The Chapters

Mr. Franklin helped me up off the sand, which, considering the hug he had just given me, was no more than fair. We took the way back together through the sandhills, he chattering all the while in the old boyish manner, and I, with my stick in one hand and his arm in the other, doing my best to believe that the little curly-headed lad who used to spoil my flower-beds and the fine gentleman in the fawn-coloured suit were one and the same person. I could not manage it then; and I am not sure that I have managed it now.

“You said, sir, at the lodge, I suppose, that you were four hours before your time?” says I, when I had got my breath. “We looked for you at close of day.”

“I looked for myself at close of day, Betteredge, until yesterday morning,” says Mr. Franklin. “Then the post came in, and I changed my mind. Here—you may as well see it. It concerns this house more than it concerns me.”

He took a letter out of his pocket-book and handed it to me. I must ask you to let me put my spectacles on, which is a thing I do slowly, being particular about the fit of them behind my ears. Mr. Franklin waited very civilly while I got them settled. I here copy the letter, word for word, from the original, which is lying at my elbow as I write, having been given into my keeping later on, for reasons that will appear in their proper place.

“Gray’s Inn Square, May 23rd, 1848.

“Dear Mr. Franklin Blake,—Since you were last at this office, a circumstance has come to my knowledge which I think you ought to hear of before you leave London. My clerk informs me that a person of foreign appearance, of dark complexion, and very civil in his manner, called here on Monday to inquire on what day you were expected to travel into Yorkshire, and by what train. He gave no name, and said he had a parcel to deliver to you. The clerk very properly told him nothing. On Tuesday the same person, or one strangely like him, was seen by my clerk standing on the opposite side of the square, watching the door. I attach no more importance to this than the facts warrant; but knowing what you carry, and knowing the history that goes with it, I take the liberty of advising you to alter the day or the hour of your journey, and to say nothing of the alteration to anybody but yourself. Go earlier rather than later, and by a train you have not mentioned. If this is an old man’s over-caution, you will forgive it. My respects to Lady Verinder.

“Yours faithfully, “MATHEW BRUFF.”

I gave the letter back to him, and I took my spectacles off, and I put them in their case, and I said nothing. It is a good rule with me, when I have a great deal to say, to begin by saying nothing at all.

“Well?” says Mr. Franklin.

“Well, sir,” says I, “Mr. Bruff is a lawyer, and lawyers are paid to be suspicious. But there is one part of his letter that I don’t understand, and that is where he says ‘knowing what you carry.’”

Mr. Franklin looked at me for a moment with a sort of grave look that sat strangely on his bright face. “Did anything happen here this morning, Betteredge?” he says. “Anything out of the common?”

I had promised Penelope to ask him about the jugglers, and here was the question asking itself. So I told him the whole story, just as I have told it to you—the three Indians on the terrace, and the little English boy, and the ink poured into the palm of his hand, and the words about the English gentleman who had got It about him, and the other words that the boy couldn’t answer, about the close of day. I made light of it as I went along, as my custom is; and I looked at Mr. Franklin, when I had done, expecting to see him laugh.

He didn’t laugh. He stood stock-still among the sandhills, with his hat pushed back off his forehead, and his face as serious as a churchwarden’s.

“You see, sir,” says I, thinking to cheer him up, “the boy couldn’t tell whether you would come by close of day or not. And here you are, four hours before it. So much for the ink!”

“I came four hours before it,” says Mr. Franklin, “because Mr. Bruff told me to change my train. If I had come by the train I first named, I should have come at close of day exactly. Think of that, Betteredge, and then tell me what you make of the ink.”

I own I didn’t like it. I had been quite comfortable, with my lady’s kind heart, and the sunny back yard, and Robinson Crusoe, and the whole matter had been nothing to me but a piece of poor Penelope’s fright; and now here was our young gentleman putting it into another shape altogether, on the very first day of his coming home.

“What does ‘It’ mean, sir?” says I. “The boy said, ‘He has got It about him.’ What is It?”

Mr. Franklin looked round him at the sandhills, and behind him at the sea, as if the very gulls might be listening. Then he said, in a lowered voice, one word; and the word was “The Moonstone.”

I had heard that word before, in the days of my youth, when the Colonel—my lady’s brother, John Herncastle, whom Mr. Franklin calls his uncle—came home from India with a black name and, as the family whispered, a yellow stone. I had never seen the stone; and, I may say at once, to save you the trouble of asking, that I did not see it now. Mr. Franklin buttoned his coat over his breast, as a man does who has something there that he values, and he said, “Not another word on the sands, Betteredge. You shall hear the whole story of it in its right order, tomorrow, when I have been to Frizinghall and back. For today, I have a favour to ask of you, and I will ask it under your own roof, and not under the open sky.”

With that he took my arm again, and we went on through the plantation of firs, he talking about Germany and France and Italy, and how each of them had had its turn at making him what he was, and I understanding about one word in three of it, and liking him none the less for that. The house is a fine house to come out upon, after the firs, with the sun on the front of it; and I saw the young gentleman look at it, and heard him say “Dear old place!” under his breath, which I took very kindly, and have set down here, as a thing to his credit.

Now for the favour.

We went into my own sitting-room, and I shut the door. Mr. Franklin put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and took out a little packet, no bigger than a snuff-box, done up in brown paper, and tied with string, and sealed at the knots with red wax—three seals, very neat, and a device on each of them which I had no leisure to examine, and, if the truth must be told, no wish to examine either.

“Betteredge,” says he, “you have the keys of the plate-room?”

“I have, sir,” I said, “and nobody else in the house has them, or has had them, since Sir John died.”

“Then lock this up there tonight, along with my lady’s plate,” says he, “and give it back to me tomorrow morning with your own hands, before I ride to Frizinghall. I would rather it was in your keeping than in mine, for one night. Don’t ask me what it is; and don’t tell anybody that you have got it.”

I looked at the packet, and I looked at him. I had my own thoughts, you may be sure; but a man who has served in a family for fifty years learns to keep his thoughts in the same place where he keeps his master’s keys—that is to say, in his own pocket. I took the packet, and I said, “Very good, sir.” That was all.

The plate-room, if you want to know, is a little strong-closet off the pantry, with an iron door to it, and Sir John’s plate in it, which my lady never uses now, and a great silver salver that came to her from her father, and other things of value that don’t concern this story. I let myself in with the big key, and the little key, and I put Mr. Franklin’s packet in the empty box that once held the second set of forks (sold, I am sorry to say, to pay some Verinder debt long before my time). I turned the two locks on it again, and I tried the door twice, as my custom is, and then I put the keys where they always go, in the pocket inside the flap of my waistcoat, and I felt them there, and I felt them there again, and then I went back to Mr. Franklin, and told him it was done. He thanked me, and he shook hands with me, and there was an end of it—for that time.

What was in the packet? I hear you ask. Patience, good friend! I have told you that I did not know. I have told you that I was not told. If you are the sort of person who must know everything before the proper time, you had better shut this book, and take up the newspaper instead, where everything is known before it happens, and is generally wrong.

Mr. Franklin’s luggage came up from Frizinghall by the carrier, and there was the getting of him into his old room, which he asked for particularly, and the airing of the bed, which the women had done for the close of day, and had to do again in a hurry for the middle of the afternoon; and in the thick of all this, in comes Penelope, with her cap on one side and a face full of news.

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

“I know that,” says I. “I went to fetch her.”

“Yes, and you brought Mr. Franklin back instead!” says Penelope, who has a quick tongue, and gets it from her mother. “Rosanna went the other way. Nancy saw her from the dairy window, going along the shore towards Cobb’s Hole, as fast as she could walk, with her cloak held tight about her, and never once looking back. She has gone to her friend there, I suppose. Cook says she may stop there, for all cook cares; and I said cook ought to be ashamed of herself. Did you ask Mr. Franklin about the jugglers, father?”

I said I had asked him, and that he had listened to it, and that it was a matter I would rather not talk about in the pantry with the door open; and Penelope, who knows my ways, took herself off, only saying over her shoulder that she was sure something was going to happen, and that when it did, I was to remember she had said so. Women are wonderful creatures for remembering afterwards what they said before. Having been married to one, I speak with authority.

At half-past four, my lady’s carriage came round to the door, and my lady got out of it alone. Miss Rachel, it appeared, had stayed on at Frizinghall with her cousins, the Miss Ablewhites, and was to sleep there, and be sent home in the morning—a thing arranged at the lunch-table, with which I had nothing to do, and which I set down here only because it is the reason why our young lady does not come into this part of my story at all. My lady heard of Mr. Franklin’s arrival on the steps, and her face lit up in a way I like to remember; and she went straight through to the library, where he was, and I followed, being wanted to know about the dinner-hour, and the wine, and one or two other things of that kind.

I shall not set down their greeting. A nephew coming home after so many years abroad, and an aunt who had known him as a little boy, have a right to be private, even in a book. I will only say that when it was over, and Mr. Franklin had got his hat out of his hand at last, and my lady had sat down in her own chair by the window, she looked at him for a moment quite gravely, and then spoke, very quietly, and very plainly, as her way is when she means a thing to be done.

“Franklin,” she said, “before you have been an hour in this house, I must ask one thing of you, and I must ask it now, so that there may be no mistake afterwards. I know why you have come, and I know whose errand you have come upon. I make no objection to your errand. But my brother John is not to be spoken of under my roof. Not his name, not his history, not his money, and not the reasons why I would not have him inside my doors while he was alive. I closed that subject twelve years ago, and I don’t open it now. You will have Rachel and me, and the birthday, and as long a stay as you please; and you will give me your word about that one thing.”

I saw Mr. Franklin glance, just for the flash of a second, my way—as if he wondered how much the old servant knew; and then he went straight up to my lady and took her hand.

“You have my word, aunt,” says he. “Colonel Herncastle shall not be so much as named. I give you my word of honour on it, and I am glad to give it.”

“Thank you,” says my lady; and then, turning to me, “Betteredge, we will dine at seven, and Mr. Franklin will take the claret his uncle—” She stopped herself, and coloured, and laughed, and said, “There! you see how easy it is to break one’s own rule. The claret Sir John was fond of. That is all.”

I said, “Yes, my lady,” and I went out. And I will confess to you, between ourselves, that I went out with the plate-room keys weighing heavier in my waistcoat pocket than they had weighed for twenty years.

The rest of that day went as such days do go in a well-ordered house, and you will not want it told. The dinner was a good dinner, and Mr. Franklin ate it in the German fashion, which is fast, and praised it in the French fashion, which is long. My lady sat with him in the drawing-room afterwards; and I heard, through the door, a good deal of laughing, and once Mr. Franklin singing, in one of his foreign languages, a thing about a miller and a river which I did not follow, but which sounded to me uncommonly like a hymn. At ten I made my rounds. I tried the plate-room door as I passed it, and I tried it again on my way back, and it was fast, and I said to myself, “There, Gabriel Betteredge, that will do.”

Rosanna Spearman had not come in.

Penelope came to me for the last time that night, in her shawl, to say so. The girl had leave to go out, it was true, and the friend at Cobb’s Hole (of whom, as I have said, more anon) was a decent woman, and nobody in the house had any right to say a word. But a servant sleeping out of the house, with no notice given, was a thing that had not happened in my time; and I told Penelope that I would speak to Rosanna in the morning, and that she was to go to bed, and that if the girl came in late she was to be let in quietly and no more said till I had seen her. Penelope kissed me, and told me I was a dear old man, and that she had never trusted those Indians, and went off; and I heard her lock the back door behind her, and then I heard nothing at all but the clock.

So there I was, at the last, in my own beehive chair, in my own sitting-room, with the candle at my elbow and Robinson Crusoe on my knee. I opened him, as I always do at a doubtful time, without choosing, and let the book choose for me; and he opened at the page where the man finds the one footprint on the sand, and stands, “like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.” I read that twice over. Then I shut the book, and sat looking at the candle, and thinking of the packet behind the iron door, and of Mr. Bruff’s foreigner standing on the far side of Gray’s Inn Square, and of a little grey cloak going away fast along the shore towards Cobb’s Hole, and never once looking back.

I don’t know how long I sat. I know that the candle was down to its last inch when I took it up, and that Rosanna Spearman’s bed, when I passed the women’s stairs, had nobody in it. And I know that I said to myself—which I am not ashamed to own to you, whoever you are, and however much wiser than an old house-steward you may be—that I wished, for that night at least, the young gentleman had kept his packet in his own pocket, and left the keys of the plate-room to gather their honest rust in mine.

That night I sat late over my papers, for I had reached a point in my argument about the progress of moral ideas which seemed to me then of the utmost importance, and it was past midnight when I put down my pen. My wife had long since gone to bed. I remember that I went out upon the lawn, as I often did, to cool my head before I followed her, and that I stood there for some minutes in my slippers with the dew about my feet and the whole quiet valley below me lying grey and still under the stars. From habit I looked for Mars. It was low now towards the west, a warm reddish point among the pines.

I had turned to go in when the sky was suddenly drawn across, from east to west, by a line of greenish light. It was not like the falling stars I had watched as a boy, which wink and are gone. This came slowly, as such things go, with a kind of deliberation, and it left behind it for the space of several seconds a luminous track that faded from green to a dull orange, like a wire cooling. It passed, as I judged, a little to the north of me, over the Ottershaw way, dropping as it went, and vanished behind the black mass of the pine woods. A moment later—or perhaps I imagine this now, knowing what I know—there came from that direction a sound that was not quite a sound, a soft concussion felt rather than heard, such as one feels when a heavy door is shut in a distant part of a great house. Then the stillness closed over everything again. A dog barked somewhere towards Chertsey and left off.

It is a curious thing, and it shows how far our habits of thought were from the truth, that I stood there and said to myself, “A meteorite—and a big one,” with a certain scientific satisfaction, and no more. I did indeed think of the flashes upon Mars, but only as one might think of two odd events in the same week, and I put the thought aside as a fancy. I went in, wound my watch, noted the hour upon a scrap of paper in case Ogilvy should care to have it, and slept as soundly as any man in Surrey.

I was waked before seven by the sound of voices at the back of the house. The gardener’s boy had come up from the village full of news. Something had fallen in the night out beyond the Ottershaw road, he said, and had knocked down a fir tree and set the bracken alight, and it was lying now in the old gravel pit, the one that had been worked out and flooded years before I came to live in the neighbourhood, and the water was all boiling round it like a copper. Half the village was going out to look. I dressed hastily and, leaving word for my wife, set off across the fields without waiting for breakfast.

The morning was very fine and warm. I remember the larks, and the long shadows of the hedges lying across the wet grass, and a cart going by upon the road with the carter standing up in it to see over the hedge. The old pit lies in a fold of the ground between the road and the pine woods, and one comes upon it suddenly, so that I was almost at the edge before I saw the thing at all.

The first impression was of steam. The whole hollow was full of it, a slow white vapour rising and drifting in the sunlight and lying in the bracken like a morning mist, so that at first I could make out nothing but the shape of the pit and a dull glow of something hot at the bottom of it. Then the light air shifted and I saw the Thing itself.

It lay across the pit, half in the water and half out, with its farther end buried in the gravel of the bank where it had ploughed in. The nearer end stood up out of the water, and about it the water was in a low continual seething, breaking into little bubbles and sending up its steam. The Thing was enormous—thirty yards long, I judged then, though it was hard to judge with so much of it hidden—and rounded like a cask, and of a dull grey-brown colour where the crust had formed upon it, with here and there a place where the crust had cracked and fallen away and something duller and paler showed beneath. A young fir tree had been snapped off short at the top of the bank and lay with its crown in the water, its needles all brown and shrivelled as though a fire had passed over them. The turf was torn up in a great furrow. Along the margin of the pond, where the water was quieter, floated a number of small fish, roach and perch, turned belly upward and white.

Ogilvy was already there. He was standing upon the bank at the far side with his hat pushed back and a note-book in his hand, and he had evidently come out in great haste, for he had no collar on and one of his boots was unlaced. He hailed me with a wave of the note-book.

“I saw it come down,” he called. “From the observatory. Did you see it?”

I said that I had, and gave him the time by my watch, which he wrote down with every appearance of satisfaction. He came round to my side of the pit, picking his way through the bracken, and stood beside me looking down at the Thing with the pleased and proprietary air of a man who has found a shilling in the road.

“An aerolite,” he said. “A meteoric stone of quite exceptional size. There has been nothing like it since the Siberian fall, and I doubt if that was as large. We shall have it in the British Museum before the year is out, and the Woking people will be sorry it did not come down on their side of the parish.”

I do not know what made me say what I did. It was the shape, I think; the shape and the ten nights of flame. I said that it seemed to me a very regular sort of stone.

Ogilvy laughed. “They are all regular after a fashion. The air planes them. A body coming in at such a speed is turned and shaped by the friction like a pebble in a torrent—more so. Look at the Melbourne iron, or any of the big ones.”

“The Melbourne iron was not a cylinder,” said I.

“It is not a cylinder,” said Ogilvy sharply. “It is a rounded mass, and you are looking at it end on, through steam, at forty yards. When it has cooled and we can get down to it you will see for yourself.” And then, because he had guessed what was in my mind, “You are thinking of Mars.”

I admitted that I was.

He shook his head at me as one shakes it at a promising pupil who has given a foolish answer. He had thought of it himself, he said—of course he had thought of it; it was the first thing any astronomer would think of—and he had put it aside in ten minutes. The flashes were a volcanic phenomenon, or the fall of a meteoric swarm upon the planet; he had said so at the time and he still said so. That a body should come to us from Mars was not in itself impossible; a fragment of the planet, thrown off in some great convulsion, might conceivably reach us in the course of ages. But that ten such fragments should be thrown off on ten successive nights, and one of them come to earth in his parish within the month, was beyond all the odds of chance. “A million to one,” he said, “I told you that before. And this is a stone. I know a stone when I see one. Give it a day to cool and I will show you the fusion crust and the pits, and you shall come and see it sawn.”

I said that I hoped so. And indeed, standing there in the sunshine with the larks singing overhead and Ogilvy so entirely confident, I very nearly believed him. He was so plainly the man who knew, and I was so plainly the man who wrote papers about morality and was learning to ride the bicycle. Yet I could not get the regularity of the thing out of my eyes, nor a certain look of its surface where the crust had scaled away, which was not the look of any stone I had ever seen, and when he proposed to try the bank on the far side where the gravel ran down into the water more gently, I let him go alone. He came back presently with his face very red and his boots steaming. The water was too hot to stand in, he said, even at the margin; it would be some hours yet. He had sent a boy on a bicycle to fetch Henderson, the London journalist who lived at Ottershaw, and he meant to telegraph to Woking and to the Astronomer Royal, and he thought, as he had had no breakfast, that he would go home and get some.

I walked back with him as far as the road and then went home myself. My wife was in the breakfast room. I had meant to make light of the matter, but she saw at once by my face that something out of the ordinary had happened, and I told her the whole of it while I ate—the light I had seen from the lawn, the steam, the fish, Ogilvy in his unlaced boots. She listened without interrupting, and when I had done she said that she would come and see it.

I do not think that I made any very serious attempt to dissuade her. I said that there would be a crowd and that the ground was rough, and she said that she had walked over rougher and that if it was safe enough for me it was safe enough for her, and went to put on her boots. I remember that as we set out she took my arm in the lane, which she did not often do in daylight, and that she asked me, quite quietly, whether I thought Ogilvy was right. I said that Ogilvy generally was right. It was not an answer, and she knew it was not, but she let it pass.

By the time we came over the rise to the pit the crowd had begun. There were perhaps thirty people there already—labourers who should have been at work, a knot of boys from Chertsey with their school books under their arms, two women with baskets, the carter I had seen earlier, who had left his cart in the road, and a party of young men on bicycles who had come out from Woking on the strength of a rumour. Henderson had arrived and was going about with a pencil asking everybody what they had seen. Ogilvy had come back and was standing where I had left him, explaining the fusion crust to anyone who would listen. The steam was thinner now. The water still seethed about the Thing, but more slowly, and the crust upon the exposed end had begun to flake away in little ash-coloured scales that slid down its curve and fell into the pond with a faint hiss.

We stood a little apart from the rest, on the higher ground, and I pointed out to my wife the furrow and the broken tree and the place where the crust had gone. She said very little. Once she asked me whether it was still getting hotter or getting cooler, and I told her that it was cooling, which was what Ogilvy said, and she looked at the steam and said nothing.

It was about eleven, I suppose, when the man was burned. He was a young fellow from the Ottershaw stables, a big good-natured lout whom I knew slightly by sight, and he had been drinking, I think, though it was early in the day for it. He had been boasting for some time to the boys that the water was no hotter than a bath, and at last, with a good deal of laughter behind him, he pulled off his boots and rolled up his trousers and went down the gentle side of the bank into the shallows. The water there was no more than warm, and he stood in it up to his knees, grinning back at us, and then waded slowly out towards the nearer end of the Thing, where the gravel shelved and the bubbles rose, until he stood within a yard of it. Ogilvy shouted to him to come back. He did not heed; he stretched out his arm, as a man reaches to pat a horse, and laid the flat of his hand upon the grey surface to show us that it was nothing.

I have never forgotten the sound he made. It was not a shout but a kind of high indrawn whistle, and he came out of the water in three great splashing bounds and fell on his knees in the bracken with his hand held out before him, staring at it. The palm was white, dead white, with the fingers already swelling and the skin risen in blisters, and the marks of the crust were on it in a curious mottled pattern like the veining of a leaf. Ogilvy was the first to reach him. He took the hand, which the man would not at first allow, and looked at it, and wrapped it in his own handkerchief, and sent two of the boys running for the doctor. The crowd, which had drawn back with one movement when the fellow cried out, drew in again as quickly, and there was a great deal of talk. I heard one of the women say that it was a judgment, and another that it was the gas out of it; and I heard Ogilvy, still holding the man’s wrist, say in his ordinary lecturing voice that a body so large would naturally retain its heat for a considerable time, and that no one else was to go down.

My wife had turned quite white. She had not looked away, as some of the women did, but had watched the whole of it, and when I took her arm I felt that she was trembling. Yet what she said to me was only, “How hot it must still be, after all these hours,” and then, after a little, “Ogilvy said it was cooling.”

I said that it was, undoubtedly, and that stone held heat as everyone knew, and that the man had been a fool. But I found that I was looking at the Thing as I said it, and not at her.

The morning wore on and grew hot. The steam had almost gone by noon, and the seething at the water’s edge had sunk to a slow simmer, but the crowd had trebled. People were coming out along the road from Chertsey in a steady stream, and across the fields from the direction of the station, and there were carts drawn up in the lane and a man selling ginger beer out of a barrow. Two constables had arrived and were standing about with the air of men who have been sent to do something and have not been told what. Henderson had gone off on his bicycle to catch the London train with his story. Ogilvy had got a tape from somewhere and was trying to measure the visible portion of the Thing from the bank, calling out figures to a boy who wrote them down.

It was then, with the church clock at Chertsey striking twelve very faintly across the fields, that I persuaded my wife to go home. She was tired, I said, and the sun was very strong, and there was nothing more to see; the Thing would take the rest of the day to cool, and they would not be able to get at it before to-morrow. She did not argue. She asked me whether I was coming, and I said that I would follow her presently, that I wanted a word with Ogilvy first; and she looked at me for a moment as if she would say something and then did not. I walked with her to the top of the rise and saw her set off along the footpath towards the road, a small neat figure in her grey walking dress against the bright green of the fields. Near the stile she turned once and lifted her hand, and I lifted mine, and she went on over the stile and out of sight behind the hedge.

I went back down to the pit. The crowd had closed up again about the edge, and Ogilvy was still calling out his figures, and the Thing lay there in the sunshine with the water simmering about it and the little grey scales sliding, one by one, from its rounded end into the pond.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*30 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Your two letters came to me together, the first having lain for three days in the lodge while I was away with the elder girls at the Cathedral town for the examinations, and so I read the secret and the three proposals at one sitting, and had to go and walk twice round the playground before I could trust myself to come in to tea. My dear, my dear, I am so glad. I do not think I was ever so glad of anything that did not happen to myself. You are to tell Mr. Holmwood--I suppose I must learn to say Arthur--that if he is not the best husband in England I shall come to Chatham Street and say so to his face, and that in the meantime I have already forgiven him for stealing you.

“As to the two poor gentlemen, I cried over them too, so you need not be ashamed of your blots, for I have matched them. But, Lucy, I think you were quite right to speak to them as you did, and I think they must be fine men to have taken it as they did. A man who can be refused and go out of the room without looking back is a man to be trusted, and I am glad you will have two such friends. Only, dear, do not write to me again about marrying three men, even in fun. I read that part to nobody, but I looked over my shoulder all the same.

“Now, you will scold me if I do not tell you about myself, and there is not very much to tell. I said in my last that Jonathan would be home in about a week. It is three weeks now, and I have had no word from him since those hurried lines. I know that it is foolish to fret, for Mr. Hawkins wrote to me most kindly only yesterday to say that business of that sort with foreign gentlemen is always slow, and that the posts from those parts are worse than slow, and that I am to think of Jonathan as sitting over a great fire eating paprika, which he says is the local dish, and growing stout. He is a dear old man, and he treats me already as if I were a daughter of the house. So I try to do as I am bid; but, Lucy, I have taken to counting the days on the school calendar, which is not like me, and I have twice been to the door when the postman came, before he rang, which is not like me either. There, I have told you, and now I feel better, as you said you did.

“The ten o’clock bell again. Bless you, dear, and bless him too.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey Morris at his rooms in Half Moon Street. Only the three of us, as promised. I set it down because I want a record of my own state of mind, and because I find that speaking into this machine is a discipline, like the writing of case-notes, which forbids one to lie to oneself.

Quincey had done the thing well: a small table, a great fire though the night was mild, and the old bearskin from the Korea on the floor, which he swears he will be buried in. Arthur came late, and came in with the look of a man who has been running downhill and cannot stop. He did not sit down. He stood with his back to the fire and told us, and I think he had rehearsed it on the way, that Miss Westenra had accepted him on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, that her mother was pleased, and that his father, who is not well, had written a letter which he would not read to us because he would not be able to finish it. Then he stopped, and looked from one of us to the other, and I saw that the messages which were to make our ears tingle were not easy for him to deliver.

Quincey saved him. He got up, and put a glass into Arthur’s hand, and said: “Art, you are going to tell us that she said something kind about two fellows that she couldn’t take, and we are going to say that she is the finest girl in the world for saying it, and then we are all going to drink her health standing up and not say any more about it to-night, because there is a limit to what a man can carry.” So Arthur told us. To me she had sent word that she counted me among her friends, as she had said, and that she meant it. To Quincey she had said something which Arthur would not repeat, but only that Quincey was to know she had told her lover of the kiss, and that her lover, being an honest man, had said it was well given.

We drank her health, and then the health of the happiest man in the wide world, and I noticed that Quincey drank his standing, with his heels together like a trooper, and that when he set down his glass he turned it upside-down upon the cloth, which I believe is an American custom for a toast that shall not be drunk again. After that we were merry. We told the old yarns--the night on the Titicaca shore, the surf at the Marquesas, the boatswain of the Korea who could not be made to understand that Arthur was a lord’s son--and Quincey told a new one about a horse in the Panhandle which I do not believe. He called the horse Lucy, by accident, and then went red under his tan and called it Sal for the rest of the evening.

I record, for my own purposes, that I was not unhappy. I had expected to be. I have observed in my patients that the announcement of an irrevocable thing is often a relief to a mind that has been swinging in the balance, and I find it so with myself. The empty feeling of the twenty-fifth is gone; what has come in its place is a kind of steadiness. I can look at Arthur without wishing him anything but well, and I could, I think, look at her. Quincey said, as he saw us to the stairs: “There’s three of us now that would go through fire for that little girl, and only one that gets to sit by it. That’s a fair division, Jack. It would have been a poor world if she had been left to freeze.” I came home by the last train. Slept.

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*4 June.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Arthur has told me all about the dinner, or as much as he says a man may tell a girl, which I suspect is about half. He says that Dr. Seward was very quiet and very kind, and that Mr. Morris made a speech, and that they all drank my health standing, and that afterwards there was a great deal of talk about a ship, and I am not to ask about it. I am so glad, Mina; I should have hated to think that Arthur had lost his friends by gaining me. He says he has not, and that they are to be at the wedding, both of them, and that Mr. Morris has already threatened to bring his own horse.

“Mamma is not so strong as I should like, and the doctor--not Dr. Seward; our own--says she must not have too much excitement, so we keep the news as quiet as we can, which, with three proposals in the house in one day, is not easy. When the school breaks up you are to come to us, wherever we may be by then. Mamma says so, and I say so, and Arthur says so; that is three votes, and you have none.

“You say nothing of Jonathan except that one line about the calendar, and I know you too well to be deceived by it. Write to me, dear, and tell me truly. I shall not tease you. I have found out in the last fortnight that one cannot be teased about the person one is waiting for.

“Your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Franz Ebner, Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*28 May.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“I write to you by the instruction of the English gentleman Herr Jonathan Harker, who was guest at this house, and who left with me, before he departed for the Borgo Pass upon the fifth day of this month, a small trunk with his winter cloak and some books, and a paper with your name and address written upon it. He requested that, should his return be delayed beyond three weeks, I should write to you at this address and say that he was well and that the trunk was safe. This I now do, since the three weeks are passed and he has not returned.

“I am able to tell you more than this, which will, I hope, be a comfort to you. Word has come down to us by the carrier who goes weekly to the Pass that the business which took the English gentleman into the mountains is not yet completed, and that he is detained by it, and that he does not expect to be able to come down for some weeks yet. It was said that he is in good health and lodged comfortably. I regret that I cannot send you anything in his own hand, but he has not written, and the carrier is not a man to carry letters, being a peasant and unable to read.

“The trunk I hold safely, and shall hold it until Herr Harker comes for it or sends. Should you wish it despatched to England I will do so upon your direction and the cost is small. I beg you to be assured, honoured Miss, that the gentleman was much liked in this house and that we wish him every good.

“With high respect,

“FRANZ EBNER,

“Book-keeper, Golden Krone Hotel.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*8 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“You asked me to tell you truly, so I send you a copy of a letter which came to me this morning, from a stranger, from Bistritz, which is the last town in Transylvania that Jonathan wrote to me from. I have copied it word for word, foreign English and all, because I want you to see it just as I saw it, and to tell me whether I am a goose.

“You see what it says. He is well; he is detained by his business; he may be some weeks. That is what Mr. Hawkins said, almost to the letter, and it is exactly what I ought to have expected, and I sat down and cried when I had read it, which I did not do when I had no letter at all. Is that not strange? I think it is because it is so kind, and so careful, and because Jonathan thought, before he went up into those mountains, that I might be anxious, and left his winter cloak and a paper with my name on it with a book-keeper, so that I should not be. He is the most thoughtful man alive, and I am very much ashamed of myself.

“And yet, Lucy, I am not comforted, and I cannot tell you why. It is nothing in the letter. It is only that the man says Jonathan has not written, and Jonathan always writes. He wrote to me from the train. He wrote to me from an inn where, he said, the paper was so bad the pen went through it. He would have written on the carrier’s sleeve. I keep saying to myself that the carrier cannot read, and that a peasant who cannot read will not think to carry a letter, and that there is nothing in it; and then I go to the map in the schoolroom, where the girls do their geography, and look for the Borgo Pass, and it is not marked, and I feel as if he had gone off the edge of the paper.

“I have written to Mr. Hawkins and sent him the letter, and asked him to tell me plainly whether he thinks I should go out. I know what you will say, and what he will say, and that a schoolmistress with nineteen pounds in the savings bank cannot go to Transylvania; but I have looked at the railway maps in Bradshaw, and it can be done in four days from London, and if I go on with this counting of days much longer I shall not be fit to teach anybody anything. Do not tell your mother, for she is not to be excited, and do not tell Arthur, for he would offer to go himself, and I should let him.

“Write to me, dear, and tell me I am a goose. I want very much to be told.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*12 June.*--A curious thing to-day with Renfield, which I set down at once so as to have it exact.

Arthur came down on Tuesday to see the place. He had never been here, and he was in the mood of a man who wants to see everything and to shake hands with everybody, and I took him round the grounds and the day-rooms, and we stood a while talking under Renfield’s window, which gives on the drive. I noted at the time that Renfield was at the window, and that he watched Arthur with his eyes only, without moving his head, as he watches a fly.

This morning I found him quiet, sitting with his hands on his knees, and I asked him the usual questions. He answered them all, civilly and shortly, and then, without any preface, as I turned to go, he said: “Is Miss Westenra well, doctor?”

I confess it took me aback, and I am not easily taken aback by patients. I asked him what Miss Westenra he meant. He said: “The young lady. Your friend’s young lady. The one you drink the health of.” I asked him who had told him of her, and he said, with the look he has when he is being reasonable and wishes me to see it: “Nobody told me. The gentleman on Tuesday said her name under my window, and said it three times; and when you spoke of her you turned your face away. I thought perhaps she was ill.” I told him she was perfectly well, and he said: “I am glad. It would be a waste,” and would say no more.

I have since gone over Tuesday in my mind, and I think it is so: Arthur did say her name, more than once, and I daresay I did turn away, for I was not, that afternoon, quite master of my face. There is nothing in it but a strong ear, a stronger memory, and the peculiar attentiveness of the man, who misses nothing that goes on beneath him. It is precisely his fixed idea to attend; I ought to have expected it. I record nevertheless that I did not like it, and that I have told Simmons to see the window is kept shut when there are visitors on the drive. A doctor who takes his patient’s guesses for insight is on the road to being a patient himself. “It would be a waste.” I shall find out what he meant by that.

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

“*17 June.*

“No answer to my letter of the eighth. Is there any news of Jonathan? Please reply, however little. MINA MURRAY.”

*Telegram, Peter Hawkins to Mina Murray.*

“*17 June.*

“Letter from Jonathan this morning dated twelfth. All well. Work nearly done. Starts home few days. Rejoice. HAWKINS.”

She did not say anything else for a while. The cab went on up the hill and the street lamps came in through the windows one after another, so that I saw her face and then did not see it. She had her eyes shut. We came up past the Pantheon, big and black with nobody in the square, and down the other side along the railings of the Luxembourg, where it was dark under the trees.

“What’s the matter, Brett?”

“Nothing. Everything. Don’t ask me, darling.”

I did not ask her. She sat up and got a cigarette out of her bag and I lit it for her, and the match showed her face, and she looked at me across it and then blew it out.

“Don’t look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a chap who’s been hit.”

“I’m all right.”

“You’re not. Neither am I. Oh, hell.” She put her head back against the leather. “Where is he taking us?”

“Montsouris. There’s a park. I thought we’d drive around.”

“I don’t want to drive around. It’s rotten, driving around. Take me to the Select.”

“All right.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He did not like it. He had been going one way and now he had to go the other, and he turned the cab in the middle of the Rue d’Assas and said something about it, and we went back the way we had come and out on to the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was lighter there, and there were people on all the terraces.

“You didn’t want to go to Montsouris,” Brett said.

“No.”

“What did you want?”

“I don’t know. I told him the first place I thought of.”

“That’s a lie, Jake.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a lie.”

The cab stopped in front of the Select and I paid the driver and we got out. The terrace was full and the people at the tables looked up at Brett as we went by, and she went past them the way she went past everything, and inside we found a table against the wall away from the door. The waiter knew her.

“Brandy and soda,” she said. “Jake?”

“Fine à l’eau.”

“You are going on a party.”

“I’ve been on one all evening.”

“So you have. Poor Jake.” She looked around the room. There was nobody we knew, only the people who are always in the Select and who might as well have been the furniture. “I don’t know why I made you come here. I hate this place.”

“We can go somewhere else.”

“It’s the same everywhere.” The drinks came and she drank half of hers and put the glass down. “You’re wondering about that crowd.”

“No.”

“You are. You’ve a face like a boot when you’re wondering. I go about with them because they’re safe. You know why they’re safe.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to. You never have to.” She finished the brandy and soda and made a sign to the waiter for another. “I say, I met a chap last week. Count Mippipopolous. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“Everybody knows him.”

“I don’t.”

“You would if you went anywhere. He has pots of money. Something in America. Sweets, I think he said. He’s a Greek, or a Turk, or something. He’s quite old and rather fat and terribly frank about the money. He wants to take me down to the coast.”

“Which coast?”

“Any coast. Biarritz. He kept saying Biarritz, and I said I knew too many people at Biarritz.”

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know.” She was turning her glass around on the marble. “Would you go, if you were me?”

“Sure. Why not? It’s the right time of year for the coast.”

“You would go.”

“I’d go. And I’d take the money too.”

“You would not.”

“No,” I said. “But you ought to. He sounds like a good sort.”

“He is a good sort. He’s awfully kind, really. He’s been very sweet.”

“That’s fine.”

“Isn’t it? It’s fine.”

“It’s a fine thing to know a count.”

“Oh, don’t, Jake.”

“I’m not doing anything. I said it was fine.”

That was the way we talked. I was jealous of a fat Greek I had never seen, and there was nothing in the world I could do about it, and I sat there and let her think I was not. She knew, of course. She drank the second brandy and soda and looked at me over it and neither of us said anything more about the count, and after a while I laughed.

“What?”

“I left fifty francs at that place.”

“I know. I told you you’d lose it.”

“I’m going back for it.”

“You are not.”

“I am. I want to see if she got it.”

“You’re a swine, Jake. You’re the worst swine I know. Go on, then. I’ll come.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I said I’d come. I can sit in the taxi. I’m not going into that box again.”

I paid and we went out and got a taxi at the corner and went back across the river and up the Boulevard Saint Michel and up the hill again into the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The street was steep and dark and the light was still coming out of the door of the Bal and I could hear the accordion from the taxi. Brett sat back in the corner.

“Be quick,” she said. “I hate waiting.”

The policeman was still by the door. He looked at me and smiled again and I went in. It was thinner inside. The proprietor was still up on his stool with the bells on his ankle, but the floor was not crowded any more and there was nobody at the big table where Braddocks had had his party. They had all gone on somewhere. The young men with the washed hair had gone too. It was the working people of the quarter now, a few couples, and the daughter of the house sitting on a bench with her shoes off. I went over to the zinc and the patronne saw me and reached under the bar and brought out the envelope.

“Nobody asked for it, Monsieur,” she said. “She didn’t go out with anybody. She is over there.”

Georgette was sitting at a table by the wall with her hat in her lap and a glass of beer in front of her, alone. She watched me come across the room. She did not seem surprised.

“So you came back.”

“I came back for my money.”

She grinned, all the way, and did not bother about her teeth. “Your money. Is that what that is?” She looked at the envelope in my hand. “I could have had it. The old one told me. I didn’t want it.”

“You could have had it.”

“I didn’t want it.” She drank some of the beer. “They all danced with me, your friends. They dance very well, those. Then they all went off to Montmartre together, and the tall blond one kissed my hand.” She held the hand up and looked at it. “Comme ça. Like a lady.”

“They’re like that.”

“Yes. I saw. They are all sick too, those.” She put the hat on and pushed it down at the back with both hands. “And the English one with the hair, you went with her.”

“Yes.”

“She is beautiful. She is sick too?”

“Everybody’s sick,” I said. “You told me.”

“That’s right. I told you.” She looked at me with her mouth closed and she was pretty then. “You are a funny type, Jacob. You bring a girl to dance and you go off with another one and then you come back for the girl. It is not a very good system.”

“No. It isn’t a good system.”

I put the envelope on the table in front of her. She looked at it and did not touch it.

“What is that for? You did nothing.”

“It’s for the dinner. And the dancing.”

“The dinner you paid for. The dancing was with them.” Then she picked it up and put it in her bag and shut the bag. “Well. It is not the season to be proud.” She stood up. “Go on. She is waiting, the English one. She is in the taxi, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Go on, then. I am going to bed. Alone. It doesn’t matter, with a woman.” She put out her hand and I shook it. “You’re a good type,” she said. “It’s a shame.”

I told the patronne to get her a taxi and paid for the beer and went out. The policeman said good night. Brett was in the corner of the cab with her eyes closed and she opened them when I got in.

“Was she there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get your fifty francs?”

“I gave it to her.”

“Of course you did. Of course you would.” She laughed and took my arm. “What did she say?”

“She said I was a funny type.”

“So you are, darling. The funniest type I know.” She leaned forward. “I’m starving. Tell him to go to the Halles.”

We went down the hill and across the river and the driver took us in among the market. The carts were coming in from the country and the street was full of them, and cabbages piled up higher than the taxi on both sides and the big horses standing with their heads down, and men in blue smocks carrying baskets on their heads and shouting, and the whole place lit up and busy as if it were noon. We got out and went into a place with a zinc bar and sawdust on the floor. Two porters in the big flat hats were drinking red wine at the bar. We had onion soup with the cheese on it and a bottle of white wine, and Brett ate the soup and was hungry and looked better.

“That’s the first decent thing I’ve had to eat in a week,” she said.

“You ought to eat.”

“I ought to do lots of things.” She lit a cigarette and looked at me through the smoke. “You didn’t like my count.”

“I don’t know your count.”

“That’s what I said. You didn’t like him.”

“I think you ought to go to Biarritz.”

“Oh, stop it. Do stop it, Jake. I’d go if it did any good. It doesn’t do any good. Nothing does any good.” She drank some of the wine and put the glass down carefully. “You know that. You know it better than anybody.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

“Well, then. Don’t let’s be beastly to each other. We’re all we’ve got.”

We sat there a long time. The porters went out and other porters came in. The window was getting grey and then it was not grey but light, and the noise outside had changed, and when I went to the door the sky over the roofs was clear and pale and the electric lights looked yellow and silly in it. Brett came and stood beside me in the door.

“It’s morning,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Get me a taxi, darling. I’m dead. I’m absolutely dead.”

There was a taxi standing at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli with the driver asleep in it, and I woke him and opened the door and Brett got in. She gave him her address and then she put her hand out through the window and I held it.

“Don’t come,” she said. “I’d rather you didn’t come.”

“All right.”

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

“Good morning, Brett.”

“You were sweet to come back for that girl. You’re a good chap.” She took her hand away. “Go home. Go to bed. Don’t think about it.”

The taxi went off along the Rue de Rivoli and I watched it out of sight and then I walked down to the river. The sun was not up yet but it was full daylight, and the water was grey and moving and there was a barge going down with a woman on it hanging out washing. I crossed at the Pont Neuf and walked along the quai on the other side. The bookstalls were all locked up, and a man in a blue apron was throwing water over the pavement in front of a café and sweeping it toward the gutter with a broom. Behind me, down the river, the towers of Notre Dame stood up and the light was on them. Two fishermen were already on the stone steps below the quai with their long poles out over the water, and they did not look up as I went by. It was cool along the river and the wind came off the water and I turned my coat collar up. I thought about Brett and about the count I did not know, and about Georgette, and about all of it, and then I did not think about it. In the daytime it did not matter. That was the thing about the daytime. I walked along the quai with the sun coming up behind me, and the river was very beautiful and I did not want to look at it, and I looked at it all the way home.

She slept a long time, and when she wakened it was quite dark outside and the lamp had been lighted in the roof of the carriage. Mrs. Medlock had bought a basket at one of the stations and had eaten some chicken and bread and butter and drunk some hot tea, and she gave Mary what was left. Mary ate it because she was hungry and not because she wanted to seem obliged to any one, and then she sat and looked at the black window until Mrs. Medlock began putting on her gloves. Her bonnet had been pushed a little crooked while she dozed and the purple velvet flowers trembled more than ever.

"We're at Thwaite station," she said. "It's time to open your eyes. We've got a long drive before us."

The train stopped with a jerk and a hiss, and a porter opened the door and let in a gust of wet wind. It was a very small station, with one lamp swinging and a wooden shelter, and there seemed to be nobody on the platform at all but the porter. Then Mary saw that there was some one else. A man was standing under the lamp with a long cloak on and his hat pulled down, and he did not come forward to meet them but stood quite still, and the light fell on his shoulders in a way that made one of them look higher than the other.

Mrs. Medlock saw him at the same moment and Mary heard her draw in her breath.

"Well!" she said under it. "I never!" and then she took hold of Mary's arm rather hard and hurried her along the wet boards.

The man did not move until they were close to him. Then he looked down, and Mary looked up. She could not see his face very well because of the hat, but she saw that he was tall in spite of his crooked shoulders and that his eyes were black and did not seem to be thinking of her at all, even while they were looking at her. He looked at her as if he had been asked to look at something and was doing it because he had said he would.

"This is the child, sir," said Mrs. Medlock.

"Yes," said Mr. Archibald Craven.

That was all. He did not put out his hand and he did not say he was glad to see her, or ask if she was tired, or say anything that people say. He turned round and walked out through the little gate to where a carriage was waiting with its lamps lighted, and the horses shook the rain off their manes and stamped. He got in first and sat down in the far corner, and Mrs. Medlock pushed Mary in after him and got in herself, and the door was shut, and they drove away from the one lamp into the dark.

Mary sat very still in her corner. She had made up her mind in the train that she would not care what Mr. Archibald Craven was like; but she found that it was different now that he was sitting in the same carriage with her, breathing, with his cloak nearly touching her knee. She did not dare look at him and so she looked out of the window, but there was nothing to see there but blackness and the rain crawling down the glass and now and then the light of the lamps sliding over a wet stone wall.

Mrs. Medlock did not talk. That was the strangest thing of all. She, who had talked for hours in the train, sat with her hands folded on her parcels and her lips shut, and glanced sideways at the corner where her master sat, and said nothing. Once she cleared her throat as if she were going to begin, and then she thought better of it.

The carriage went through a village with a few lights in it, and past a church, and over a bridge where Mary could hear water running under them in the dark. Then the road began to go up, and the horses slowed, and the wind came round the carriage and pushed at it and howled, so that Mary put her hand on the strap of the door.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock in a low voice, and then looked at the corner and stopped.

Mr. Craven said nothing.

Mary pressed her face against the window. She could not see the moor, whatever it was. She could only feel that the carriage had come out from between walls and hedges into a great emptiness, where the wind had all the room it wanted and used it. It was not like anything in India. The night was not warm and thick and full of smells; it was cold and wet and huge, and it seemed to Mary that if the carriage stopped and the lamps went out they would never find their way anywhere again.

They had been driving so for what seemed a long time when the horses were pulled up suddenly and the carriage jerked and stood still. The coachman shouted something, and the groom on the box shouted back, and then there was only the wind.

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

Mr. Craven did not answer her. He leaned forward and opened the door on his own side and got out, and the wind came into the carriage and blew the rain into Mary's face.

"Sir!" said Mrs. Medlock. "Mr. Craven, sir, you'll be wet through--"

He did not turn round. Mary heard his feet on the road and saw his cloak go past the light of the near lamp and disappear.

She did not know afterward exactly why she did what she did next. Perhaps it was because she had been sitting still for two days and her legs ached, or because she was tired of not being able to see anything, or because nobody had told her not to. But she slipped down out of the open door on to the road before Mrs. Medlock could catch her sleeve.

"Come back!" cried Mrs. Medlock. "You'll be blown off your feet! Mary! come back this minute!"

But Mary was already standing on the moor in the dark.

The wind took hold of her at once and pushed her against the wheel, and the rain, which had seemed so small through the window, ran down her neck inside her collar. The ground under her feet was wet and gave a little, and there was a strong sharp smell which she did not know, of things growing and rotting in water. She could see the two lamps and the horses' steaming backs and the coachman standing at their heads, and beyond that the darkness was so complete that the road seemed to end where the light ended. In front of the horses a dim shape lay across the way, and Mr. Craven and the groom were bending over it.

"It's a sheep, miss," the coachman called to her over the wind, as if she had asked. "Nobbut a dead sheep. They come down off th' moor an' lie i' th' road for th' shelter o' th' wall, an' summat's got her. Get thee back in, tha'll be starved."

Mary did not know what starved meant and did not get back in. She stood with her thin hands holding on to the wheel and stared out into the blackness on the other side of the road, where the wind was coming from. There was a sound in it that was not the wind itself. It was a low, wide, humming sort of sound, like nothing she had ever heard, and it seemed to be made by the whole of the emptiness at once. She thought, without any reason, that the moor was alive and did not care about her in the least, and she was not sure whether she liked that or hated it.

Then Mr. Craven came back past the lamp. He saw her standing there and stopped, and for a moment he looked at her again in that way he had. The rain was dripping from the brim of his hat.

"Get in," he said.

That was the second thing he had said. She got in. He handed her up without touching her more than he must, and got in after her, and pulled the door to, and the men dragged the sheep off the road and climbed up on the box again, and the carriage went on.

"Well, of all the--" began Mrs. Medlock, and then remembered the corner, and only pulled Mary's wet hat straight with a jerk and wrapped the end of her own mantle round her, muttering. Mary sat and dripped and said nothing. Her feet were cold and her face was cold and she was wider awake than she had been for days.

She saw nothing of Misselthwaite Manor that night but a long black mass with a few lights in it, and a great door which opened and let out a square of yellow light and an old man with a bent back and a lantern. She thought the old man must be Pitcher, because he went straight to Mr. Craven and took his cloak and spoke to him low, and Mr. Craven went away with him up a broad staircase without looking round, and that was the last Mary saw of her uncle.

Mrs. Medlock took her up another staircase, and along a passage, and up some steps, and along another passage, until Mary lost count, and opened a door.

"Here's your rooms," she said. "This and the next. You're to keep to them. There's a fire, and your supper will be brought up. Don't touch anything and don't go out."

It was a room with a fire in it and tapestry on the walls, dark and full of trees and people, and a bed with hangings, and a table near the fire with a white cloth on it. Mary stood in the middle of the carpet in her wet frock and looked at it all and said nothing, and Mrs. Medlock, after looking at her for a moment, said, "Humph," and went away.

Her supper was brought, but it was not brought by a maid. Mary had expected a maid, because she had always been waited on by women, and when the door opened and a tall young man in a plain dark coat came in with a tray she stared at him. He was a big, raw-boned, fresh-faced young man with large red hands and a shock of hair the color of straw, and he set the tray down on the table and began taking the covers off the dishes with great care.

"Tha's to sit thee down, Mrs. Medlock says," he said, "an' get thy supper while it's warm. There's a bit o' broth, an' a chop, an' some bread an' butter, an' a sup o' milk, an' if tha wants owt else tha's to ring an' I'll fetch it. Tha's not to go wanderin' off after it thysel'. Th' fire's mended for th' night an' tha's not to touch it."

Mary sat down at the table, but she went on staring at him. She had understood that she was to eat her supper, and something about the fire, but the rest had gone past her like the wind on the moor. He spoke as if his mouth were full of something soft, and the words ran together and turned into other words before she could catch them.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said in her stiff little voice. "I can't understand you."

The young man stopped with a dish-cover in his hand and looked at her, and his face went slowly red all over, up to the roots of his straw-colored hair. But he did not seem offended. He seemed rather pleased, as if she had said something clever.

"Nay," he said, "I dunnot suppose tha can. Mrs. Medlock said tha'd been fetched fro' foreign parts. It's nobbut Yorkshire, miss. Tha'll come to it. Eat thy chop."

He said the last part slowly and loudly, as if she were deaf, and pointed at the chop with the dish-cover, and Mary, who did not know whether to be angry or not, found that she was too hungry to decide, and ate it. When she had finished he took the tray and went out and shut the door, and she heard his heavy boots go away down the passage until she could not hear them any more.

Then it was very quiet.

Mrs. Medlock came back and undressed her, because there seemed to be no one else to do it, and did it in a business-like way with her mouth tight, as if she were folding linen. Mary stood and let her, and thought that in India Saidie would have talked all the time. When she was in the big bed with the hangings, and the candle had been set on the chest by the door, Mrs. Medlock stood a moment with her hand on the curtain.

"Go to sleep," she said. "You've had a long day."

It was then that Mary heard it.

It came from somewhere a long way off in the house--so far off that at first she thought it was outside. It was a sound like something heavy being dragged slowly across a floor, and then stopping, and then a long, hollow, rising note, like a voice in a corridor, and then a bang, as if a door had been shut hard by some one in a temper. It was not loud. If the room had not been so quiet she might not have heard it at all.

She sat straight up in bed.

"What is that?" she said.

Mrs. Medlock had heard it too. Mary saw her head turn, and the purple flowers on her bonnet tremble, and for the space of a breath her hard red face looked different. Then it was itself again.

"That's the wind," she said. "It gets into the passages in a house this size and makes all manner of noises. It's a wild night. Lie down."

"It banged like a door," said Mary.

"There's doors enough in this house to bang," said Mrs. Medlock, "and wind enough to bang them. Lie down and go to sleep, and don't you go asking questions of Mr. Craven's servants about noises, for they'll not thank you for it and neither will he." And she took the candle, which Mary had not expected, and went out and shut the door, and the room was black.

Mary lay on her back and looked up at where the top of the bed must be.

She was not frightened. She was not the kind of child who was frightened of the dark, because in India there had always been some one sleeping on a mat outside her door, and the dark had been full of lizards and crickets and people breathing. She was only very much awake, and she was thinking. She was thinking that it had not sounded like the wind. She had heard the wind all the way across the moor and she knew what it sounded like. The wind did not drag things across floors, and it did not stop to take breath in the middle of a noise. Something had been going on at the other end of the house, and Mrs. Medlock had known it was not the wind, and had said it was.

Mary lay and listened. The house creaked and ticked as old houses do, and the rain went on against the window, and once, far away, she thought she heard the hollow note again, and then she could not be sure. But it did not matter whether she heard it again or not. She had made up her mind.

Mrs. Medlock had said she was to keep to her rooms and not go poking about, and in the train Mary had said she should not want to. But that had been in the train. Now she lay quite still with her eyes open in the dark, a plain, yellow, cross little girl with her fists shut under the counterpane, and decided that as nobody in this house was going to tell her anything, she would find out for herself what the sound had been.

The walk to the house was slow, for Madame Ratignolle made the most of her cramp, and Robert accommodated his step to hers with a patience that was habitual to him. The children ran ahead and were lost in the tangle of the path; the nurse-maids followed at their own gait, which was leisurely.

"You did not come down to bathe," said Robert. "That is the second morning. Mrs. Pontellier will lose the little she has learned, and I shall have to begin all over again."

"She has learned nothing," said Madame Ratignolle, laughing. "She goes in as far as her waist, and she clings to the rope, and she looks at the water as if it had said something to her. I have watched her."

"That is what I have been thinking," Robert answered, and for a moment he did not go on. Then he said, in the light tone which he used for everything, so that one never knew how much he intended: "She is like a person who stands a long while at the edge of the water and does not go in. Some day she will go in over her head—all at once, without telling any one—and then she will be surprised to find that she is not drowned. I should like to be there to see it."

"What foolishness!" said Madame Ratignolle. "You have been too much in the sun, Robert. Give me your arm again; I am not walking, I am being dragged."

He gave her his arm and said nothing further about Mrs. Pontellier. Madame Ratignolle, for her part, talked of Alphonse's letter, and of the price of the new sewing-machine at Madame Lebrun's, and of the dressmaker on Chartres Street who had never been paid; and so they came to the house.

Edna remained with the children under the tent until the sun had climbed high enough to make the shade of no account. Then she gathered up Raoul and his brother, who resisted, and delivered them to the quadroon, and went slowly up the path alone. She was still a little flushed, and there lingered about her the confused, warm feeling of having said more than she intended, which was not disagreeable to her.

It was at dinner that the telegram was brought to her. It had come over on the boat with the mail, and the boy laid it beside her plate with an air of importance which the contents did not justify. Mr. Pontellier regretted that a matter of business would keep him in the city over Saturday; he would not come out to Grand Isle at the end of the week; the children were to be careful of the sun; he sent his love.

She read it twice and folded it and put it under the edge of her plate, and went on with her dinner.

"It is not bad news?" asked Madame Lebrun, who sat at the head of the table and missed nothing.

"No; it is only that Mr. Pontellier does not come Saturday."

"Ah, the poor man! that is what it is to be in business," said Madame Lebrun, and the little Farival twins, who had been listening, were told to attend to their soup.

Edna did not look to see whether Robert, who sat at the far end of the table beside his mother, had heard. She was conscious of feeling nothing in particular. There would be one Saturday less of the box of delicacies, of the accounts of the week, of the going down to meet the boat. She did not examine what she felt, which was perhaps a little like the relief of the summer before when the children had gone to Iberville; but she did not admit it, and she asked Madame Ratignolle to pass the bread.

In the heat of the afternoon the house grew still. Madame Ratignolle had gone to lie down with her needlework and her cologne; the nurses had disposed of the children upon their cots; Madame Lebrun's sewing-machine, which usually clattered through those hours, had fallen silent. Robert was nowhere about. Edna did not look for him. She took her key from the peg and her hat from the other peg, and went down the long sandy path a second time that day, through the camomile which was hotter than it had been in the morning and gave up a heavier smell.

The beach was deserted. The lovers had gone; even the lady in black had retired somewhere out of the sun. The Gulf lay flat and shining, with none of the choppy wind of the morning, and the small waves came in as though they were too warm to do more than lie down at the edge of the sand.

She undressed in the bath-house and went down into the water. All the summer she had been going in, and every day of it she had been unable to leave the shallow places, holding to the rope that ran out from the piles, or to Robert's hand, with an ungovernable dread of the water beyond her, where it deepened. The dread had been laughed at and coaxed and reasoned with by the whole colony, the children included, and it had not yielded.

She stood now with the water at her waist and then at her breast, and she looked at the empty stretch of it before her. Nobody was holding out a hand. Nobody was counting, or telling her to let go, or laughing. She thought—if it was thinking—of the meadow of grass that had seemed as big as the ocean, and of the little girl who had thrown out her arms and beaten through it as one strikes out in the water; and she leaned forward and let the water take her weight, and struck out.

There were perhaps four strokes, perhaps five; then the old terror returned and her feet went down and found the sand, and she stood up gasping and shaking the water from her eyes. But for the space of those strokes the bottom had not been under her and she had not gone down. It had been quite easy. It had been nothing at all. She laughed aloud, alone, and the sound was strange to her upon the empty beach.

She did not try it again. She came out of the water and dressed slowly, and sat upon the little gallery of the bath-house with her hair down to dry it, with her hands folded in her lap and her feet stretched before her, feeling a curious, secret, half-childish elation which she had no wish to share with any one. She would tell no one. It belonged to her, as the meadow had belonged to her; it had happened to her alone.

She was so absorbed that she did not notice the lady in black, who had returned to the neighboring gallery and had resumed her devotions, until the book was closed and a voice addressed her. In the whole of the summer the lady in black had not spoken to her; she had only appeared and disappeared, with her beads and her velvet prayer-book, at the edges of things.

"Monsieur Pontellier does not come Saturday, madame?"

"No," said Edna, startled. "He is kept in the city."

"Ah." The lady in black looked out at the water a moment with her pale, incurious eyes. "It is a good thing, a husband who is occupied. Mine was never occupied." And she opened the prayer-book again at the place she had marked with her finger, and said no more.

Edna put up her hair and went back to the house.

It was after supper, when the lamps had been lighted and the moths were beating against them, that Madame Ratignolle came over to the Pontellier cottage and settled herself on the steps of the gallery with a rustle of white draperies, having recovered entirely from her cramp. The children were being put to bed within, and their voices came out through the shutters, and the voice of the quadroon exhorting them.

"You should have heard Robert this morning, *chérie*," said Madame Ratignolle, with the candor which she practised as a matter of course and which never failed to take Edna a little unawares. "He talks about you like a boy. He says you are a person who stands a long time at the edge of the water and does not go in; and that some day you will go in over your head all at once, and be astonished not to drown, and that he means to be there to see it. I told him he had been in the sun."

She laughed, comfortably, and fanned herself, and looked at Edna to share the joke.

Edna did not laugh. The color went up into her face and she was glad of the darkness of the gallery. "He says a great deal of nonsense," she said.

"Oh, a great deal! He has always said nonsense. It is his way with all of us." And Madame Ratignolle, having repeated the remark, dismissed it, and told the story of the dressmaker on Chartres Street, and presently went home to see that her little girl was covered.

The house grew quiet. The quadroon had gone; the children slept; from the main house came the last sounds of chairs and voices and then the shutting of a door. Edna did not go in. She sat alone on the gallery with her arms along the back of the rocker, and the moon came up over the water and laid a path upon it that reached, it seemed, as far as the eye went.

She could still feel it—the moment when the sand had not been under her feet, and she had not gone down. Nobody knew. It was hers. And yet Robert, who did not know, had said it that morning, walking up the path with Adèle on his arm, before she had done it—had said it laughing, and gone on to talk of something else. She turned it over and over, and could not put it away, and did not try. Some day she will go in over her head, all at once, without telling any one; and then she will be surprised. She sat there very late, with the words going round in her mind like the sound of the water, and did not know why they should trouble her so, nor why the trouble was not altogether unlike joy.

The book confirmed my worst fears. The symptoms I had just witnessed were set down there, almost word for word, in the cold print of the medical text, and I closed it with a hand that was not quite steady. I let myself out by the front door and set off down the drive at a pace which my leg, still far from sound, resented at every step.

The storm which had hung over us all the evening had broken at last in the small hours. I had slept through it, but the evidence was everywhere: the gravel was pitted with rain, the lime trees dripped upon my head, and the air had that washed and shining freshness which follows a night of thunder. It seemed to me a heartless morning. The birds were making an outrageous noise.

Leastways Cottage, where the Belgians were lodged, stood at the far end of the village street. I had expected to find its shutters closed and its inmates still abed. To my surprise, the door stood open, and Poirot himself, fully dressed, with his boots gleaming and his moustache already waxed to two immaculate points, was standing on the step, looking down the road as though he waited for someone.

“Ah, Hastings,” he said, as I came up. “I thought that it might be you.”

“Poirot,” I cried, “I have come to ask your help. Mrs. Inglethorp——”

He held up his hand.

“Mrs. Inglethorp is dead. She died a little before five o’clock, in convulsions, and the two doctors have refused a certificate. Yes, yes, my friend, I know it all.”

I stared at him.

“But how on earth——? It is barely half-past six. The house has hardly stirred.”

“Dr. Bauerstein passed this way on his return from Styles. He saw my light—I sleep very little in these days—and he stopped to tell me. He has known of my name, it appears, for some years. That was very civil of him, was it not?” He said this in a tone of perfect blandness, and yet I had the impression that he did not think it civil at all, but something quite other. “Now, tell me exactly what you have come to say. Speak in order. Omit nothing.”

I told him, as clearly as I could, the events of the night, and of John’s consent to his being called in. He listened without a word, his head a little on one side, his green eyes very bright.

“Good,” he said, when I had done. “Return to the house, my friend. I will follow in a few minutes.”

“Follow? But Poirot, every moment——”

“Every moment is precious, yes. It is for that reason that I do not run up the road like a lunatic and arrive out of breath, incapable of thought, with my collar awry. One does not enter a house of mourning in a state of disorder. Also I have some little arrangements to make here. Go, Hastings. I shall not be long.”

There was no arguing with him. I went.

It was a little after seven when I came up the drive again, and the household was now fully astir, in that hushed and aimless fashion which death brings to a house. I had my hand on the door when it was opened from within, and I found myself face to face with Alfred Inglethorp.

I do not know what I had expected. Certainly not that he should be standing in his wife’s hall in his black clothes, damp about the shoulders, with his beard neatly combed, and his face composed into an expression of grave and dignified sorrow. He held out his hand to me. I took it, I am ashamed to say, before I had time to think.

“Mr. Hastings. You have heard, of course. A terrible blow—a terrible blow. Poor Emily.” He shook his head slowly. “And that I should not have been with her at the last.”

John came out of the dining-room at that moment. His face was set, and he did not look at his stepfather.

“Inglethorp has just come in,” he said to me, in a curiously flat voice. “He has been telling me where he was.”

“I will tell it to Mr. Hastings also,” said Inglethorp, with his air of measured suavity. “There must be no mystery about my movements. I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein, as you know, and he asked me in. We fell into talk—he is a most interesting man—and the time went faster than I realized. It was past eleven before I rose to go, and at that very moment the storm broke. You never heard such rain. Bauerstein pressed me to wait until it slackened, and it did not slacken; if anything it grew worse. When it was near one o’clock, and no better, I thought it out of the question to rouse the house at such an hour, and I took a bed at the Styles Arms. I was awakened at a little before six by the boots, who had had the news from Baily as he drove through for Dr. Wilkins. I came up at once—by the road, as fast as I could walk—and let myself in by the front door with my latch-key not twenty minutes ago, to find—this.” He made a small gesture. “Poor Emily. I fear she must have called for me.”

I remembered her voice crying “Alfred—Alfred——,” with her eyes upon Bauerstein’s bearded face, and I said nothing. John said nothing either. There was a silence which no one seemed able to break, until Inglethorp, with a murmured word about seeing the servants, went slowly up the stairs.

“Well?” I said, when he was out of hearing.

John passed his hand over his face.

“I don’t know. God help me, Hastings, I don’t know what to think. It all sounds reasonable enough.”

“It does,” I admitted. And yet the very reasonableness of it grated upon me, as though it had been prepared beforehand.

Poirot arrived at half-past seven, walking up the drive with small quick steps and carrying his hat in his hand. He was admitted by Dorcas, who regarded him with the deepest suspicion, and taken by me to John. I had feared that John might find something absurd in the little foreigner, with his egg-shaped head and his elaborate manners, but Poirot’s condolences were so simple and so evidently sincere that even John’s reserve was touched.

“I ask of you only one thing at present, Mr. Cavendish,” said Poirot. “The keys of the rooms which the doctors locked. And your permission to question anyone in this house whom I may wish to question.”

John gave him the keys.

“Do as you like,” he said. “Only—there’s no need for the whole county to know of it.”

“I am the soul of discretion,” said Poirot. He bowed, and we went up together.

On the gallery we met Cynthia. She was dressed, but she looked ill and heavy-eyed, and she still had the flushed, stupefied look which I had noticed in the night. She would have passed us with a murmur, but Poirot stopped her.

“Mademoiselle, forgive me. One question only, and I will trouble you no more. Are you accustomed to sleep so soundly that you cannot be roused?”

She looked at him in some surprise.

“No—that is what is so odd. I’m the lightest sleeper in the house, as a rule. Dorcas says I wake if a mouse walks. But last night Mary shook me, and shook me, and I simply couldn’t come to myself. I hardly knew where I was when I got to Aunt Emily’s room. And my head still aches abominably.”

“I thank you, mademoiselle. That is all.”

He bowed, and she went on down the stairs, wondering, as I could see, what he was about. I wondered too.

“Poirot,” I said, “what possible bearing——”

“Patience, my friend. Let us see the room.”

He unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room and we went in. Someone had drawn a sheet over the bed. The morning sunlight lay across the carpet, and the gas which John had lit still burned faintly and foolishly above the mantelpiece. Poirot turned it out. Then he stood for a full minute just inside the door, and looked.

I do not think I have ever seen a man look so thoroughly. His eyes went round the room slowly, resting upon each thing in turn—the overturned table, the broken cup and the dark stain of coffee upon the carpet beside it, the despatch-case which lay upon the writing-table by the window, the candlestick with its guttered candle, the row of prim china figures upon the mantelpiece at which Lawrence had stared so strangely, the great wardrobe, the two locked doors in the further wall. Then he began to move, and I saw that the disorder of the night was not, to him, disorder at all, but a story written in a language he could read.

He went down on his knees beside the little table, and examined the fragments of the cup one by one without touching them. He smelt the stain upon the carpet, and wrinkled his nose. He looked at the tray, and at the saucer, and at the small spirit lamp which stood unlit upon the bedside. He examined the despatch-case and observed, without comment, that it was locked. He opened the wardrobe and shut it again. He looked long at the candlestick.

“There has been much coming and going in this room,” he said at last. “Too much. Six, seven people, in the night—and all of them treading upon my evidence.”

“You could hardly expect us to think of evidence,” I said, a little nettled. “She was dying.”

“No, no. I do not blame you. I state a fact.” He crossed to the door which communicated with Alfred Inglethorp’s room—the door we had broken in—and studied the splintered frame. Then he went on to the other, the door which gave upon Cynthia’s room, and which Dorcas had told us was never undone.

The bolt was an old-fashioned one, heavy and stiff. He drew it back—it moved, I noticed, more easily than I should have expected—and bent to look at the socket into which it had been shot. Then he took a pair of small tweezers from his pocket, and with great delicacy extracted something which he laid upon the palm of his hand and held out to me.

It was a tiny scrap of stuff, not larger than my thumbnail, of a dark green colour, frayed at the edges as though it had been caught and torn.

“What do you make of it, Hastings?”

“It looks like a bit of material—cloth of some kind. It must have caught in the bolt.”

“Precisely.” He produced an envelope, dropped the scrap into it, sealed it, and wrote something on the flap.

“But Poirot,” I said, “what does it mean? Whose is it? What has it to do with——”

“Ah!” He shook his head at me, and put the envelope in his breast pocket. “That, my friend, I keep to myself for the present. I have my little ideas—one has always one’s little ideas—but I do not part with them until they are grown up.”

He would say no more, and I knew him well enough of old not to press him.

He shot the bolt again, and stood for some moments with his fingers resting upon it, in an attitude of the deepest reflection. Then he asked me to ring for Dorcas.

The old servant came up with a face swollen with weeping, and stood just inside the door, plainly resenting the presence of a foreigner in the mistress’s room. Poirot addressed her with a gentleness that soon disarmed her.

“I will not keep you long, Dorcas. You have been in this house many years?”

“Ten, sir, come Michaelmas.”

“And this door”—he touched the bolt—“it was never opened, you said, in all that time?”

“Never, sir. Not since Miss Cynthia came. The mistress liked it kept bolted, and it was.”

“Bon. Now tell me: the front door of the house. It was unbolted last night, when the chauffeur went for the doctor?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. John unbolted it himself.”

“And after the doctors went away?”

“I bolted it again, sir, and put up the chain. It’s the habit of the house, and I didn’t rightly know what I was doing, and did it without thinking. It was bolted till Annie undid it for the milk, and that was gone half-past seven.”

Poirot’s eyes flickered, but his voice did not change.

“Then Mr. Inglethorp did not come in by the front door this morning?”

Dorcas’s mouth set.

“No, sir, that he did not. He came in by the garden door of the boudoir. I saw him myself from the landing window, coming across the lawn from the shrubbery walk, and a proper wet way he must have had of it, for the grass was drenched.”

“The shrubbery walk. Where does it lead?”

“Down to the stile, sir, and the footpath over the fields. It’s the short way to the village, if you don’t mind the wet—and it goes on past the Raikes’ farm.”

There was a little silence.

“At what hour was this?”

“I couldn’t say to the minute, sir. Just after seven, it would be. Before ever Mr. Hastings came back.”

“I thank you, Dorcas. You have been of great help to me. That is all, for the present.”

When she had gone, he closed the door and turned the key in the lock. I was bursting to speak.

“Poirot! He told us he came by the road, and let himself in at the front with the latch-key. He said so in as many words. And the Raikes woman——”

“Gently, Hastings. A man may take the short way home across the fields and say that he came by the road, for reasons which are his own and which may have nothing to do with murder. I do not say that it is so. I say that it may be. Do not run so fast. You will fall over your own feet.”

He drew the envelope from his pocket and laid it upon the little table which someone had set upright again, and we stood looking at it, the two of us, in that quiet sunny room with its sheeted bed. Somewhere below, a door closed, and I heard Lawrence’s voice, and the deep tones of Alfred Inglethorp answering him. The clock upon the mantelpiece, which had pointed to five when I looked at it last, now showed some minutes past eleven; the church clock in the village, far off across the wet fields, presently confirmed it.

Poirot laid one finger upon the envelope.

“You see, my friend,” he said softly, “it is not the door we broke that troubles me. Everybody in this house saw that door broken. It is the door that was never opened. When a thing that has never happened turns out to have happened, it is either a very little matter or a very great one—and I cannot yet tell you which, because the person who could tell me is the one person in this house who has said nothing at all.”

I did not in the least understand him.

The First National Bank was a gray stone building on Broadway that had been built to look like a bank and nothing else, so that nobody could make a mistake about it. I went in at a little after two and told a boy in a brass cage that I wanted to talk to whoever handled Donald Willsson’s account. The boy went away and came back with a young man from behind the paying teller’s window.

His name was Albury. He was a nice-looking blond boy of twenty-five or so, with a clean pink face and a smile that was used to being liked. He took me through a gate into a corner where there was a desk and two chairs, and asked what he could do for me.

I told him who I was and who had hired me, and let him look at my credentials. He looked at them longer than they needed and gave them back.

“Willsson wrote a check yesterday afternoon a little before three,” I said. “Five thousand dollars. I want to know if it was cashed, certified, or deposited, and by whom.”

He said he would see. He was gone ten minutes. When he came back his face was more serious than it had been.

“Nothing,” he said. “The check hasn’t been presented. It hasn’t been certified. Mr. Willsson didn’t come in yesterday at all.”

“Sure of that?”

“Quite sure. Any check he wanted certified would have come to me. I’ve handled his account since he took over the papers. He wasn’t in the bank yesterday. I asked the other windows to make sure.”

“Enough in the account to cover it?”

“Several times over.”

“So somebody’s walking around Personville with a piece of paper that’s good for five thousand dollars of a dead man’s money, and hasn’t tried to get the money.”

The boy didn’t say anything to that. He looked at the desk between us.

“What happens if it comes in now?” I asked.

“I couldn’t say. It would depend on the estate, and on what Mr. Elihu⁠—on what the executors decided.” He looked up. “Do the police know about the check?”

“Not from me. I’m not the police.”

He flushed a little.

“I only meant⁠—Mr. Willsson was a very decent sort. If there’s anything I can do⁠—”

“You can let me know at the Great Western if that check shows up, and who brings it, before you do anything with it.”

He said he would. He walked me to the gate. He had the air of a boy who had a question he didn’t want to ask, so I gave him time. He didn’t ask it. I went out.

I walked for a while, thinking about twenty minutes. A man writes a five-thousand-dollar check, goes out with it, is gone twenty minutes, comes back without it, and dies seven hours later, and the check doesn’t come to the bank. Twenty minutes is time enough to walk a few blocks and hand a piece of paper to somebody and walk back. It isn’t time enough for much else. Somebody had the check. Somebody who didn’t need the money today, or couldn’t use it, or was afraid to.

I got back to the hotel at four. The clerk gave me my key and said there was a lady waiting for me in the parlor off the lobby. I didn’t ask who. I went in.

Mrs. Willsson was sitting very straight in a plush chair by the window with a black hat and a black coat on and her gloved hands together in her lap. She was as pale as she had been at five past eleven the night before. She stood up when I came in and stood there while I shut the door, and then she sat down again as if her knees had decided it for her.

“You have been to see my husband’s father,” she said.

“Yes.”

“He telephoned me. He has been telephoning me all day. He told me what you told him.” Her accent was thicker than it had been when she was playing hostess. “He told me you would have me in jail by night. I thought I had better come and see what sort of man you are.”

“What sort am I?”

She didn’t answer that. She said:

“I did not kill my husband.”

“I didn’t say you did. I told the old man what I saw. He put the rest on himself. He’s good at it.”

“You saw the blood.”

“I saw something on your slipper.”

“It was blood.” She looked at her gloves. “Donald’s.”

I sat down where I could see her face without the window behind it, and waited. She made me wait a while. Then she talked, in a low even voice, as if she had gone over it enough times to have the emotion worn off it.

“The telephone call was a man. I did not know his voice. He did not give his name. He said that if I wished to know why my husband was not at home to meet his guest, I could find him in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, at a house there, with a woman. He told me the number of the house. Then he hung up.”

“And you went.”

“I went. I am not⁠—I was not a trusting wife. His father will have told you that.” She said it without any bitterness at all, which was worse. “I drove there. I stopped the car a little way down the street, across from the number. It was very dark. I sat and waited. I do not know how long. Then the door opened and Donald came out. He came down the steps and turned toward where I was. I think he was going to walk to the corner. I had my hand on the door of the car. Then the shooting.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. Across from him. From the dark. I saw him fall. I ran to him. He was⁠—He was dead when I got to him, I think. I knelt in⁠—” She stopped and started again. “There was a man there. I don’t know where he came from. From one of the houses, perhaps. He bent over Donald too. He said something to me. I don’t know what. People were coming out, lights. I got up and ran to the car and drove away. I don’t know what happened to the man. I never saw his face.”

“Why did you run?”

“Because I was there. Because I had gone there in the way I had gone, and I knew what it would look like, and I knew what his father would make of it.” She lifted her eyes. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“It looks like a lot of things. Did you see the woman?”

“No.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“No. The man on the telephone did not say. I did not see anyone but Donald.”

“Your husband ever mention a five-thousand-dollar check?”

That got a real look out of her, the first one.

“A check? No. Why? To whom?”

“I don’t know. He wrote one yesterday afternoon. Nobody’s tried to cash it.”

She shook her head slowly.

“He told me nothing. He told nobody anything. That was his way.” She had put her gloves together again. “You know that Max Thaler came to my house this morning.”

“I saw him go in.”

“He knew that you had seen him. He said so.” She let me think about that for a second. “He wished to know what I had told the police about last night, and whether I had told them about the telephone call. I said I had told them nothing. He said that was wise. He said the call had not come from him, and that if I said it had, it would be bad for me, not for him.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know what to believe. I do not know why he cared. He said one other thing. He said that my husband’s death was not a thing he wanted, and that whoever wanted it would be sorry.” She stood up. “That is all I have to tell you. I have told the police less. I will not tell them more unless I am made to. Will I be made to?”

“Not by me.”

She looked at me for a moment as if she was trying to decide whether that was worth anything, and then she went out. From the window I watched her get into the Buick coupé and drive away. Her driving was steadier than her hands had been.

I went up to my room and sat on the bed and put her story next to the Herald’s story. They fit where they touched. A man and a woman bending over the dead man, and gone before anybody got to the street. The shooting from the alley across the way. Nothing in it that couldn’t be true. Nothing in it that had to be. She could have come out of that house herself, walked her husband down the steps, and been the woman the neighbors saw, with the shooting done for her by a friend in the alley. Or she could have been exactly what she said she was, a jealous wife sitting in a dark car. The old man’s French hussy. It didn’t make her a killer any more than it made her a saint.

The thing that stuck was the phone call. Somebody had wanted her on Hurricane Street at ten-forty. Somebody had wanted her there badly enough to tell her the number of the house.

At half past six a bellboy knocked and handed me an envelope.

“Fella downstairs gave me a quarter to bring it up,” he said. “Said you’d know who it was from.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just a fella. Cap. Didn’t stay.”

I gave him another quarter and shut the door.

The envelope was a plain white one from a drug store rack. The sheet inside was the same. The writing on it was small and neat and slanted, and there wasn’t much of it:

You saw me this morning. I saw you too. Don’t let that worry you. I didn’t kill Willsson and I don’t know who did. Yet. The Frenchwoman has been to see you. Before you buy all she sells, ask her who called her at nine last night, and what he sounded like. If you want to talk, I can be found on King Street tomorrow after eight. Nobody will bother you coming or going. That’s a promise.

M. T.

I read it twice. The second time I liked it less. A man who has been telling a widow to keep her mouth shut in the morning, and telling the detective to ask her questions in the evening, is a man who wants the questions asked by somebody else. Nine o’clock. She had said the call came before ten-twenty and hadn’t said when. He was either fixing a time for me to catch her on, or he had been near enough to that telephone to know. Either way, he knew a lot for a man who didn’t know who killed Willsson. Yet.

I put the note in my pocket, went down to the dining room, and ate a dinner that wasn’t as good as it cost. Then I went to the Western Union office on Broadway and wrote out a night letter to the Old Man. The clerk counted it twice and looked at me as if he thought I ought to be ashamed of the length of it. This is what it said:

Donald Willsson, who retained us by letter and check, shot dead ten-forty last night Hurricane Street here, hour and twenty minutes before appointment with me at his home. Never saw him. Nature of job unknown; he confided in nobody here. Father Elihu Willsson controls city, mine, bank, papers; is hostile, abusive, refuses information, insists son’s wife guilty. Wife was in Hurricane Street when he fell, on strength of anonymous phone call, and left before police arrived. Story plausible, unproved. Local gambler Max Thaler, known as Whisper, visited her this morning, has since sent me note disclaiming murder and asking meeting. Dead man drew check five thousand dollars afternoon before death; bank teller Albury states check never presented or certified; payee unknown. Political angle strong; police useless. We have no client unless father hires us, which he has refused. Am holding on here pending instructions. Great Western Hotel. Expenses moderate so far.

I signed it with my name and the Old Man’s private wire address and paid for it and walked back to the hotel.

The lobby was full of the kind of men who fill hotel lobbies in mining towns at night, and none of them paid any attention to me, which meant either that I wasn’t worth attention or that somebody was being paid to make it look that way. I took my key and went up.

The room was hot. I opened the window on the noise of Broadway and sat by it with my coat off and my feet on the sill and Thaler’s note in my hand, not reading it any more. The wire was gone and there was nothing to do about it till morning. Mrs. Willsson was home behind whatever kind of door she kept between herself and the old man’s telephone. Whisper was wherever Whisper went at night. The Lewis girl was home with her father the secretary, and the two of them likely weren’t talking about the paper’s finances.

And somewhere in Personville, in a pocket or a drawer or a stocking or a stove, there was a check for five thousand dollars with Donald Willsson’s name on it that nobody had tried to turn into money. A man had walked out of his office with it a little before three and come back twenty minutes later without it and gone on dictating letters about post office regulations. Seven hours after that he was dead on a sidewalk. Whoever had the check had known where he was going to be that night, or hadn’t. Whoever had it either didn’t need five thousand dollars, or knew that trying to collect it would be as good as signing a confession, or was waiting for something. I couldn’t make up my mind which of the three was the worst.

I sat there until the noise in the street thinned out and the lights across the way went off one by one, and I still hadn’t made it up when I went to bed.

The rain had stopped. When Eve came out into Shaftesbury Avenue the sky had cleared to a watery blue and the pavements were steaming gently in a sudden burst of sunshine, so that the umbrella, which had been such a comfort ten minutes before, now seemed to her something of a responsibility. She looked at it thoughtfully. It was a good umbrella. It had a curved malacca handle with a thin gold band round it, and it had plainly not been bought at a stall. Somewhere in that gloomy building in Dover Street a young man with a monocle was presumably going about his affairs with the sensation of having done a good deed, and it seemed to Eve that the least she could do was to see that the good deed did not cost him thirty shillings. She turned and walked back the way she had come.

The hall-porter of the Drones Club is a large, calm man who has seen a great deal in his time, and it was with no more than a faint lifting of the eyebrows that he received across his counter a lady's umbrella from a lady wearing a hat which he was subsequently to describe in the steward's room as a fair knock-out.

"I want to return this," said Eve. "A member of your club lent it to me this morning. At least, I suppose he was a member. He came out of here and went back in again."

"Yes, miss. What name, miss?"

"That's just it. I don't know his name. He didn't stop to say. He was very tall and thin and had an eyeglass. Do you think you could find him?"

The porter considered this. It occurred to him that the description, while vivid, might apply to a fair proportion of the membership.

"I could make enquiries, miss."

"Would you? And could I write him a note? I feel I ought to say thank you properly."

The porter produced paper and a pen with the air of one who is above being surprised, and Eve, leaning on the counter, wrote rapidly. She found that the note presented difficulties. One cannot begin "Dear Sir" to a man who has clasped one's fingers round an umbrella and fled without a word, and one cannot begin "Dear Eyeglass." In the end she omitted the beginning altogether.

"Thank you very much," she wrote. "It was the greatest success, and my hat is deeply grateful. I hope you did not get wet running back. I sent it before you had time to miss it." She hesitated, then added with a smile: "The Girl under the Awning."

"There," she said, folding it. "Give him that with the umbrella, will you?"

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

"He doesn't know my name."

"No, miss. But it has to go in the book, miss. Property returned. The committee is very particular."

"Oh, very well. Halliday. Eve Halliday." She laughed. "Though it isn't the slightest use to him."

The porter wrote it down without comment, and Eve, feeling that her conscience was now clear and her morning satisfactorily rounded off, went out into the sunshine to think about lunch.

Left alone, the porter did what any conscientious official would have done. He took the umbrella to the cloak-room, ascertained from the attendant that it was the property of the Honourable Hugo Walderwick, and placed it, with the note, in the rack allotted to that gentleman. The description of a tall thin member with an eyeglass he dismissed as one of those things which ladies say. The umbrella was Mr. Walderwick's. That was in the book.

* * * * *

Psmith, having lunched, was in the smoking-room, sunk in a deep chair with the *Morning Globe*, when the Honourable Hugo Walderwick came in. Mr. Walderwick was a stout young man with a pink face and a small, indignant moustache, and he was carrying an umbrella in one hand and a sheet of club notepaper in the other. He came and stood over Psmith's chair and breathed heavily.

"Look here, Smith," he said. "What the devil is all this?"

Psmith lowered his paper and regarded him with a mild and courteous interest.

"Comrade Walderwick," he said. "You are agitated. Sit down and tell me all about it."

"I'll tell you all about it, all right. Barnes in the cloak-room says you walked off with my umbrella this morning."

"An umbrella," said Psmith, "resembling that one?"

"It *is* that one. And now some girl's brought it back and left a note with it. Listen to this." Mr. Walderwick read from the paper in a voice throbbing with grievance. "'Thank you very much. It was the greatest success, and my hat is deeply grateful. I hope you did not get wet running back.' Running back! I haven't been running anywhere. 'The Girl under the Awning.' What awning? I don't know any awnings. I don't know any girls under awnings. What I want to know is, what have you been doing with my umbrella?"

Psmith took the umbrella from him, opened it, closed it again, and examined the handle through his monocle with the air of a connoisseur inspecting a piece of old silver.

"It is a very good umbrella," he said.

"I know it's a good umbrella. It cost me twenty-five bob."

"Comrade Walderwick," said Psmith, "I will not deceive you. I could give you an explanation. I could tell you a story which would hold you spellbound and leave you a better and a broader man. But there are matters which a gentleman does not discuss, even in a smoking-room, and this is one of them. I will therefore say nothing. I will merely ask you to name your price."

"My what?"

"For the umbrella. I wish to buy it. It has acquired for me associations which I should find it hard to put into words, and I could not bear to think of it going out into the world under the arm of a stranger. Twenty-five shillings, you say. I will give you ten pounds."

Mr. Walderwick's moustache twitched. He had come into the room prepared for an argument, possibly for something in the nature of a scene, and this sudden shifting of the ground took the wind out of his sails.

"Ten pounds? Don't be an ass."

"You are right. It is worth more. Fifteen." Psmith produced a note-case and began, with an unhurried care, to count. "There are those who would say that fifteen pounds is an absurd sum to pay for an umbrella, and I do not dispute it. But I have this morning severed my connection with the fish trade, and a man who has just severed his connection with the fish trade is in no mood to haggle over trifles. Fifteen pounds. Take them, Comrade Walderwick, and let us say no more about it."

The Honourable Hugo looked at the notes. He looked at the umbrella. He looked at Psmith, in whose face he could detect nothing but a grave benevolence. Then, being a young man who had never yet been known to refuse money, he took the notes.

"You're potty," he said, but without heat.

"The document also," said Psmith, holding out a hand for the note, "if you have no further use for it."

"Have it. Have the lot." Mr. Walderwick stuffed the money into his pocket and moved towards the door. There he paused. "But I'd like to know what the dickens you *did* do with it," he said wistfully, and went out.

Psmith read the note twice. Then he folded it and placed it in his breast-pocket, and sat for some moments looking at the umbrella which stood beside his chair.

"'The Girl under the Awning,'" he murmured. "Charming. A little wanting, perhaps, in precision. A name would have been a convenience."

* * * * *

It was Psmith's intention, when he left the club at a little after three, to walk in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue and inspect one of those establishments which undertake to find employment for the deserving; but he had got no farther than the lower end of the Haymarket when the English summer, which had been sulking behind a cloud for the last hour, decided that it had shown quite enough restraint for one day. The heavens opened. Psmith, who had brought the umbrella with him on the principle that a man who has paid fifteen pounds for a thing should get some use out of it, put it up and proceeded at his leisure. And it was thus, on the pavement outside a tobacconist's, that he became aware of a black bird of Paradise feather drooping disconsolately from a hat of soft dull satin in the shelter of the shop's doorway.

Eve, for her part, was aware first of a pair of very long legs and then of an umbrella which had appeared, as if by magic, over her head. She looked up, and her eyes opened wide.

"It's you!" she said.

The young man with the monocle looked down at her with grave attention.

"Madam?" he said.

"You're the man who gave me an umbrella this morning. In Dover Street. Outside the coal shop."

"I fear," said Psmith, "that you are mistaken. I am, as it happens, a stranger to Dover Street. I have always understood it to be a pleasant thoroughfare, but I have never had occasion to visit it."

Eve stared at him. Then she looked at the umbrella, and at the malacca handle with the gold band round it.

"But that's the same umbrella. I'd know it anywhere. I sent it back not two hours ago."

"This umbrella," said Psmith, "I purchased this afternoon from a gentleman of the name of Walderwick, who assured me that it had never been out of his possession. The transaction was conducted in the presence of witnesses. I have his receipt." He had nothing of the kind, but he said it with such quiet conviction that Eve, for an instant, almost believed him.

"I believe you're the man and simply won't own up."

"There is, I understand, a strong resemblance between myself and a large number of people. It is a cross I have learned to bear. Only last week I was taken for the Bishop of Bath and Wells." He moved the umbrella an inch to the left, where a drip from the shop's fascia was threatening the feather. "But you are going somewhere, and it is raining. Permit me."

Eve hesitated. She had been brought up to a healthy suspicion of young men who accosted one in the Haymarket; but this young man had, whatever he might say about it, already accosted her once that day to her considerable advantage, and the rain was coming down as if it meant it. She stepped out from the doorway.

"I'm going to a club in Northumberland Avenue," she said. "The Senior Conservative. I've an appointment at four."

"Then let us proceed. I am a stranger there also, but I have a rough idea of its position."

They walked in silence for some yards. Eve stole a glance at her companion's face and found it entirely solemn.

"I said thank you in a note," she said at length. "I don't see why I should say it again to somebody who says he isn't him."

"Precisely," said Psmith. "The point is well taken."

"Though if you had been the man, I should have said it was very kind of you and rather mad."

"If I had been the man," said Psmith, "I should have been touched. As it is, I can only pass the message on to him, should our paths ever cross. Might I have your name, in order to give the thing an official character?"

"Certainly not. If you're not the man who lent me the umbrella, you've no business to know my name. And if you are, you've got my note."

Psmith inclined his head.

"A shrewd thrust. I withdraw the question. There are, I perceive, brains beneath that hat as well as a bird of Paradise."

They had come to the corner of Northumberland Avenue, and presently to a building with pillars and a doorstep. Eve stopped.

"This is it. Thank you. Whoever you are."

"Not at all. It is a pleasure to be of service to a friend of the Girl under the Awning." He raised his hat, turned, and walked off up the street with long strides, the umbrella held at a precise and gentlemanly angle, and Eve, watching him go with her lips twitching, thought that she had never in her life met anybody so entirely absurd, and that she would very much like to know his name.

* * * * *

The hall-porter of the Senior Conservative Club regretted that his lordship was not in the club. His lordship had been in the club until ten minutes ago, and had then gone out. His lordship had asked the way to a flower-shop, and had been directed to one in the Strand, some fifty yards along on the right-hand side. His lordship had mentioned, in going, that he expected a young lady at four and that she was to be asked to wait; but the porter, who had had a good look at the young lady's hat, took it upon himself to suggest that the flower-shop might be the quicker course.

It was. Eve found the Earl of Emsworth in the back of the shop, bent double over a bench of potted plants, with his nose about an inch from a small purple object which he was addressing in a low, reverent murmur. He was a long, thin, amiable-looking man with a straggling moustache, and he was peering at the purple object in the manner of one who is not seeing it very well. Eve coughed.

"Lord Emsworth?"

His lordship straightened up slowly and turned upon her a pair of mild, unfocused eyes.

"Ah," he said. "Yes. Just so. Now, this one. I want to know about this one. Is it a hardy? The card says it's a hardy, but I don't believe a word of it. Look at that leaf."

"I'm afraid I . . ."

"Feel it. Go on, feel it. Would you call that a hardy?"

Eve felt it. It seemed to her a perfectly ordinary leaf, but she said that she would not have called it a hardy, and his lordship beamed upon her with the warmth of a man who has found a kindred spirit in a cold and hostile world.

"Exactly. Exactly what I said. And they want three and sixpence for it. Three and sixpence! Wrap me up the one at the end, my dear, the one with the—no, not that one, the *other* one. And put it down to me. Emsworth. I'm at the Senior Conservative."

"Lord Emsworth," said Eve, "I'm not the shop. I'm Miss Halliday. I've come about the library."

There was a pause, during which his lordship gazed at her with a slowly dawning comprehension, like a man surfacing from deep water.

"Halliday?"

"Yes. Your secretary wrote to me. About cataloguing the library at Blandings. I was to see you at four."

"God bless my soul! Of course. Baxter said something. Yes, yes. The girl about the library. My dear young lady, I do apologise. I took you for—I can't see a thing, you know, I've mislaid my glasses. I had them at lunch. I distinctly remember having them at lunch." He patted himself vaguely about the chest and hips in the manner of one who does not really expect to find anything. "Baxter usually finds them. Well, well, well. So you're Miss Halliday. Now tell me. Are you fond of flowers?"

Eve, who had come prepared to discuss the Dewey system and her acquaintance, slight but honestly acquired, with the principles of classification, was a little taken aback.

"I—well, I like them very much. I don't know anything about them, I'm afraid."

"Nobody does, nobody does," said his lordship generously. "My sister Constance thinks a calceolaria is something you eat. What do you think of hollyhocks?"

"I think they're lovely."

"So do I. So do I. Baxter says they're vulgar." His lordship shook his head over the aberrations of secretaries. "Now, this library. Baxter says it wants cataloguing. I daresay it does. It's a very large library. My grandfather collected it, I believe, or somebody. I never go into it myself. But Baxter will tell you all about it. You'll come down, of course?"

"You mean—you'd like me to take the post?"

"Take it? Of course take it. Capital. Capital." He had returned to the purple plant and was regarding it lovingly. "And you'll bring your glasses, if you wear any. There's nothing so tiresome as . . ."

"Lord Emsworth."

"My dear?"

"They're in your breast-pocket. I can see the chain."

His lordship's hand went to his breast-pocket, and a look of almost religious ecstasy spread over his face as it encountered pince-nez.

"God bless my soul! So they are. My dear young lady, you're a marvel. Baxter would have taken a quarter of an hour. Come down whenever you like. Baxter will write. Baxter writes everything." He adjusted the pince-nez, looked at her properly for the first time, and appeared much struck. "Bless my soul, what a hat!" said Lord Emsworth. "Now, about this hardy. . . ."

And so it came about that Eve Halliday, who had gone to be interviewed for a post concerning which not one single question had been asked of her, left the shop ten minutes later carrying a potted calceolaria which his lordship had pressed upon her as a keepsake, engaged, apparently, at Blandings Castle from as soon as Baxter should be told about it, and with a strong feeling that she would never, in a lifetime of odd days, have one quite so odd as this.

* * * * *

The smoking-room of the Drones Club at nine o'clock that evening was empty, save for Psmith. He had dined, and he was sitting in the deep chair by the window with the umbrella across his knees and the note from the Girl under the Awning open in his hand, looking out at the wet glimmer of Dover Street and the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, now furled for the night. He was not reading the note. He knew it by heart. He was merely looking at it, in a reflective way, as a man looks at a puzzle to which he suspects there is a simple solution if he could only think of it.

The door opened and the hall-porter came in, deferential and unhurried.

"Beg pardon, sir."

"Come in, Bates. Come in and share my solitude."

"Thank you, sir. Mr. Walderwick informs me, sir, that the umbrella returned this morning is now your property."

"That is so. I acquired it at a figure which I will not distress you by mentioning."

"Yes, sir. In that case, sir, I thought I should mention that the young lady's name was entered against it in the book, sir. Property returned. It's the committee's rule. I thought you might wish to have it, sir, as the article's changed hands."

Psmith did not move, but the monocle in his right eye gleamed suddenly in the lamplight.

"That was a thoughtful act, Bates. The name?"

"Halliday, sir. Miss Eve Halliday. The young lady spelt it, sir, for the book. She said," added the porter, with the faint air of one quoting a remark he did not understand, "that it wasn't the slightest use to him."

"She was in error," said Psmith. "Thank you, Bates. That will be all."

The porter withdrew. Psmith sat for a long moment looking at the note in his hand. Then he folded it with care, returned it to his breast-pocket, took off the monocle, polished it, and replaced it. He picked up the umbrella and examined once more the malacca handle with the gold band.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith, softly and thoughtfully. "Comrade Halliday. Well, well!"

And he gazed out again at the rain.

Lady Russell, though a woman of sound principles and a very warm heart, was not one to be hurried into advice; and it was not till she had spent several days in serious consideration of the Kellynch affairs, and in as much private consultation with Anne as could be obtained without alarming the rest of the family, that she felt herself prepared to lay her thoughts before Sir Walter. She had a great deal of prudence, but she had also a great deal of deference for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them; and the scheme which she at last brought with her to Kellynch Hall, on a fine morning towards the end of the month, was rather the scheme of a friend who wished to spare, than of a creditor who meant to be paid.

Mr Shepherd was there before her. He had been sent for, that the whole might be gone through at once, and he came with a paper of his own, drawn up in a fair hand, and folded so as to shew nothing till it should be wanted. He was a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his hold or his views on Sir Walter, would rather have the disagreeable prompted by any body else, and he was very willing that Lady Russell should speak first.

She did speak first. Her plan, which she read aloud from a paper as neatly written as his own, proposed a considerable reduction in the number of horses, a lessening of the establishment of servants, the discontinuance of the annual expedition to London, or at least its being confined to a fortnight, and a general revision of the table and the household, which, with some care in the article of new purchases, she reckoned might, in seven years, clear the property of its heaviest encumbrances. She spoke with great earnestness and great gentleness, and dwelt more than once upon the credit which such conduct would do to Sir Walter in the eyes of every body whose opinion was worth having. "It will be known, of course," said she; "these things always are known; but it will be known only that Sir Walter Elliot has acted like a man of sense and a man of honour, which is precisely what a man of sense and a man of honour would wish to have said of him."

Sir Walter heard her to the end, which was more than Elizabeth had expected, and then, with the smile of one who has been listening to a child, thanked her for the trouble she had taken. "But you will allow me to say, my dear Lady Russell, that you have not perfectly understood the case. You speak of the horses, and the London journey, and the servants, as if they were things which a man might have or not have, as he chose. They are nothing of the kind. They are what Kellynch Hall requires. I have never in my life kept a horse more than the place demanded, nor a footman more than my daughters' situation made necessary; and as to London, I should like to know what the county would say if it were understood that Sir Walter Elliot could not afford to spend a month in town. No, no. I am obliged to you, but it cannot be done. It is not the way in which a man in my situation can be expected to live."

Lady Russell had the sense not to argue the point at once, and Mr Shepherd, seeing his moment, unfolded his paper. It was a modest production. He knew his client too well to have proposed any thing so severe as the discontinuance of the London journey, and he had confined himself chiefly to the stable, to the giving up of one of the carriages, and to a lease of some outlying farms upon terms which he had reason to think might be obtained; the whole to produce, in his own phrase, "a very sensible relief, without being felt in any point of consequence." He had also, though he touched it lightly, a word to say about the repairs which were going forward at the lodge.

It was heard with even less patience. Sir Walter had been irritated by the first plan, and the second, though smaller, was for that very reason more offensive, as implying that he had been thought capable of giving up his carriage. "One of the carriages! And which, pray? The chariot, in which my daughters have been seen at every house in the neighbourhood these ten years; or the coach, which was new-lined last spring? I am to be driven about the country, I suppose, in the gig, like a curate. Upon my word, Shepherd, I had expected something better from you. This is worse than Lady Russell's, for she at least proposed to save something; you propose to disgrace me for a hundred a year."

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said he had only meant to suggest, and Sir Walter, having disposed of both his advisers, walked to the window and looked out upon his own grounds with the air of a man who has been ill used, but who means to bear it.

There was a pause, in which nobody seemed inclined to speak, and it was in this pause that Anne, who had been sitting a little apart with her work, and who had listened to every word with a heart very much more engaged than her countenance shewed, laid the work down and spoke.

She had not meant to speak. She had said all that she had to say to Lady Russell in private, and had been content to leave it to a better advocate; but she had heard that better advocate fail, and she had heard Mr Shepherd fail after her, and she could not bear that the whole should end in nothing. Her voice was low, but it was steady, and the very surprise of hearing it at all procured her a silence which she had not often commanded in that room.

"I think," said she, "that neither plan goes far enough. If any thing is to be done, it had better be done completely, and at once, so that it need never be done a second time. If we were to give up the London journey altogether, not for this year only but until the debts are paid; if we kept only such horses as are really wanted for the farm and for one carriage; if the establishment were reduced to what it was in my mother's time; and if we were to determine to buy nothing for the house, and to receive very little company, for three or four years, I believe the whole might be cleared in that time, instead of in seven. It would be felt, of course; but it would be felt only by ourselves, and it would be over the sooner. I cannot think that the county would respect us the less for it. I am sure my mother would not have thought so."

She had finished, and coloured, and taken up her work again before any body answered her. Lady Russell looked at her with a mixture of pain and approbation; Mr Shepherd looked at the carpet; and Sir Walter, turning from the window, was about to say something which, from his expression, would not have been encouraging, when he was prevented by a voice from which nobody in the room had looked for support.

"I think Anne is right," said Elizabeth.

It was said coldly, and rather as if she were finding fault with her sister than agreeing with her; but it was said, and it was decisive in producing astonishment. Sir Walter stared. Lady Russell, who had known Elizabeth from her cradle, could hardly believe her ears. Anne herself looked up with an expression which very nearly betrayed her.

Elizabeth was not without her reasons, though they were not exactly those of her sister. She had listened to Lady Russell's plan with the resentment which she always felt when Lady Russell presumed to direct the house of which she herself was mistress; she had listened to Mr Shepherd's with the contempt which she felt for any thing that came from a country attorney; and she had been struck, in the course of the last half hour, with a conviction which had never before been so distinct to her, that if the thing were to be done by halves, it would have to be done again, and again, and that she would be nine-and-thirty before it was over. If there must be economy, let it be a great economy, carried through under her own eye, and finished with; and let it be understood that it was Miss Elliot's doing, and not Lady Russell's. There was, besides, something in the idea of a very strict and dignified seclusion at Kellynch, for a limited period, which was not without its charm to a mind that had been a little wearied by thirteen seasons of opening the same balls. She did not say all this. She said only, that if they were to retrench at all, she had rather it were done thoroughly, and that she saw no reason why the family should not live for a few years as they had lived when her mother was alive; and having said it, she looked at her father.

Sir Walter was thrown into real perplexity. He could not treat Elizabeth as he had treated Lady Russell, nor as he had treated Anne. He walked twice across the room, said that he must consider of it, that it was a very serious thing, that he did not see how it could be done, and that he wondered Elizabeth should think so; and he was still walking, and still wondering, when Mr Shepherd, who had been waiting for an opening with the patience of his profession, and who saw that the ladies had gone farther than he had dared to go, ventured upon the one suggestion which he had brought with him unwritten.

"There is, to be sure, another way," said he, with a great deal of deliberation, "which I mention only because it is my duty to mention every thing, and which Sir Walter will reject or not, exactly as he pleases. A house like Kellynch Hall, if it were for a short time only in other hands, might be made to pay, in a very handsome manner, for its own encumbrances. There are gentlemen, at this moment, who would give almost any thing to be the tenant of such a place, and who—"

He was not permitted to finish. Sir Walter had stopped in the middle of the room, and the colour which rose in his face was not the colour of a man of fifty-four.

"Tenant!" said he. "A tenant at Kellynch! Mr Shepherd, I do not know what I may have done to deserve this from you. I should have thought that a man who had been in the confidence of this family for twenty years would have known better than to speak of it as if it were a farm at the road-side, to be let to any body who could pay the rent. A tenant! I will hear no more of it. I desire, sir, that the word may never be used again in my presence, upon any occasion whatever; and I shall be obliged to you, Lady Russell, and to my daughters, to remember that I have said so."

Mr Shepherd was all apology. He had meant nothing; he had only meant to lay the whole before Sir Walter; he begged pardon for having done so; and Lady Russell, who had not been consulted upon this last idea and did not at all like it, was glad to join with him in dropping the subject. The morning ended, as such mornings generally do, without any thing being settled. Sir Walter would consider. He would consider Elizabeth's view of the matter, which he could not help thinking very extraordinary in Elizabeth; he would consider what could be done about the horses; he was sure that something might be done about the tradespeople, who were very unreasonable; and in the mean while, nobody was to speak of it in the neighbourhood, and least of all Mr Shepherd.

Lady Russell went home with Anne's plan in her head and Elizabeth's support of it in her heart, and thought, as she drove through the village, that she had never before had so much reason to believe well of her elder god-daughter, or so little to believe that any thing would come of it.

It was in the afternoon of the same day, when the family had dispersed to recover from the fatigue of having been advised, that the post brought a letter from Uppercross. It was directed to Anne, in Mary's hand, and it was such a letter as Mary generally wrote.

"My dear Anne,—I make no apology for writing, for I know you are never doing any thing, and I am really so unwell that I think it is quite time somebody knew of it. I have had a sore throat this week, and one of my bad head-aches every day, and the children are so noisy that I cannot get a moment's quiet; and Charles goes out shooting the whole morning, and says it is nothing. Mrs Musgrove has been here once, but she only talked about the Hayters. I am sure if I were to die, nobody at Uppercross would find it out for a week. I wish you would come to me. You cannot be wanted at Kellynch, for Elizabeth never wants any body, and my father would not know whether you were in the house or not. I do not ask Lady Russell, because she would only tell me to take exercise. Pray come as soon as you can, and do not write to say you will come, but come. I have not been down stairs since Tuesday.—Your affectionate sister, Mary M."

Anne read it twice, and then carried it to Elizabeth, who, being just then in the full consciousness of having been very good all the morning, read it with more indulgence than usual, and said that Mary was always ill when she was not attended to, and that Anne might go if she liked; she could very well be spared. Sir Walter, being applied to, thought it a very proper thing that Mary should want her sister, and a very proper thing that her sister should go, and observed, as the only difficulty, that the carriage could not be sent so far without the horses, and the horses, it seemed, were now to be looked upon as a subject of economy; but Mr Musgrove, no doubt, would send for her, and there could be nothing against her going.

Nothing else was said of the morning's business. It was already as if it had not been.

When the candles were brought in, and her father and sister had gone up to dress for a dinner which was to be exactly as large as it had ever been, Anne remained for a little while alone in the drawing-room, with Mary's letter in her lap and the last of the light going out of the windows that looked towards the lawn. She would go to Uppercross. There had never been any question of it; and if it had not been wanted, she would have been glad to be wanted any where. But she could not help feeling, as she sat there, that she was going away from a house in which nothing had been decided, and in which, if she read her father rightly, nothing would be decided until it was decided for him; that the plan she had ventured upon in the morning, and which had been so strangely upheld, would very likely never be spoken of again; and that of all the people who had sat in that room and talked so gravely of horses and carriages and the honour of the family, she was the only one who understood how very near the end of such talking they had come.

She was used to being of no consequence, and she did not think of herself. But she thought of her mother, and of the seventeen years of method and moderation which had kept it all from being seen; and she thought, with a pang which she did not attempt to reason away, that there had been a time, some years ago now, when she had not been quite so ready to go wherever she was sent.

The dinner-bell rang. She folded the letter, and went up to answer it.