” set me thinking, in a way I didn’t much like, of three foreigners of a sort, who had been on our terrace only that morning, with their drums and their bottle of ink. I said nothing of them yet. I had promised Penelope to ask Mr. Franklin about the Indians, and I meant to keep my promise; but I had a notion that the Indians would go down better with him after dinner than before it.

“I make of it, sir,” I said, “that Mr. Luker is a careful man, and that you have done a wise thing in taking his advice. What I don’t make out is what the foreigner wanted.”

“No more do I,” says Mr. Franklin—very cheerfully, for a young gentleman who had been followed to the Strand. “But I will tell you what I have got about me, Betteredge, and then perhaps you will make it out for yourself.”

And with that, he put his hand again into the breast of his coat, and brought out a little packet, not much bigger than a snuff-box, done up in brown paper, tied with string, and sealed at every fold with a great red seal. He weighed it in his hand, and looked at it, and then he looked at me.

“You keep the plate-room key?” says he.

“Day and night, sir,” says I. “On this chain, along with my watch, and under my pillow when I sleep.”

“Then take this,” says Mr. Franklin, “and lock it up in the plate-room to-night; and ask me no questions about it till to-morrow. I want to sleep on it, Betteredge. I want to sleep on the whole business—the letter, and the foreigner, and what I am to say to my aunt. A night’s rest in the country clears the head wonderfully. Will you do that for me?”

I took the packet. I am not going to pretend to you that I was not curious. I turned it over; I felt it; I held it, I am afraid, a little nearer to my ear than was strictly needful, as if it might tell me its own secret if I gave it the chance. It told me nothing. It was small, and it was hard, and it was sealed as if the whole Bank of England had had a hand in the sealing of it—and that is all I can honestly say I learned about it, then or that night. I put it into the inside pocket of my waistcoat, and buttoned my coat over it.

“It shall be in the plate-room, sir,” I said, “inside the half-hour.”

“And nobody the wiser?”

“Nobody, sir—not even my daughter Penelope, which is saying a good deal.”

He laughed, and got up, and gave me his hand, and hauled me on to my legs as easy as if I had been a boy. I looked round, once, for Rosanna Spearman, before we started. There was nothing to be seen but the sandhills, and the sea coming in silently over the sand. I remember thinking that the girl had gone in to her dinner after all; and I remember thinking no more about her, just then, than that. So much for an old man’s sagacity! We went back together through the plantation of firs; Mr. Franklin talking all the way, in his foreign fashion, about the country and the house and the years that were gone, and asking after everybody by name; and I, with the packet under my coat, feeling for it with my hand every twenty yards or so, like a man who has got a bad tooth and can’t leave it alone.

At the house I left him in the hands of Samuel, the footman, to be got out of his travelling dust; and I went straight down, by the back stairs, to the plate-room. This is a small strong room, opening out of my own sitting-room, with an iron door, and a lock that the late Sir John had put in from London, and that I would back against any burglar in Yorkshire. I laid the packet on the shelf where the second-best salver stands, when it isn’t wanted—there being nothing, as I have observed in the course of a long life, that looks less like a hiding-place than a shelf with a salver on it. I locked the door on it. I tried the door, when it was locked. I tried it again. And then, being an honest man, and wishing to put down everything as it happened, I will confess to you that I stood in the passage for a full minute, with the key in my hand, wondering what in the name of wonder it was that I had got the charge of, and why a respectable foreigner should follow a young gentleman to the Strand on account of it.

I might have stood there longer, if my daughter Penelope had not come running down the passage to me, with her cap-ribbons flying.

“Father!” says she. “Rosanna has not come in.”

“Not come in?” says I. “I left her on the sands, not an hour ago, on her way to her dinner.”

“She never came near her dinner,” says Penelope. “Nancy has been throwing it at her ever since. And I met the boy from the lodge just now, and he says he saw her on the road to Cobb’s Hole, a good while back, walking as fast as she could go, with her cloak held tight round her, and never looked at him when he spoke to her. She has gone to Cobb’s Hole, father; she has gone to the Yollands’. And it isn’t her afternoon out, and she has had no leave—and cook says she shall hear of it, and I say—”

“And I say hold your tongue, Penelope,” I put in, “and let cook mind her kitchen.” The fact is, I was a little put out; not so much with the girl for going, as with myself for having let her go under my very eyes. Cobb’s Hole was the fishing-village I have mentioned, and the Yollands were the friends I have promised you should hear more of by-and-by. Rosanna had been there before, by permission, and no harm in it. But to go off, without a word, on a day when she was wanted, and after fainting in the morning, and crying on the sands—it was unlike her. I said to Penelope that Rosanna should be spoken to when she came back, and that nobody was to speak to her before I did; and Penelope, having got her information off her mind, went up-stairs again, tossing her head, which she gets from her poor mother.

You will say, and say rightly, that I am always stopping to explain things. But the fact is, I have got to the point now where our lady comes into the story; and in a house like ours, my lady is not a person to be run at, and disposed of in a line.

She came back in the carriage at half-past five—alone. Miss Rachel had been persuaded to stop on with the young ladies at the house where they had lunched, and to dine there, and to be sent home in their carriage late in the evening; so that (as things fell out) Mr. Franklin didn’t set eyes on his cousin that day at all, and I am spared the trouble of describing her till she is ready to be described. I met the carriage at the door, and told my lady that her nephew was arrived. She looked at her watch, and then at me.

“By what train?” says she.

“By no train, my lady,” says I. “By an early train to the town, and a hired fly across the moor. Mr. Franklin will tell you the reason himself.”

My lady said nothing to that. She went straight into the library, where Mr. Franklin was walking about among the books; and she gave him both her hands, and kissed him, and held him off, and looked at him, and kissed him again, as women will. I was in the room, having been told to stay, on account of the tea; and I saw the whole of it. He was her sister’s son; and I don’t think, till that moment, she had known how much she wanted to see him.

“You are very like your poor mother, Franklin,” she said. “Sit down. Why have you come so early, and why have you come by such a road?”

He told her. Not all of it—not the letter—not the packet in the plate-room. Young as he was, he had the sense to feel his way with my lady. He said that something had happened in London, which he would tell her of to-morrow, when he had slept on it, and which had made him think it wiser to travel quietly; and he said—being one of those persons who say the thing they are thinking of, whether they mean to or not—that it had to do with a matter that had been left in his father’s hands, by my lady’s brother, the Colonel.

I was pouring out the tea. I stopped pouring. My lady had been leaning back in her chair; she sat up in it.

“Franklin,” she said, “I have not seen my brother for twenty years, and I have not spoken his name for ten. He has been the disgrace of our family, and the wretched end of his life has been of a piece with the rest of it. I make no inquiry into what he may have done, or left undone, or left to your father. I ask nothing; I wish to hear nothing. Whatever you have come here to say, you will say it as if my brother had never lived. His name is not to be spoken in this house, and his affairs are not to be discussed under my roof. Do you understand me?”

I have served my lady, boy and man, for the best part of fifty years; and I never heard her speak in that voice but twice before. Mr. Franklin, who had never heard it at all, took it, I am bound to say, like a gentleman. He got up, and made her a bow—a foreign bow, but a good one.

“I understand you, aunt,” he said, “and I agree. The name shall not pass my lips again in this house. If I have anything to say to you to-morrow, I will find some way of saying it that need not offend you.”

My lady gave him her hand once more, and it was over; and I went on pouring out the tea, which had got a little strong in the interval.

Now for the Indians. I had promised Penelope; and after dinner, when my lady had gone up-stairs, and Mr. Franklin and I were alone on the terrace, with his cigar and my pipe, I told him the whole story—the three men and the boy, the ink in the palm of the hand, and the boy’s saying that the English gentleman would travel to this house that day, and had got It about him. I told it, I own, as a joke against Penelope. Mr. Franklin did not take it as a joke. He let his cigar go out, and he stood looking at me in the dusk.

“Betteredge,” he said, “the men who followed me in London were Indians. The boy was right about the gentleman, and the boy was right about the day. And I am very much afraid, in spite of what I said to my aunt in the library, that the boy was right about It. You know what my uncle brought home from Seringapatam? You have heard of the Moonstone?”

I had heard of it—who in our family hadn’t? I said so.

“Then don’t ask me anything more to-night,” says he, “for I have promised my aunt, and I must think how I am to keep my promise. Is that packet safe?”

“Under lock and key, sir,” says I, “and the key under my pillow, in a quarter of an hour.”

“Then I’ll go to bed,” says he, “and so will you, old friend.” And he went in.

I did not go to bed—not directly. I looked into the servants’ hall first, and asked after Rosanna Spearman. She had not come back. I went round the house, and saw to the fastenings, as I do every night of my life, and tried the plate-room door on my way, which is a thing I do not do every night of my life. Then I took my candle and my pipe, and my Robinson Crusoe, and sat down in my beehive chair, and opened the book where it fell open of itself, which is generally the right place. It fell open at these words: “Now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.”

I thought of the packet in the plate-room, and the three foreigners in the Strand, and my lady’s face in the library; and I thought of the poor plain girl on the sands, who was out somewhere on the road from Cobb’s Hole at that hour, with her grey cloak held tight round her. Between one thing and another, I did not doze off as easily as I had done in the morning. The house was quiet; the wind had dropped; you could hear the sea. And there I sat, an old man in a beehive chair, past midnight, with Robinson Crusoe on my knee, a key round my neck, and a housemaid missing—which is where I must leave myself, if you please, till the next chapter.

It was barely half-past six when I let myself out by the side door and set off for the village. The threatened storm had passed off in the night without breaking, and the morning was fresh and grey, with a heavy dew on the grass that soaked my boots before I reached the lodge gates. I had the road to myself. The very stillness of it seemed unnatural after the horror of the room I had left, and I walked fast, my head full of what I had read in the library. Tetanic convulsions—the body arched upon the head and heels—death in the course of a few hours. Every line of that cold medical description had risen up before me, and I had seen it enacted.

Leastways Cottage, where the Belgians were housed, stood a little back from the village street. I had expected to have to rouse the household, and was surprised to find the door already open, and Poirot himself standing on the step, fully dressed, his patent-leather boots gleaming, and his moustaches drawn out to their customary fine points. He was engaged in brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve. He looked up as I came through the gate, and his face was grave.

“Ah, my friend,” he said, before I could speak. “So it is true. Madame Inglethorp is dead.”

I stopped short, a good deal taken aback.

“You know? But how on earth——”

“It was your chauffeur, the man Baily, who told me. He passed here in the car a little after five, going for the doctor, and stopped for one moment at the corner to call out to Mrs. Higgs, the good woman who brings us our milk, that his mistress was taken very bad, and that Dr. Wilkins must be fetched at once. Mrs. Higgs told it to my landlady, and my landlady, who thinks I am an old man to be spared nothing, told it to me with my hot water. I have been waiting for you, Hastings. I said to myself, he will come.”

“Then you know how she died?”

“That, no. Baily said a fit. I do not think you have walked two miles at this hour to tell me that a lady of seventy has died of a fit.”

I told him then, as briefly and as clearly as I could, all that had passed since Lawrence woke me: the locked doors, the breaking in, the convulsions, Dr. Bauerstein’s arrival, the dying cry of “Alfred,” the doctors’ refusal of a certificate, and the post-mortem fixed for that night. I added that I had looked up the symptoms in a medical book, and that in my opinion they answered to strychnine.

Poirot heard me through without a word, only raising his eyebrows once or twice. When I had finished he was silent for a moment.

“And Mr. Inglethorp?” he asked.

“That is the strange part of it. He is not in the house. He has not been there all night.”

“Mr. Cavendish has authorized you to bring me in?”

“He has. He said he left it in my hands.”

“Good.” Poirot went back into the cottage for his hat and stick. When he returned he had also a small black bag, of the kind a doctor carries. “Go back to the house, mon ami. I follow in a quarter of an hour. I have one or two small matters to attend to first, and I wish to look, as I go, at the road.”

“At the road?”

“At the road,” said Poirot, and would say no more.

I confess I thought this a waste of precious time, but I knew my friend too well to argue with him, and I set off back to Styles at a good pace. I had scarcely turned in at the lodge gates when I saw a figure walking up the drive ahead of me, and recognized the long black coat and the black beard of Alfred Inglethorp.

He walked slowly, like a man in no hurry. As I overtook him he turned, and I saw with a little shock that he was smiling—that curious, unemotional smile of his that never reached his eyes.

“Ah, Mr. Hastings. You are abroad early. A beautiful morning after the heat.”

I stared at him. It was impossible that he should not know. And yet, if he did, his composure was monstrous.

“Mr. Inglethorp,” I said, and I heard my own voice shake, “have you not heard? Your wife——”

“Emily? She is not unwell, I hope? She was over-tired last night.”

“She is dead.”

For a moment his face did not change at all. Then he stopped where he stood, and put his hand up to his beard.

“Dead? Emily? Impossible. When?”

“Early this morning. About five o’clock. She had some kind of seizure. The doctors were sent for, but nothing could be done.”

“My poor Emily,” said Alfred Inglethorp slowly. “My poor, poor Emily. And I was not there.” He looked at me. “You will think it strange that I was not there.”

“The whole household thought it strange,” I said bluntly.

He did not seem to resent this. He resumed his slow walk towards the house, and I fell in beside him, since there was nothing else to do.

“I will tell you exactly how it was,” he said, “since it is right you should know. I walked down to the village with Dr. Bauerstein, as you saw. At his door I remembered that I had promised to look in on Denby—the man at Blackwater Farm—about the accounts of the home farm. Emily had been pressing me on the matter. I went on there. It is a good mile beyond the village. We were a long time over the books, Denby being a slow man with figures, and when at last I looked at the time it was close on one o’clock. I put my hand in my pocket for the latch-key, and found I had not got it. I must have left it lying on the hall table when I went out. I did not care to knock up the house at that hour, and Denby offered me a bed. I accepted it. That is the whole of it.”

“You could have telephoned,” I said.

“Denby has no telephone. And to what end? I had no reason to suppose anything was wrong.” He sighed. “I shall reproach myself for it as long as I live.”

We had reached the house. The hall door stood open, and Dorcas was crossing the hall with a tray. At sight of Alfred Inglethorp she stopped dead, and I saw her face harden. He went towards her at once.

“Dorcas, I have just heard the terrible news from Mr. Hastings. Where is Mr. Cavendish? And—my latch-key. I left it on the hall table last night, and so could not get in. Will you see that it is put back on its hook?”

Dorcas set down her tray. She was a devoted servant, and I could see that it cost her something to speak, but she spoke.

“Begging your pardon, sir, the key wasn’t on the table. It hasn’t been on the table. You took it with you when you went out. I saw you take it off the hook and put it in your coat pocket at the door, and I locked up after you at ten, same as always, thinking you had it.”

There was a pause. Alfred Inglethorp put his hand into the pocket of his coat, and drew it out again. The latch-key lay in his palm.

“Dear me,” he said, without any change of expression. “So I did. I must have overlooked it in the dark of Denby’s passage. How very stupid of me.”

He put the key on the table, and went past her into the dining-room, where John was. Dorcas looked after him, and then looked at me, and neither of us said anything at all. I heard John’s voice, low and constrained, and Alfred Inglethorp’s answering it, and then the door was shut.

Poirot arrived some ten minutes later. He was quite unhurried, and stood for a moment in the drive looking up at the front of the house, and then at the windows of the right wing, before he came in. I told him in a low voice of my meeting with Alfred Inglethorp, and of what had passed in the hall. He listened with his head a little on one side.

“He is in the house now?”

“In the dining-room, with John.”

“Then we will leave him there for the present. Mon ami, I should like to see the room of Madame Inglethorp before anyone has more time to be helpful in it. Who has the keys?”

I fetched them from John, who came out to give them to me himself, and shook Poirot by the hand with a kind of dull civility. He asked no questions. I think he was past asking any. Alfred Inglethorp did not appear.

We went upstairs together. Poirot did not go at once to the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room. He walked the length of the corridor first, from the head of the stairs to the door of Cynthia’s room, and back, counting his steps, and he stood for a full minute before the door of Alfred Inglethorp’s room with his hand on the panel, though he did not open it.

“The doors,” he murmured. “Always the doors. Now, Hastings, the key.”

The room was as we had left it, save that someone—Dr. Bauerstein, I supposed—had drawn the sheet up over the bed. The gas was still burning palely in the grey daylight. Poirot turned it out. Then he stood just inside the door with his hands behind his back and looked slowly round, and I saw his eyes go from the bed to the overturned table, from the table to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the splintered connecting door by which we had entered in the night, and from that to the further door, the one into Cynthia’s room. His face was quite expressionless.

“Nothing has been moved?”

“Nothing, except that John lit the gas, and Annie brought the brandy. The table was overturned when we came in. Mrs. Inglethorp must have done it herself in one of the convulsions.”

“The table.” He crossed to it, and knelt down. The little table had been beside the bed. On the carpet round it lay a reading-lamp, some books, a box of matches, a broken glass, and a coffee cup, cracked clean across, with the dregs of the coffee spilt in a brown stain upon the carpet. Poirot looked at all these things for a long time. He did not touch the cup.

“She had not drunk her coffee when she went up,” I said. “I noticed that. She took it with her.”

“You noticed that. Good. You noticed also, perhaps, whether the lamp was alight when you broke in?”

I had to confess that I had not.

He rose, brushed the knees of his trousers with care, and went to the bed. He drew back the sheet, and stood looking down at the dead woman’s face, and for a moment I saw something in his own face that I had not seen there before, and could not name. Then he covered her again very gently, and turned away.

He went next to the fireplace. The ashes in the grate were quite dead now. He stirred them with the poker, and looked long at the row of ornaments on the mantelpiece, and at the clock, which had stopped—I could not have said when. Then he went to the connecting door into Cynthia’s room, and here he stayed a long while. The bolt was shot, as Dorcas had said. It was an old-fashioned bolt, stiff with disuse, and its socket was thick with dust. Poirot bent close to it, so close that his nose almost touched the wood, and then, with an exclamation that was almost a purr, he took a pair of small tweezers from his pocket and drew something from the edge of the bolt-socket.

“Look, Hastings.”

He held it out to me on the palm of his hand. It was a tiny thread of dark green stuff, a mere wisp, not half an inch long, of some coarse woven material.

“What is it?”

“That is what I ask myself.”

“But how did it get there? What does it mean?”

Poirot took an envelope from his pocket-book, laid the thread carefully within it, sealed it, and wrote something upon the outside with his pencil.

“Poirot,” I said, “I think you might tell me.”

“Not yet, mon ami. If I told you now what I think, you would tell me at once what you think, and one of us would be wrong, and it might be me. I prefer to be certain.” He put the envelope away. “There is one thing more I must do in this room, but not yet. First I wish to speak to Mademoiselle Cynthia. One question only. Is she able to see me?”

I went to find her. She was in the morning-room with Mary Cavendish, and she came at once, though she was very pale, and looked, I thought, as if she had been crying. Mary made as if to come too, but Poirot, who had followed me to the head of the stairs, said courteously that he would not detain mademoiselle a moment, and Mary drew back. Cynthia came up alone. Poirot did not take her into the room. He spoke to her in the corridor, outside her own door.

“Mademoiselle, I will not distress you. I ask one thing only. Last night, when Madame Cavendish came to wake you, it was with great difficulty that she did so. You were, they tell me, very heavy with sleep. Is that your habit? Are you ordinarily a sound sleeper?”

Cynthia shook her head.

“No. That is what is so odd. I’m not at all. I nearly always wake at the least thing—if a door bangs, or the dogs bark. I have been laughed at for it. But last night I don’t remember anything from the time I went to bed until Mary was shaking me, and I felt so stupid and heavy that I could hardly stand up. My head still aches with it.”

“At what hour did you go to bed?”

“At about ten. I took up Aunt Emily’s despatch-case to her, and said good-night, and went straight to my room.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all. You have been of the greatest help.”

She looked at him doubtfully, as if she could not see how, and went slowly down again. Poirot watched her go with an odd expression.

“Now,” he said, “the door.”

We went back into the room, and he locked the door behind us. It was past eleven; a full sun had come out and lay in a bar across the carpet, and somewhere below us in the house I could hear the murmur of voices, and once the telephone bell. Poirot walked once more round the room. Then he came and stood by the bed, and took the little envelope from his pocket and laid it on the counterpane between us, and stood looking down at it with his hands behind his back.

“Hastings,” he said, “you saw four doors in this affair. Two were bolted, one was locked, and one was broken open. Which of them was it that killed her?”

I stared at him.

“None of them,” I said. “It was the poison.”

“Ah,” said Poirot softly, “that is where you and I differ,” and he laid one finger on the envelope, and said nothing more.

“Have you?” I said.

“You know I have.”

The cab went up the hill past the lighted square and then on into the dark, still climbing, and then levelled out and went along a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, and then went smoothly down the asphalt, past the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, and then turned on to the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. Brett had her eyes shut. I could see her face in the light that came in when we passed the street-lamps. She had her hat off and her hair was brushed back and her head was against the leather. The cab bumped on the cobbles.

“Where are we going?”

“Montsouris. You said to drive around.”

“I don’t want to drive around. I want a drink.”

“You can have a drink anywhere.”

“I want to go to the Select. Take me to the Select, Jake. Tell him.”

I leaned forward and told the driver and he went on down to the bottom of the street and turned and we went back up along the Boulevard de Port Royal with the trees black against the sky and the houses dark. Brett had opened her eyes. She was looking straight ahead at the back of the driver’s neck.

“You don’t mind?” she said.

“No.”

“It’s the only place I know where one can sit down and be let alone.”

“You won’t be let alone there.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not. But one can pretend one is.”

She put her hand on my arm and left it there. We went along the Boulevard Montparnasse, past the Closerie des Lilas with the lights on the terrace and nobody sitting under them, past the Rotonde, where the crowd was two deep on the terrace, and stopped in front of the Select. The terrace was full. Inside it was smoky and loud and there was a man at the bar with a green hat on who had not taken it off all winter. We found two places at the end of the bar.

“Brandy and soda,” Brett said.

“Two,” I said.

“That’s twice to-night,” Brett said. “I’m keeping count. I said I wasn’t going to get tight.”

“Two brandies won’t hurt you.”

“No. It isn’t the brandies.” She looked at the mirror behind the bar, and the bottles, and at herself. “I look a hundred,” she said.

“You look fine.”

“I feel a hundred. It’s been a rotten week, Jake.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That’s just it. Nothing ever happens.” She drank some of the brandy. “I met a man,” she said.

“You always meet a man.”

“No, but this one’s rather nice. He’s a count. At least he says he’s a count. Mippipopolous. Count Mippipopolous. He’s Greek, or he says he is. He came up to a chap’s table last week at Zelli’s and bought champagne for everybody and then sat down and never said a word for an hour. I liked that.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Nobody has. He owns a chain of sweet-shops in America. He’s got pots of money. He told me he’d been in seven wars and four revolutions, and he showed me the arrow-wounds.”

“Where?”

“Never mind where. He has them, all right. He’s a good chap, Jake. He wanted to take me to Biarritz for the week-end and give me ten thousand dollars to do it.”

“Are you going?”

“I told him I knew too many people in Biarritz.”

The bartender came down the bar and looked at the glasses and went away again. A girl I knew waved at me from a table and I nodded. Brett had not seen her. She was looking down at the zinc.

“You don’t like it when I tell you things like that,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know. Your face gets a way of being.”

“I don’t care who buys you champagne.”

“No,” she said. “Of course you don’t.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“That’s right. It’s none of your business.” She finished the brandy and put the glass down. “Buy me another, will you, and we’ll not talk about it.”

I bought her another and one for myself and we did not talk about it. I sat and drank and looked at the people. They were the same people who are always in the Select. Every one of them has a name and a story and by the end of the summer you know the stories and by the next summer you have forgotten which story went with which name. It does not matter. They are always there. The man in the green hat went out and another one came in. Brett said hello to somebody and somebody else came over and told her a long thing about a studio and a landlord, and she said, “How rotten,” and “How simply foul,” and the somebody went away pleased.

“Did you hear any of that?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Neither did I. Isn’t it awful? One doesn’t hear anything any more.” She put her hand up to her hair and brushed it back. “Jake,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”

“You just got here.”

“I know. I’m not any good, am I? I thought it would be all right here and it isn’t. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Where you like.”

“I have to go back to the Bal,” I said.

“What on earth for?”

“I left fifty francs there.”

“For that girl?”

“For that girl.”

Brett laughed. “She won’t be there. She’ll have gone off with Lett or one of them. You said so yourself.”

“Then I get the fifty francs.”

“You’re a funny chap, Jake.”

“Come on,” I said. “It isn’t far.”

“Oh, all right. But I’m not going to walk it.”

I paid and we went out on to the terrace and found a taxi. It was cooler now. The taxi went down the Boulevard Montparnasse and along the Rue de Rennes and across to the Rue des Ecoles, and then up the hill. Brett sat in her corner with her legs pulled up under her. She did not say anything and I did not say anything, and then she said:

“I say, don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you are.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Neither am I. It’s a lovely night and we are both of us being perfectly foul.”

“I thought you were having a lovely evening.”

“I am. I always have a lovely evening. That’s what I do.”

“Well, then.”

“Well, then, nothing.” She turned her face toward the window. “I wish I hadn’t seen you to-night.”

“I wish you hadn’t come in with that crowd.”

“I know you do.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to, darling. You never do.”

We came up the steep street and the taxi stopped in front of the Bal and I told the driver to wait. I did not say what I was thinking and she did not either, and we had been not saying it since the Napolitain, and it was the same thing we had not been saying for two years. I was in love with her and I could not do anything about it, and that was all it came to.

The accordion was still going. Inside it was hotter than before and the floor was full. The policeman had gone home. The proprietor was still up on his stool with the bells going on his ankle, and his wife was back of the bar, and the daughter was carrying a tray of beer between the tables. The crowd of young men had gone. Frances was gone and the Braddockses were gone. I looked for the patronne and she saw me from behind the zinc and reached under it and came out with the envelope in her hand.

“Monsieur,” she said. “Voilà. She did not ask.”

“She’s still here?”

“Certainly she is still here.” The patronne pointed with her chin.

Georgette was sitting on the bench along the wall with her hat in her lap. She had her shoes off and she was dancing them, one in each hand, on her knees in time to the accordion. A boy in a jersey with a cap on the back of his head was sitting beside her and she was not paying any attention to him. When she saw me she put the shoes down and stood up in her stockings.

“Well,” she said. “The fiancé.”

“Hello.”

“You went away with the English one.”

“Yes.”

“I saw you. I thought, there goes my dinner.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Those little ones? They dance all right, that’s all you can say for them. They wanted me to go to Montmartre. I said I have been to Montmartre, thank you, and I’m not sick enough yet to go with that lot.” She shrugged. “Then they went. They were very gay about it.”

I gave her the envelope. She opened it and looked at the note and looked at me.

“What’s this for?”

“For the evening.”

“You didn’t have any evening.”

“You did.”

“Hell,” she said. She folded the note and put it into her bag and snapped the bag shut. “All right. You’re not a bad type. I said so.” She looked past me at the door. “Is she outside?”

“Yes.”

“She’s good-looking, that one.”

“Yes.”

“Sick too, I bet.”

“Everybody’s sick,” I said. “You said so.”

She grinned and then remembered and closed her mouth. “Go on,” she said. “Don’t keep a lady waiting. And don’t drink pernod.”

I said good night to the patronne. The proprietor nodded from the stool without stopping. Outside the taxi was standing with the motor going and Brett was leaning out of the window, looking up the hill.

“Well?” she said.

“She was there.”

“Did you get your money?”

“I gave it to her.”

Brett looked at me. “You are a funny chap,” she said, and then she laughed and moved over and I got in. “Where now?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care. Somewhere there’s a drink and nobody I know.”

“There isn’t any such place.”

“Then somewhere there’s a drink.”

We went across the river and up to Montmartre after all, to a place where there was a negro drummer and the music was loud and it cost forty francs to sit down, and Brett did not meet her date and did not look for him. We drank champagne there because they would not sell anything else, and we did not talk, and when we did talk it was about the drummer, and about a woman across the room in a silver dress whom Brett said she had known in Cannes, and who would not look at her. Then we went to another place, downstairs, where there was nobody at all but a woman washing glasses, and had a brandy standing up. Brett was very quiet. Once she put her head against my shoulder and left it there, and once she said, “Oh, Jake,” and that was all. It was cold in the street when we came out and the sky over the roofs had begun to go grey.

“It’s getting light,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m going home. Put me in a taxi, will you, and don’t come.”

“All right.”

“Don’t look like that. I’ve got to go home some time.”

There was a taxi at the corner with the driver asleep in it and I woke him. Brett got in and sat back in the corner. She looked very tired. I stood at the window.

“Will I see you?” she said.

“You know where I am.”

“Yes. I always know where you are.” She put her hand out through the window and I took it and she held on hard, the way she had at the bar, and then let go. “Good night, darling. I’ve had a lovely evening.”

“Good night.”

I told the driver the address and the taxi went off down the hill and around the corner and I stood and watched it and then it was gone.

I did not want a taxi. I walked down the hill through the empty streets where the shutters were still closed, past a man opening a café and putting the chairs out on the pavement, and past a milk-cart, and came out on to the boulevards and went along them and down to the river. It was quite light now. The Seine was grey and flat and the barges were tied up along the quai with their washing hung out and smoke starting from one of them. The trees along the bank were black and wet-looking and the plane leaves were very green in the first light. A man was fishing off the end of the Ile, with a long bamboo pole and a float, and there was a woman asleep on the stones beside him with a newspaper over her face. The towers of Notre Dame were grey against a sky that was going from grey to yellow. There was no one on the bridge. I crossed it and went along the left bank with the river beside me, walking home, and the sun came up behind me and my shadow went ahead of me along the quai, and it was a fine morning, and I felt like hell.

Eve came out into Shaftesbury Avenue to find that the rain had stopped and that a watery sun was making apologetic efforts to atone for its behaviour. This was gratifying in itself, but it left her with a problem. The umbrella, which had been so unexpected an addition to her equipment, was now merely a piece of luggage, and the fact that it did not belong to her was beginning to weigh on a conscience which, though elastic in the matter of small bets on horses, was scrupulous in the matter of other people's property. A man who dashes off into a club without waiting to be thanked is a man who will presently miss his umbrella, and she had no wish that anyone should pay for his chivalry with a wetting. She resolved, before doing anything else, to take the thing back to Dover Street.

A club, as she had already guessed, is a place at which a young woman cannot simply ring and ask for a tall gentleman with an eyeglass. But it has a porter, and porters exist to solve difficulties. The one whom she found in the little glass box inside the door of the Drones was elderly and looked at her, and at the umbrella, with the benevolent suspicion of his calling.

"I want to return this," said Eve. "One of your members lent it to me this morning in the rain. I don't know his name. He was very tall and thin and wore an eyeglass, and he came in here about half-past ten."

The porter took the umbrella and examined it, and something in his manner suggested that it was not altogether a stranger to him.

"I couldn't say as to the gentleman, miss," he said cautiously.

"Well, could I leave a note with it? If I might have a piece of paper. . ."

Paper was found, and a pencil, and Eve, leaning on the ledge of the glass box, wrote a few lines of gratitude, and folded them, and addressed them, after some thought, "To the gentleman who lent the umbrella," and signed them with her initials.

"You'll see that he gets it?"

"I'll see it's put in the rack, miss. What name shall I say?"

"Miss Halliday. Miss Eve Halliday. But it's all in the note."

She went out, feeling that she had behaved well and regretting only that so pleasant an episode should have ended on so businesslike a footing, and the porter, having entered the transaction in a book, placed the umbrella in the rack, and beside it, in a small bowl reserved for the purpose, the note. He did these things unhurriedly, and it is possible that he might have done them more quickly had he known that at that very moment the whole matter was being canvassed with some heat in the smoking-room above his head.

* * * * *

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick was a small, round, pink young man, and he had come in from the street with the rain still on him and an expression on his face which suggested that he had been reading the morning papers and found them full of crime. He made straight for the arm-chair in which Psmith, having lunched, was reposing with the peaceful air of a man who has done a good deed and is now resting on his laurels.

"Look here, Smith!"

"Comrade Walderwick," said Psmith with a gentle cordiality, "you have found me. Take a chair. Take two chairs. What is on your mind, if I may put it that way?"

"You know dashed well what's on my mind. Where's my umbrella?"

Psmith adjusted his monocle and gazed at him with a kindly concern.

"You have lost an umbrella?"

"I haven't lost it. It's been pinched. Somebody has snitched it out of the rack, and Perkins says he saw you go out with it at half-past ten this morning."

"Perkins," said Psmith, "is a man of sterling worth and I would not for the world say anything against him. But has it occurred to you that in a world so full of umbrellas as this one a porter, even a good porter, may be pardoned for an occasional confusion of identity? Describe the article."

"It was a jolly good umbrella. I paid two pounds for it in the Burlington Arcade only last week. Silk, with a malacca handle and a gold band with my initials on it. You can't mistake it."

"No," agreed Psmith with feeling. "No, one could not mistake it. It was, I may say, a beauty. I have seldom seen a finer. It would be idle to deny that I have handled that umbrella, Comrade Walderwick. I took it out this morning."

"Well, dash it, then!"

"But I did not do so in any spirit of frivolity. It was required for a purpose. The purpose was a good one. You may take my word for that. And, as I foresee that the explanation, though it would do you credit if you could grasp it, might take some little time, I will not weary you with it. Let us come straight to the point. What will you take for the umbrella?"

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick's pink face became a shade pinker.

"I don't want to sell it. I want it back."

"I fear that is not possible. Not at the moment. The umbrella has gone out into the world, Comrade Walderwick, and who shall say when it will return? But I will buy it of you. You paid two pounds. I will give you six."

"Six?"

"Six," said Psmith. "I am not a rich man, or shall not be after to-night, when I sever my connection with the fish business, but I have always held that an object of sentiment cannot be priced by the ordinary standards of commerce. Come, we will make it seven. Seven pounds for an umbrella which cost you two. There is a certain rounded generosity about the figure which I feel you will appreciate."

Mr. Walderwick was a young man of some temper, but he was also a young man whose allowance had lately been cut down by a parent with old-fashioned views on the subject of bridge. He opened his mouth to reject the proposal with scorn, and closed it again with the scorn unspoken.

"You're potty," he said at length.

"Possibly," said Psmith. "The point has been raised before. But my money is sound." He produced a note-case and counted out seven pounds with the air of one conferring a decoration. "You will find that correct. Should the umbrella ever come back into your hands, which I think improbable, I must ask you to look upon it as mine. I will take a receipt if you wish it."

"I don't want a receipt," said Mr. Walderwick, gathering up the notes with a certain dazed haste, as one who fears that a lunatic may recover his reason at any moment. "But I don't know what you want with the dashed thing."

"You may put it down," said Psmith, "to a whim."

* * * * *

It had been Eve's intention, having got rid of the umbrella, to spend the interval before her appointment quietly and cheaply somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. James's Street, for it was in that street, at the Senior Conservative Club, that Lord Emsworth had arranged, by letter, to see her at three o'clock. But the sun, having once come out, came out so thoroughly that Piccadilly became a place of pleasure, and she had drifted along it as far as the Arcade before she remembered that a girl with her income has no business in the Arcade at all. She was standing before a window in which a single hat reposed on a stand, like a jewel on velvet, when a voice at her side said:

"A creditable effort, but not, I think, quite in the class of yours."

She turned. The tall young man of the morning was regarding the window through his monocle with grave attention. He was now wearing a hat himself, a glossy hat of the very latest fashion, and he looked, if possible, even taller than he had done under the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe.

"Oh!" said Eve. "It's you!"

The young man removed the hat and bowed.

"I have always felt," he said, "that this is the one greeting which a man may safely acknowledge without fear of misunderstanding. It is, on the face of it, unanswerable. Yes, it is I. It has been I for some years now, and I have grown accustomed to it."

"But you know what I mean," said Eve. "You lent me an umbrella this morning. In Dover Street. In the rain. I took it back to your club about an hour ago and left it with the porter."

The young man looked at her with what appeared to be a sympathetic interest.

"Now this," he said, "is very curious. This is one of those things which make one wonder. I have been told, more than once, that I have a common type of face. My friends have remarked on it. It is a face, they say, which is continually reminding them of other people. I once had the greatest difficulty in persuading a gentleman in Fleet Street that I was not his brother-in-law. And now it seems that I have lent you an umbrella."

"Didn't you?"

"I should be delighted to think so. I should like to be the sort of man who lends umbrellas to--if I may say it--young ladies in hats like that one. But I must in honesty tell you that I have never in my life owned an umbrella. I regard them as a confession of weakness. A man who carries an umbrella is a man who has admitted that the weather can beat him."

Eve looked at him doubtfully. There was nothing in the solemn face to suggest that he was not perfectly serious.

"But you came into the club," she said. "I saw you go in. I saw the eyeglass."

"There are eyeglasses everywhere," said the young man. "I make no claim to a monopoly of them. And clubs, as you may have noticed, are full of people going in. It is one of the chief things they are for. No, I fear you must look elsewhere for your benefactor, though I am sorry to say so, for I can see that he was a man of judgment." He glanced again at the hat in the window and back to the one on her head. "I am sure you thanked him very nicely."

"I left a note."

"He will treasure it," said the young man. "Now, this hat. . . ."

But Eve had seen the clock in the window of the shop opposite, and it told her that it wanted only twenty minutes to three, and that the Senior Conservative Club was still some way off. She said good-bye, a little confusedly, and hurried away, and the young man, replacing his glossy hat, watched her go until the corner of the Arcade hid her from sight. Then he sighed, and, having nothing better to do, went on gazing at the hat in the window, though with a diminished interest.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club does not admit women to its premises, but it has, in deference to the spirit of the age, set aside a small room near the entrance in which a member may receive a lady visitor under the eye of a hall-porter, a portrait of the late Lord Beaconsfield, and a fern. It was in this room, at five minutes to three, that Eve sat down to wait for the Earl of Emsworth, and it was there, at twenty minutes past, that she was still waiting when a long, thin, elderly gentleman with a bald head and a vague eye wandered in from the street, looked about him as if he had never seen the place before, and made as though to wander out again.

"Lord Emsworth?" said Eve, rising.

The elderly gentleman stopped and turned. He seemed to be trying to find something, and after a moment Eve realised that what he was trying to find was a pair of pince-nez. He had put a hand into every pocket he possessed before he found them dangling from a cord about his neck.

"Eh? Oh, ah, yes. Yes, quite so. You are--don't tell me--you are the young lady who. . . ?"

"Miss Halliday. About the library."

"The library. Yes, yes. My secretary, Mr. Baxter, said something about the library. He said I was to see somebody. To be sure. Sit down, sit down." He sat down himself, on the edge of a chair, and looked at her with a benevolent bewilderment. "You will forgive me, my dear. I have had a most trying morning. I have been to Kensington--to the Gardens--and, do you know, I found there a *Rosa moschata* in bloom, in June, on the open wall, and the head man had the effrontery to tell me it was nothing out of the way. Nothing out of the way! I wish you could see the one at Blandings. It is on the south wall by the terrace. Baxter will show it you. You are fond of roses?"

Eve said she was, and for some minutes the interview proceeded upon these lines, so that it would have been hard for any impartial observer to say whether she was being engaged as a librarian or as an under-gardener. She had begun to feel that the moment had come to bring the conversation gently round to the subject of books when Lord Emsworth, who had been growing more and more restless, suddenly gave a little start and felt in his breast-pocket.

"Bless my soul, I had forgotten. Baxter gave me a paper. He wrote down some questions. He said I was to be sure to ask you. . . . Here it is."

He unfolded a sheet of paper, adjusted his pince-nez, and read from it with care.

"Is the guest to be met at Paddington or is the car to be sent to Market Blandings? . . . H'm. Ah. Does he take an early tea? . . ." He looked up, and a slow dismay spread over his face. "But this is nonsense. This is not it at all. This is the other one. This is about the poet fellow my sister is bringing down. I must have. . . . Now what can I have done with the other paper? I distinctly remember. . . ." He searched his pockets again, without result, and fell into a gloomy silence, staring at the fern. "I am afraid," he said at last, "that it must have been the one I gave the man at Kensington. He wanted the name of the nurseryman. I wrote it on the back of something. Dear me. Dear me, dear me."

"Perhaps," said Eve, "I could tell you what you would want to know. I've done a little cataloguing before, and I was at Wayland House, and. . . ."

"Yes, yes, no doubt, no doubt," said Lord Emsworth, waving a hand. "I am sure you would do it excellently. Baxter arranged it all, and Baxter is a most capable young man. Most capable. If Baxter is satisfied, I am satisfied. You must come down as soon as ever you can. The car shall meet you. Baxter will arrange about the car. And I will show you the *moschata*. It is on the south wall, by the. . . ." He rose, looking at his watch, then shaking it, then putting it away. "I have to see my son Frederick. Or was it that he was to see me? Good-bye, my dear. So glad. Baxter will write to you."

And he wandered out, leaving Eve alone with Lord Beaconsfield and the fern and a distinct impression that she had been engaged, though by whom, and to do what, and on what terms, she would have found it hard to say. She sat for a moment, then began to laugh, and the hall-porter, who had heard a good deal through the door, permitted himself the ghost of a sympathetic smile as he showed her out.

* * * * *

Night had fallen on Dover Street. In the smoking-room of the Drones Club the lamps were lit, and Psmith, who had spent the earlier part of the evening in composing a letter to his uncle, informing that magnate in courteous but unmistakable terms that from to-morrow morning the fish business would have to get along without him, sat alone in the arm-chair by the window with the letter in his pocket and a feeling of quiet achievement in his heart. It had been, he considered, a good day, marred only by the fact that the seven pounds now in the possession of Comrade Walderwick had purchased him an umbrella which he did not possess.

He was meditating on this when the door opened and Perkins, the porter, came in, bearing before him a silk umbrella with a malacca handle and a gold band, which he laid on the table at Psmith's elbow.

"Mr. Walderwick said I was to bring this up to you, sir. He said it was yours now, and you was to have it. It come back this afternoon."

"It came back?" said Psmith, sitting up.

"Young lady brought it in, sir, about half-past four. Left a note with it." Perkins produced the note and placed it beside the umbrella. "It's not addressed to anybody in particular, sir, but Mr. Walderwick said as it was your umbrella it was your note. Miss Halliday, the young lady gave the name, sir. Miss Eve Halliday. Very particular I should get it right."

He withdrew. Psmith did not immediately open the note. He took up the umbrella instead, and held it for a moment, and looked at the gold band with Comrade Walderwick's initials on it, and there came over his solemn face once more that gentle smile which had flickered across it in the cloak-room that morning.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith softly to the empty room. "Eve Halliday."

He put up his monocle and gazed at the umbrella with the eye of a man who has made a good bargain, and is well pleased with it.