The Chapters

Then came the night of the first falling star. I had sat up late over my papers—the seventh, I think it was, of that series upon the development of moral ideas which the events of the succeeding weeks were to interrupt so conclusively—and it was past one when I put out my lamp. My wife was long asleep. The night was close, and before going to bed I stood awhile at the open window of my study, looking out over the dim, hushed country towards Ottershaw, and thinking, as I remember, not of Mars at all, but of some trifling point of my argument.

And then I saw it. It came, a line of greenish light high in the eastern sky, moving with an odd deliberation quite unlike the swift winking transit of an ordinary meteor. It left a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds, and as it drove down athwart the stars I heard, or fancied I heard, a thin sustained hissing, as of some vast body cleaving the air. It passed out of my sight behind the black mass of the trees to the northeast, and a moment after there came a dull, muffled concussion, felt rather than heard, that set a dog barking somewhere down the lane. Hundreds must have seen it that night, and taken it for nothing more than a falling star of unusual size; and I confess that I, who had watched the flames spurt from the edge of the planet, made at first no connection whatever between the two things. So slowly does the mind consent to associate the portents of the heavens with the security of the fields about one’s own door. I went to bed and slept, as the reader who has followed me thus far will scarcely credit, quite soundly.

It was the milkman who brought me the news in the morning, with my wife’s jug in his hand and an unwonted animation in his manner. Something had come down in the night, he said, out beyond the Ottershaw road—a thunderbolt, his brother-in-law called it—and had pitched fair into the old ballast pits by the Bourne, that the winter’s rains had left brimming with water. Half Ottershaw had been out to see it before breakfast. I remembered then the green streak of the night, and a curious excitement took hold of me, so that I left my egg half eaten, told my wife only that a meteorite had fallen and that I should be back within the hour, and set off at once across the fields.

The morning was wonderfully still and warm, the sun just clearing the pine woods towards Weybridge side, and the dew still grey upon the grass. I heard the thing before I saw it. As I came over the rise by the fir plantation there reached me a sound of hissing, steady and profound, like a locomotive standing at pressure in a station, and above the further lip of the pits a column of steam went up, leaning a little in the light air, white against the dark trees.

The pits, I should explain, were old gravel workings, long abandoned, three or four in number, and the largest of them, into which the thing had come, was flooded to a depth of perhaps ten or twelve feet. The missile had struck the water at a steep slant, driven through it, and buried its forward part in the gravel beneath, so that what one saw was a great rounded back of some dark substance, rising six feet or more out of the pool and slanting down into it, for all the world like the hulk of some capsized vessel. About it the water seethed and smoked. Bubbles rose in strings and burst; a scum of dead fish, roach and small perch, floated white-bellied along the margin; and from the whole surface of the pool the steam went up in wavering sheets, so that the thing showed and was hidden and showed again, and the willows on the far bank dripped as if with rain. The heat of it came across the water against one’s face.

There were already a score of people about the pit’s edge—labourers on their way to work, a couple of boys, the landlord of the inn upon the Ottershaw road—and among them, to my great satisfaction, I found Ogilvy, hatless, his boots soaked to the ankles, in a state of high professional contentment. He had been there, I learned, since a little after dawn.

“It is a meteorite,” he said, almost before I had greeted him. “The largest fall on record in this country—in Europe, I daresay. A magnificent thing. If only it had had the grace to come down on dry land!”

I asked him whether it might not have some connection with the disturbances we had watched upon Mars, and I remember how he turned upon me with a sort of affectionate impatience, as a schoolmaster upon a promising pupil who has answered foolishly.

“That’s Markham’s notion too—he was out here at seven with a photographer. It’s in the air, that idea; it will be in the evening papers, you may depend upon it. And it is moonshine. Consider the odds against it. Matter is flying about the sun in every direction and always has been; the earth sweeps up a hundred tons of it a day. That we should have a great fall now proves nothing more than that great falls happen. Post hoc, my dear fellow, is not propter hoc.”

“But the interval,” I said. “The flashes ceased—and this comes.”

“The flashes were volcanic. I have said so from the first.” And he fell to expounding, with much vigour, the thickness of crust that such a mass must have fused about itself in its rush through the air, and the weeks it might take to cool, plunged though it was in water; and he computed its probable weight at some thousands of tons, and lamented the water afresh, and talked of writing that very day to the Astronomer Royal.

Yet even as he talked I found my eyes returning to the thing itself, and a doubt I could not master growing in me. For the outline of that great back, where the shifting steam gave one a clear sight of it, seemed to me too regular, too smoothly and continuously curved, for any honest stone out of the sky. The scaly, dun-coloured incrustation that covered it was such as fire might make; but beneath the incrustation the form was the form of a cylinder, huge, rounded, ended—so far as one could judge of the end that showed—with an almost geometrical evenness. I said as much to Ogilvy.

“The rotation,” said he promptly. “A rotating mass, fusing as it comes, must grind itself true, as a pebble is ground in a stream. I could wish it were odder-shaped myself; the shape will breed a deal of nonsense.”

I did not argue further—who was I, to set my eye against his learning?—but the doubt went home with me, and sat with me at my second and more leisurely breakfast, and communicated itself to my wife. Nothing would content her but that she should come and see the thing herself; and about ten, the day being now fully hot, we walked over together, she in her garden hat, and I carrying, at her sensible insistence, a flask of cold tea. I remember that as we went she took my arm and asked me, half laughing, whether this was my star of the other night that I had shown her, come down to be looked at; and I said that Ogilvy vouched it a common meteorite, and she said that it seemed a strange sort of commonness that killed all the fish in a pool; and we went on in the sunshine past the hedges white with dust.

By the time we reached the pits the crowd had grown to a hundred or more, and was growing every minute. The news had gone into Chertsey with the morning carts, and along the road came a straggling procession—cyclists, a governess cart full of children, men in their shirt-sleeves, girls in their light summer dresses, all in a holiday humour. Two enterprising boys were selling ginger-beer out of a barrow. There was a great craning and pointing about the rim of the pit, and the steam, thinner now than in the early morning but still abundant, drifted over the crowd, and the people coughed in it and laughed at one another’s coughing. The hissing of the pool had sunk to a gentler, more intermittent sound, and one could hear beneath it a persistent ticking and creaking from the mass itself, such as a great boiler makes in cooling; and once there came a crack like a pistol-shot, at which the whole crowd swayed back, and a woman screamed, and everybody laughed again—for it was but the incrustation splitting with the heat, and a flake of it slid rattling down into the water.

It was a little after eleven that the accident happened of which so much was afterwards made. Some of the bolder spirits had worked round to the shallow end of the pit, where a spit of gravel ran out towards the buried nose of the thing, and where a fin or flange of it—so I must call it, though Ogilvy would have it a mere splash of fused matter—stood up out of no more than a foot of water, within a long stride of dry land. A young fellow from Chertsey, a plumber’s apprentice by the name of Cheeseman, was dared by his companions to lay his hand upon the thing, and, having taken off his boots and socks and rolled his trousers to the knee, he waded out amid great applause. The water, he called back to them, was no more than comfortably warm—it had had the whole night and the whole pool to spend its heat upon—and this, I suppose, emboldened him; for he reached out his open hand and laid the palm of it flat upon the grey metal.

His cry rang across the pit and stopped every voice in the crowd. He went staggering back through the water, gripping his wrist, his face white as paper, and was hauled ashore by his friends; and the palm and fingers, when they opened his hand, were already rising in one great blister. Ogilvy was round to him in a moment, sent a boy running to Ottershaw for oil and bandages, and turned upon the crowd with an anger I had never seen in him.

“You will oblige me by keeping back from it!” he shouted. “All of you! The thing is not two-and-twenty hours out of the sky. It came into our air white-hot, do you understand—white-hot through and through—and there is heat enough in the heart of it yet to serve you all the same way. Does that look like a hoax, or a signal, or any of the fool’s talk that is going about? It is a mass of iron off the sun’s hearth, and it will burn like one for a week to come.”

And to me, more quietly, as young Cheeseman was led off moaning towards the road: “There’s your Martians for you. Heat—simple meteoric heat. I hope the lesson is cheap at the price of a blistered hand.”

I said nothing. But I had seen, or thought I had seen, when the flake of crust fell away and again where the lad’s hand had touched, the surface that lay beneath the burnt scale; and it had not the look of any iron, sunlit or otherwise, that I knew. It was grey, with a faint yellowish lustre, even and unpitted, like the fractured face of no stone and the casting of no foundry upon this earth. I did not say this to Ogilvy, who was busy and would have laughed; and I have wondered many times since how much difference it would have made if I had said it to anyone at all.

Noon came, and the crowd still thickened, and the heat of the day joined itself to the heat of the pit until the place was hardly to be borne. My wife had grown very quiet. She stood looking at the great scarred back of the thing where it slanted into the smoking water, and presently she said, in a low voice, not as one making conversation, that she wished it had fallen anywhere but there, and that she did not like the way it lay—like something waiting, she said, and then laughed at herself, but not easily. I told her it was the sun and the crowd and the steam, and that she had far better be out of all three; and after a little persuasion she consented to go home to lunch, upon my promise that I would follow within the hour and would on no account go down the gravel to the water as the foolish people were doing. I watched her go up the field path, her white dress bright in the sun, until the hedge took her; and then I turned back to the pit, and to the steam rising and rising into the blue stillness of that last untroubled noon.

It is one thing to ask advice, and another to be prepared to follow it; and both father and daughter, in summoning their two friends to counsel, had rather expected to be relieved than to be directed. How the debts were to be paid without any body’s paying them, was the problem proposed; and it must be owned that neither Lady Russell nor Mr Shepherd came to Kellynch Hall the following morning with a solution of exactly that shape.

Lady Russell had taken up the business with all the earnestness of true attachment and real concern. She had passed a great part of the night with pen and paper; she had made calculations, weighed comforts against claims, and reduced her conclusions to a scheme which she brought with her, fairly written out, and laid before Sir Walter in the breakfast-room with as much gentleness of manner as its substance would allow. Mr Shepherd, who arrived within the half-hour, and who would at all times rather have had the disagreeable suggested by any lips than his own, was heartily glad to find her there before him, and disposed himself to second whatever she should propose, with such softenings as his profession had taught him. Elizabeth sat by her father; Anne sat a little apart, present because nobody had thought about her enough to wish her away.

Lady Russell’s plan was comprehensive. The table was to be simplified, the establishment of servants reduced, the number of horses brought down, the annual journey to London given up altogether, and every expense of mere display suspended, until, by the regular application of the savings, the whole of the debt might be cleared in seven years. She read her paper steadily through, and then, laying it down, addressed herself to what she knew to be the tenderest part of the subject.

“Kellynch Hall has a respectability in itself, my dear Sir Walter, which no reduction of this kind can touch. What is Sir Walter Elliot the worse, in the eyes of any body whose eyes are worth consulting, for keeping a plainer table and fewer horses? The true dignity of the head of a house consists in owing no man any thing. You will be doing only what many of the first families in the kingdom have done before you, and what all of them ought to do.”

She might as well have recommended that he cut off his hair. Sir Walter heard her to the end with tolerable civility, for she was Lady Russell, and then rejected the whole, root and branch. Give up the journey to London! Reduce the servants of Kellynch Hall to the establishment of any common squire! Sit down to two courses instead of three, that Mr Tomkins the grocer might be at his ease! He would sooner be gone from the place at once, he declared with heat, than consent to remain in it upon terms so disgraceful; and having thus relieved himself by an extravagance which nobody was expected to take literally, he pushed the paper from him, and looked out of the window at his own grounds with the air of a man who has been very ill-used.

Mr Shepherd then, with many prefaces, ventured his own scheme, which had been framed upon the principle of asking so little that it could not decently be refused. He proposed nothing violent, nothing sudden; a single year’s absence from London, upon the plea of Miss Elliot’s health, or of improvements at Kellynch; the quiet sale of two or three horses, which might pass for a change of taste; the postponement of the new furnishing of the drawing-room; a few unobtrusive economies in the hot-house and the stables; the whole so contrived, he flattered himself, that the neighbourhood need suspect nothing, and Sir Walter’s consequence remain exactly where it was.

But Sir Walter could not like this plan either, and liked it, perhaps, the less for its very smallness. Economies which must be hidden confessed that there was something to hide; and a baronet who crept out of debt by half-pence, over ten or fifteen years, was in his view more degraded than one who owed the money like a gentleman. He did not put it precisely so; he said only that he saw no occasion for any of it, that Mr Shepherd took a great deal too dark a view of things, and that he wondered what the world was coming to, when a man could not keep four horses without being lectured in his own breakfast-room.

There was a silence of some duration; and it was broken from a quarter whence nobody had looked for any thing at all.

Anne had listened to the whole with a full heart. To her, the question had never for a moment been one of appearances; it was one of justice. The tradespeople whose bills lay unanswered in Mr Shepherd’s office had claims, in her estimation, very much superior to those of the second course and the second pair of horses; and though she had learnt, through many years, the uselessness of her own voice at Kellynch, there are occasions on which principle will speak, whatever be its expectation of being heard. She coloured, but she spoke.

“I cannot help thinking,” said she, “that both plans, so far from going too far, do not go far enough. If we owe money which we cannot at present pay, every expense that can be spared ought to be spared, and at once. I would give up London not for one year but altogether; I would part with the horses entirely, but what plain necessity requires; I would reduce the table, the servants, every thing, to what mere decency demands, and carry the whole of the surplus, every year, to the persons we are indebted to. It might all be done, I believe, in five years; and I cannot think that Sir Walter Elliot would stand lower in any body’s opinion for having done it, or that there is any real dignity for us in any other course.”

The sensation produced by this speech was considerable, but it was nothing to the sensation produced by its reception; for Elizabeth, from whom Anne had expected, if any notice at all, a look of quelling astonishment, said, after a moment, and to the visible amazement of every creature in the room—

“I declare I think Anne is right.”

Lady Russell turned to her with a start of pleasure; Mr Shepherd bowed very low over his papers; Sir Walter looked at his eldest daughter as a man looks at a prop which has given way beneath his hand.

“If a thing of this sort must be done,” continued Elizabeth, whose support, it may be suspected, proceeded from her pride rather than her principles, “let it at least be done handsomely, and done quickly. Nothing is so pitiful as little savings. To be paring and scraping for ten years together, hiding it all the while, and trembling every quarter-day, is what I could not submit to; the whole country would have found us out by the second winter, and we should be pitied,—which is not to be borne. But a great reform, made all at once, and openly, has something decided in it. Every body would say we chose it. And in two or three years it would be over, and we might do as we liked again; whereas by Mr Shepherd’s plan we should be poor all our lives and get no credit by it. I am sick of Mr Shepherd’s hints, and I am sick of the bills; and if Anne’s scheme would put an end to both, I am for Anne’s scheme.”

Anne, who in thirteen years had never once been of Elizabeth’s party, scarcely knew how to feel her elevation; but it availed nothing. Sir Walter had borne, with what patience he could, to be advised by his friend and his agent; to be reformed by his daughters was beyond every thing. He rose from his chair. Was he to understand that his own children were combined against him? Was Sir Walter Elliot to live like a curate, that a set of tradespeople in Crewkherne might be paid before their time? Every mode of life that had been proposed to him that morning, he said, was a mode of life unworthy of a gentleman; he wondered that Lady Russell could lend herself to such schemes; he wondered still more at Elizabeth; and he desired to hear no more of any of it.

It was at this unpromising moment that Mr Shepherd, concluding perhaps that where every thing had been refused, nothing further could be lost, ventured upon ground which he had long been secretly surveying.

“There is, to be sure, one other resource,” said he, rubbing his hands slowly, and looking at nobody; “one arrangement which, in similar cases of temporary embarrassment, families of the very first consideration have not disdained. If Sir Walter could bring himself,—the house itself, I mean, being what it is, and the country so remarkably healthy,—there are persons, I have reason to know, persons of large fortune and unexceptionable character, who would think no rent too high for the privilege of such a residence; and a responsible tenant—”

He got no further. Sir Walter’s countenance, during the earlier part of this speech, had been changing from red to a still deeper red; at the fatal word he found his voice.

“A tenant! Kellynch Hall to be advertised! to be walked through by strangers with an appraiser at their heels! the park, the gardens, the very shrubberies, to be at the command of any body who can pay a rent! Mr Shepherd, I am obliged to you for your zeal, but you will do me the favour never to let me hear that word again. It is not to be spoken in my presence. Kellynch Hall has been inhabited by the Elliots and by nobody else these two hundred years, and while I live it shall be inhabited by nobody else. Let me hear no more of it.”

Mr Shepherd, with a discretion which did honour to his profession, heard no more of it himself, gathered up his papers, hoped that Sir Walter would allow him to turn the whole matter once again in his mind, and took his leave. Lady Russell staid a little longer, pressed Anne’s hand with a look which said every thing, attempted one gentle word more with Sir Walter, found it useless, and drove home to Kellynch Lodge with a heavier heart than she had brought; and the morning’s council ended exactly where it had begun, save that four plans had been rejected instead of none, and that a word had been forbidden.

The remainder of the day passed heavily. Elizabeth, finding her father immovable, and having no relish for a losing cause, said no more of Anne’s scheme, and by dinner-time seemed rather to repent of her moment of alliance than to remember it; and Sir Walter’s spirits were only restored by the arrival of the post, which brought, among other things, a letter from Uppercross.

It was from Mary, and it was a letter very much in Mary’s usual style. She was excessively unwell; she had a sore throat which she was sure was more than a common sore throat, though nobody about her would believe it; Charles was out from morning till night, and thought nothing of her; the elder Mrs Musgrove had sent her some broth, which was all very well, but broth was not company; she had not seen a creature the whole week who cared whether she lived or died; and if Anne could come to her, and come soon, it might do her some good, though she supposed that at Kellynch they were all too fine and too busy to think of her.

“Anne had better go, certainly,” said Elizabeth, when the letter had been read aloud; “nothing is wanted of her here.” And Sir Walter, observing only that Mary was grown so coarse he wondered at her exposing herself even at Uppercross, made no objection. To Anne herself the summons, ungraciously as it was worded and ungraciously seconded, was almost welcome. To be of use was her surest happiness; and to be wanted anywhere, even as Mary wanted her, was more than she was accustomed to at home.

When the candles were brought, and her father had retired to the consolations of the Baronetage, and Elizabeth to her own apartment, Anne sat some time alone at the open window of the little morning-room. The summer evening was very still; the elms of the park stood black against a sky not yet quite dark, and every thing before her spoke of the security and permanence which she now knew to be neither. Nothing was settled; nothing was even begun; the debts remained entire, the plans all rejected, the forbidden word still hanging, she could not but feel, somewhere in the air over Kellynch Hall, waiting its time. Her own strange half-hour of consequence, when Elizabeth had taken her part before them all, she recalled with a sad sort of smile; it had lasted rather less than the morning. She could do no good by staying; at Uppercross she might do a little; and it was with a mind made quietly up to set off for Mary’s on the morrow, and a heart more anxious for her home than her home had ever been for her, that Anne Elliot at last took her candle and went upstairs.

The first thing I did, when Mr. Franklin let go of my neck, was to hold him out at arm’s length, and look at him. The last time I had seen him, he was a rosy-cheeked boy going away to foreign parts in charge of a courier, and crying fit to break his heart at the carriage window. Here, in the boy’s place, was a slim, bright, easy gentleman, brown of complexion, with a something in his eye and a something in his laugh that were the boy’s still, whatever the foreign lands had done with the rest of him. I am not ashamed to own that my own eyes wanted the bandanna handkerchief next, after Rosanna had done with wanting it. When you come to be past seventy, good friend, and one of the children of the old time drops out of the sky on you in a fawn-coloured suit, you will make no better a figure than I did, I promise you.

“Bless your dear heart, Mr. Franklin!” I said, when I could say anything. “You’re four good hours before your time, sir. We looked for you at the close of day, and here you are at the beginning of the afternoon. What may that mean?”

Instead of answering me, he looked all round him—at the sandhills on the one side, and the quicksand and the sea on the other—as if this horrid solitude of ours was the pleasantest prospect in England.

“It means, Betteredge,” says he, “that I have found the very place I wanted. There isn’t a living creature within hearing of us. Sit where you are; I have something to say to you. But first”—here he put his hand into his pocket, quite grave—“I pay my debts. Seven-and-sixpence, borrowed of you the day I went to Germany, to buy a knife with. There it is; and Heaven knows what the interest comes to, after all these years.”

I mention this trifle of the seven-and-sixpence because it was the boy all over, and it warmed me to him; and also because, as things turned out, it was the last laugh we two had together, standing on that beach, for many a long day afterwards. His face altered while I was still chuckling over the money. He took a letter-case out of the breast of his coat, and a letter out of the letter-case, and put the letter open into my hand.

“You are the oldest friend I have in this part of the world,” he says, “and I am not sure but you are the wisest. Read that, Betteredge, and you will know why I came down by the morning train instead of the afternoon, and why I left my luggage to follow me from the station, and walked over to the house across the moor, like a man that had reasons for not being seen on the high road.”

I got out my spectacles (which takes time, at my age, on the slope of a beach), and I read the letter. It was in the hand of Mr. Bruff, the family lawyer in London—a gentleman whose name will come round again before I have done with this narrative of mine—and it ran, as nearly as I can now give it, in these words:

“Private.—Gray’s Inn Square, Wednesday.—Dear Mr. Franklin,—I think it right that you should know what has happened here since you called on me on Monday last. Yesterday afternoon a stranger—a man of dark complexion, dressed like an Englishman, and speaking English remarkably well—presented himself at my office, and inquired, with perfect civility, whether Mr. Franklin Blake was not shortly to travel into Yorkshire, and, if so, on what day and by what train. My head clerk (following his standing instructions in all such matters) told him nothing. In the evening of the same day, I have reason to believe that my own house was watched, and that the man watching it answered to the same description. Connecting these circumstances with the nature of the charge which you have undertaken on your father’s behalf, I strongly advise you to alter the hour of your journey to-morrow without mentioning the alteration beforehand to any living soul; to keep what you carry about your own person until you reach Lady Verinder’s house; and, once arrived there, to put it under lock and key without an hour’s needless delay. The strong-room of a bank is the proper guardian of such a charge—failing that, the safest and least likely corner your ingenuity can discover. Forgive a short letter; I write with the post going out. Yours faithfully, BRUFF.”

I read this through twice; and, upon my folding it up small and giving it back, my mind misgave me all on a sudden, and out came the thunderbolt that had been waiting inside me ever since dinner-time in the servants’ hall.

“Mr. Franklin,” I said, “there were three Indian jugglers at the house this very morning, with a little English boy along with them.”

It was wonderful—considering how easy he had been the minute before—to see how those words sobered him. He caught me by the arm. “What did they do?” says he. “What did they say?” I told him what my daughter Penelope had seen and heard: the ink poured into the boy’s hand, and the boy sent off into a trance, and the words the boy said—that the English gentleman from foreign parts would travel to this house that day, and that he “had got It about him.” Mr. Franklin heard me out without once opening his lips; and then he asked me one question. “Did the boy say what ‘It’ was?” “No, sir,” says I; “the boy said no more than I have told you.” Upon that, Mr. Franklin sat looking out over the quicksand, with the letter in his hand, for as long as you might count fifty.

“The letter and the boy point the same way, Betteredge,” he said at last, more to himself than to me.

“And which way may that be, sir?” I asked.

“Not to-night,” says he, getting on his feet and pulling me up after him, with the strength of his arm and the good-humour of his face coming back together. “I can say nothing to anybody until I have seen my aunt. Meet me here to-morrow morning, when I have had my breakfast, and you shall have the whole story out of me at this very place, with the sea for a witness. In the meantime, old friend, there is one thing you can do for me at once.” He took out of an inner pocket a little packet, done up in white paper, sealed at both ends with wax, and with never a line of direction upon it anywhere. It was a small matter to look at—not so big as my snuff-box—and it lay in my open hand as innocent as an egg. “Lock that up to-night,” says Mr. Franklin, “in the safest place you have got under your care; give it back into my own hand, and no other person’s, when I ask you for it to-morrow; and—there’s a good fellow!—ask me no questions, and say not one word about it to a living soul in the house.”

You will wonder, may be, that a man of my experience took the packet, and pocketed it, and asked nothing. I answer you, that is exactly what I did; and I will tell you why. First, because Mr. Bruff’s letter had said, plain enough, that quick locking-up, and no talking, was the wholesome course. Second, because there is a way of saying “ask me no questions” which stops the questions in a man’s throat; and Mr. Franklin had that way, along with the rest of his foreign accomplishments. And third (which I take to be the true reason, the other two being what my poor mother used to call trimmings), because I was as curious as a woman to hear the whole story on the morrow, and had sense enough to know that pestering him overnight was not the road to it. So we walked back together through the plantation of firs, talking of the old times and the new; and never a word more of packets, or letters, or Indians, passed between us till the house was in sight.

I ought to mention here—things being bound to go down in their places—that my lady had come back from her lunching-party alone, Miss Rachel having been prevailed on to stop and dine with her friends, who were to send her home in their carriage at night. So it fell out that Mr. Franklin’s welcome, that first evening, was his aunt’s welcome only; which he took, I could see, with a shade of disappointment on him, the two having been famous playfellows in the years before he went abroad.

My lady received him in her own sitting-room; and, being rung for to take her orders about our young gentleman’s rooms, I was in and out, and heard what I am now to set down. She met him with both hands out, and kissed him, and was as glad of him as ever an aunt was of a nephew yet. Then, before more than ten words had passed, she put him off from her a little, and spoke in a changed voice—the voice she keeps for the few occasions when she means to be obeyed.

“One condition, Franklin, before you unpack so much as a hat-box in my house. I am told you have been lately much taken up with the affairs of your uncle Herncastle. I don’t ask whether that is true; I don’t want to hear. But I forbid one subject under this roof, and I forbid it once for all. Your uncle Herncastle’s name is not to be spoken here—not to me, not to the servants, and, above all things in this world, not to Rachel. My brother was no fit company for my child living, and his very name shall be no company for her now he is dead. Do you promise me that?”

Who my lady’s brother was, and what the family quarrel had been, and why the wicked Colonel (as the family called him among themselves) had knocked at his sister’s door for years and never once got over the threshold of it, are matters that shall be told in their right place, and not a page sooner—I know my business as a narrator better than to spill everything out of the basket at once. All that concerns us here is Mr. Franklin’s answer. He changed colour—I saw it, standing at the door with my orders; and there was a moment when I thought he was going to say something, and Mr. Bruff’s letter turned over of its own accord, as you may say, in my mind. But whatever it was, he swallowed it.

“Your wishes are laws to me in your own house, aunt,” says he, kissing her hand with one of his foreign flourishes. “The name shall not pass my lips.” Upon which my lady’s face cleared like our bay when the sun comes out on it, and she took his arm, and the talk ran on the safe ground of his travels; and I went off about my business, with the little sealed packet weighing in my pocket like a paving-stone, for all it was no heavier than a hen’s egg.

My business, as I understood it, was plain. Opening out of my pantry there is a stout little room, with a door sheathed in iron and a lock to it that the late Sir John had down from London—the plate-room, as we call it, where the family plate is kept in its chests, and the keys of which have lived on my own bunch, and slept in my own bedroom, these forty years. Into the plate-room I went that evening, when the servants were safe at their supper; and I put the little packet away at the back of the topmost shelf, behind the case that holds the great silver epergne (a thing so hideous, between ourselves, that no thief with any taste in him would burden his sack with it); and I turned the key on the whole, and gave the door a shake to make sure, and went out no wiser than I went in as to what it was that I had been locking up. Set that down to my credit, good friend, for it went sorely against the grain with me.

I had got back to my pantry, and was thinking of my pipe, when in came Penelope, with her face longer than I liked to see it.

“Father,” says she, “Rosanna has never come back to her work. She sent word in by one of the fisher-lads from Cobb’s Hole that she had gone on there to see her friend, and that we were not to wait up for her. Gone on to Cobb’s Hole, father—after missing her dinner!—and this the day when the jugglers came! Did you ask Mr. Franklin about the boy and the ink, as you promised me?”

“I did, my dear,” says I.

“And he laughed at it, of course, as you did?”

“He did not laugh at it,” I was obliged to own; and I saw my girl turn away half triumphant and half frightened—which is a mixture I have never known to agree with any woman yet. As for Rosanna, I said what a father in office is bound to say, namely, that the girl should hear of it from me in the morning; and I said it, I fear, without believing that any words of mine would matter a straw. Her white face at the Shivering Sand was before my eyes while I spoke, and her talk about her grave waiting for her among the quicksands; and I confess my mind was not easy—no, nor my stomach neither, and the two are nearer neighbours than the doctors will admit.

It was a fine warm May night. I took my pipe, and my chair, and ROBINSON CRUSOE, out into the back court, where this chapter (if chapter it may be called) began with me; and I sat there while the light died out over the sandhills, and the house quieted down behind me, and ten o’clock struck from the stables, and still no Rosanna Spearman came home. The keys of the plate-room were in my breeches pocket, appointed to pass the night under my pillow. Have I put it down already, in this narrative, that I am no bigot in the matter of tobacco, and that I have found, on the trial of a long life, that ROBINSON CRUSOE and a pipe together will compose a man’s mind when nothing else will? If I have, it will bear saying twice. I opened the book, by no choice of my own, at page one hundred and fifty-six, and my eye fell on these words: “Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”

The man who doesn’t believe in ROBINSON CRUSOE after that, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit. Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is better reserved for some person with a livelier faith. I smoked my pipe out over that passage; and I do not deny that I looked more than once, before I went in to my bed, at the dark side of the house where the plate-room window is, and more than once again down the path that leads away towards Cobb’s Hole—which lay empty and grey in the last of the light, with never a little grey cloak stirring on it anywhere.

The world may be divided broadly into two classes: the men who, on discovering that their umbrella has vanished from the club rack, take the blow like Red Indians at the stake, and the men who go about the place making of their bereavement a public scandal. The Honourable Hugo Walderwick belonged to the second and noisier group. At twelve-fifteen, requiring his umbrella for the short walk to a luncheon engagement and finding the rack empty of it, he had said things in the cloak-room of the Drones Club which had caused Blenkinsop, the attendant, to look like a wounded fawn. At twelve-forty he was in a measure soothed, for the hall-porter came to him bearing the missing property, together with a small envelope.

The umbrella had been returned some twenty minutes earlier by a young lady. She had walked into Dover Street with the direct and businesslike step of one who dislikes being in debt to mysterious strangers, had handed the umbrella across to the hall-porter, and with it a note which she had written at the stationer’s round the corner.

“This belongs to one of the members,” she had said. “Will you please give it back to him, with this?”

“Which member would that be, miss?”

“I don’t know his name. He is very tall and very thin, and he wears an eyeglass.”

Something flickered for an instant in the hall-porter’s eye; but hall-porters of good London clubs are trained from boyhood to look at all times as though they had just been unveiled, and he merely inclined his head.

“I will see that it reaches its owner, miss,” he said.

And Eve, who had half thought of asking a question and had decided that girls who ask porters the names of strange young men come to bad ends, went out again into Dover Street, where the sun was now shining with an air of never having done anything else.

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick, then, at twelve-forty, opened the envelope. The note within was brief, and it perplexed him. He read it twice, breathing stertorously, and then made his way to the smoking-room, where Psmith, in the window-seat, was gazing out at the premises of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe with the expression of a man revisiting the scenes of his childhood.

“I say, Psmith.”

“Comrade Walderwick! Take a seat. You find me in reflective mood.”

“Look here, dash it. Blenkinsop says you took my umbrella out of the rack this morning.”

“I did.”

The frankness of the confession seemed to disconcert the injured man for a moment.

“Well--dash it--why?”

“For the noblest of motives, Comrade Walderwick. More I cannot say. There are chapters in every man’s life on which the lips must remain sealed.”

“But look here.” Mr. Walderwick brandished the note. “Some female has sent the thing back with this. ‘Thank you so much for the umbrella. You went away too quickly to be thanked properly. I hope you got in before you were wet.’ There’s no name signed. I don’t know any female. I never lent any female an umbrella in my life. What I want to know is--”

“May I see the document?” Psmith took it, adjusted his monocle, and studied it with grave attention. “A model of what such a communication should be,” he said. “Terse, cordial, wanting in no essential respect save a signature. Comrade Walderwick, what did that umbrella cost you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything. What did it cost?”

“Thirty bob, I suppose. But--”

“I will give you ten pounds for it,” said Psmith, producing notes.

Mr. Walderwick’s jaw drooped slowly, like a tired flower.

“Ten quid?”

“The umbrella and the note. As they stand. One does not haggle over these things.”

“But, dash it, you can’t go about buying a chap’s umbrella at ten quid a time. I mean to say, why? What’s the idea? What’s it all about?”

“That,” said Psmith, pressing the notes into his hand and taking the umbrella from his unresisting grasp, “is precisely the point on which, as I hinted earlier, my lips are sealed. Let it be sufficient for you, Comrade Walderwick, that you have this day brought off the finest financial coup of the London season. An umbrella which cost thirty shillings has changed hands at ten pounds. Throgmorton Street, in its palmiest hour, has seen nothing so spectacular. I would keep it quiet, if I were you. If it gets about, fellows will be pestering you to take options on their hats.”

And Psmith, tucking the umbrella beneath his arm and folding the note away in an inner pocket with something of the reverent care of a curator handling a first folio, moved off in the direction of the luncheon-room, leaving the Hon. Hugo Walderwick staring at the ten-pound notes in his hand with the eyes of one who has been present at a miracle without catching the drift of it.

* * * * *

At four o’clock that afternoon Lord Emsworth stood at the window of a small visitors’ room at the Senior Conservative Club, thinking of Blandings. London always affected him in this way. Somewhere far off in Shropshire his hollyhocks were coming along without him, and he was penned here in a stone wilderness where nothing grew but policemen. He was aroused from these melancholy musings by a page-boy, who announced Miss Halliday; and he turned, beaming vaguely, and peered at his visitor with the unfocused benevolence of a man who has once more mislaid his pince-nez.

“Ah! My dear Miss--er--quite so. Quite so. Sit down, sit down.”

Eve sat down, and waited for the interview to begin. She had come prepared to be examined searchingly on the subject of cataloguing, and had spent an improving half-hour at a bookshop that morning gazing at the backs of volumes so as to be able to talk easily of first editions.

“You have come about the library,” said Lord Emsworth, with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit. “My secretary Baxter arranged it. A most capable fellow, Baxter. He arranges everything.” He looked at her with sudden wistfulness. “Are you fond of gardens?”

“Very,” said Eve, and thereby wrecked the interview beyond salvage.

For the next twenty minutes Lord Emsworth spoke of gardens; of his rose-garden; of his yew alley; of his head-gardener McAllister, a capable man but Scotch and mule-like on the subject of gravel paths; and of his hollyhocks, which, he was inclined to think, would this summer be the talk of Shropshire. Twice Eve endeavoured to introduce the subject of the library, and twice it went under without a struggle, like a swimmer seized by sharks. At the end of this period his lordship, wishing to show her a letter from McAllister containing agreeable news of the delphiniums, felt in his pockets, groped, patted himself, and grew agitated.

“Bless my soul! I have lost my glasses. Most extraordinary thing. I had them at luncheon. I am always losing them. My dear young lady, I cannot read a word without my glasses.”

“Aren’t those they?” said Eve. “Down the back of your collar?”

They were. Lord Emsworth retrieved them, gazed at her with the frank astonishment of one witnessing sorcery, and said that she was a most capable young lady--Baxter himself could have done no more; and it is probable that this single feat did more to establish Eve in his esteem than any amount of book-learning could have accomplished. He resumed the letter, resumed the delphiniums, and, rising to indicate with a sweep of the arm the sheer stupendous height to which these blooms had attained--“as tall, I assure you, my dear, as tall as *that*”--swept from the little table at Eve’s side a bowl of roses, which emptied itself, flowers, water and all, over the supreme hat of soft, dull satin with the black bird of Paradise feather.

To the masculine mind a wet hat is a trifle, a thing to be dried at leisure. Eve’s hat had cost a sum which I decline to reveal, and the bird of Paradise now drooped over her left shoulder like a fowl that has been out all night in the rain. She laughed gallantly, and said it did not matter in the least; and Lord Emsworth, appalled, dabbed at her with a handkerchief in a manner that distributed the moisture more evenly, ringing meanwhile for a waiter, deploring his clumsiness, and begging her to take the greatest care of the chills which, he understood, followed upon damp.

“Capital, capital,” he said at length, when order had been restored, evidently feeling that the proceedings had reached their natural close. “Then we shall expect you at Blandings on--on--Baxter will know. Wednesday. Delighted, my dear, delighted.”

And Eve found herself in the street, still employed--indeed, rather more warmly regarded by her employer than when she had entered--but with a ruined hat, no faintest notion of her duties, hours or salary, and not one word spoken on the subject of cataloguing from first to last. It occurred to her, as she walked, that she had also learned nothing whatever of Mr. Keeble; but Blandings itself, she reflected, would provide ample scope for that campaign, and her spirits, which nothing could depress for long, began to rise.

* * * * *

There are natures which in the hour of disaster seek solitude, and natures which seek sympathy. Eve’s was of the second sort; and it was for this reason that five o’clock found her climbing once more the stairs of the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, while a fresh shower--for the English summer never does these things by halves--rattled on the pavement of Shaftesbury Avenue behind her. She had now, of course, no umbrella; the irony of this had not escaped her.

In the waiting-room, seated between a stout lady who looked like a cook in search of a duke and a thin lady who looked like a duke’s cook in search of anything, was a very tall, very thin, very well-dressed young man with a monocle in his right eye and an umbrella across his knees.

“Why!” said Eve, stopping. “It’s you!”

The young man rose and bowed courteously.

“In what way can I be of service?”

“You lent me an umbrella this morning. In Dover Street.”

“I fear,” said the young man, gravely, “that you are confusing me with another.”

“I’m quite sure I’m not. You came out of the club opposite the coal place, and you hadn’t a hat, and you put the umbrella into my hand and simply ran.”

“I can only repeat that the man you describe is a stranger to me. Or rather, no. From your description, I fancy I can identify him. The Hon. Hugo Walderwick. A member, I believe, of the Drones Club, which stands, as you rightly say, opposite the coal place. Chivalry, they tell me, is a positive obsession with him. He spends his days lending umbrellas to strangers. His nights, too, I understand, if it is raining. It is his one weakness.”

Eve looked hard at the umbrella across the seats.

“Then whose is that umbrella?”

“This umbrella,” said the young man, regarding it with quiet pride, “is mine. I bought it to-day. It cost me ten pounds.”

“Ten pounds! For an umbrella! I don’t believe a single word you’ve been saying.”

At this point the door of the private office opened, and Miss Clarkson appeared upon the threshold.

“Eve! My dear child! You’re soaked. Come in at once”--and Eve was swept within, casting over her shoulder as she went a glance in which suspicion, amusement and frank bafflement were nicely blended.

She emerged some ten minutes later, comforted, and paused at the outer door.

“If you ever meet your friend Mr. Walderwick,” she said, “will you thank him for me?”

“I will make a point of it,” said Psmith.

The door closed behind her, and shortly afterwards he was ushered into the presence of Miss Clarkson, to whom he explained that he had called in search of employment; that he was open to consider anything of a reasonably lucrative nature; and that his sole stipulation was that the position should have nothing whatever to do with fish. Miss Clarkson, having looked through her books and found nothing that was not connected with fish or otherwise ineligible, expressed her regret; and her visitor rose, wholly unbowed.

“I shall not despair,” he said. “Something, I feel, will turn up. It has been that sort of day. One thing more. The young lady who left as I came in--charming, if I may say so--an old friend of yours?”

“Eve Halliday? One of my very dearest. I was a mistress at her school,” said Miss Clarkson, who could no more withhold information about those she loved than a thrush can withhold song. “Such a brave girl, and so--”

“Halliday,” said Psmith thoughtfully. “Eve Halliday. Thank you. Good afternoon.”

And he passed out into Shaftesbury Avenue, where, opening the umbrella for the first time on his own behalf, he reflected that ten pounds is after all a small sum to pay for a really sound article.

* * * * *

The smoking-room of the Drones Club was almost empty that evening, the bulk of the members having gone off to theatres; and Psmith sat alone in the window-seat, the umbrella propped against the arm of his chair. A waiter, passing, had eyed it with silent reproach, for umbrellas do not belong in smoking-rooms; but Psmith had explained that it was not an umbrella but a relic, and the waiter had withdrawn, marvelling.

Outside, the rain had begun again, drumming softly on the window; and across the road the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe glimmered through the dusk. Psmith drew from his pocket a small sheet of note-paper, read it through once more, and replaced it with care.

“Eve Halliday,” he said meditatively, to the umbrella. “An admirable name. It is a singular thing, when you come to reflect, that no other girl I have ever met has possessed it.”

And he gazed across at the awning of Thorpe & Briscoe as a pilgrim, his journey done, gazes at a shrine.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*26 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“What a letter! I have read it three times through, and each time I have laughed and cried in the same places. Three proposals in one day, and the right man the third! My dear, I am so happy for you that my own pen runs away with me. Mr. Holmwood is, I am sure, all that you say, for you could not love him else; and as for the other two poor fellows, you were right to be honest with them, and honesty of that kind makes friends who last a lifetime. Mind you keep them! A married woman cannot have too many honest friends, and a doctor and a Texan between them ought to be equal to most of the accidents of life. I shall not tell a soul except Jonathan, as you allow me, and him only when I see him.

“And that brings me to my one little cloud, dear, which I mention only that you may not think me dull when we meet. I have had no word from Jonathan since those few hurried lines from Transylvania that I told you of, and by his own reckoning he should have been home a week ago and more. I tell myself that lawyers’ business is like the mills of God, and that foreign lawyers’ business must grind slower still; and that a man buried in title-deeds cannot always be at a writing-table for his own pleasure. Still, I look for the postman more than is quite dignified in an assistant schoolmistress, and I confess it to you, though to no one else. When he does write I shall scold him roundly, and then forgive him at once, which I believe is the whole art of scolding. I am keeping up my shorthand--I wrote this letter out first in shorthand, for practice, so you are helping in my education without knowing it. Write to me soon, dear, and tell me everything about Arthur; you see I make free with his name already.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey Morris at his rooms; Art the third. Quincey had it all done as like a camp as chambers in London may be--a fire, though the night was warm, and chairs pulled round it, and no servant after the cloth was drawn, so that we three were alone as we used to be alone under bigger skies. Art brought his news, which tingled duly in both my ears; there is no need to phonograph what it was, since I knew it already at first hand, and the knowledge is filed where I keep things that hurt. He told it well, like a man; and looked at Quincey and me while he told it, which was better than any words.

When he had done, Quincey stood up and gave us a toast: “Miss Lucy Westenra, God bless her; and the man that’s worthy of her, which is more than Jack or I could say for ourselves; and may the two of us dance at the wedding with the best face we can carry.” We drank it standing, and I found the wine easier to swallow than I had expected. Art then delivered his messages: that a certain lady holds us both her true friends, and means to keep us to it all her life. Quincey said that a friend was rarer than a lover, and more unselfish anyhow; I have heard him say it before, and begin to think he says it to himself as much as to us. We sat till two, and told the old yarns--the Marquesas, and Titicaca, and the night at the Korea--and if two of the three of us were talking one ache down between us, no man mentioned it, and so it was well done.

Query: is not this the sane man’s form of my own prescription to my patients--occupation, and the company of one’s kind? *Similia similibus.* To-day, work. Renfield continues to be the most interesting study in the house.

*2 June.*--Renfield again. His fly-catching goes on and grows systematic; he has a whole colony now in a box, and feeds them with sugar begged from the attendants, entering something in a little note-book like a man balancing accounts. I let him keep the flies for the present; the ledger interests me more, and I shall have it examined when occasion serves. He talked rationally enough, for him, of the weather and of the birds outside his window; and I was at the door, thinking of other things, when he called after me, in the easy voice of one asking the time of day:--

“And Miss Westenra, doctor--I hope Miss Westenra is quite well?”

I do not care to record what a start it gave me to hear that name in that room. I came back and asked him quietly whom he meant, and what he knew of any such lady. He looked at me with his cunning look, the one that shuts down over his face like a shutter over a shop-front, and said only that a man in his position heard the birds, and the birds heard everything; and then fell to counting his flies, and I could get no more from him than from the box on the sill.

The explanation, of course, is simple, and I set it down to keep myself from a less simple one. My errand of the 24th was known in this house before I was an hour home again; a keeper’s romance is common property below stairs, and names travel through an asylum faster than through a village. Simmons, on being questioned, admits there has been talk in the hall. So the mystery is none. Yet I did not like to hear her name in that place, and from that mouth; which shows that a man may diagnose sentiment all day in others and harbour it himself like any housemaid. (*Mem.*, speak to the attendants about gossip; and, *mem.* also, physician, heal thyself.)

*Letter, Anton Leutner, of the Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*4 June.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“I pray you forgive that a stranger writes, and that he writes so bad an English. I am the landlord of the Golden Krone at Bistritz, where the English Herr, Jonathan Harker, did lodge in the beginning of May before he went on beyond the Borgo Pass upon his business. The Herr left with me the direction of the honoured Miss, wrote upon a card, and made me a promise give: that if he should not be come back to Bistritz within the month, I would write to this direction, that his friends make not themselves unease.

“Now is the month gone, and the Herr is not yet come back; but there is come down to us by the carrier from beyond the pass a word, that the business of the English Herr holds him yet some weeks more, and that letters shall follow to England in their time. Therefore I write as I did promise, that the honoured Miss shall know the Herr is only delayed, and shall not make herself fear. He was well and strong when he went from my house, and ate a good breakfast. My wife bids me say that she prays daily for the good gentleman, who was so friendly to us; she is an old woman and prays for all who travel. His room waits for him, and when he comes again to Bistritz I will see with my own eyes that he writes at once with his own hand.

“I kiss the hands of the honoured Miss, and am her servant to command,

“ANTON LEUTNER.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*10 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have had a letter at last, and it is not from Jonathan. It is from the landlord of the inn at Bistritz, where he stayed, and I copy it out for you exactly, bad English and all, because I have read it so often that I could write it from memory:--” [*The letter of Anton Leutner is here copied in full, and is omitted.*] “There, is it not a kind letter? And was it not like Jonathan, careful for others even in his own affairs, to leave such a charge behind him so that I should not be anxious? I cried over it, Lucy, and I hardly know whether I cried because it comforted me or because it did not. For see, dear: it was written to spare me unease, and it is the first word in a month, and it is not his word. Why should Jonathan send a message by a carrier and no letter to me, when he knows--but there, I am doing exactly what the good landlord begged me not to do.

“I have taken the practical way instead, like a lady journalist, as I threatened you I should become. I have written to Mr. Hawkins at Exeter, who sent Jonathan out and will have news if any one in England has it, and I have begged him to telegraph to me the very moment a letter comes to the office, and not to wait for the post. Mr. Hawkins is goodness itself, and Jonathan is like a son to him, so I know he will not think me forward. Till the telegram comes I shall correct exercise-books and practise my shorthand and be sensible.

“Write and tell me about Arthur, and about the wedding, for I want happy things to think of; and count the days, as I do, till our holiday together.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*12 June.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Now it is my turn to be the comforter, and you shall see how well I do it. I read your letter to mamma--only the part about the landlord, you may be sure--and she says that in her day the young men who went abroad on law business were always given up for lost by their families and always came home fat. And I read it to Arthur too, for you gave me leave to tell him everything by telling me to tell you everything, which is woman’s logic and quite good enough; and Arthur, who is the most sensible man alive except about me, says that foreign conveyancing takes three times as long as English, which takes for ever, and that a purchaser in those parts would keep his lawyer by him to the last signature and seal. So you see, dear, the wise of two generations are against your fretting.

“And oh, Mina, I am so happy that I cannot let any one I love be anything else. Arthur talks of September. Think of it--and think of your Jonathan coming home brown and full of strange stories, just in time to see me married! I order you to believe in that picture, as I believe in it.

“Your loving

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Mind, when the telegram comes, you are to send me word that very day.

“L.”

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

“*18 June.*

“Letter from Jonathan just received, dated twelfth June. He is well, but detained on business some weeks longer.

“HAWKINS.”

The train had rattled and swayed through the darkness for a long time when Mary was wakened by its stopping, and by Mrs. Medlock shaking her arm.

"You have had a sleep!" she said. "It's time to open your eyes! We're at Thwaite Station and we've got a long drive before us."

Mary stood up and tried to keep her eyes open while Mrs. Medlock collected her parcels. The little station was scarcely lighted at all. The rain had stopped, but the wind had risen instead, and when the carriage door was opened it came rushing in at them, cold and wet and smelling of things Mary had never smelled before. The station-master spoke to Mrs. Medlock in a rough, good-natured way, pronouncing his words in a queer broad fashion, and then he said something which made Mrs. Medlock stop quite still on the platform.

"Th' Master's here hissel'," he said. "He's been waitin' this half-hour."

"Never!" exclaimed Mrs. Medlock, under her breath, and her bonnet with the purple velvet flowers trembled all over. "Well, I never did in all my days!"

Mary looked where she was looking. At the end of the platform, where the light of the one lamp scarcely reached, a tall man was standing quite alone. He wore a long dark coat with the collar turned up, and he stood in a curious way, with his shoulders high and uneven, so that at first Mary thought he was leaning against something. Then she saw that he was not, and that his back was crooked, and she knew who he must be. She remembered "Riquet à la Houppe" for a moment, and then she forgot it, because he came slowly toward them and there was nothing in the least like a fairy story about him. He had black hair streaked with white, and a dark face which looked as if it had never been glad of anything.

Mrs. Medlock began to speak in a great hurry, saying something about the train and the child, but he did not seem to hear her. He looked down at Mary. His eyes were so unhappy that they made her uncomfortable, and because she was uncomfortable she gave him her stiffest look, and neither of them said anything at all. It seemed a long time before he spoke, and then it was not to her.

"The carriage is outside," he said, and he turned and walked away down the platform, and they followed him.

That was all. Mary had understood that he was her uncle and that she was to live in his house, and she had thought that even a hunchback who cared about nobody would say something to a person he had never seen before—if it was only something disagreeable. But he sat in his corner of the brougham with his collar up and his eyes shut, or at least turned away into the dark, and he did not once look at her. Mrs. Medlock sat bolt upright and did not chatter as she had done in the train. Nobody would have dared to chatter. There was no sound but the horses' feet and the wheels and the wind, which seemed to get louder the farther they drove.

Mary could see nothing from the window but darkness. The lamps of the carriage threw yellow rays a little way ahead of them, and now and then she caught sight of a bit of rough road and a low twisted tree, and once a white gate, and after that nothing at all—only blackness on either side, stretching away and away. The carriage began to jolt as if it were driving over something rougher than a road.

"We're on th' moor now," Mrs. Medlock ventured at last, in a low voice, as if she felt someone ought to say it.

Whatever a moor was, Mary thought it must be the sea, for the wind went over it with a low, rushing, hollow sound, rising and falling, wilder than any sound she had ever heard. On and on they drove through the dark, and she was staring out at the nothingness when the carriage suddenly pulled up so short that she was thrown against Mrs. Medlock's black silk mantle. The horses stamped and snorted, and the driver could be heard getting down from his seat.

"What is it, Weston?" Mrs. Medlock called out of the window.

"Summat i' th' road, ma'am," the man answered. "One o' th' wild ponies, an' he'll noan shift for th' whip."

Mr. Craven neither moved nor spoke. Mrs. Medlock put her head out of the window and drew it in again, and while she was fussing with the parcels on her lap Mary did a thing she had never done before in her life, because she had never before wanted to do anything enough. She turned the handle of the carriage door on her own side and slipped out on to the moor in the dark.

The wind nearly took her breath away. It came at her over miles and miles of blackness, and it smelled of rain and of something wild and clean, like nothing in India. She could hear it wuthering—though she did not yet know that word—round the carriage and away over the world, and under her feet the ground was springy and rough with heather. In the light of the lamps she could see the pony, a shaggy, rough-coated little creature with a long mane blown across its eyes, standing square in the middle of the road and looking at the horses as if the road belonged to it. It did not seem in the least afraid, and Mary, standing there with her black dress whipping about her legs, was not afraid either, though she was only a thin, plain little girl alone on a Yorkshire moor at night. She felt small, which was a new feeling, and she did not exactly dislike it.

"Mary! Mercy on us, child!" cried Mrs. Medlock from inside the carriage. "Get in this minute!"

The pony tossed its head and trotted off into the darkness of its own accord, as if it had seen all it wanted, and the driver picked Mary up without ceremony and put her back into the carriage. As she settled into her seat she saw that Mr. Craven's eyes were open and fixed on her. She thought he was going to speak, and perhaps he thought so too, but he only looked at her for a moment in the dim swinging light of the lamps—a queer, sharp look, as if she had reminded him of something—and then he turned his face to the window again, and he did not speak all the rest of the way.

It seemed to Mary that the drive would never come to an end, but at last the wheels rolled on to something smoother, and they passed under a long avenue of trees whose branches made an arch of blackness overhead, and stopped before an enormously long house built round a stone court. A light showed in one or two windows upstairs; all the rest were dark. An old man opened the great door, and Mr. Craven got out of the carriage first and went up the steps and past him into the hall without a word to anybody, and Mary, following with Mrs. Medlock, saw him go away down a passage with the old man—who she supposed was Pitcher—walking after him.

The hall was so big and dim that the lamp the old man had left on the table only made a little island of light in it. There were portraits on the walls, and figures in suits of armor, and Mary felt very small indeed and did not look at any of them longer than she could help.

"Well," said Mrs. Medlock, letting out her breath, "him at the station! I've been housekeeper here ten years and such a thing was never known. You're to have your supper and go straight to bed. Come this way."

She took up a candle and led Mary up a broad staircase and down a long corridor and up a short flight of steps and through another corridor and another, until a door opened in a wall and she found herself in a room with a fire in it and a supper laid on a table.

"Here you are," said Mrs. Medlock. "This room and the next are where you'll live—and you must keep to them. Don't you forget that!"

It was in this way Mistress Mary arrived at Misselthwaite Manor, and she had perhaps never felt quite so contrary in all her life.

She had expected a maid to bring her supper, because maids and Ayahs had always brought her everything, but presently there came a knock at the door and there entered a manservant—a big young footman with red cheeks, carrying a tray with a covered dish on it. He set it down and lifted the cover, and there was a bowl of porridge with a jug of milk beside it.

"Mrs. Medlock says tha's to sup it while it's hot," he said. "An' tha mun get thysen to bed after. Th' fire's been mended an' there's nowt else tha'll be wantin' to-night, I'se warrant."

Mary looked at him with her stiff little look.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said. "I cannot understand your language."

The young man looked at her in astonishment for a moment, and then he grinned a broad, good-humored grin, not in the least abashed.

"Eh!" he said. "I'm talkin' too fast an' too broad for thee, I reckon. Yon's tha supper"—pointing at the porridge—"an' tha's to eat it up."

"I heard that part," said Mary coldly. "It was the rest I could not understand."

"Th' rest were nobbut th' same thing said twice over," he answered cheerfully, and he went away and left her, and she could hear him laughing to himself down the corridor, which made her furious.

She was too hungry to refuse the porridge, though she had never in her life been given such a supper, and when she had eaten it Mrs. Medlock came in and saw her undressed and into a big carved four-post bed hung with dark old tapestry, in the room next to the one with the fire. The candle made great shadows on the walls, and outside the wind went round and round the house with its low hollow roar, flinging handfuls of rain at the panes.

It was just as Mrs. Medlock was taking up the candle that Mary heard the sound. It was not the wind, or at least she did not think it was. It came from somewhere far away inside the house—a curious, muffled, hollow sound, as if in some distant corridor a door had been shut and then another, and then something had gone echoing away down empty rooms and lost itself. She sat up in bed.

"What is that?" she said.

"What is what?" said Mrs. Medlock, rather quickly.

"That sound. In the house. Like doors, a long way off."

"It's th' wind," said Mrs. Medlock. "It's the wind, wuthering round the house and down the chimneys. There's a hundred rooms in this house and the wind finds its way into all of them. You'll hear queer enough sounds on a night like this, and you're to take no notice of any of them. Lie down and go to sleep."

She said it in her briskest, hardest voice, and she went out with the candle and shut the door, and Mary heard her footsteps go away down the corridor.

The room was quite dark then, except for a dull red glow from the fire in the next room showing under the door, and Mary lay in the big bed and listened. The wind wuthered and wuthered. She was getting used to it now; it was a wide, outside sound, going round and round the walls. And then, quite distinctly, threaded through it, she heard the other sound again—far off, inside, hollow—and it stopped, and the wind went on alone.

"That was not the wind," said Mary to herself, sitting up in the dark. "It was not the wind, whatever she says. It was inside the house."

She was a contrary child, and being told to take no notice of a thing was, perhaps, the one way in the world to make her determine to notice it. She did not know what the sound was, and there was nobody who would tell her, because in this house, it seemed, nobody ever told anybody anything. Very well. She lay down again with her stiff little mouth set in a straight line, wide awake, listening to the wuthering of the wind, and made up her mind that she would find out for herself.

The book was old, and its type close and crabbed, but I found what I sought soon enough. Strychnine, I read, produces convulsions of a tetanic character, the body arching backward until it rests upon the head and the heels; and I remembered, with a shudder I could not repress, that terrible posture on the bed, and Dr. Bauerstein’s words: “Quite—tetanic in character.” I replaced the book upon its shelf with hands that were not quite steady, and let myself quietly out of the house.

The morning was fresh and beautiful. The storm which had threatened all the previous evening had passed away in the night without breaking, and the air had that washed and glittering quality which seems a mockery when one carries heavy news. As I walked rapidly down the drive and through the village, it seemed impossible to believe that, in that peaceful world, an old lady lay dead—and dead, if my suspicions were correct, by the hand of a murderer.

The Belgians in the village were lodged in a small house near the park gates, and I knew that Poirot occupied a room at Leastways Cottage. I had raised my hand to knock when the door opened, and Poirot himself stood before me. He was fully dressed—at that hour!—and his face was grave.

“My friend,” he said, before I could utter a word, “I know why you have come. Madame Inglethorp is dead.”

I stared at him, thunderstruck.

“But—how can you possibly know? It happened barely two hours ago!”

“It was Baily who told me—your man who drove the car. Dr. Wilkins lives but two doors from this cottage, and when Baily hammered upon his door at five o’clock this morning, half Styles St. Mary put its head out of the window. The good Baily is not a discreet man, Hastings. Before the car had turned round, the whole street knew that Mrs. Inglethorp had been taken terribly ill, and by six o’clock the whole street knew that she was dead. News of that kind, mon ami, travels faster than any motor-car.”

Briefly, and with what coherence I could muster, I poured out the events of the night, and the errand on which John had sanctioned my coming. Poirot listened with the closest attention, his head a little on one side, his curiously green eyes narrowed.

“You have done well to come to me,” he said, when I had finished. “Mrs. Inglethorp was very good to us Belgians here. I am grateful to her, and I do not forget. If I can serve her now, I will do so with all my heart. Return to the house, my friend. I follow you within the hour—but a Hercule Poirot does not present himself to a house of mourning with his moustaches uncurled and his boots unpolished. Order and method, Hastings—they begin with the toilet. Go; say to Mr. Cavendish that I come.”

I confess the delay chafed me, but I knew my friend of old, and argument would have been useless. I retraced my steps up the drive, and had just reached the hall when the front door opened behind me, and Alfred Inglethorp walked in.

I do not know what I had expected—guilt, perhaps, or confusion, or the haggardness of a sleepless night. He showed none of these things. He stood there in the hall, stroking his long black beard, and his voice, when he spoke, was quiet and mournful.

“This is a terrible business, Mr. Hastings. My poor Emily. I heard the news in the village not twenty minutes ago. I came at once.”

John had come out of the dining-room at the sound of the door. He stood very stiffly, and did not offer his hand.

“Where were you last night?” he asked, and his voice was hard.

Alfred Inglethorp spread out his hands with a gesture of deprecation.

“My dear John, do not speak to me in that tone—not to-day of all days. It is simply told. I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein, as you know, and we fell into conversation at his lodgings—a most interesting man, the doctor. When I rose to go it was past one o’clock, and I discovered, to my annoyance, that I had come away without the latch-key after all. I could not bring myself to rouse the whole household at such an hour—Emily slept so badly of late—so I took a bed at the Stylites Arms, and slept there. I meant to be back before any of you were down. If I had known—if I had dreamed——” His voice broke, very suitably, and he passed his hand across his eyes.

There was something in the performance—for so, rightly or wrongly, I could not help regarding it—that revolted me. John turned on his heel without a word and went back into the dining-room, and after a moment Inglethorp went slowly up the stairs, murmuring that he must be alone with his grief.

We breakfasted, the three of us, in almost unbroken silence. It was as Dorcas was clearing away that the thing happened. The old servant’s eyes were red with weeping, and her hands trembled among the cups, and suddenly she set down the tray and spoke, in a voice that shook.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. John, and I know it’s not my place—but I can’t hold it in, sir, not if I die for it. The master says he came away last night without the latch-key. Sir, that’s not true. I fetched it for him myself, out of the drawer of the hall table, not five minutes before he left with the doctor, and I saw him slip it into his coat pocket with my own two eyes. I’d take my Bible oath on it, sir.”

There was a moment of dead silence. John and Lawrence looked at one another, and I felt a queer cold sensation at the back of my neck.

“Thank you, Dorcas,” said John at last, very quietly. “You did quite right to tell me. Say nothing of it to anyone else for the present.”

Dorcas went out, and none of us spoke. What was there to say? A man might, conceivably, forget that a key lay in his pocket. But my mind ran back to Evelyn Howard, and her parting words to me, and I found that I had little inclination to be charitable.

It was shortly after eight when Poirot arrived. I had been watching for him from the window, and went out to meet him. He was, as ever, a wonder of neatness—his egg-shaped head with its scrupulously smooth hair, his stiff military moustache, his patent-leather boots on which the dust of the drive had hardly presumed to settle. He limped a trifle, but he carried himself with the air of a general taking the field.

John received him in the hall, gravely and courteously, and Poirot bowed low over his condolences, which were brief and, I thought, sincere. Then he became at once the man of business.

“The keys of the rooms, Monsieur Cavendish, if you will be so good. And I must ask that no one—no one at all, you comprehend—enters that wing until I have finished.”

John handed over the two keys which Dr. Bauerstein had given him, and Poirot and I went up the stairs together. At the door of the death chamber he paused, unlocked it, and stood for a moment on the threshold, his eyes travelling slowly round the room. Then he entered, and I followed, closing the door behind us.

The room was as we had left it in the grey of the morning. The curtains were still drawn, though the sun beat gaily against them; the dead woman lay upon the bed, the sheet drawn up over her face; the door into Alfred Inglethorp’s room hung splintered upon its hinges, as witness of our violence of the night; and the little table which had stood by the bed lay overturned upon the floor amidst a litter of broken glass and china, a reading-lamp, some books, matches, and a guttered candle.

Poirot’s methods were a revelation to me. He moved about the room with the quick softness of a cat, examining everything, touching nothing without need. He knelt by the overturned table and studied the wreckage minutely, his nose an inch from the carpet. He examined the guttered candle, and a splash of candle grease upon the floor by the window, and measured it carefully with a little rule from his pocket. He peered into the ashes of the grate, still feebly grey in the fireplace, and stirred them delicately with his finger-tips, and stood a long while looking down at them. Among the fragments by the bed he found a coffee-cup that had been crushed—not broken merely, but ground almost to powder—and over this he remained so long, and with a face grown so grave, that I ventured a question. He did not appear to hear me.

At last he crossed to the door which communicated with Cynthia’s room—the door which Dorcas had told us was always bolted. It was bolted still. Poirot bent, and scrutinized the bolt through the little magnifying-glass he carried; and suddenly he uttered a small exclamation of satisfaction.

“Ah! *Voilà!*”

From his pocket he took a tiny pair of forceps, and with infinite delicacy drew from between the bolt and its socket some small object, which he held up to the light. Then he produced an envelope, dropped the thing within, and sealed it down.

“See you this, my friend?” He held out the open envelope for a moment before my eyes. Within lay a mere scrap—a few frayed threads of some dark green fabric, no bigger than my thumb-nail.

“What is it?” I asked eagerly. “Where did it come from? What does it mean?”

“It means, mon ami, what it means.” He put the envelope carefully away in his pocket-book.

“But Poirot—hang it all! You might tell me. Is it important?”

“I do not know yet what is important and what is not. When I know, it is possible that I shall tell you. It is also possible”—his eyes twinkled for the first time that morning—“that I shall tell you nothing at all. The good detective, Hastings, he does not scatter his ideas about like a man sowing corn. He keeps them here”—he tapped his egg-shaped head—“where they are safe.”

And with that I had to be content. He straightened himself, dusted the knees of his trousers with care, and stood surveying the mantelpiece, with its prim row of ornaments—the same, I remembered with an odd thrill, at which Lawrence had stared with so ghastly a face in the night. Mechanically, as it seemed, Poirot put out a hand and set one or two of the ornaments more exactly in line, for the passage of many hands had left them a little disturbed.

“It offends me, the crookedness,” he murmured absently. “Everything on the chimney-piece must be straight. So.”

We came out then upon the corridor, Poirot locking the door behind us, and it was there that we met Cynthia. The poor girl looked white and heavy-eyed still, most unlike her usual radiant self, and she would have passed us with a murmured word had not Poirot stepped courteously into her path.

“Mademoiselle, forgive me. One question only, and I do not derange you further. You slept last night, I understand, very heavily—so heavily that Madame Cavendish could scarcely wake you. Tell me: is it your custom to sleep so?”

Cynthia shook her head wonderingly.

“No—never. That’s the queer part of it. I’m the lightest sleeper in the world—Mrs. Inglethorp always said I woke if a mouse ran across the landing. But last night I slept like the dead. Mary shook me and shook me, and it was ages before I knew where I was—and my head ached all the morning, and I can’t stop yawning even now. I can’t think what came over me.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all.”

He bowed with great politeness, and stood aside. Cynthia went on down the stairs, and I saw Poirot look after her, and his eyes had gone green as a cat’s; but when I demanded what he made of it, he only shook his head at me and would say nothing.

For above an hour after that he was busy—in Alfred Inglethorp’s room, in the corridor, on the stairs; he interviewed Dorcas and Annie in the boudoir below, and I was not admitted; and it was hard upon half-past eleven when he touched me on the arm.

“Come, my friend. We return once more to the room of Madame, you and I alone, and then I have finished—for the present.”

He unlocked the door of the death chamber and we went in together, and he locked it again behind us. The sunlight was pressing more strongly than ever against the drawn curtains, and in the dim golden gloom the room was very still. Poirot drew the little envelope from his pocket-book and laid it on the top of the chest of drawers between us, and we both stood looking down at it—at that absurd scrap of green threads which he prized so mysteriously.

“You are impatient with me, Hastings,” he said at last. “You say to yourself: the little Belgian, he picks up rubbish from a bolt and seals it in an envelope like a relic of the saints, and he will explain nothing. But regard, my friend.” He nodded towards the fireplace, where the dead ashes lay grey in the grate. “Last night, in July, in the hottest week of the summer, a fire was lighted in this room. It burned, and it burned what was given to it—and yet *this*”—he touched the envelope with one finger, very gently—“this did not burn. When you can tell me why the one burned and the other did not, mon ami, you will be able to tell me everything—and I mean everything—about the death of Madame Inglethorp.”

I stared from the envelope to the grate, and from the grate back to the envelope. The fragment had come from the bolt of a door, not from the fire; nothing about it was so much as singed; and what a scrap of green stuff could have to do with a handful of burnt ashes was more than I could conceive.

I did not understand him in the least.

The First National Bank of Personville was a gray stone box on Broadway with bronze doors and a floor you could have skated on. I got there a little after noon and sent my card in to somebody with authority. What came out to the rail was an assistant cashier named Albury, a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or so with a fresh face and clear eyes that hadn't been in Personville long enough to go cloudy.

"I was working for Donald Willsson," I told him when we had found a corner behind a marble pillar. "Or I would have been if he'd lived long enough to tell me what the work was. Yesterday afternoon he wrote a check on this bank for five thousand dollars. The stub doesn't say who to. I want to know if the check's been in."

The clear eyes clouded up a little at that.

"You'll understand that the bank can hardly⁠—"

"The bank's depositor was shot four times last night in Hurricane Street," I said. "That takes the account out of the class of private business. You can talk to me now or you can talk to a coroner's jury later, with reporters writing down how hard you had to be squeezed."

He chewed that over, decided he didn't like the taste of the second half of it, and said:

"Wait here, please."

He was gone ten minutes. When he came back he had a scratch pad in his hand and a puzzled line between his eyebrows.

"Nothing," he said. "No check of Mr. Willsson's for five thousand dollars, or for any amount near it, has been presented. Nothing has come through the clearing house. Nobody has asked us to certify such a check. His balance would have covered it three times over, so it wasn't a question of funds. The check simply hasn't shown up."

"Was he in the bank yesterday afternoon? Between, say, half-past two and three?"

"I asked the tellers that. Nobody saw him. I didn't see him, and I generally waited on him myself when he came in. He liked that⁠—he didn't know many people here."

"You knew him pretty well?"

"As well as anybody in the bank, I suppose. He was pleasant to deal with." The boy's face colored up as if being pleasant to deal with were something you could get arrested for in Personville. "It's a rotten thing, his being killed."

"It usually is," I agreed. "Do this for me: if that check comes in⁠—today, next week, whenever⁠—hold it up long enough to get me on the phone. I'm at the Great Western."

He said he would, and I believed him. He was young enough to mean it.

I ate lunch at the hotel and spent a nickel of the Continental's money calling the Herald. Their police-court man had seen the list of what had been taken off the body at headquarters: a watch, keys, a fountain pen, thirty-some dollars, letters, a handkerchief. No check. I thanked him and hung up.

So Donald Willsson had written a five-thousand-dollar check, gone out with it for twenty minutes without going to his bank, and been dead eight hours later without it on him. Nobody had cashed it. Nobody had tried to. It was somewhere in Personville, and wherever it was looked to me like a better address than any the police had.

I was working on a cigar in the lobby, doing my thinking there because my room was hot, when a bellhop came around calling my name in the discreet mumble they use for it. A lady to see me. She was standing near the desk, and she was Donald Willsson's widow.

She wore black. Black didn't take anything away from her white skin and blondness. She was composed the way a wound-up watch spring is composed.

"You're the man who was at my house night before last," she said. It wasn't a question.

I admitted it and steered her to a pair of chairs in the emptiest corner of the lobby, behind a palm that had given up hoping for sunlight.

"You went to my father-in-law this morning," she said when we were sitting. "You told him things about me. His lawyer has been to see me. He talked to me as if⁠—" Her hands were quiet in her lap, but the knuckles showed. "What did you tell him?"

"What I saw. That you went out at ten-twenty, came back at eleven-five, and had blood on your slipper. Your husband was killed at ten-forty. I'm a detective, Mrs. Willsson. Sitting on things isn't my line of work."

"You think I killed him."

"I don't think anything yet. It's cheaper that way. But if you've got an explanation, this is a good place to spend it. The next man who asks you may be wearing a badge, and he'll ask louder."

She looked at the palm for a while. Then she looked at me and told it in a low, even voice, her accent thickening a word here and there.

"The telephone call⁠—the one that came while you were waiting⁠—was from a man. He did not give a name. He said that my husband had taken a check for five thousand dollars to the house of a woman in Hurricane Street, and he gave me the number of the house, and he said that if I wished to know what my husband was I should go there. He laughed and rang off. I went. I am not proud of it, but I went. You saw me go."

"I saw you go. What did you find?"

"I parked the car up the street from the number and sat in it. I was there perhaps a quarter of an hour, feeling⁠—" she hunted for the word and gave it up. "Then my husband came out of the house. I saw him plainly under the light on the porch. He walked down toward me on the other side of the street. Then the shots. They came from across from him, from a dark place between two houses. He fell. I did not think. I ran to him and knelt down. He was dead. There was⁠—that is how it came on my slipper."

"The papers say a man and a woman were bending over him. Who was the man?"

"I don't know. He was there⁠—he came from somewhere, from behind me perhaps, or from the house, I don't know⁠—and he bent over Donald too, and then doors were opening along the street and he went away quickly, and I⁠—I was afraid of how it would look, my being there. I ran back to the car and drove. It was cowardly. But my husband was dead and being brave would not change that, and being found there would have changed a great deal."

"What did the man look like?"

"It was dark. Not tall, I think. I saw only that he was there and then that he was gone."

"Did you touch your husband's pockets? Did the man?"

Her chin came up.

"I did not. As for him⁠—I don't know. It was seconds only."

"Was the check on him when he fell?"

"How would I know that? I never saw any check. I know of it only what the voice on the telephone told me."

"Who was the woman in the house?"

"I don't know her name. I know what the voice called her, and I will not repeat it."

"Max Thaler was at your house this morning," I said. "That's why I put off calling on you. What did he want?"

For the first time her composure slipped a thread. It was only in the eyes, and only for a second.

"He came to tell me that he did not kill my husband," she said. "He said also that I should be careful what I said and to whom. That is a strange kind of condolence, is it not?"

"In Personville it's probably the standard kind. Why come to me with all this?"

"Because my father-in-law is telling everyone I murdered his son," she said, and now the spring wound one turn tighter, "and because you are the only person in this city who is being paid to learn the truth instead of to bury it. I did not kill Donald. Find who did."

"The Agency was hired by your husband, not by you," I said. "But his money's in our till, and I'm not leaving town till it's earned. That's the best you get from me. If your story's straight you've got nothing to worry about from my end. If it isn't, you have."

She stood up, said, "Thank you⁠—I think," pulled her gloves through her fingers once, and walked out with her back very straight. Through the door I could see the Buick coupé at the curb.

I went up to my room, put my feet on the window sill, and let the afternoon go by while I sorted what I had. It didn't sort into much. A check that had gone out of the Herald office and hadn't come down anywhere. A voice on a telephone that knew about the check before Willsson was cold⁠—knew about it, for that matter, while he was still alive. A woman in Hurricane Street. A small man in the dark who bent over a corpse and faded.

At half-past six the telephone rang. A voice came over the wire that was not a voice at all, just a hoarse whispering with words in it.

"This is Thaler."

"Well?" I said.

"You get around," the whisper said. "The old man in the morning, the bank after lunch, the widow for tea. That's a full day."

"I'm paid by the day."

"Then here's a day's worth free. The check never came to me, nor to Yard, nor to Pete. The woman you talked to this afternoon didn't chill him. You're wasting shoe leather in three directions."

"That leaves a fourth," I said. "Want to point at it?"

"Find your check," the whisper said. "Where the check is, that's where your man is. And, mister⁠—when you go looking, look ahead of you, not behind. Behind you is my business."

The line clicked dead before I could ask him anything else. I sat holding the phone and thinking that Bill Quint had called him dynamite, and that dynamite that telephones you tips instead of blowing you up is either friendly dynamite or dynamite that wants you digging in a particular spot. I couldn't tell yet which, and either way the spot was the same one I'd already picked.

I ate dinner in the hotel dining room, and after it walked down Broadway to the Western Union office. Under the green-shaded lights I used up a pad of blanks getting a night wire to the Old Man in San Francisco boiled down to where it wouldn't bankrupt the Agency:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD TEN FORTY NIGHT OF MY ARRIVAL BEFORE I HAD SEEN HIM STOP POLICE HAVE NOTHING AND SHOW NO SIGNS OF WANTING ANYTHING STOP WILLSSON DREW CHECK FIVE THOUSAND AFTERNOON OF DEATH PAYEE UNKNOWN STOP CHECK NEVER PRESENTED NEVER CERTIFIED NOT ON BODY NOT FOUND STOP WIDOW ADMITS PRESENCE AT SHOOTING SAYS ANONYMOUS PHONE CALL SENT HER THERE STOP FATHER BLAMES WIDOW AND REFUSES ALL OTHER INFORMATION STOP LOCAL POWERS THALER YARD PETE THE FINN CHIEF NOONAN VARIOUSLY INTERESTED STOP THALER DISCLAIMS BY PHONE AND ADVISES ME TO FOLLOW CHECK STOP CLIENT DEAD BUT RETAINER BANKED STOP STAYING WITH IT STOP DETAILED REPORT MAILED TOMORROW

The clerk counted the words twice, looking sorrier for the Agency each time, took the money, and I walked back to the Great Western through streets that smelled of smelter smoke even at night.

Up in my room I opened the window as far as it would go, which wasn't far, and stood looking down at Broadway's lights doing their best in the yellow dirt of the air. Somewhere out under those lights was a slip of paper worth five thousand dollars to whoever's name was on it and considerably more than that to me. It hadn't gone to the bank. It hadn't stayed with the dead man. Everybody in Personville seemed to know about it and nobody had it⁠—or somebody had it and was sitting on it, waiting, the way you sit on a card you can't use till the play comes around to you.

I smoked a cigarette down to where it burned my fingers, put out the light, and went to bed with the question still open, which is the only way I ever seem to take questions to bed in this town.

The walk back to the house was accomplished at Madame Ratignolle's pace, which was that of a woman mindful of her condition and of the heat. She leaned upon Robert's arm with the whole confiding weight of her beautiful person, and for a while they said nothing, the sun being high and the sandy path offering little shade until they gained the water-oaks near the houses.

"You are not amusing this morning, Robert," she said at length, fanning herself. "You have not made me laugh once."

"It is too hot to be amusing," he answered. Then, after a moment, with an abruptness which was not usual with him: "Madame Ratignolle, have you noticed how Mrs. Pontellier looks at the water?"

"I have noticed that she looks at it a great deal. It is what one does at the seashore, *mon ami*. There is very little else to look at."

"That is not what I mean. The rest of us look at the water and think of our dinner, or of the fish that are in it, or of nothing at all. She looks at it as if she were listening to something the rest of us cannot hear." He walked on a few paces, kicking at the tufted grass which invaded the path. "She is like a person waking up, little by little, out of a life-long sleep. I sometimes wonder what she will do when she is wholly awake."

Madame Ratignolle laughed at his solemnity, and declared that the sun had touched him; and then her cramp seized her again, and she required all his attention and both his arms for the last hundred yards, so that nothing further was said of Mrs. Pontellier or of anybody's awakening.

It was toward noon that the telegram came, brought up from the wharf by one of Madame Lebrun's little black girls, who carried it gingerly, holding it out before her as if it were hot. Telegrams were rare enough at Grand Isle to gather a small audience upon the gallery of the main house, and Edna opened hers under the mildly expectant gaze of half a dozen ladies. It was from her husband. Business of an urgent character detained him in the city; she was not to expect him Saturday; a letter would follow with particulars.

She read it twice, folded it, and put it in her pocket. The ladies were sympathetic. Madame Lebrun said it was too bad, *cela ne finissait pas*, those money affairs of the men; and old Monsieur Farival's daughter observed that Mr. Pontellier was killing himself with work, one could see it, and all for his family. Edna agreed that it was too bad. What she felt, walking back to her own cottage, was a lightness so faint and so unaccountable that she did not stop to examine it. She was aware only that Saturday, which had stood at the end of the week like a small closed door, now stood open upon nothing at all, and that the week ran on unbroken, like the Gulf itself.

At dinner she was gay, gayer than she had been, and afterward she declined to make one of a card party, saying that she meant to sleep. The whole island slept at that hour. The children slept, stretched upon their cots with their limbs flung out like little bronzed fallen warriors; the quadroon slept, nodding over a palm-leaf fan; even the water, when Edna came down to it through the vacant, sun-white afternoon, seemed to sleep, heaving in long, slow swells that broke without violence upon the sand.

She had not intended to bathe. She had put on her bathing suit under her muslin almost furtively, telling herself nothing, and she left her dress in the bath-house and went down and stood in the water with no clear purpose that she could have named. All summer she had been receiving instruction from both the men and boys, and even from the women and children; all summer a certain ungovernable dread had hung about her in the water, so that she clutched at any hand that was near, and could do nothing unless a hand was near. There was no hand near her now. The beach was empty as far as she could see in either direction, except for the lady in black, motionless upon the gallery of a neighboring bath-house with her velvet prayer-book.

Edna walked out until the water reached her waist, and stood a long time feeling the slow lift and fall of it, the way it took her weight from her and gave it back. Then—she could not afterward have told how, any more than the child who first finds that its legs will carry it across the room can tell how—she lifted her feet from the bottom and struck out, as she had struck out with her arms at the tall grass in the meadow in Kentucky. Three strokes, four; her face wet, her breath gone; and she was standing again, trembling, with the water streaming from her, laughing a low little laugh all to herself. She did it once more, to be sure it was true. Then she came out of the water quickly, almost guiltily, as one leaves off reading a forbidden book at the sound of a step.

She would tell no one. The resolution formed itself without deliberation. It was hers; it was the first thing in a long time that had been wholly hers; and she folded it away as she had folded the telegram, next to her heart rather than in her pocket.

As she passed along the gallery toward her own compartment, the lady in black lifted her eyes from her book.

"You were in the water alone, madame," she said. It was the first time in all the summer that she had spoken to Edna, and her voice was low and rusty, like a bell not often rung. "One should never go into the Gulf alone. It was on a day as calm as this one, off Grande Terre, that my sister's husband was drowned—God rest his soul. The Gulf is very treacherous, madame. It gives no warning."

Edna thanked her, and said that she had only been wading; and the lady in black inclined her head and returned to her devotions, her lips moving, her beads sliding one by one through her fingers.

In the evening, when the heat had lifted and the children were at their games under the water-oaks, Madame Ratignolle came across to Edna's gallery with her diminutive roll of needlework, quite restored, luxuriously refreshed by her afternoon's rest. She was full of small news: the Farival twins had a new duet; the cook at the main house had given warning again; and Mr. Pontellier's telegram—that was too provoking, *pauvre chérie*, though of course the men could not help these things. Then, threading her needle and smiling to herself, she said:

"Do you know what that boy Robert said of you this morning, coming back from the beach? I have been laughing over it half the day."

"Something absurd, I suppose," said Edna.

"He said—wait, let me have it exactly, it was too solemn to spoil—he said that you look at the water as if you were listening to something the rest of us cannot hear; that you are like a person waking, little by little, out of a life-long sleep; and that he wonders what you will do when you are wholly awake. *Voilà!* From Robert! Who cannot ordinarily be serious for two minutes together. I told him the sun had touched him."

Edna laughed with her, and said that Robert had been reading poetry, and that it was very bad for him; and Madame Ratignolle sewed and chattered until the mosquitoes drove her home to her husband and her children and her *tisane*.

The night came on softly. The quadroon put the children to bed, and Edna went in and looked at them where they lay, and touched Raoul's forehead, which was cool. Then she came out and sat alone on the gallery in her rocker, as she had sat on another night not long before, weeping without knowing why. She was not weeping now. There was no moon; the water made its endless whispering down beyond the line of the bath-houses, and a light or two showed far out where the boats rode at anchor.

She was thinking of nothing—so she would have answered had any one asked her; and, retracing, she found that she was thinking of the water lifting her that afternoon when her feet left the bottom, and of the meadow of waving grass, and of the lady in black's rusty voice saying that the Gulf gives no warning; and under and through it all, like an air that will not be dismissed, ran Robert's speech as Adèle had repeated it, solemnly, to have it exactly. A person waking, little by little, out of a life-long sleep. He wondered what she would do when she was wholly awake.

She rocked slowly in the darkness, her arms bare to the night air, and she wondered too.

The taxi climbed the hill and came out on the square by the Panthéon. The Panthéon was very large and dark above the square and the café on the corner was putting up its shutters. Brett lay back in the corner of the cab with her hat off and her eyes shut, and the street lights came in and crossed her face and went out again as we passed them.

“Don’t be miserable,” I said.

“Can’t help it, darling. I’ve been miserable all evening. That’s why I went with the crowd. One can’t be miserable with them. They’re too bloody funny.”

“You didn’t look miserable.”

“One doesn’t.”

We went down the Rue Soufflot with the gardens dark behind the iron fence, and at the bottom the driver slowed and looked back through the glass.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“I don’t care. Have him drive.”

“He can’t drive all night.”

“He’d love it. It’s what they’re for.” Then she sat up. “No. I know. Take me to the Select, Jake. I want to stand at a real bar and drink something with ice in it. I can’t cry riding about in a cab.”

“You’re not crying.”

“I would be in another minute.”

I put my head out and told the driver the Select, Boulevard du Montparnasse, and he swung the cab around and we went along past the gardens, the trees making it darker under them, and out onto the Boulevard.

“Was it bad tonight?” I asked.

“Rotten. Don’t let’s go into it.”

“All right.”

“You’re a lovely one not to go into it.” She found my hand and held it and looked out at the street going by. “It’s no good, you know.”

“No,” I said. “It’s no good.”

“Well, then.”

She let go of my hand and put her hat on, and by the time we came to the Select she was sitting up straight and looking fine.

The Select was bright inside and nearly empty. Two men I did not know were playing dice at the end of the bar with the barman watching them, and a girl was asleep at one of the tables with her head on her arms. Brett got up on a high stool.

“Brandy and soda,” she said. “With a great deal of ice.”

“Two,” I said.

The barman made the drinks and Brett drank half of hers straight off and set the glass down and looked around the room as though she had bought it.

“That’s better,” she said. “This is a good bar. It’s an awfully good bar.”

“It’s a bar.”

“Don’t be superior, darling. I say, I’ve made a friend.”

“You’ve made several tonight.”

“A real one. A count. Count Mippipopolous. Met him last week at a party of Zizi’s.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have. He’s not one of the arty ones. He’s got piles of money. Sweetshops in the States or something of that sort. Whole chains of them.”

“What’s he count of?”

“Haven’t the least idea. Greek, I think. He’s quite one of us, though.”

“How do you know?”

“One knows. He wanted to take me down to Biarritz. Offered me ten thousand to go.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Know too many people in Biarritz.” She laughed and finished the brandy and soda and pushed the glass across the zinc. “Don’t look like that. I told you he was one of us. He didn’t mind a bit. Wanted to make it Cannes, and I said I knew too many people in Cannes, and he said San Sebastian, and I said I knew too many people everywhere, and he ordered another bottle and we talked about his wounds. He’s been in seven wars and four revolutions.”

“He sounds fine.”

“He is fine. You’d like him.”

The barman brought the second drinks. The dice-players paid and went out, and the girl at the table slept on. Then I remembered.

“Good God,” I said. “What time is it?”

“Why, what have you got on?”

“My fifty francs. It’s with the patronne at the Bal, and they close at two.”

Brett began to laugh. “Your fifty francs. Your marriage portion. Come on, Jake, we can’t leave it. It’s the only honest money in Paris.”

I paid for the drinks and we got a taxi in front of the café and went back across the river and up the hill. Brett would not come in.

“I couldn’t stand the young men again,” she said. “Not twice in one night. I’ll sit here.”

Inside, the Bal was half empty. The policeman was gone from the door. The proprietor was still up on the high stool playing the accordion with the string of bells going on his ankle, but only three couples were dancing, and the Braddockses had gone, and the tables were being cleared. Georgette was dancing with the tall dark one, called Lett, her hat off, and the rest of the young men sat together at a long table with a great many saucers in front of them, talking all at once. The patronne saw me from behind the zinc.

“You came back, Monsieur.”

“For my letter.”

She took the envelope from the shelf under the bar and gave it to me. It had gotten a wine ring on it.

“She never asked for you,” the patronne said. “She has not missed you at all.”

“No,” I said. I put the envelope in my pocket. The music stopped and Georgette came off the floor and saw me and came over. She was hot from dancing and her face was shiny.

“So,” she said. “You went off with the lady.”

“Yes.”

“You might have said good night.”

“I left you fifty francs with Madame.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve taken it back.”

She thought that over and then grinned, keeping her mouth closed the way she did.

“That’s regular,” she said. “You’re a queer type, but you’re regular.”

“Here’s twenty for a taxi.”

“I won’t need a taxi. They have a motor-car.” She nodded at the long table where the young men were all talking at once. “They’re taking me to Montmartre after. They’re very nice boys. What are they, anyway?”

“They’re very nice boys.”

“That’s what I said. Well, good night, Jacob. It’s a shame you’re sick.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

The music started and Lett came for her, and I went out. In the taxi Brett was smoking a cigarette in the corner.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes.”

“And your fiancée?”

“She’s being taken to Montmartre in a motor-car.”

Brett laughed. “You’ve been jilted, darling. Everybody’s being taken to Montmartre except us.” She threw the cigarette out of the window. “I’m hungry, Jake. Isn’t that extraordinary? I haven’t been hungry in weeks. Take me to the Halles and give me soup with the workmen.”

I told the driver, and we went down the hill and along the river and crossed, and the streets on the other side were empty and then all at once they were not empty. The carts were coming in to the market, the big two-wheeled carts loaded high with cabbages and carrots, the great horses walking in their sleep, the drivers asleep on top of the loads, and along the pavements men were carrying quarters of beef on their shoulders, wet and shiny under the lights. It smelled of wet greens and horses. We got out and walked between the carts and found a workmen’s place with a zinc bar and marble tables, all lit up, full of men in blouses drinking coffee and marc. We took a table and had onion soup, the cheese thick and crusted brown over the top of the bowls, and a bottle of white wine, and Brett ate like a schoolboy and the workmen at the bar turned around to look at her, one after another, and did not care that she saw it.

“I say, this is good,” Brett said. “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this what people do?”

“This is what they do.”

“We do have fun together, Jake. Don’t we have fun?”

“Grand fun.”

“Say it as though you meant it.”

“We have a lot of fun.”

“There. I knew we did. Nobody has the fun we have.”

“Nobody.”

It was not any fun. I wanted her, and there was nothing to be done about it. Brett looked at me over her bowl and then put her spoon down.

“Don’t look like that, darling.”

“Like what?”

“Like that. Please don’t. I can’t stand it when you look like that. Pour the wine.”

I poured the wine. We drank it and did not talk, and around us the men in blouses talked very loud about the price of cabbages, and through the doorway you could see the carts still coming in, and after a while the doorway went grey, and then you could see the roofs of the market sheds against the sky, and the electric lights in the street turned pale and silly-looking the way they do when it starts to be morning.

“It’s to-morrow,” Brett said. “Oh, God, it’s to-morrow already. Get me a taxi, Jake. I must sleep for a week.”

“Will you see the count to-day?”

“Perhaps. He rings up. Don’t be like that. Come round at five and be nice.”

“At five, then.”

I paid, and we went out and walked between the carts, and a taxi was standing empty by the corner of the sheds with the driver drinking coffee at the counter of a stall. He came out wiping his mouth and Brett got in and gave him the name of her hotel, and then she leaned out and took my hand and pressed it hard, the way she had done at the bar, and did not say anything at all, and I did not say anything, and then she let go.

“Five o’clock,” she said. “Don’t be tight.”

“No.”

The taxi went off down between the wagons, one wheel up on the curb to pass a load of cauliflowers, and turned at the end of the sheds and was gone.

I walked down through the market to the river. It was full daylight coming now, grey first and then with color in it, and I came out on the quai and the river was smooth and grey-green, and the mist was going off the water. Down river the towers of Notre-Dame stood up against the sky with no sun on them yet. The bookstalls along the parapet were shuttered and locked, and a watering-cart came along the quai spraying the pavement, the water very bright on the grey stone. On the low bank below the parapet a man was setting out fishing-poles, getting them arranged all in a row, and taking a great deal of care over it. A tug came down river with her funnel dropped back to go under the bridges, towing a string of barges, and the wash from the barges came in against the stone bank below in a series of slaps, and after the tug had gone under the bridge the river smoothed out again as though nothing had gone by.

I crossed at the Pont Neuf and walked up the Left Bank side, along the water. Some men were going down the steps to the barges with loaves of bread under their arms, and smoke was starting up from the barge chimneys. The sun came onto the upper windows of the houses across the river, and then onto the towers, and the town was commencing all around, very fresh and clean-smelling from the watering-carts, everybody with something to do and doing it.

Walking along the river in the early morning I was all right. In the morning it is all simple enough. It is only at night that it is another thing altogether.