The Chapters

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*26 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Your letter came by the first post, and I have read it three times: once in a hurry, standing in the hall; once slowly, in my own room with the door shut; and once again just now before I sat down to answer it, which I am doing in the half-hour between classes, with a row of copy-books at my elbow. If this is blotted you will know why, and forgive it, as I forgave yours.

“Three in one day! I laughed till the girls at the next table looked round, and then I cried a little over the two poor fellows, and then laughed again over number Three, who was so confused that you could not describe him at all, and who is the only one of the three, I am sure, who had any business to be there. You need not have told me who he was; I think I knew before I had turned the first page. When we were little you could never keep a secret from me for a whole day, because your face told it; and it tells it still, my dear, even by post. I am glad you were so honest with the other two. I think it was brave, and kind, and I like Mr. Morris all the better for taking it standing up. I should have found it harder, I think, to send away Dr. Seward, who tried so hard to be calm and sat upon his hat; a man who plays with a lancet whilst he proposes is very much in earnest. But, as you say, they will not let a girl marry three. You must not think me unfeeling if I say that I mean to make a study of them all. When I come to you I shall make you go over every word of it, and take it down in shorthand, and you will be astonished at how much you have forgotten. Your secret is safe. There is no one here to whom I could tell it if I would, and no one to whom I would if I could; except Jonathan, who has your leave, and who is not here to be told.

“That is my own news, which is that I have none. When I wrote to you I said he would be home in about a week. The week is gone, and more than another after it, and there has been nothing, not a line, since those few hurried words I told you of. I know there is no reason for uneasiness. Mr. Hawkins wrote very kindly, the moment I asked, that he had heard nothing either, and that I was not to fret; that the business Jonathan went upon is a large one, and that such affairs, done in a strange country and in a strange tongue, are never done in a day. I dare say that is so. I have written twice to the hotel at Bistritz, where Jonathan said letters would find him when he came back to it, and yesterday I put in a little note to the landlord besides, in my best German, which is the German of the Fourth Form, begging him to see that my letters reach the English gentleman. I have no one to whom I can say that I am anxious; so I have said it to you, and now I am not, or not so much. There is the bell. Good-bye, my dear, and be as happy as you deserve, which is very happy indeed.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“Give my love to your mother. And, Lucy, you said nothing at all about the curly-haired man in your last but one, and everything in your last. I am not a bad correspondent; I am a patient one.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey Morris and Art at Quincey’s rooms. Quincey had a fire lit, in May, for pure sentiment’s sake, and the windows open above it, so that we were roasted on one side and frozen on the other, exactly as we used to be on the prairie. He said so, and Art laughed. He is not a man who laughs easily, but he laughed all last night.

He brought his messages. They were from her. She had told him everything, he said, both of us, the day and the hour, and how each of us had taken it; she had told him it was her duty to tell him, because a woman ought to tell her husband everything. That is her phrase. Her message to Quincey was that he had made a friend of her, and that friends are rarer than lovers; he had said as much to her, and she gave it him back. Her message to me was that she hoped I would come to see her as before, and not stay away, for that would be to punish her, and she had done nothing wrong. Quincey and I looked at each other over the table, and I think we both felt what fools we should have been to expect anything less from her.

Then we drank the health. Quincey made a speech; there was a great deal in it about the Korea, and about a certain night at the Marquesas which Art has always called a landing and Quincey has always called a swim; and at the end of it he was serious, and put out his hand to Art across the table, and there was nothing any one could add. I said what I could. Then Quincey told yarns till the fire was out, and we walked Art home, and Quincey and I walked on together for a mile beyond, saying nothing whatever, which is a thing that only old friends can do.

I felt, when I came in, that I had put down something I had been carrying about for three days. That is what she meant to do, and she has done it. She reads faces better than I do, whose business it is. To-day, work, and the better for it.

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street,*

“*3 June.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Only a line, for Arthur is coming at four, and it is half-past three, and mamma says my frock is not fit to be seen. Your letter made me cry, but nicely. You are not to make a study of *me*, whatever you do with the others, for you would find out in a minute that I am not nearly good enough for him, and I know it already.

“Arthur went to Mr. Morris’s dinner and came back next day looking as though he had not been to bed, which I believe was the case. He would not tell me what was said, except that they drank my health, all three, and that Mr. Morris made a speech and Dr. Seward a shorter one, and that afterwards they were very silent and very fond of one another. Men are the strangest creatures. If three girls had been in such a case they would have talked all night and never been friends again; and these three walked home together, and are better friends than ever. Dr. Seward has been here since, just as he always is, and looked me straight in the face as if he were reading it, and I let him. I think he read that I was sorry, and glad, and he smiled. Mr. Morris has not come yet, but Arthur says he will.

“And your truant? Arthur says foreign lawyers are worse than English ones, and English ones are the slowest things in creation, and that you are not to fret, for he will turn up with a great many papers and no apologies, as men do. I never felt so well in my life, my dear, nor slept so sound, nor was so happy. Arthur’s father has not been well, so we shall not go anywhere at present; but you are to come to us in the holidays, wherever we are, and we will sit by the fire and undress and talk, even if it is August. There, it is four, and I have not changed.

“Your loving

“LUCY.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*8 June.*--A curious thing to-day, which I set down whilst it is fresh, because it puzzles me, and I do not like to be puzzled.

Renfield has taken to catching flies. He keeps them in a box, and coaxes them in with sugar, and will not have them touched; the attendant tells me he counts them, and knows to a fly when one is gone. I went to him this afternoon in the ordinary way of my rounds, with nothing in my mind but his flies, and had said no more than good-day, when he looked up from his box and asked, quite pleasantly, as a man asks after the weather:--

“Is Miss Westenra well, doctor?”

I said that I did not know whom he meant. He said, “I think you do,” and went back to his flies, and would say nothing more, though I stayed some minutes.

Now, I have not spoken that name within these walls. Not to an attendant, not to a patient, not to this machine; I have gone over the cylinders since, and it is not there. So I have been trying to find how he came by it, for come by it he did, and his eyes are quick. On the twenty-fifth I had him up to my study to question him, and my letters lay open on the table, and there was a note from Quincey Morris among them in which her name is written twice. It is possible. He reads whenever he can; he has asked me for the newspaper. Or the attendants may have talked; the men gossip, and they know that I dine out, and where. Either would serve, and I will take the simpler, as a physician should.

But it was not the name that stayed with me. It was that he asked it as a man asks a question to which he thinks he already knows the answer; and that when I did not reply he looked at me, up and down, once, and nodded, and let me be. I have made a practice of reading men’s faces. It did not occur to me that mine might be read, and least of all by such a reader. (*Mem.*, I have tried often enough to read hers, and got nothing for my pains. I am, it seems, an easier study.) I shall say nothing of it to him again. There is nothing to say. I set it down only because I mean this record to be *accurate*, and a thing is not to be left out because it is not understood.

*Letter, Martin Kessler, of the Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Mina Murray.*

“*Bistritz, 8 June.*

“Gracious Fräulein,--

“I make my excuse that I write the English so bad. I have it only from the travellers, and the English travellers come not many to us. The gracious Fräulein’s letters for the Herr Harker are come here, three, and also her German letter to myself, which my wife and I have read with much pleasure and could well understand. I have them all safe in my office. The Herr has not come back to us since the fifth of May, when he went with the diligence from our door to the Pass, and I did think he should be here again soon, as he said, and kept for him the same room. But the day before yesterday a carrier, who comes down from beyond the Pass to our market, brought by mouth a word for the hotel, that the English Herr is well, but is detained by his affairs some weeks longer, he could not say how many, and that letters which come for him are to be kept here and not sent after, because he is not sure to be in one place and the roads are bad. So I keep them. The carrier could say nothing more; he is a stupid fellow, and had it only from another. I thought the Fräulein would wish to know why her letters bring no answer, and that it is not that they are lost.

“My wife bids me say that she remembers the young Herr very well, and that he was civil and cheerful and ate a good supper, and she prays that he comes back to us so. If the Fräulein wishes, I will send the letters after him when there is a safe hand going; but I think it is better I keep them, as the word said, till he comes.

“I am, with high esteem, the servant of the gracious Fräulein,

“MARTIN KESSLER.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*16 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have had a letter at last, and it is not from Jonathan. It is from the landlord of the hotel at Bistritz, and I send it to you just as it came, spelling and all, for I would not have you miss a word of it; and you are to send it back, for I mean to keep it. I have read it, I think, twenty times. The first time I was so glad that he is well that I could have kissed the stupid carrier; the second time I began to count on my fingers what ‘some weeks longer’ might mean; and by the tenth I had come round to thinking that a message which has passed through the mouths of two men who had it from a third is not a thing to build upon either way, and that the only sure thing in it is the kind heart of the good woman who remembers that Jonathan ate a good supper. I think he did; he always does.

“So I am not to be fretted, and I am not. Mr. Hawkins says the same, and that he has heard nothing either, and that he is sure all goes well, for Jonathan is careful and would have written if anything were amiss. He is right, and I know he is right, and I say so to myself when I wake in the night, which is not often. In the meantime I have my shorthand, which is coming on famously, and my typewriter, and my girls; and I am to have you in the holidays, wherever you are, by the fire in August. I shall bring the landlord’s letter, and we will make a study of it together. Arthur is right, too: he will come with a great many papers and no apologies, and I shall not want any.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“I have written to Herr Kessler to thank him, and to say that he is to keep the letters. And I have written to Jonathan again, all the same, to lie with the others, so that when he comes down to the hotel he will find that I did not stop.”

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

“*27 June.*

“Two letters from Jonathan. Latest dated nineteenth says he started for home that morning. Expect him daily.

“HAWKINS.”

It was not many nights after that walk that the first of the falling stars came down. It had grown into a habit with me since my vigil with Ogilvy to go out into the garden before bed and find the planet, and I recall that I stood so on this night, with my back against the warm brick of the house, and that there were a few small clouds in the west, and that the air had the stillness which comes before a change in the weather. Mars was high and very bright. I had looked at it, I suppose, for the better part of a minute, and was thinking of nothing more remarkable than the paper I had left unfinished upon my desk, when a point of light appeared low in the east, over towards Chertsey, and grew.

It did not grow as an ordinary falling star grows, which is to say it did not simply flick across the sky and vanish. It came on steadily and with a kind of deliberation, a hard greenish spark drawing a line of fire behind it, and the line broadened as it came until it was like a streak of white-hot wire laid across the darkness. It passed a little to the north of me, so that I had to turn my head to follow it, and I remember that it seemed very near, and that for a moment the pines at the end of the garden stood out black against a green glare, and that I heard—or afterwards believed I heard—a sound like the tearing of silk. Then it was gone behind the trees, downward, towards the low ground beyond Ottershaw, and the sky was as it had been.

I stood for some time expecting a report, and none came. Nothing came but the creak of a cart on the road and, a long way off, a dog barking, and presently that stopped also. I was struck chiefly, I think, by the greenness of the thing, and by its slowness, and I said to myself that it would be a fine subject for Ogilvy, who had never, so far as I knew, been fortunate enough to see a large meteorite fall. I even considered walking over to the observatory at once. But it was late, and I had no lantern to hand, and the road was dark; and in the end I went in and told my wife, who was already in bed, that I had seen a very handsome meteor, and slept as soundly as I have ever slept in my life.

I have thought since that there must have been a good many people awake and abroad that night who saw the same thing and slept as soundly as I did. A carrier on the Chertsey road saw it and took it for a rocket from some late party at one of the great houses. A few small boys saw it. Ogilvy, as I shall tell, saw it; but he alone of all of us had the curiosity to go and look for it in the dark.

I was up before six. It was a grey, warm morning, with mist lying in the hollows, and I went out with no clearer purpose than to walk in the direction the thing had taken and see whether anything was to be found. The road runs down from the higher ground towards Chertsey through a region of small farms and market gardens, and beyond the last of the cottages it drops to a stretch of flat wet meadow where gravel was dug some years ago and the diggings have since filled with water. There is a rough track to the place, much used by carts in the summer, and I had gone perhaps a hundred yards along it when I became aware of a smell of scorching, and then, over the hedge, of something white and drifting which I took at first for the ordinary river mist.

It was steam. When I came through the gap where the carts go in I saw the whole extent of the pit, a shallow irregular mere of two or three acres with reeds about its margin, and the far half of it was hidden altogether in a rolling white cloud, and out of that cloud, on the nearer side, rose the back of the Thing.

I call it the Thing, as everyone came to call it in the days that followed, because I had then no other word for it and have found none better since. It lay tilted in the water like a beached hull, more than half its bulk under the surface, so that what I saw was a great rounded flank of a dull ochreous colour, perhaps eighty feet of it, sloping down into water that bubbled and smoked wherever it touched. The near end was buried in the gravel of the bank, which it had thrown up before it in a low rampart; the far end, so far as the steam allowed me to judge, was lost in the deeper water towards the middle of the pit. The reeds along that side were burnt to black stubs. A pollard willow which had stood at the water’s edge for as long as I could remember was split and scorched and leaning, and the grass on the bank was brown for twenty yards. And over it all hung the steam, rising and thinning and rising again, with a continual soft roar of boiling that I could hear quite plainly from where I stood.

I was so much occupied with looking at this that I did not at first see Ogilvy. He was standing on the rampart of gravel, in his shirt sleeves and with his coat over his arm, bareheaded, and he had the look of a man who had not been to bed. When he saw me he waved his coat and came scrambling down.

“You saw it?” he said.

“I saw it fall,” I said. “About eleven.”

“Ten minutes past. I had the clock. I was outside taking the air and it went clean over the dome; I was here before one. My dear fellow, you never saw such a sight. The whole pit was going like a kettle, and the light off it—you couldn’t come within fifty yards. It has been cooling ever since. It’s a meteorite, and the biggest that has ever come down in this island, or I’m very much mistaken. There’s nothing in the national collection to touch it. There’s nothing in Europe to touch it. It will be in every paper in the kingdom by tomorrow night, and I want a photograph of it before the fools from Chertsey begin chipping bits off.”

He went on in this way for some time, and I let him go on, because I was looking at the Thing.

It is difficult, now that everyone knows what it was, to recover the frame of mind in which I looked at it that morning. I did not think of Mars—not at first. I thought of the blackened willow, and of how the cattle would have to be kept off the meadow. But as the steam thinned with the rising of the sun, and the flank of the Thing stood up more clearly out of it, I found myself troubled by its outline. It was too regular. A meteorite, as I understood the matter, is a broken lump, pitted and knobbed and anyhow; but this was a cylinder, or the greater part of one, and the curve of it as it went down into the water was as true as the curve of a boiler. The scale that covered it was blistered and cracked and in places had flaked away, and beneath the flakes there was a surface of a smoother, greyer colour that caught the light.

I said something of this to Ogilvy.

“Pooh,” he said. “It has come through eighty miles of air at forty miles a second. What do you suppose that does to a mass of iron? It melts it like a candle; it planes it and rounds it as a river rounds a pebble. There are stones in the Vienna collection as smooth as cannon-balls. Regular! Of course it’s regular.”

“It is very large to be regular,” I said.

“It is very large,” said Ogilvy, “and that is all that need be said about it. Peary’s Greenland iron weighs thirty tons and looks like a tent. This is bigger. Very well, then, this is the biggest. Somebody had to find the biggest.”

I hesitated, and then I said what had been in my mind for some minutes: that we had seen a light on Mars ten nights running, and that it had stopped, and that here, within the time one might allow for such a journey, was a very large body fallen out of the sky. I said I did not know what to make of it, but that it seemed to me a thing worth making something of.

I wish I could convey the look he gave me. It was the look of a man who has been kind to an amateur and is now being paid for it.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “there are stones falling on this planet every night of the year, and in the last ten years I have not seen one come down. That I should see one this week proves nothing but that I have been living a great deal out of doors this week. As for the flashes—they were volcanic, or they were meteoric, or they were something we have not the least idea of; but I will tell you what they were not. They were not anybody firing at us. I said to you, not a month since, that the chances against anything manlike on Mars were a million to one, and I say it still. You have been reading the illustrated papers.”

“I have been writing for them,” I said, which was not quite true; and he laughed, and the matter dropped, and we went round the pit together to see whether one could approach from the far side. One could not. The heat came off the water like the heat from an open oven door, and the sedges there were still smouldering.

I went home to breakfast about eight, leaving Ogilvy sitting on the rampart with a notebook, and I told my wife what I had seen. I told it, I am afraid, with a good deal of Ogilvy’s manner and very little of my own doubt, for the doubt had already begun to seem foolish to me in the daylight; but she was curious, as anyone would have been, and when I said that I meant to go back she said at once that she would come with me. I remember that she put on the stout boots she wore for the country and a hat with a veil against the flies, and that as we went down the lane she took my arm and asked whether the thing was hot still, and whether it was safe.

It was after nine when we came again to the gap in the hedge, and already there were people. The news had gone up the road with the milk. There were half a dozen men from the cottages who should have been at work, and a knot of boys, and two or three women standing well back with their arms folded, as women do when they have come to see a thing and mean to disapprove of it. A man in a trap had pulled up in the track and was standing on the seat to look over the hedge. Ogilvy had got a labourer to fetch a hurdle, and had set it across the gap on the near side with a board chalked Keep Off, and nobody was taking the least notice of it. He himself was pacing the bank with a tape, and a young man I did not know was holding the other end.

The steam was much less. One could see now the whole exposed length of the Thing, and even something of the far end, where a low grey curve broke the surface like the back of some enormous animal lying in the shallows. The water round it no longer boiled, but shivered and smoked, and every few moments a bubble the size of a bucket came up out of the water along its side and burst with a sound like a cork drawn under a blanket. A dead pike floated near the reeds, very white, with its belly up. Two of the boys were trying to reach it with a stick.

My wife stood looking for a long time without saying anything. Then she said, “It is like a ship,” which was very much what I had thought myself and had not liked to say again in Ogilvy’s hearing.

The crowd grew all the morning. I have said that people in these latter days have little conception of the abundance of our newspapers; they have as little, I think, of the appetite of a Surrey village for a spectacle, and the news that something had fallen out of the sky into the old gravel pit went out along every road in the district as fast as a bicycle could carry it. By eleven there were forty or fifty people about the pit. Somebody had brought a barrel of beer on a cart from the inn at Ottershaw and was doing well with it. A constable came, looked, took out his notebook, put it away, and stood by the hurdle with the air of one who has been given a duty and cannot think what it is. Ogilvy was asked a hundred times what the thing was, and told them a hundred times that it was a meteorite, and I saw more than one man go away disappointed at the plainness of the word.

It was towards noon that the accident happened. The spit of gravel which the Thing had thrown up ran out along its side for some distance, so that a man might walk dry-shod almost to the water’s edge, and some of the younger men had for an hour been daring one another out along it. Ogilvy had twice ordered them back. A big fair young fellow from one of the farms, with a clay pipe in his mouth and his hands in his pockets, went further than the others, and stood for a moment quite close under the curve of the flank, and looked round grinning at his friends, and said that it was no hotter than the side of a copper, and to show them, took out his hand and laid it flat upon the surface.

I saw his shoulders jerk before I heard him. Then he screamed—a high, astonished sound that stopped everyone on the bank where they stood—and came stumbling back along the gravel with his arm held out stiffly before him and his face gone the colour of tallow. His friends caught him at the bank. The palm and fingers were white and puckered, and even as they held him the skin began to rise in a great blister across it, and one of the women pushed through and got him down on his knees with his hand in the ditch that runs out of the pit, where the water was cold, and he crouched there whimpering and swearing by turns while the constable, who had found his duty at last, began to shout at the crowd to stand back.

They stood back. There was, for a minute or two, a silence over the whole bank, and in that silence the Thing lay steaming a little in the noon sunshine, and a lark went up out of the meadow behind us as though nothing whatever had happened.

My wife had taken my arm very tightly. When I looked at her she was quite white, and I knew that she had not liked the place from the first, and had stayed only because I had. I said to her that it was nothing, that the fellow had burnt his hand and would keep the use of it, and that Ogilvy and the constable would have the gravel cleared now; and then I said that she had far better go home, and that I would come to her at one. She did not want to leave me, I think, so much as she wanted to be gone; but she made me promise that I would not go out upon the gravel myself, and that I would send word by one of the boys if anything happened, and I promised. I walked with her as far as the gap in the hedge. The man in the trap was still there, and offered to drive her up the lane, and she got in beside him and looked back once, and I waved, and the hedge hid her.

I remember that as I turned back the clock at Chertsey was striking twelve across the meadows, very small and clear, and that the fair young man was being led off up the track with a handkerchief round his hand, and that Ogilvy, with his tape rolled up in his fist, was explaining to a group of newcomers that the surface of a large metallic body would naturally remain hot for a considerable time. People were still arriving. Two cyclists came down the track, and behind them a governess cart with children in it, and behind that, at the top of the lane, I could see the dust of others. I found a place on the bank where the grass was not burnt, and sat down with my back to the crowd and my face to the pit, and watched the last of the steam go up from that long grey flank into the sunlight.

The shower which had driven Eve Halliday beneath the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, having done all that could reasonably be expected of it for the coal trade of Dover Street, drifted away shortly before noon in the direction of Bloomsbury, and the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, coming down into the hall of the Drones Club with the intention of walking round to his tailor's, paused on the mat and eyed the sky. It was a doubtful sky, and Mr. Walderwick was a young man who took no chances with a new grey suit. He went to the cloak-room.

"Umbrella," he said.

The attendant received the request without enthusiasm. He had been expecting it for an hour and a half.

"Mr. Psmith took it, sir. At half-past ten. He asked me whose it was, and I told him, and he said 'Ah!' and took it."

There was a pause. The Hon. Hugo was not a rapid thinker, and the situation seemed to him to call for a good deal of thought.

"Where is he?"

"In the smoking-room, sir, I believe."

Psmith was in the smoking-room. He had returned to it, after his errand of mercy, with the glow which comes to the man who has done a good deed and had a ringside seat while doing it; and from a point some little way back from the window, for he had the delicacy not to appear to be waiting for applause, he had watched the girl in the hat step out from under the awning, laugh, and walk away round the corner into Piccadilly, taking the sunshine with her. It had left him thoughtful. When Mr. Walderwick came in, he waved a kindly hand.

"Comrade Walderwick! Come in. Take a chair. Take a cigarette. The glass, I think, is rising."

"Look here," said Mr. Walderwick, who had prepared a rather better opening on the stairs but had mislaid it on the way up, "what about my umbrella?"

"Ah," said Psmith. "Your umbrella. I was on the point of raising the subject myself."

"Jenkins says you took it."

"Jenkins is a truthful man. I did."

"Well, what have you done with it?"

Psmith placed the tips of his fingers together and regarded his visitor with benevolence.

"That," he said, "is a question which I fear I am not in a position to answer. It is not that I distrust you, Comrade Walderwick. But there are matters--delicate matters, touching the honour of a third party--on which a man must consult not his inclination but his conscience. Let it suffice that the umbrella is not at the moment on the premises."

"Not on the--! Do you mean you've lost it?"

"I would not say lost. I would prefer to say that it has gone out into the world. After years of dull routine in a rack, it has found its true vocation. I am sorry that I can tell you no more, but you will appreciate the position."

Mr. Walderwick did not appreciate the position, and said so. He said, further, and at some length, that the umbrella had been given him by his aunt, that it was a dashed good umbrella with a gold band round the handle and his initials on it, and that he was not going to stand there and be talked at. He wanted his umbrella, and he wanted it now.

"You raise," said Psmith, "an interesting point, and I think I can meet you. I cannot give you the umbrella, for the reasons stated. But we are both men of business. What is the article worth?"

"What?"

"What did your aunt give for it? These things are sold, I believe, by the guinea."

"Thirty-five bob," said Mr. Walderwick sulkily. "At Briggs's in the Arcade. But that isn't the point--"

"Thirty-five shillings. That is your figure, and I make no attempt to beat you down. I will give you ten pounds."

"Ten--!"

"I see that you hesitate. You are thinking of the sentimental value. The aunt. The gold band. Very well, I will not haggle with you. Fifteen."

"But dash it, look here--"

"Twenty," said Psmith. "Twenty pounds, Comrade Walderwick, and I take the entire risk of the thing never coming back. Any advance on twenty? Going--going--"

He had taken out a note-case, and was laying four five-pound notes one by one on the little table at his elbow with the air of a man dealing a hand at patience. Mr. Walderwick looked at them. He was, as has been said, no thinker, but he could count, and the total to which he presently came was one of which he happened at the moment to stand rather badly in need, a horse named Sunset Glow having done at Newbury exactly what any impartial judge could have told him it would do. He had come into the room as a wronged man, and it is not easy to lay down a part in which one has been doing so well. But twenty pounds is twenty pounds.

"Gone," said Psmith, "to the gentleman in the grey suit. Pick them up, Comrade Walderwick. The umbrella is mine. I have bought it. Should it ever return to the bosom of this club, Jenkins will hand it to me, and nothing more need be said. Should your aunt make inquiries, you may tell her with perfect truth that it has been acquired by a collector."

The Hon. Hugo gathered up the notes in the manner of one who suspects a trick but cannot see where it comes in. Then, feeling that some comment was called for and finding nothing to hand but the truth, he said that Psmith was potty, and went out. Psmith adjusted his monocle and resumed his contemplation of the premises of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe. It was his opinion that he had got a bargain.

* * * * *

The rules of the Senior Conservative Club, which are in most respects of a granite rigidity, relent so far as to permit a member to receive a lady visitor in the small dark apartment off the hall known as the Strangers' Room, and it was here, at half-past three, that Eve Halliday, having lunched for reasons of economy on a bun and a glass of milk, was shown in to be interviewed by her prospective employer.

She had prepared herself with some care to make a good impression. She need not have troubled. It was clear within two minutes that Lord Emsworth, a long, thin, amiable man with pince-nez which seemed to have been put on his nose by somebody else, had not the least recollection of who she was or why she had come, and was too courteous to say so. He had been reading a seed catalogue, and he rose holding it and gazed at her with a mild, hopeful vagueness.

"Miss--ah--yes. Of course. Baxter said something. Do sit down. You have come about--?"

"The library, Lord Emsworth."

"The library! Exactly." He seemed relieved. "My secretary, Baxter, is very anxious to have it catalogued. I cannot think why. Nobody ever reads the books. I don't. My son Frederick doesn't. But Baxter is a very energetic young man. Do you know anything about the library?"

"Not yet. But if you would like to hear what I--"

"No, no, how could you? It has a great many books in it. That is really all I can tell you about it myself." Lord Emsworth removed his pince-nez, looked at them as though surprised to find them in his hand, and replaced them. "Do you like flowers, Miss--Miss--"

"Halliday."

"Halliday, of course. Do you like flowers?"

"Very much."

"Ah!" said Lord Emsworth, and it was as if the sun had come out.

For the next quarter of an hour he spoke of flowers. Eve, who had brought three testimonials and a working knowledge of the decimal system of classification, sat with them in her lap and listened. She learned of the hollyhocks and what the frost had done to them, of the yew alley, of the roses, of a head gardener named McAllister who held strong views on gravel paths; she learned, in passing, that his lordship's brother-in-law, a Mr. Keeble, had talked to him only yesterday for ten minutes about something of the utmost importance, though what it was his lordship had not the faintest idea. Twice she tried to bring the conversation round to the decimal system, and twice it slid gently away and came to rest among the roses. It was not, she felt, going well. It was not going at all. She had almost forgotten that she was being interviewed when Lord Emsworth laid the catalogue on the table with a sigh.

"I ought to be in the garden now. I should never have come to London at all, but my sister Constance insisted. I was to see you, and I was to lunch with a poet. A Canadian poet. Constance collects poets. He is coming to stay with us at Blandings, and I have no doubt he will talk to me about his poems from morning till night. McTodd, his name is. Ralston McTodd."

Eve sat up.

"Ralston McTodd!"

"You know him?"

"I know his wife," said Eve.

Something in her voice caused Lord Emsworth to peer at her with faint uneasiness. Eve did not notice. It had been a trying day. Her friends were unhappy, her shoes were wet, and here, in the last place in the world where she would have looked for him, was the man who was the cause of half of it.

"She is one of my dearest friends, and he has just deserted her. He simply walked out and left her without a word, and she has cried herself ill, and if Ralston McTodd is coming to Blandings, Lord Emsworth, I think you ought to know before you engage me that I am going to find it very hard to be civil to him. I don't think I shall try. I should like to--" She paused for the word. "I should like to hit him with something."

She stopped. It had been borne in upon her, a moment too late, that this was not the manner in which the better handbooks advise applicants for posts to address prospective employers. Nobody, so far as she knew, had ever secured a situation by announcing that she proposed to assault the guests. She waited, a little breathless, for the interview to be brought to a close.

Lord Emsworth had taken off his pince-nez again. He was looking at her with a peculiar expression, and it was some moments before she was able to identify it as one of profound and reverent approval.

"Would you?" he said. "Would you really? God bless my soul! My dear young lady, I have felt exactly the same about every poet my sister Constance has ever brought into the house, and I have never once had the courage to say so." He beamed upon her. "You had better come down as soon as you can. Baxter will write to you about the trains. And if you should feel like hitting the fellow when he arrives, hit him, my dear, hit him. Only not in the rose garden. McAllister is very particular about the rose garden."

* * * * *

The sun, by the time Eve reached Dover Street, was shining with a brilliance which made the events of the morning seem to belong to another and a wetter life. The awning had been rolled up, and Eve, umbrella in hand, was crossing the road toward the door through which her benefactor had vanished when it opened and he came down the steps. He was wearing a hat now, and looked, if possible, taller.

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

Psmith removed the hat and looked down at her with grave inquiry.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're the man who lent me this umbrella."

Psmith took the umbrella from her and examined it through his monocle with the courteous interest of a connoisseur asked his opinion of a piece of old china.

"A very handsome umbrella," he said. "I congratulate you. But I fear you are under some misapprehension."

"But you did! This morning, under that awning. You came across from this club without a hat and put it into my hand and ran away."

"I have never in my life run," said Psmith with dignity. "I have occasionally, when circumstances seemed to warrant it, walked briskly, but even that I try to avoid. And I invariably wear a hat. No, the description does not fit. You are thinking of some other tall man. London is full of them. They are turned out, I understand, by the gross."

"With an eyeglass?"

"The eyeglass is far commoner than you suppose. In Dover Street alone . . ." He handed back the umbrella. "My advice, if I may offer it, is to keep it. Somebody has evidently given it to you, and it is a good umbrella, and one does not look a gift umbrella in the ferrule. You will observe that it has a gold band on the handle, with initials."

Eve looked. The initials were H. W.

"Neither of which," said Psmith, "is mine."

Eve looked from the initials to his face. It was entirely solemn, and yet she had a distinct impression that somewhere behind it something was enjoying itself very much indeed. She did not know whether to be annoyed or to laugh, and compromised by being a little of both.

"Then, as it isn't yours, you won't mind if I leave it inside with the porter? With a note?"

"An admirable plan. The porter is a most reliable man. Whoever the gentleman is, I have no doubt it will reach him." He replaced his hat. "And now you must excuse me. I have an appointment at the top of Shaftesbury Avenue which I have already postponed once to-day, and a man in my position cannot afford to be careless about appointments. Good afternoon."

"Who are you?" said Eve.

"A passer-by," said Psmith. "Merely a passer-by."

And he bowed, and passed by.

Eve went up the steps. The porter of the Drones Club, a large, calm man to whom nothing had been a surprise for many years, received her without a flicker and supplied her, on request, with a sheet of the club's notepaper and a pen. She wrote standing at his desk, and she wrote with some feeling:

"Returned with many thanks to the tall gentleman with the eyeglass who lent it to me this morning outside Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe's, and who has since, I am sorry to hear, entirely lost his memory. It is hoped that the sight of it may help to bring it all back."

She did not sign it. She folded it and gave it to the porter with the umbrella.

"For the gentleman who has just gone out," she said. "The very tall one."

"Very good, miss. And what name, miss?"

Eve was conscious of a strong desire to ask the porter what name he would have given the gentleman with the eyeglass, and of a still stronger determination not to give the gentleman with the eyeglass the satisfaction.

"He'll know," she said.

"It's the rule, miss," said the porter, "for articles left for members. Full name, if you please, for the book."

Eve gave it, and went out into the sunshine, and walked home, because she could not afford a cab.

* * * * *

It was a little after seven when Psmith returned to the Drones. He had spent the intervening hours in a variety of ways, none of which need detain us, and he was feeling the mellow contentment of a man who has put in a good day's work when the porter emerged from his box with an umbrella in one hand and a folded paper in the other.

"A young lady left this for you, sir, this afternoon."

Psmith took the umbrella. He looked at the gold band. Then he unfolded the paper and read it, and something that was very nearly a smile came and went upon his solemn face.

"A young lady," he said. "Did she leave a name?"

"Yes, sir. Halliday, sir. Miss Eve Halliday. She didn't seem to want to give it, sir, but I told her it was the rule, and I made a note of it in the book."

"Quite right, Robinson," said Psmith. "A rule is a rule. It is all that stands between us and chaos."

He went up to the smoking-room. At that hour it was empty, the club having gone in to dinner, and he sat down in the arm-chair in the window with the umbrella across his knees and looked out at Dover Street. The light was going. The frontage of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, shorn of its awning, presented to the world once more the aspect of a shop that sells coal and nothing else. Nobody was standing under it. It had ceased to be a place and become a memory.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith.

He said it aloud, to the empty room, in the manner of a man trying over a phrase of music to see how it goes; and, having tried it, sat on in silence with his monocle in his eye and his umbrella across his knees, looking out at the coal-merchant's window. It would be idle to pretend that he had ever heard a name he liked better.

Lady Russell was a woman of sound principle and steady judgement; and if her judgement was a little too apt to be led by rank, and her principle to bend before a coat of arms, it was a bending only, and never a breaking. She could not think it possible that Sir Walter Elliot should be in debt; and when she was obliged to think it, she could not think it possible that he should remain so. Her regard for him as her friend’s husband, her regard for the Elliots as a family, and her regard for Kellynch as the seat of that family, all united with a strong personal dislike of every thing that was not honourable, to make her set about the business of his relief with an earnestness which admitted of no delay. She had consulted, she had calculated, she had spent three evenings over a sheet of figures; and before the morning appointed for the consultation at the Hall, she had a scheme ready which she believed no reasonable man could refuse.

She had consulted Anne, for Anne was always consulted by Lady Russell, though by nobody else; and Anne’s opinion had been, from the first, that more must be done than Lady Russell was willing to propose. But Lady Russell, thinking of what Sir Walter could bear, had softened, and softened again, till the plan which she carried up to the Hall was as moderate as her conscience would allow, and a good deal more moderate than her god-daughter’s.

Mr Shepherd was there before her. He was a civil, cautious man, who had been the agent of the Kellynch property above twenty years, and who understood the family too well to bring forward any thing disagreeable in his own person, when it could possibly be brought forward in another’s. He had a plan also; but he had resolved that Lady Russell should speak first.

They were assembled in the library; Sir Walter in his own chair, Elizabeth beside him, Anne, as usual, a little apart, and the Baronetage lying open on the table between them, where it had been lying, Anne suspected, ever since breakfast.

Lady Russell laid her paper on the table with the composure of a woman who has done her duty and expects others to do theirs. Her scheme was this: that the journey to London should be given up every second year, and in the intervening years confined to lodgings rather than a furnished house; that the four carriage horses should be reduced to a pair; that two of the men-servants and the under-gardener should be dismissed; that the table should be less profuse and the wine less costly; that the subscriptions to the county races and the assembly should be withdrawn; and that a fixed sum should be laid by out of every quarter’s income, by which means, according to her calculations, the whole of the debt might be discharged in seven years, and the family remain at Kellynch all the while, in a style which she called respectable, and which Anne privately called still too handsome.

Sir Walter read it through, holding the paper at some distance from him, as if it had been ill-scented; and having read it, laid it down.

“Seven years!” said he. “And I am to go to London every other year, like a country attorney; and to be seen in the Park with a pair of horses, like a physician; and to have my wine looked into by my own butler! No, Lady Russell. I am much obliged to you; I am sure it is all very kindly meant; but this is not a plan for Sir Walter Elliot. It would do vastly well for a Mr Smith.”

Lady Russell had expected some resistance, but not this. She attempted to argue; she spoke of the tradespeople, of the mortgage, of what the county might come to hear; but Sir Walter had done. He would listen to no plan which required him to appear in the world otherwise than as he had always appeared. The credit of the family was in its appearance. Let the tradespeople wait; they had waited before.

Mr Shepherd, when it came to his turn, was more circumspect. He did not lay down a paper; he had it in his pocket, and left it there. He began with the timber. There was a great deal of very fine timber upon the estate; the plantations on the north side were now, in his humble judgement, at their best; a judicious fall, of nothing that could be missed from the house or the approach, would go a great way, a very great way indeed, towards satisfying the most pressing of the London creditors; and if Sir Walter would further permit him to hint, to the two or three gentlemen in question, that a friendly accommodation, a small abatement of their demands, in consideration of prompt payment of the remainder—

He got no further. Sir Walter had risen from his chair.

“Cut down the timber! Trees that the first Sir Walter planted! And go begging to my tradesmen for an abatement, as if I were a bankrupt haberdasher! Mr Shepherd, you forget yourself. You forget where you are, and to whom you are speaking.”

Mr Shepherd begged pardon; had merely thrown out an idea; was entirely at Sir Walter’s disposal; and sat down again, a little pinker than he had risen, but not at all discomposed; for he had reckoned upon this, and had something else in reserve.

There was a pause. Lady Russell looked at her paper; Elizabeth looked at the empty grate; Sir Walter looked at himself in the glass over the chimney-piece, and was somewhat restored by what he saw. It was in this pause that Anne spoke.

She had not meant to speak. She was so little in the habit of being attended to, that she scarcely knew, when she began, whether she would be allowed to finish; but the thing had been on her mind a fortnight, and it seemed to her that if it were not said now, it would never be said at all.

“I believe,” said she, “that neither of these plans goes far enough.”

Everybody looked at her.

“I do not mean that Lady Russell’s is not very good, or Mr Shepherd’s very well considered. But they are both contrived to spare us; and I do not think we ought to be spared. If we are in debt, we are living upon money which belongs to other people; and I cannot see that there is any dignity in that, whatever there may be in a chaise and four. I would give up London altogether; not every other year, but altogether, for five years at least. I would keep only such horses as are wanted for the farm and for one carriage. I would bring the household down to what it was in my mother’s time, when the house was kept, I have always heard, as well as any in the county. I would pay everybody, to the last shilling, as fast as it could be done, and ask no abatement of any one; and I would live at Kellynch the whole time as quietly as if we had never lived in any other way. It would be hard for two years, and afterwards it would be a habit; and at the end of it we should owe nothing to anybody, and might hold up our heads.”

She stopped, a little breathless, and quite pale. She had never made so long a speech in that room in her life.

Lady Russell was moved, and not altogether pleased; it was her own plan, but it was her own plan with all the softenings taken out, and she had put the softenings in on purpose. Mr Shepherd examined the ceiling. Sir Walter was for a moment too much astonished to be angry; and it was in that moment, before he could find his words, that Elizabeth said,

“I think Anne is right.”

If the bookcases had spoken, there could not have been more surprise. Anne herself turned to look at her sister. Elizabeth was sitting very upright, with a colour in her cheeks, and the air of one who has made up her mind.

“I think Anne is right,” she repeated. “I am sick of the bills, and of Mr Shepherd’s hints, and of being told at every turn what cannot be afforded. If a thing must be done, let it be done thoroughly, and let it be over. I had rather give up London for five years than go there and be talked of. I would not for the world have it said, in any drawing-room in town, that the Elliots were retrenching by halves. Let us do it all at once, and let it be known that we chuse to do it; and then nobody can say any thing.”

Such was Elizabeth’s support; and if Anne, in the first warmth of the moment, gave her credit for more feeling than was strictly her due, she may be forgiven. Elizabeth’s motives were not Anne’s. Elizabeth had lately begun to suspect that a spring in London, at nine-and-twenty, with a father who could not settle his tailor’s account, was not the triumph it had been at nineteen; and she saw, in one bright and sudden view, the figure she might make in the county as the daughter who had nobly given up every thing for the honour of her house, while remaining, all the while, mistress of that house, and the first woman in it. That the sacrifice would fall chiefly upon the servants who were to be dismissed, the horses which were to be sold, and the guests who were to be less handsomely dined, did not lessen its merit in her eyes. It was her own plan already. She had forgotten that it was Anne’s.

But Sir Walter had not forgotten; and though he looked from one daughter to the other, it was upon Elizabeth that his eye rested with the deeper reproach.

“You, Elizabeth!” said he. “You would have me live like a farmer at my own gate! You would have the world say that Sir Walter Elliot keeps one carriage and sees no company, and sits at home in Somersetshire because he cannot afford to be seen in Bond Street! I had thought you had more pride. No. I will not do it. I would sooner quit Kellynch altogether than live in it in such a manner. I would sooner shut up the house.”

He had meant nothing by it; it was the mere heat of a wounded feeling; but Mr Shepherd had been waiting the whole morning for a word to build upon, and here it was.

“If Sir Walter would forgive me,” said he, leaning forward with the utmost deference; “if Sir Walter would allow me to observe, that what has just fallen from him opens, in my poor judgement, the only road out of the present difficulty which is entirely free from any thing that could be called a sacrifice of consequence. Sir Walter speaks of quitting Kellynch. Now, a house of this character, and in this situation, would let, I have not the smallest doubt of it, at a rent which would very nearly clear the whole of the incumbrance in a very few years; the family, residing meanwhile at Bath, or wherever they might prefer, would be living in a style perfectly suitable, at a fraction of the expense; nothing need ever be said of retrenchment; it would be a change of residence merely; and the most respectable of tenants—”

“Tenant!” cried Sir Walter.

He turned quite white, and then quite red.

“A tenant in Kellynch Hall! A tenant sitting in that chair, and walking upon that lawn, and dining under the Elliot arms! Mr Shepherd, I do not know what you can be thinking of. I beg that I may never hear the word again under this roof. Never. It is not to be spoken in my presence. Kellynch was not built to be let, and I will not have it talked of as if it were a house in a street. Let us hear no more of it.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and heard no more of it, and said no more of it; but he had said it once, and he was a man who knew how much may be done by saying a thing once.

Lady Russell, who had listened to the proposal with a very different feeling from Sir Walter’s, and who saw in it, at the first hearing, the germ of something she might one day be brought to approve, was far too wise to press it now. She folded her paper, and made a slight remark upon the heat of the morning; and it was at this juncture, to the relief of every one, that the servant came in with the letters.

There was one for Anne. It was from Uppercross, in Mary’s hand; and Sir Walter, who would at that moment have welcomed a letter from his coachman, desired her to read it aloud, that they might hear how Mary did.

“My dear Anne,

“I make no apology for writing, for I am sure you can have nothing to do at Kellynch, and I have been so very unwell these three days that I hardly know how to hold my pen. It is the old complaint, and worse than ever, and nobody here cares about it in the least. Charles has been out on the farm every day from breakfast till dinner, and when I told him yesterday that I thought I should faint, he only said I had better lie down, which was exactly what I had been doing. Mrs Musgrove has not been near me since Sunday, and when the girls come they talk of nothing but themselves, and the children are so noisy that I can get no rest at all. I am sure that if I were at Kellynch I should have been dead by this time, for nobody would have thought of me there either; but as you are not wanted at home, I really think you might come to me. I should not ask if I were not very ill. Pray come directly; Charles will send the carriage to the turnpike if you will say what day, or I dare say Lady Russell would bring you as far as the cross-roads. I cannot write more, I am so weak.

“Your affectionate sister,

“MARY M.”

“Well,” said Sir Walter, when it was ended, “Anne had better go. Anne can very well be spared.”

“Yes, do go, Anne,” said Elizabeth. “Mary will be the better for it, and we shall be none the worse.”

Lady Russell alone demurred. She had rather Anne stayed; there was much to be gone through in the next few weeks, and Anne’s judgement, she said, glancing at Sir Walter, was not to be dispensed with. But Anne, who knew exactly the weight of her judgement in that house, thought otherwise. Mary was probably no worse than usual; but Mary was certainly no better for being left; and at Uppercross, at least, she would be of use to somebody. The question was decided in a very few minutes, as questions concerning Anne generally were, and by everybody but herself.

Lady Russell took her leave soon afterwards, promising to come again on the morrow; Mr Shepherd bowed himself out, engaging to turn the matter over; and the family dined at the usual hour, and in the usual style, for Sir Walter had given no orders to the contrary, and did not intend to give any.

At dinner Elizabeth spoke of the plan again; but it had already undergone some alteration in her hands. The horses were still to be sold, but the housekeeper was to be kept; London was still to be given up, but the drawing-room, since they were to be so much at home, might after all be newly furnished, as a kind of compensation; and by the time the cloth was drawn, it had become a scheme of her own, which she meant to think over very seriously, when there was less to distress her. Sir Walter said nothing at all, and helped himself twice to the fish.

Anne went up early to her own room. The evening was warm and still; the windows were open upon the park, and the long shadows of the elms were stretching across the grass, as she had watched them stretch on a hundred such evenings, from the same window, with the same feeling of being nobody in particular to any one below. Nothing had been settled. Her father would neither retrench nor remove; the tradespeople would write again; Mr Shepherd would call again; Lady Russell would reason again, to the same purpose and with the same success; and Elizabeth’s zeal, which had surprised her so much at noon, had by nine o’clock dwindled to a new carpet. The debts were exactly what they had been in the morning, and the Baronetage, she did not doubt, was lying open still.

She would go to Mary. She would write to Uppercross in the morning, and be there by the end of the week. It was the only thing, that day, which had been settled by anybody; and it had been settled, at least, by herself.

Mary slept until the train stopped, and even then it was Mrs. Medlock's hand on her arm that woke her.

"Wake up," said Mrs. Medlock. "This is Thwaite Station, and there's a long drive before us yet."

Mary sat up. Her crêpe hat had slipped over one ear, and beyond the window everything was black, so that she could see nothing but her own yellow little face looking back at her out of the glass.

A porter opened the door and let in a rush of cold air, and Mary got down after Mrs. Medlock and found herself on a little wooden platform with one lamp on it. The rain had stopped, but the boards shone wet under the lamp, and beyond the light there was nothing at all. The air was not like any air she had ever breathed. It was cold and clean and seemed to come from a very long way off, and it smelled of something she did not know.

There was a man standing under the lamp.

Mrs. Medlock saw him first. Mary heard her draw in her breath in a queer short way, and then she dropped a curtsey, which Mary had never seen her do before, even in London.

"I'd no notion, sir," she said, and her brisk hard voice had gone quite flat. "I'd have looked for Pitcher, or the carriage only. I'd never have thought--"

"I know," said the man.

Mary looked at him because she could not help it. He was tall, and wore a long dark coat with the collar turned up, and his hat shadowed his face. But she could see his shoulders. They were high and crooked, and his head was set forward between them, and where the lamplight caught his hair it was black with white in it. She stared, because she had been wondering ever since London what a hunchback would look like. She had thought of Riquet à la Houppe, but this was no man out of a story. He was only a tall man standing in the wet with his hands in his pockets.

Then he turned his head and looked at her.

Mary held herself stiff, as she had done when Mr. Crawford patted her shoulder, and waited for him to say that she was plain. Everybody said it. But his eyes were in shadow, and it came to her that he was not seeing her at all, but something behind her, or a long way off. Then he looked away, past the lamp, into the dark.

"Come," he said.

That was all. He walked down the platform, and Mrs. Medlock caught up her skirts and hurried after him, and Mary followed last, because there was nothing else to do.

The carriage was waiting in the road below, with two lamps burning. Mr. Craven got in first and sat down in the far corner, and Mrs. Medlock climbed in after him and pulled Mary up beside her, and they set off. Nobody spoke. Mrs. Medlock sat with her lips pressed together, and Mary understood that there would be no more talk about the queer place they were going to now that its master sat three feet away in the dark. She pressed herself into her corner and looked out of the window.

At first there were walls beside the road, and a few dark houses. Then the walls stopped and there was nothing beside the road at all. The carriage lamps threw a little yellow light on either side, and beyond that the darkness went on and on, and there was a sound in it. It was low and hollow and did not stop, like the sea, only it was not the sea. Now and then it rose and pushed at the carriage so that the windows rattled, and then it fell again and only hummed.

"What is that?" she said, before she remembered that she was not going to speak.

"It's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock, very low, as if she were in church. "That's the wind on it. It's miles and miles of moor from here to the house, and there's nothing on it but heather and gorse and sheep."

Mary thought it the loneliest sound she had ever heard, and yet she could not stop listening to it.

They had been driving a long time when the horses were pulled up so suddenly that she was thrown against Mrs. Medlock's arm. The man on the box called out, and another man jumped down, and Mary saw the light of a lantern swing past the window.

"What's amiss?" said Mrs. Medlock.

"Summat i' th' road, Mrs. Medlock," the man called back. "It's nobbut a sheep. She's laid hersen down slap i' th' middle an' she'll noan shift."

Mr. Craven, in his corner, moved for the first time. He opened the door on his own side and got down into the road, and stood there with his back to the carriage, looking out into the dark. Mary did not decide to get out. She found that she had opened her own door and stepped down before she knew it, and Mrs. Medlock said "Mary!" behind her in a sharp whisper. But she had done it, and she stood still.

The wind took hold of her at once. It pulled at her skirt and filled her mouth when she opened it. It was cold, and it felt as if it were simply the air of the place, moving, as it had moved over that ground for a thousand years. When she took two steps off the road the ground was suddenly soft and springy, and something rough and wet brushed her stockings and smelled strong and strange. Overhead the clouds had torn apart and there were stars. And all round her, in every direction, there was nothing. Not a light, not a tree, not a wall--only the dark going away and away, and the low sound of the wind going over it.

In the ring of lantern light the sheep had got up and was going off, and beyond it Mary saw other gray shapes, like stones that moved, going away into the heather. She was a very small thing standing at the edge of a very large one, and it was the first time in her life she had ever felt small. She only knew that she was not frightened, and that she thought she ought to be.

She looked across the carriage lamps and saw that Mr. Craven had turned and was looking at her, or at the moor behind her. His crooked shoulders were black against the light. He did not say anything. After a moment he got back into the carriage, and Mrs. Medlock leaned out and took Mary by the arm and pulled her in.

"Getting out on the moor in the dark!" she said under her breath. "You'll catch your death, and then what?"

Mary did not answer.

She did not know how long it was before there were walls beside the road again, and great gates, and trees, and then a house. It was only a great dark mass with one lighted door in it, low down, and in the door an old man stood with a lamp.

Mr. Craven got out first and went in past the old man without a word, and Mary heard his step go away somewhere inside and a door shut. The old man--it was Pitcher, Mary knew afterward--looked after him and then at Mrs. Medlock.

"He went himself," said Mrs. Medlock. "I never in my life--"

"Aye," said Pitcher. "He's gone up now and he'll not come down. She's to have the two rooms at the end of the east corridor, and she's to be kept from the West Wing." He looked at Mary then, and his old face did not change at all. "There's a fire lit," he said, and went away with his lamp.

The hall was so big that Mary could not see the top of it. Mrs. Medlock led her up a great staircase and along a corridor, and along another, and up three steps, and along another still, past doors and doors and doors, all shut. At last she opened one, and there was a room with a fire burning and a bed with curtains and a table laid.

"Here you are," said Mrs. Medlock, "and here you'll stay. This room and the next is yours, and you're to keep to them. Your supper'll be up directly." And she went out and shut the door.

Mary took off her hat and gloves and stood by the fire. The room was old and dark, and she thought she had never seen an uglier place. She was standing there when there was a knock and a man came in with a tray.

She had expected a maid. In India there had always been a woman to bring her things. But this was a man, and a big one, young, with a wide red face and a great deal of thick yellow hair, and he set the tray down with a clatter.

"There now, Miss," he said. "Tha'll be fair clemmed after that road. Mrs. Medlock says Ah'm to tell thee to sup it while it's warm, an' tha's to eat all on it, for tha's nowt but skin an' bone. Th' fire's nobbut just catched, but it'll draw grand in a bit."

Mary stared at him.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said.

"Eh?" said the young man.

"I cannot understand you," said Mary. "You are not speaking English."

The young man's wide face went wider, and he laughed out loud.

"Nay, Ah'm speakin' Yorkshire," he said, "an' there's them as says it's a deal better nor English. Ah forgot tha' was fra' foreign parts." He pointed at the tray. "Supper," he said, very loud and slow, as if she were deaf. "Thee. Eat." And then he grinned and went out.

Mary was very angry, and very hungry, and the hunger was the stronger, so she sat down and ate. She ate it all, sitting very straight, and while she ate she thought about the young man's laugh. Nobody had ever laughed at her in that way before--not as Basil laughed, to be cruel, but as if she were a small funny thing that could not be helped. She decided that she would find out what "clemmed" meant, so that if he said it again she would know whether or not to be offended.

When Mrs. Medlock came back she found the tray empty.

"You've eaten, then," she said. "That's something. Now you'll go to bed." And she undid Mary's black dress and brushed her hair hard and put her into the big bed, and turned the lamp low, talking all the while. "You'll have your meals here, and you're not to go wandering. There's rooms you're to keep out of, and the West Wing's one, and you're not to go looking for Mr. Craven, for you'll not find him and he'll not thank you."

"I shall not want to look for him," said Mary.

"See you don't," said Mrs. Medlock, and put her hand to the lamp.

And it was then, in the quiet after she had stopped talking, that Mary heard the sound.

It came from somewhere far off in the house--not outside, she was sure of that, but inside, along the corridors--and it was a long, low, dragging sound, as if something heavy were being pulled slowly across a floor. It went on for as long as it takes to draw three breaths, and then there was a dull thud, and then nothing.

"What was that?" said Mary, sitting up.

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still with her hand on the lamp. She did not turn round.

"It's the wind," she said.

"It was not outside," said Mary. "It was in the house. It was something moving."

"It's the wind," said Mrs. Medlock again, and now she did turn, and her red face looked redder than ever. "It gets into the long passages. There's near a hundred rooms, and half of 'em's got doors that don't fit, and when it wuthers round the house it makes all manner of noises. You'll get used to it. Go to sleep."

She turned the lamp out altogether and went to the door.

"I heard the wind on the moor," said Mary out of the dark. "It didn't sound like that."

"Go to sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, and shut the door behind her, and Mary heard her steps go away along the corridor a good deal faster than they had come.

Mary lay down. The fire had sunk to a red glow, and the house was so still that she could hear her own heart. For a long time there was only the wind outside, hollow and far away, going over the moor. And then the sound came again--the same slow dragging, fainter, and the same dull thud at the end of it--and then silence.

It was not the wind. Being told so by a woman who had gone red and walked away fast only made Mary more sure. She had been told a great many things in her life by people who did not think it worth while to tell her the truth, and she knew the sound of it. She lay with her eyes wide open in the dark. She was in a house with a hundred rooms, most of them locked, with a hunchback in the West Wing who had said one word to her, and a housekeeper who told her untruths, and nobody in the world who cared what she did. And Mrs. Medlock had said she was not to go poking about.

"I shall find out what it was," said Mistress Mary to herself, quite contrarily, and folded her thin hands on the counterpane, and lay awake in the dark, listening.

You will have gathered, from what I have said of my own feelings, that I was in no state to ask questions just at first. When I did find my tongue, the first use I made of it was to inquire of Mr. Franklin how he came to be here on our sands, with his arm round my neck, at one o’clock in the day, when the whole house, from my lady down to the kitchen-maid, had been given to understand that he was not to be looked for till five.

“Don’t blame the railway, Betteredge,” says he, jumping up on his own legs, and hauling me up on mine. “The railway did its duty. Blame the post. I had a letter in London last night; and the letter is the reason why I have come four hours before my time, and why I never wrote to say so, and why I walked over from the station instead of waiting for a fly. A plump girl at your back door, with her mouth full, told me you had gone to the sands to fetch somebody in to dinner. Here I am; and the somebody (I see) has taken herself off in the opposite direction. Put on your spectacles, and read that.”

He took a letter out of the breast of his beautiful coat, and gave it me. I put on my spectacles (which live in my waistcoat pocket, along with my pipe), and read as follows:

“Gray’s Inn Square, May 24th, 1848.

“My dear Sir,—Since you left my office this afternoon, I have heard something which, in my judgment, you ought to know before you leave London.

“The clerk whom I sent to the bank this morning, on the business we spoke of, reports that, while he waited his turn at the counter, a foreign man—dark in the face, very quiet and civil in his manner, and speaking good English—inquired of one of the cashiers at what hours the strong-room is opened and closed. My clerk thought nothing of it at the time. On his way back, however, he observed a person of the same description standing at the corner of the square; and he is now of opinion (nor can I say that he is wrong) that the man followed him from the bank to my door.

“I have no wish to alarm you about what may prove to be nothing. But, having regard to the nature of the charge with which you leave town, I strongly advise you to alter the hour of your journey; to take the early train into Yorkshire in place of the afternoon train which you named to me; and to say nothing of the alteration to anybody, by letter or otherwise, until you are under Lady Verinder’s roof.

“I remain, dear Sir, faithfully yours—”

—and then the name of Mr. Bruff, the lawyer: the same Mr. Bruff, if you please, who (in company with Mr. Franklin) has set me writing this history two years afterwards, at an age when I ought to be let alone. It seems hard that he should write half a page, and leave me five hundred. But I say nothing.

I gave the letter back, and took off my spectacles, and looked at the quicksand—not because I wanted to see it, but because a man must look somewhere when he is putting two and two together. A foreign man, dark in the face, very quiet and civil. Three foreign men, mahogany-coloured, in white linen, civil enough to make your flesh creep—on our terrace, that very morning, with their drums! I had told my daughter the whole business was a rehearsed trick. I had also told her I would put it to Mr. Franklin when he came. Here was Mr. Franklin; and a promise is a promise, whatever a man may privately think of the sense of it.

“Mr. Franklin,” I said, “before we go a step further, I have got something to tell *you*.”

And I told him—the drums, the Indians, the little English boy, the ink in the palm of the hand, and the whole of Penelope’s account: the gentleman who was to travel to our house that day, who “had got It about him,” and who might, or might not, be here at the close of day. I told it, I own, in a manner meant to show that *I* believed none of it. But the tone of one man’s voice is one thing, and the look on another man’s face is another. Long before I had done, the smile was gone out of Mr. Franklin, and the foreign varnish with it; and what was left was as grave a young Englishman as ever stood on a beach with his hands in his pockets.

“Say that again,” says he. “The part about the boy. ‘He has got It about him.’ Were those the words?”

“Those were the words, sir, as my daughter heard them.”

“And nothing to say what It was?”

“Nothing whatever. Penelope took It to be something. I took It to be nothing—and I take It to be nothing still,” says I, standing up for my own opinion, as a man ought.

Mr. Franklin took a turn along the sand, and came back to me. “Your daughter is a sensible girl, Betteredge,” says he. “I could tell you what It is—or what I believe It to be. I believe It to be the Moonstone.”

The Moonstone! I had heard of the loadstone, and of the philosopher’s stone; I had heard of moonshine, and of moon-blindness in horses; but the Moonstone was as new to me as if he had said it in one of his foreign languages, and I told him so.

“You shall hear of it,” says Mr. Franklin; “not here, though, and not today.” He turned, as he spoke, and looked back through the gap in the sandhills, towards the firs, and the chimneys of the house beyond them. “It’s a long story, and it is not mine. It belongs to my uncle Herncastle; and I have a notion, from something my father let fall, that my uncle Herncastle is not a welcome subject at my aunt’s table. Meet me here tomorrow morning, before breakfast, and you shall have the whole of it. The only listener on this beach is the quicksand; and the quicksand, I take it, keeps what it is told.”

We went back through the plantation together. On the way (I set it down to his credit) Mr. Franklin paid me my seven-and-sixpence, and took my receipt in the shape of a shake of the hand. Halfway among the firs, where the walk is darkest, he stopped, and put his hand into the breast of his coat again.

“You keep the plate-room still, Betteredge? and the keys of it?”

“Both, sir.”

“Is there room in it for this?”

He brought out a small packet, and put it into my hand. It was done up in white paper, and sealed at every fold with red wax; it was no bigger, I should say, than a snuff-box; and it was heavier than any snuff-box has a right to be. That is all I can tell you about the outside of it. About the inside of it, I could have told you nothing, then, if you had paid me.

“I would rather not carry that about me tonight,” says Mr. Franklin. “Lock it up with the plate; keep the key on your own person; say nothing of it to anybody in the house; and don’t ask me what it is. You shall give it me back in the morning.”

Now, I have a principle about that. A servant who is trusted with a thing to lock up, and who wants to know what the thing is, is a servant who will never be trusted with anything again, and who deserves his fate. I put the packet into my inside pocket, buttoned my coat over it, and asked no questions. What I may have thought, walking up through the firs with the thing lying cold against my ribs, is my own affair. At my time of life a man’s thoughts and a man’s knowledge are two very different articles; and you will find them so yourselves, if you are spared to my age.

Our plate-room is at the end of my own passage, next door to my sitting-room—a stone place with an iron door, and inside it a strong cupboard of iron again, which nobody in my time has opened but me. I set the packet on the top shelf, between the great salver and the case of the apostle spoons; I turned the key on it; I turned the other key on the door; and I hung the two keys where they always hang, which is on me. Mr. Franklin, who had come as far as the passage and no farther, nodded when he heard the lock go home, and went upstairs to wash the railway off him, whistling a foreign tune.

I had hardly got into my sitting-room chair (not the beehive, mind; the beehive is for after supper) when my daughter Penelope came in with the look on her face which means that she has been right about something, and that I am going to hear of it.

“Rosanna’s not come in, father,” says she. “Her dinner was kept back, and it’s kept back still; and Nancy says she may eat it cold or go without, for all *she* cares. Her bonnet’s not on the peg. And the stable-boy saw her, an hour ago, going along the top of the sandhills the Cobb’s Hole way—walking as fast as she could go, father, with her cloak held round her.”

“Then she has gone to her friend at Cobb’s Hole,” I said—“the friend I spoke of a while since; more anon, more anon. She asked leave this morning for a breath of air, and she is taking more of it than she asked for. She will be in by dark, and I’ll speak to her.”

“Without her dinner, father? and without a word to a soul?”

“Rosanna has her own ways,” I said.

Penelope tossed her head—Nancy’s toss, to a hair—and then came a step nearer, and dropped her voice. “Did you ask Mr. Franklin about the Indians, father?”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

I told her, in a general way, that Mr. Franklin had not laughed. I did not tell her that he had called her a sensible girl; a woman who is once told that will remind you of it for the rest of your natural life. She went away contented; and I sat looking at my own knees, with the keys inside my waistcoat, wondering what there could be in a young gentleman in a fawn-coloured suit to send our second housemaid off over the sandhills without her dinner. I gave it up.

My lady’s carriage came back a little before six. Miss Rachel was not in it. She had been kept to sleep where she had lunched, and was to be sent home in the morning—so that Mr. Franklin’s welcome from his cousin, which he had been looking for (I could see) every time a door opened, was put off for a day. My lady came in alone; and I had the pleasure of telling her, in the hall, that her nephew had been five hours in the house.

“Five hours, Gabriel!” says my lady. “And I not here to receive him! What brought him so early?”

I said a letter had brought him. It was Mr. Franklin’s letter, and Mr. Franklin’s to tell of; and my lady, who knows me, asked no more.

Mr. Franklin came down two stairs at a time; and my lady met him at the drawing-room door with both her hands out. I stood by, waiting for my orders about the dinner-hour; and I saw him kiss her hand, foreign fashion, and then, remembering where he was, kiss her cheek, English fashion; and I saw my lady laugh, and hold him off, and look at him. He sat down by her; and being a young gentleman who could no more hold a thing in than a sieve can hold water, he began, before he had well got into the chair, on the very subject he had told me he meant to keep for the beach.

“Aunt,” says he, “I ought to tell you at once that I have not come empty-handed. I come charged with an errand. My father, as executor to my uncle Hern—”

My lady put up her hand. I had seen her put up her hand in that way once before in my life—at our own front door, a good many years ago, to a person who was not let in—and I had hoped never to see it again.

“Not under my roof, Franklin,” says she. Her voice was perfectly quiet. “I would not receive Colonel Herncastle living; I will not receive his name, now that he is dead. Whatever he has left behind him, and whatever errand of his has brought you here, you will not speak of it to me, and you will not speak of it to Rachel, in this house. If it is business, Mr. Bruff can have it. If it is not business, I do not want it. Do you promise me?”

Mr. Franklin got up, and stood before her. “I promise it, aunt,” says he. “Not a word of him, under your roof, to you or to Rachel.” I saw his hand go to the breast of his coat, feeling for something that was not there; then I saw him remember where the something was; and his eyes came round the room to me. I looked at the carpet. There are moments when the carpet is the only safe thing in a room to look at; and I recommend it.

You must know—and it is all you shall know from me tonight—that my lady had a brother. I have told you the Story of Rosanna and the Story of the Sands in this one day already; and I decline, at my age and at this hour, to tell you the Story of the Brother into the bargain. He shall keep till the morning, when Mr. Franklin has promised him to me on the beach. Only observe that here was my lady shutting one door in the house on her brother’s name, at the very time when I, with the keys inside my waistcoat, had just shut another door in the same house on—I didn’t know what.

My lady gave me my orders for dinner as if nothing had happened; and nothing, to look at her, had. They dined together, the two of them; and I heard my lady laugh, over the dessert, as I had not heard her laugh since Sir John’s time. Whatever else Mr. Franklin had brought back from foreign parts, he had brought the knack of that.

And Rosanna Spearman? Rosanna Spearman never came back. The women went up; the house was shut at half-past ten; her candle stood unlit on the shelf where the women’s candles stand; and nobody in the servants’ hall but my daughter had a word to say about it—and that word was “cold mutton.” Not once, in all her four months, had the girl stopped out at night before. I told myself she was at Cobb’s Hole, safe with her friend. I told myself I would speak to her in the morning, and speak sharp. And, having told myself these two things, I went out into the back court, and sat down in the beehive chair, with my pipe and my Robinson Crusoe, and the keys of the plate-room in my waistcoat pocket.

I have said, I think, that I open that book, in any difficulty, wherever it chooses to fall open, and take what it gives me. It fell open, this night, at the part which most persons will remember, whether they have read Robinson Crusoe or not; and what it gave me was this:

“It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.”

“About noon”—“on the sand”—and a foot that had no business there! I read it twice over, and looked out over the top of the book at the plantation, where the firs stood up black against the sky, with the moon (which I had no reason, then, to think an unlucky thing to look at) coming up behind them. Not a foot on the path; not a sound but the sea on the great bank outside the bay. Where Rosanna was, what she had seen in Mr. Franklin, and what Mr. Franklin had given me to keep, were three things I did not know; and I sat with the three of them till my pipe went out—which is where, for tonight, I leave you.

Madame Ratignolle was not a light burden. She leaned upon Robert with her whole weight, which was by no means inconsiderable, and every few yards she stopped to shift the little girl from his arm to her own and back again, the child having made up her mind to be carried by her mother and set down by nobody at all. The sand was hot through the soles of their shoes. The camomile gave off its dry, bitter smell under the sun, and the wind that had whipped the water into froth at the beach had somehow lost itself among the orange trees, so that the path lay in a still and shimmering heat.

“Did you see her face when we came up?” Robert asked, when they had gone a little way in silence.

“Whose face? I saw a great many faces. Your troop of savages, and two nurse-maids who looked as if they would like to drown the lot of them.”

“Mrs. Pontellier’s.”

“She had been talking,” said Madame Ratignolle. “It goes to her head, like wine.”

“I have noticed it before,” Robert went on, as though he had not heard. “Not only to-day. She goes about among us like some one walking in her sleep. Whatever is said to her she hears from a long way off. And then something touches her—one never knows what—and she half opens her eyes and looks at you as if she had never seen you before. One of these days she is going to wake altogether.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. I should like to be somewhere near when it happens.”

Madame Ratignolle laughed, and pressed her free hand to her side, where the stitch had caught her again.

“*Mon Dieu*, how you talk! You have been reading too many novels this summer. Give me your arm properly. It is my knee that has gone to sleep, whatever Mrs. Pontellier’s condition may be, and I would thank you to attend to it.”

Robert laughed too, and gave her his arm properly, and the subject was allowed to drop. He left her at her own door, where the two children who had stayed at home came running out to meet her, and went off across the yard toward the house, whistling, with his hat on the back of his head.

Edna stayed with the children under the awning until the sun stood high and the shade had shrunk to a strip no wider than a rug. Then the whole procession went back along the path, the nurse-maids bringing up the rear in silence. She had not been ten minutes at the cottage, and was drawing the pins out of her hat before the small glass over the washstand, when the boy who ran Madame Lebrun’s errands came across the yard with a telegram. It was from Léonce. He would not come out on Saturday. A matter of business kept him in the city; he would write; she was not to expect him before the week following, and perhaps not then. He had signed it with his full name, as if it were addressed to a stranger.

Edna read it twice, standing at the window with the hat still in her hand. She was conscious of no disappointment. What she felt was rather the sensation that comes when a door somewhere in a house has been left open and a draught goes through the rooms, and one looks up without knowing from what quarter the air is moving. The week had been walled at one end by Saturday. Now it ran on without any wall at all. She folded the paper small and put it in her pocket beside her bath-house key, and went out to see what the quadroon was doing with the boys.

The afternoon at Grand Isle belonged to sleep. The shutters of the cottages were drawn; the hammocks on the galleries hung motionless under their burdens; even the mocking-bird in the water-oaks gave it up and was silent. Edna lay down with the rest and did not sleep. The room was close, and smelled of mosquito-netting and warm cypress. She could hear the boys breathing beyond the partition, and beyond that, faint and unresting, the sound of the water, which she was never able to forget for long. After a time she got up, put on her bathing-dress and a wrapper over it, took her key, and went down the long path alone.

There was nobody on it. There was nobody on the beach either, except the lady in black, who sat on the gallery of the neighboring bath-house as she sat at almost every hour of the day, with her prayer-book open upon her knee and her beads passing through her fingers. Edna had never heard her speak. Nobody had, so far as Edna knew; she came and went in the wake of the two lovers like a shadow that had been cut loose from something and was patiently looking for it. Edna nodded to her as she always did, and was fitting the key into the lock, when the woman said, in a low voice that was a little rough, as if from disuse:

“Madame is going in alone?”

Edna turned. The lady in black had not lifted her eyes from the page.

“Yes,” said Edna. “Every one is asleep.”

“It is the best hour.” The beads slid on. “In the morning there is too much noise. They all call out to you—do this, do that—and one learns nothing with people calling out.” She turned a leaf. “I could swim, once, before I was married. It is only the being afraid that has to be got over. The water does the rest.” Then her lips began to move again over her devotions, and she did not speak again.

The water near the shore was as warm as milk. Farther out it grew cool against the body, and the bottom sloped away under the feet by degrees so gentle that one did not notice it going until it was gone. Edna had been shown how to swim a dozen times that summer. Robert had held her under the chin; the young people had shouted directions from the pier; Léonce himself had wasted a Sunday afternoon upon it and given her up. And each time, the instant the sand went from under her, a foolish and ungovernable terror had seized her, and she had gone down like a stone and come up clutching at whichever arm was nearest. To-day there was no arm. She stood breast-deep and looked out at the level line of the Gulf, and at the sails that had not moved since morning, and at the lady in black, small and upright on her gallery, who was not looking at her at all.

Then she lay forward upon the water as she had been told to do.

She expected to sink, and she did not sink. Her arms went out, once, twice—it was the motion she had made as a little girl walking through the Kentucky grass—and her feet left the bottom and did not go looking for it again. Three strokes; four. The water lifted a little beneath her and let her through. Then the thought came that there was nothing under her but water, a great deal of it, going down and down, and the thought was too much. She gasped, went under, found the sand with her toes and stood up streaming, her heart beating as though she had run the whole length of the island.

She laughed aloud. There was no one to hear. She lay forward again, and this time she counted six.

When she came out and had dressed, the lady in black did not raise her head. Edna went up the path in the slanting light and met nobody until she reached the yard, where Robert, lying in a hammock on the gallery of the house with his hat over his eyes, pushed it back and called out to ask if she had been in the water.

“Yes,” said Edna.

“Alone? And did you swim?”

“About as usual,” she answered, and went on to her cottage. She had not decided to say that; it had said itself. But once said, she found that she was glad of it, and that she wanted the thing kept where it was, inside her, like the telegram in her pocket. It was the first thing she had ever possessed that was altogether her own, and she had no intention of passing it about the dinner-table as she had passed about the pâtés and the syrups from Léonce’s box.

At dinner she said very little, and nobody remarked it, since it was what she generally did. Afterward, when the boys had been put to bed and the quadroon had taken herself off, Madame Ratignolle came across the yard with the small roll of needlework and sat down on the gallery beside her. She said she had come to be quiet. The knee was better; it was the fault of the sand. Then, after a while, threading her needle by the light that came through the doorway:

“Do you know what Robert said of you this morning?”

“No. What?”

“He said you go about among us like some one walking in her sleep.” Madame Ratignolle bit off her thread. “That you hear everything from a long way off, and that one of these days you are going to wake altogether. I told him he had been reading too many novels.”

Edna laughed. “Robert says a great many things.”

“Yes,” said Madame Ratignolle. “He always did.” She held the needle to the light and looked, not at the needle, but at Edna’s face, for a moment longer than she was in the habit of looking at anything. Then she rolled up her work, since it was too dark after all to see the stitches, and went home to her husband.

Edna sat on. The cottage behind her was dark and full of the breathing of the two little boys. The wind had dropped with the sun. There was no moon, but the sand of the yard held a faint light of its own, and beyond the last of the cottages, where the path began, the water went on with its low, continual sound, as it had gone on all the afternoon while it held her up.

Some one walking in her sleep. She turned the words over as she had turned the telegram, looking for the thing in them that had touched her and would not let go. It was not that they were unkind; she did not believe Robert had meant them unkindly. It was that they had been said of her by some one who had watched her when she did not know it, and had seen something she had never been shown herself; and it seemed to her strange, sitting there with her hair loosened on her shoulders and her arms still remembering the water, that on the one day of her life when she had been most awake, he should have told Madame Ratignolle that she was asleep.

The cab went up the hill past the Panthéon, with the dome black against the sky, and over the top and down the other side. Brett kept her eyes shut. I sat with my hands on my knees and watched the street-lamps come in through the window and go across her face one after another, and between them it was dark.

“What is it?” I said.

“Nothing. Everything. Don’t make me talk, Jake.”

“All right.”

We went along under a high wall. It went on for a long way. There was a lamp at the corner and then the wall again, and no windows in it.

“What’s that?”

“The Santé. The prison.”

“It would be,” Brett said.

She sat up and found a cigarette in her bag and I lit it for her, and her face came up close to the match and then went away again into the corner. She smoked and looked out at the wall going by.

“I don’t want to go to a park. What does one do in a park at this hour?”

“Look at it.”

“I can’t look at things. Take me to the Select, Jake. I want a light and a lot of people I needn’t talk to.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He said something to himself and at the next corner swung off toward the Lion de Belfort, and we went up the Boulevard Raspail with the trees going by on both sides.

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

“You’re a good chap. You’re so damned good it makes me want to hit you.”

“Go ahead.”

“No.” She put her head back in the corner. “I’ve been such a bloody fool to-night. Trailing about with that lot. And then I saw you standing in the door with a beer, looking as though you’d like to kill somebody.”

“I would have.”

“I know. That’s why I came over.”

The Select was full. It was the hour when every one came back from wherever they had been to sit on the terrace and be seen before they went home, and the tables went out under the awning onto the sidewalk, and the light from inside came out yellow across the marble. We found a table at the edge. Brett knew people at three tables and lifted her hand to them and they let her alone. That is one thing about the Select. The people there have all had enough of each other.

“A fine,” I said to the waiter.

“Brandy and soda. I told you I’m never getting tight any more.”

“You did.”

“You needn’t say it like that.”

The drinks came and she held hers and did not drink it.

“I met a chap last week,” she said. “At Zelli’s. He’s a count. Mippipopolous. Isn’t that a name? Greek, or something. He owns a chain of sweet-shops in the States.”

“I never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have. He isn’t literary. He doesn’t write and he doesn’t paint and he doesn’t sit about talking about it. That’s why I like him.” She drank a little then. “He has pots of money. He bought champagne for the whole place and then sat down and told me about a war he was in. Not ours. Some other war, somewhere.”

“That must have been a change.”

“It was, rather.”

“Good.”

“He wants me to go down to Biarritz. He says he’ll drive me. He has a car the size of a house.”

“You ought to go.”

“Ought I?”

“Sure. It would do you good.”

“Yes. It would do me good.” She looked at me over the top of the glass. “You’d like that.”

“I’d like anything that did you good.”

“You’re a liar, Jake.”

“Sure.”

“So am I.”

I did not want her to go to Biarritz or anywhere else with anybody, and I sat there and told her it would do her good.

She put her hand on mine on the table and held it for a while and then took it away and picked up the glass. A man with a beard came by and said something to her about a party on Thursday and she said “Lovely,” and he went on. Inside they were arguing about a picture. You could hear the word “significant” come out through the door every little while like a cork.

“Let’s go,” Brett said. “I only wanted the light. I’ve had it now.”

“I’ve got to go back to the Bal.”

“Whatever for?”

“My fifty francs.”

Brett laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since we left. “Oh, Jake. You are priceless. You’re going all the way back up that hill for fifty francs.”

“It’s my fifty francs.”

“It’s hers. You gave it away. I watched you.”

“I gave it to the patronne. That’s different.”

“Well, come on, then. I want to see this.”

I paid for the saucers and we got a taxi in front of the Rotonde and went back across the Boulevard and through the dark streets and up the hill. The two taxis were gone from in front of the Bal and the policeman was gone. The door was open and the light came out of it, and the accordion.

“I’ll wait,” Brett said. “I’ve had enough of that box for one night.”

Inside it was the working people’s crowd now. The young men were gone. The proprietor was up on his stool with the bells going on his ankle, and the girls danced with their hats on and the men in their caps, close together, and did not talk. The daughter of the house was collecting glasses. The patronne was behind the zinc. She saw me and reached under the bar and put the envelope on the zinc and put her hand flat on it.

“Voilà, Monsieur. She did not ask for you.”

“She’s gone?”

“No. Those gentlemen went away. She did not go with them.” She lifted her chin toward the floor.

Georgette was dancing with a short man in a cap. She danced very seriously, with her hat off and her mouth shut, and she looked quite pretty. The music stopped and she saw me and said something to the man and came over to the bar.

“So,” she said. “You came back.”

“I came back for this.” I showed her the envelope.

“What is it?”

“Fifty francs. It was for you if you asked for me.”

“Why would I ask for you? You went off with the lady. I have eyes.”

“Your friends took you up.”

“They danced with me,” Georgette said. “They dance very well, your friends. Then they went to Montmartre. They did not ask me to come. Those ones never ask you. They are like women.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. The little one in the cap doesn’t dance well but he asked me.”

“Here,” I said, and gave her the envelope.

She opened it and looked in and shut it and put it in her bag.

“That’s a lot for a dinner that wasn’t chic.”

“It’s for the evening.”

“You’re a funny type.” She looked at me with her mouth shut. “You’re not a bad type. Go on. Your lady is in the taxi. I saw her. She’s very chic.”

“Yes.”

“She’s a real lady?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody is something,” Georgette said, and the accordion started and she went back to the man in the cap.

I gave the patronne five francs and she said it was not necessary and took it, and I went out.

“Well?” Brett said. “Did you get it?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“I gave it to her.”

Brett laughed. “I told you you’d lose it.”

“I didn’t lose it. I gave it away.”

“It’s the same thing, darling. It always is.” She leaned back. “Tell him the Halles. I want some soup. I haven’t eaten since I can’t remember when.”

We went down the hill and along the quai and across the river. The river was black and the lights of the Right Bank were in it, and then we were across and going up past the Châtelet, and the streets got narrower and there were carts in them. The carts come in from the country all night, the big two-wheeled carts with the horses steaming under the lamps, and the streets around the pavilions were full of them, with the cabbages and carrots and the crates of lettuce piled up higher than a man along the sidewalks, and the *forts* in their big flat hats carrying the sides of beef in on their shoulders. It smelled of vegetables and wet straw and horses. It was the only part of Paris awake in earnest. Everywhere else people were awake because they could not sleep.

We got out at the corner by Saint-Eustache and went into a place where the market people ate. It was hot inside and full of men in blue smocks, and nobody looked at Brett, or at least they looked and then went back to their soup. We sat at a table by the window and had the onion soup with the cheese burned across the top of it, and a bottle of the white wine they drink there at that hour, and Brett ate all her soup and some of my bread.

“I was hungry,” she said. “I didn’t know it. Isn’t it funny that one doesn’t know it?”

“You look better.”

“I feel better. I’m not, but I feel it.” She lit a cigarette. “Jake.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. I was going to say something and there isn’t anything to say. Is there?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

Outside the window the light was changing. First it was just the lamps looking weaker, and then you could see the shapes of the church and the pavilions without the lamps, and the sky over the roofs was grey and then a kind of white. The men in the smocks went out and others came in. A cart went past the window with a load of flowers on it, roses and stock, and the man walking at the horse’s head with the reins over his arm.

“I’m going to Biarritz,” Brett said. “I think I am. Then I shan’t. I don’t know. Don’t ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“No. You never do. That’s the worst of you.” She stood up. “Get me a taxi, darling. I want to go home before it’s day. I can’t bear it being day.”

There was a taxi at the corner with the driver asleep in it and I woke him. Brett got in and leaned forward and told him where to go herself. Then she sat back and looked at me through the open window.

“Don’t come round to-morrow.”

“All right.”

“I mean to-day. Whatever it is. I’ll send you a *petit bleu*.”

“All right.”

“Good night, Jake. Good morning. Whatever it is.”

The taxi went off toward the Rue de Rivoli and I watched it to the corner, and it turned and was gone.

I walked down to the river. It was quite light now, the flat grey light that comes before the sun, and the quais were empty. The book-stalls along the wall were shut with their lids down and padlocked. Below on the lower quai there was a barge tied up with a line of washing on it and smoke coming out of a stove-pipe, and a woman came out on the deck and threw a pail of water over the side and went in again. The water was grey and moving slowly and there was a mist on it out in the middle. I crossed by the Pont Neuf and went along the Left Bank under the trees. A man was sweeping the gutter and the water ran in it clear over the stones. An old man had come down onto the lower quai with a rod and was sitting on a stone with his line out, not fishing so much as sitting there. Up ahead the towers of Notre-Dame stood up out of the mist, and while I looked at them the sun came up behind them, and the tops of the towers went yellow, and then the light came down the river all at once and the water was not grey any more.

I was very tired and I did not feel anything much. It was going to be a fine day. I walked home along the river.

The house which the Belgians occupied lay close to the park gates, so that I had not far to go; but I covered the distance at something very like a run. The threatened storm had grumbled itself away in the night without breaking, and the morning was fresh and clear, with the birds shouting in the hedges as though nothing in the world were amiss. I remember resenting them.

I had rehearsed, as I went, the terms in which I should break the news to Poirot. It was wasted labour. Before I had so much as laid my hand upon the gate of Leastways Cottage the door opened, and my friend came out upon the step, fully dressed, his boots gleaming, in the act of settling his hat upon his head with the care he gave to everything.

“You have come to tell me, mon ami,” he said, “that Mrs. Inglethorp is dead.”

I stopped short.

“How on earth——”

“It was Dr. Bauerstein who told me. He passed beneath my window not half an hour ago, on his way home, and was so good as to stop and call up to me.”

“Bauerstein!”

“But yes. Why not? He knows, I think, that the poor lady was my benefactress. He said also”—Poirot paused to flick a speck from his sleeve—“that there is to be a post-mortem. That is a word which does not occur in the ordinary course of things. I have been waiting for you since.”

I told him, in as few words as I could manage, what had passed: the locked doors, the convulsions, the dying cry, the two doctors closeted together, and John’s permission. I told him also of the medical book I had found in the library, and of what it said concerning strychnine. He listened without interrupting, his head a little on one side.

“It may be as you say,” he said when I had done. “It may equally be that the good doctor has poisons on the brain, as Monsieur Lawrence tells you. For the moment I know nothing, and it is a great advantage to know nothing, Hastings, provided one is aware of it. Go before me. I will follow in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes! But every moment——”

“Every moment is precious, yes. And in twenty minutes I shall have brushed my coat and drunk my chocolate, and I shall arrive at the house with a mind in order. A man who comes untidily to a tragedy, my friend, will look at it untidily. Go.”

There was nothing for it. I went.

I was back at Styles at a quarter to seven, and the first thing I saw, as I came into the hall, was Alfred Inglethorp.

He was standing just inside the door, his hat still in his hand, and Dorcas was before him with her apron to her eyes. John had evidently that moment come out of the dining-room. Lawrence stood a little way behind him. Nobody spoke as I entered, and the silence had a quality I did not like.

“Hastings,” said John, in a flat voice. “Inglethorp has just come in.”

Alfred Inglethorp turned his black-bearded face towards me. He was very pale—paler, I think, than I had ever seen him—and the hand that held the hat was not quite steady.

“Dorcas has told me,” he said. “I cannot—I can scarcely take it in. When I left her last night she was tired, yes, but nothing more. Nothing to——” He broke off. “I was not here. God forgive me, I was not here.”

“Where were you?” said John.

There was no accusation in his tone. It was, if anything, too carefully without expression, and I saw Lawrence glance at him quickly.

“In the village.” Inglethorp passed a hand across his forehead. “I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein, as you know, and we sat talking in his rooms—it must have been close on midnight when I left him. I started back, and I had got as far as the lodge gates when I felt for the latch-key and found I had not got it. I must have left it lying on the hall table. Well—I had told you all not to sit up, and I did not care to rouse the house at that hour, so I turned about and went back to the village, and got a bed at the Styles Arms. I heard nothing—nothing at all—until the landlord came up this morning and told me the car had gone through in the small hours for Dr. Wilkins. I came at once.”

He looked from one to the other of us. Nobody answered him. It was Dorcas, of all people, who broke the silence, and she broke it with a sob.

“But you *took* the key, sir. I saw you take it up off the hall table with my own eyes, when you went out with the doctor, and I heard it go down into your pocket. And the door was left on the latch all night, as you’d said, sir. Baily found it so at five o’clock when he went round for the car.”

Inglethorp’s face seemed to go greyer.

“Then I must have dropped it,” he said, after a moment. “Somewhere on the road. I certainly had not got it when I felt for it. I—I will look for it presently.”

I remembered that I had myself seen him take up the key the night before, and I said nothing. It was not, I felt, the moment. John, too, held his peace, though I saw the muscles of his jaw tighten. Lawrence had turned away to the window.

“I should like to go up to her,” said Inglethorp, in a low voice.

“The room is locked,” said John. “Both rooms. The doctors wished it, and I have given my word. I have the keys.”

“Both rooms? My own room too? But surely, John, as her husband——”

“It is the doctors’ wish,” said John, and turned on his heel and went back into the dining-room.

Inglethorp stood for a moment where he was. Then he laid his hat down very carefully on the table from which, according to Dorcas, he had taken the latch-key, and went slowly along the passage towards the library. I heard the door shut behind him.

Poirot was as good as his word. A little after seven he was shown into the morning-room, where I had taken John, and I introduced them. John’s manner, which had been reserved, thawed a little under my friend’s grave courtesy; and when Poirot said simply, “Monsieur, I owe your mother’s family a debt which I can pay in only one way, and I ask nothing better than to pay it,” he gave up the two keys without a word.

“Nobody has entered since the doctors left?”

“Nobody. The keys have not been out of my pocket.”

“Bien. Then, Hastings, you will come with me. And you, monsieur, will be so good as to see that we are not disturbed for a little.”

We went up together. The door that gave upon the corridor was intact, and Poirot opened it with the key, went in, and closed it behind us. The room was as we had left it, save that somebody—Bauerstein, I supposed—had drawn the sheet over the still figure on the bed. The gas had been turned out and the curtains were still drawn, so that the light was dim and yellow. Poirot stood for a full minute just inside the door, quite motionless, looking about him.

Then he began.

He went first to the connecting door into Inglethorp’s room, which hung crazily upon its hinges where we had burst it, and examined the splintered framework and the bolt, which was still shot home, with the greatest attention. He went to the door by which we had entered and examined that bolt likewise. He set the overturned table upright, and knelt to gather up the fragments of a coffee-cup which lay smashed upon the carpet beneath it. There was a dark stain where the coffee had soaked into the pile. He bent his head and sniffed at it like a dog, and I saw his eyebrows go up. But he only said “Ah!” and laid the pieces of the cup carefully together on the table.

“What is it?”

“It is a coffee-cup, mon ami, broken.”

I did not know what to make of him. The despatch-case, which I remembered Mrs. Inglethorp had asked Cynthia to bring up to her, was lying on the writing-table. He looked at it, and at its lock, and touched it once with his finger, and left it where it lay. Then he crossed to the fireplace.

I confess that I could not follow him there. The ornaments on the mantelpiece stood in their prim row, exactly as they had stood when Lawrence’s terrified eyes had been fixed upon them a few hours before; and Poirot, so far as I could see, did nothing whatever but straighten them. He moved a vase a hair’s breadth to the left. He set a china shepherdess a fraction nearer her shepherd. He stood back, head on one side, and moved the vase again.

“Poirot,” I said, “for heaven’s sake! Is this the time for tidying the mantelpiece?”

“It is always the time, Hastings, for tidying what is not tidy. It offends me, that is all.” But his eyes, as he said it, were not on the ornaments. They were travelling slowly over the surface of the marble, and over the little heap of grey ash in the grate below, and there was a look in them that I had not seen before.

He said nothing more, however, and turned to the last door—the one which led into Cynthia’s room.

“This is the door that is never opened?”

“So Dorcas says. John tried it from Cynthia’s side last night, and it wouldn’t budge.”

“Naturally, since the bolt is on this side, and it is shot. Let us see how it goes.”

He drew it. It slid back easily, and without a sound. Poirot said “Tiens!” under his breath, shot it home again, and drew it once more, and again it ran as sweetly as though it had been oiled that morning. Then he stooped, and put his face close against the socket into which the bolt ran, and I heard him give a little grunt.

“Hastings. Your eyes are younger than mine. Look there, in the angle, where the bolt runs into the plate. Do you see nothing?”

I looked. It was a moment before I saw it: a wisp of something dark, no bigger than a fingernail, jammed in the crack between the bolt and its socket.

“A thread—a bit of fluff, isn’t it?”

For answer Poirot took from his waistcoat pocket a small pair of forceps, and with great delicacy drew the thing out. He held it up to the light from the curtained window. It was a fragment of cloth—dark green stuff, torn rather than cut, with a frayed edge on one side and, on the other, the clean line of a seam.

“Voilà,” said Poirot softly.

“What is it? What does it mean?”

“It is a piece of cloth, my friend, of a dark green colour, and it has been caught in a bolt.”

“Yes, yes, I can see that! But whose? How did it get there? Poirot, you must have some idea——”

“Some idea? I have a great many ideas. That is precisely the trouble.” He laid the fragment in an envelope which he took from his pocket-book, and put the pocket-book away. “No, Hastings. Do not ask me. When I know, I will tell you; and when I only think, I will hold my tongue, for a thought spoken too soon has a way of growing legs and running about the house. Come. I wish to see the rest of this wing, and then I wish to come back here.”

We were the best part of two hours over it. He looked at Inglethorp’s room, at the unslept-in bed, at the washstand and the wardrobe and the window. He paced the corridor and the gallery. He asked Dorcas, whom we met upon the stairs, a number of questions about lamps and candles and the hours at which the household went to bed, and thanked her with a gravity that seemed to comfort her more than anything else had done that morning. And all the while I was aware, with a mounting impatience, that he had not asked one single question about the thing that was uppermost in all our minds.

We came down, at last, into the hall. The clock there said that it wanted a few minutes of eleven. Sunlight lay in a long bar across the flags, and through the open door of the morning-room I could see Cynthia sitting on the window-seat, with Mary Cavendish beside her. The girl still looked heavy and dazed. Her face had lost its flush, and was very white now, with dark marks beneath the eyes, and she was pressing the back of her hand against her forehead.

Poirot stopped in the doorway, and bowed.

“Mademoiselle. You will forgive me. I have one question to ask you, and one only. Do you sleep always so soundly as you slept last night?”

Cynthia looked up at him, surprised.

“No,” she said slowly. “That’s just what I can’t understand. I’m a wretchedly light sleeper as a rule—I wake if a door bangs at the other end of the house. And last night I heard nothing. Nothing at all. Mary says she shook me for quite two minutes before I so much as opened my eyes, and even then I couldn’t seem to get properly awake. I felt—I still feel—as if my head were full of cotton wool.”

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

He bowed again, and turned away; and I, who had expected him to follow up so extraordinary an answer with a dozen questions more, was left to go after him up the stairs in a state of some bewilderment.

He unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room once more, and this time, when we were inside, I heard him turn the key behind us. The room was lighter now; the sun had come round to that side of the house and was striking through the crack of the curtains in a thin bright line. Poirot went straight to the little table he had set upright by the bed, took out his pocket-book, and drew from it the envelope. He shook the scrap of green cloth out upon the polished wood, and stood looking down at it, with his hands behind his back, on one side of the table. I stood on the other.

It lay between us, a torn and trumpery thing, no bigger than my thumbnail.

“Do you know, Hastings,” said Poirot at last, very quietly, “what I say to myself when I look at that? I say: it is very fortunate that a bolt cannot speak. For if it could, I think this one would tell us who drew it. And then, mon ami, we should have to decide whether or not to believe it.”

I stared at him across the table. I had not the smallest idea what he meant.

The First National Bank was on Broadway, four blocks from the Herald, in a gray stone building with columns across the front that were meant to make you think of Rome and made you think of a mausoleum instead. I got there at a quarter to three, which gave me fifteen minutes before the doors would be shut against the public.

I asked for somebody who could tell me about Donald Willsson's account and was passed along a marble counter to an assistant cashier named Purcell. He was a plump pink man of fifty with a small gray moustache and a stiff collar his neck had outgrown. His eyes went damp when I said the dead man's name.

He didn't want to tell me anything. Banks never do. I told him I was a Continental operative, that Donald Willsson had sent for me, and that I had spent the morning in Elihu Willsson's bedroom talking about it. The last item did what the first two couldn't. Elihu Willsson owned the bank the way he owned the rest of the town, and Purcell's collar seemed to get tighter while I watched.

"What is it you wish to know?" he asked.

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

Purcell went away through a gate and was gone five minutes. When he came back he had a card in his hand and a puzzled look under the moustache.

"No such item has come through," he said. "Nothing has been drawn against Mr. Willsson's account since Monday, and that was a small check to a tailor. We have certified nothing for him. And he was not in the bank yesterday, I am quite sure of that. I should have seen him. Everyone would."

"Could it have been cashed somewhere else? Another bank, a store?"

"It would have reached us by this morning in the clearing. It has not. And⁠—" he lowered his voice, though nobody was within twenty feet of us⁠—"if it were to come in now it would not be paid. We had notice of his death before we opened. In the circumstances the check is⁠—" he hunted for a word⁠—"so much paper, until the estate says otherwise."

"His balance would have covered it?"

"Several times over." He looked at the card in his hand as if it might have changed while he wasn't watching it. "Five thousand dollars. You are sure of the amount?"

"It's what's on the stub."

"Then I don't understand it," Purcell said, and I believed him. He had the look of a man who had spent thirty years making sure pieces of paper went where they belonged, and this one hadn't.

I thanked him, gave him the name of my hotel in case anything turned up, and went out past the columns. The doors were being locked behind me as I reached the sidewalk.

I walked back toward the Great Western thinking it over. Donald Willsson had written a check for five thousand dollars, put it in his pocket, and been out of his office for twenty minutes. He hadn't gone to the bank. Five minutes there and five back would have left him ten to spare, but he hadn't gone. He had gone somewhere else, to somebody who hadn't been in any hurry to turn the check into money, or who hadn't been able to. Then he had come back and dictated a letter to a Senator about post office regulations, and at ten-forty that night somebody had put four bullets into him from an alley. Whoever had the check now had a piece of paper worth nothing, and knew it, if they read the Herald.

It was a nice little problem. I hadn't earned any of my fee yet.

At the Great Western the clerk gave me my key and a look. The look came first. Then he said:

"There's a lady waiting for you, sir. She's been in the writing room the better part of an hour. I told her I couldn't say when⁠—"

"What name?"

He hadn't got a name, and he hadn't liked not getting one. I went across the lobby to the writing room.

She was sitting at a desk by the window with her gloves in her lap and nothing in front of her, the slender blonde who had asked me questions in her living room the night before. She was in black now, all of it, down to her shoes. Her face was still white, but it was a different white from the one she had worn at five minutes past eleven. This one had been put on carefully in front of a mirror.

She stood up when she saw me.

"I wish to talk with you," she said with her faint accent. "Not here."

We went up to my room. She took the one chair. I sat on the edge of the bed, offered her a cigarette she didn't want, and lit one for myself.

"My father-in-law telephoned me this morning," she said, "to tell me he had a detective from San Francisco who would see me hanged. He told me the name of your hotel. He wished me to be frightened. He told me you had seen blood on my slipper."

"I did."

"Yes." She turned the gloves over in her lap. "It was Donald's blood. I will tell you how it came there, and you may believe it or not. I do not think it matters very much what you believe. But I would rather you heard it from me than from that old man."

"Go ahead."

She told it flatly, like a lesson she had learned.

At twenty minutes past ten, while I was sitting in her living room with my hat on my knee, she had been called to the telephone. A man's voice, one she didn't know, had told her that her husband was at that moment in a house in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, that a woman lived there, and that he had taken five thousand dollars to her. The man gave her the number of the house and hung up.

"I went," she said. "You saw me go. I did not think. I got the car out and drove there and stopped on the other side of the street, a little way down, and turned the lights off and sat. I do not know how long. Then the door opened and Donald came out. There was a light in the hall behind him. I saw him plainly. He came down the steps and along the sidewalk, and he had gone perhaps twenty feet when the shots came. From across the street, from the dark, from near where I was. He fell."

She stopped and looked at the cigarette in her fingers as if wondering how it had got there. She had taken it after all. Then she went on.

"I ran to him. I did not think of anything else. I knelt down beside him on the sidewalk and he was dead. That is when it came on my slipper. There was a great deal of it. Then a man was there, bending over him from the other side. He had come out of the dark. He did not say anything. He looked at Donald and then he looked at me, and then he went away, back across the street, quickly. And I was afraid. I got up and ran to the car and drove home. You saw me come in."

"What did the man look like?"

"It was dark. He was not tall. He had a hat pulled down. I could not see his face. I have told the police this."

"They been to see you?"

"This morning. The chief of police himself. He was very kind." She said it as if kindness were a thing to be examined for hooks. "He did not ask me about my slipper. I do not think he knew. I do not know what my father-in-law has told him since."

"Max Thaler was at your house this morning too," I said. "Before or after the chief?"

She didn't jump. She had been waiting for it.

"After. Mr. Thaler wished to know what I had seen. I told him what I have told you."

"Why should Max Thaler want to know what you'd seen?"

"I did not ask him. In Personville one does not ask Mr. Thaler why. Donald had spoken with him twice, for the newspaper, and he came to the house once. I have said good day to him. That is all I know of him, and it is more than I wish to."

"Whisper wanted to know about the man who came out of the dark?"

"He wanted to know if I had seen his face."

"And you told him you hadn't?"

"I told him the truth."

"That word gets used a lot in this town," I said.

She looked at me with eyes that had nothing in them at all.

"The five thousand dollars," I said. "The man on the phone told you Donald had taken it to the woman. Did Donald tell you anything about it?"

"Donald told me nothing about anything. He wrote checks. He went to his newspaper. He came home late. When I asked where, he smiled and said, 'Working.'" Her voice didn't change on the word, but her fingers had crumpled one of the gloves into a ball. "If you wish to know who has the money, you had better ask the woman in Hurricane Street. I did not go up her steps."

"Did you know there was a woman?"

"I knew there was something. One always knows that. When the man said it on the telephone I was not surprised. I was only⁠—" she found the word⁠—"sure."

It was a good story. It fitted the newspaper's man and woman, it fitted the slipper, and it fitted the alley across the street. Stories that fit that well are either true or made by somebody who knows all the pieces. She had had all day to know them.

I asked her some more things and got some more answers, all of them careful. She said Donald had said nothing to her about sending for a detective, that she had learned it first from me, sitting in her house. She said the house in Hurricane Street was number eleven fifty-seven, and that she had not been back to look at it by daylight.

When she got up to go she stood a moment with her hand on the doorknob.

"You will tell that old man what I have said?"

"I don't work for him."

"For whom, then? Donald is dead."

"That," I said, "is what I'm going to find out tonight."

She went out. I listened to her heels going down the corridor and didn't hear them hesitate.

I had washed my face and was sitting by the window looking at nothing when the bellhop knocked. He had an envelope, hotel stationery, with nothing on the outside but the number of my room in pencil.

"Man left it at the desk," he said. "Just now."

"What kind of a man?"

"Just a man. Gray suit. I didn't notice him much." He noticed the quarter, though.

Inside was a single sheet, folded once, and on it in pencil, in small neat capitals:

YOU SAW ME THIS MORNING. I SAW YOU LAST NIGHT AND I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. THAT MAKES US EVEN. THE LADY HAS TOLD YOU WHAT SHE KNOWS AND IT IS TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES. LET HER ALONE. THE FIVE THOUSAND IS NOT MINE AND I DO NOT KNOW WHERE IT IS. I WOULD LIKE TO. I DO NOT CARE WHAT YOU DO ABOUT THE REST OF IT. M. T.

I read it twice. There was nothing in it that had to be read twice, but I did it anyway.

The lady had left my room a quarter of an hour ago. Either she had gone straight to a telephone, or somebody had been in the lobby when she came in and had guessed what she'd say. Neither way was any comfort to her, if she was as innocent as she was careful. And a man who takes the trouble to write that he'd like to know where five thousand dollars went is a man who has already been asking.

I put the note in my pocket, got my hat, and went out to find a telegraph office.

There was a Western Union on Broadway two doors from the drug store where I had telephoned Elihu Willsson that morning. The night man had a green eyeshade and a way of reading your message aloud under his breath while he counted the words. I let him. There was nothing in it Personville couldn't know if it wanted to, and I had a notion that anything Personville wanted to know it found out anyhow.

The wire was to the Old Man, at the Agency's San Francisco office. It said:

CLIENT DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT BEFORE I SAW HIM STOP NEVER LEARNED WHAT JOB WAS STOP FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON DECLINES TO EMPLOY AGENCY AND TOLD ME GO HOME STOP FATHER ACCUSES WIDOW STOP WIDOW HAS GIVEN ME ACCOUNT OF NIGHT WHICH MAY BE TRUE AND PUTS HER AT SCENE STOP CLIENT WROTE FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH PAYEE UNKNOWN NEVER PRESENTED NOR CERTIFIED STOP LOCAL POLITICS CROOKED AND POLICE PROBABLY IN IT STOP GAMBLER MAX THALER INTERESTED IN CASE AND HAS WARNED ME OFF WIDOW STOP CLIENTS FEE ALREADY IN OUR HANDS AND NOTHING EARNED ON IT STOP WILL STAY AND EARN IT UNLESS YOU WIRE OTHERWISE

I signed it with my name and the hotel and paid for it. The night man said it would go out in ten minutes. He read it over once more before he put it on the hook, and this time he didn't bother to keep his voice down.

I walked back. Broadway was lit up in the middle of the blocks and dark at the corners, and the traffic was mostly Fords with their tops down and men in them who looked at the sidewalk more than the road. Nobody looked at me particularly. I hadn't expected anybody to. When a town is run the way this one was, the looking is done by people you don't see.

The Great Western's lobby had three men in it reading newspapers they had already read, and none of them was Bill Quint, and none of them wore a gray suit, or if one did I couldn't pick him. I took my key and went up.

In the room I locked the door, put a chair under the knob because the lock didn't look like much, and turned out the light so I could stand at the window without being a picture in it. Mountain Boulevard was somewhere up in the dark to the right, with a dead man's house on it and a widow in it who told the truth as far as it went. Hurricane Street was off to the left somewhere, with a woman in it who had had a light in her hall at ten-forty and five thousand dollars promised to her, or hadn't. It had been a woman who telephoned Willsson at his office and got him to say ten o'clock. He had told her he would have to hurry away. He had been hurrying away when he fell.

Somewhere between those two streets was a strip of paper with Donald Willsson's name on it and five thousand dollars written across the face of it, and it was worth exactly nothing to whoever held it, and somebody was holding it, and had held it since a little before three yesterday afternoon. He had gone out with it and been back in twenty minutes. He hadn't gone to the bank. Either he had handed it to somebody who hadn't wanted it badly enough to run it to Purcell's window before the doors were locked, or he had brought it back in his pocket, and it had still been in his pocket at ten-forty, and Noonan's men had it now, or Noonan had it, or the man who had bent over him from the dark had it.

I didn't know which. I thought I might ask the chief of police in the morning, politely, and see what his face did.

I went to bed. The Stutz didn't come by. I lay a long time listening for it anyway.