The Chapters

I went to the First National Bank.

The assistant cashier was a narrow man with gray cuffs and a gold tooth named Albert Galt. He didn’t like detectives, San Francisco ones, or talking about customers’ checks. He liked the Herald’s dead publisher even less. He looked as if he had been sleeping in the bank, waiting for somebody to come in and ask him questions he could refuse to answer.

I told him enough to make him take me into a little glass stall, where a fat adding machine stood on a table beside a vase of flowers that had given up.

“Mr. Willsson drew a check yesterday,” I said. “Five thousand dollars. I want to know what happened to it.”

He made his lips small.

“If Mr. Willsson drew a check, and if it was drawn on this bank, the bank’s records will show it when it is presented in due course.”

“That’s what I thought. Has it been presented?”

He looked at me through the glass wall at the tellers beyond, and back at me.

“No.”

“Certified?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

He got colder.

“I am sure that no check for five thousand dollars drawn yesterday by Mr. Donald Willsson has been presented or certified at this bank.”

“Anybody ask about certifying one?”

“No.”

“Anybody phone?”

“No.”

“Could it have gone through another bank and not reached you yet?”

“It could not have been paid without reaching us. It has not reached us.”

“Then he either still had it when he was killed, or somebody has it now.”

“That seems to follow.”

“Was there anything unusual about his account?”

“There is nothing about a customer’s account that I am at liberty to discuss.”

“You can skip liberty. Was there five thousand in it?”

His gold tooth showed and went away.

“There was considerably more than five thousand dollars to Mr. Willsson’s credit.”

I asked him who in Personville would be apt to take a five-thousand-dollar check and hold it instead of cashing it. He didn’t know. I asked him if a check with the payee’s name left blank would make him nervous. He said it would make him refuse certification until the omission was corrected. I asked him if a man in a hurry might draw a check, tear it out, and leave the stub as I had found it. He said a man in a hurry might do almost anything. He didn’t say it pleasantly.

I left him with his wilted flowers and went out into the street.

Personville was doing its afternoon work. Smoke lay over it like a worn blanket. Men with dinner pails and women with bundles moved up and down the sidewalks, not hurrying, not loitering, but going somewhere because there wasn’t anything else to do. A policeman on the corner looked at me with official disinterest. I looked back until he remembered something across the street.

The check was not in the bank. It had been born, if Miss Lewis and the stub knew their business, a little before three yesterday afternoon. It had left the Herald office with Donald Willsson. It had not got as far as being money. That left it paper, and paper was easy to hide, easy to burn, easy to carry around in a pocket, easy to make somebody kill for if the paper meant enough.

At the Great Western I asked for my key.

The clerk said: “A lady’s waiting for you.”

He didn’t say it as if he had found a lady in the hotel before. He leaned on his elbows and watched my face. I didn’t give him anything to watch.

“Where?”

“In your room. She said you expected her.”

“I always do,” I said, and took the key.

I went up slow enough to let anybody who wanted to get away get away. Nobody did. I opened the door.

Mrs. Donald Willsson was sitting by the window with her hands folded in her lap. The blinds were half down. The room smelled faintly of her perfume and strongly of hotel. She wore black now, something soft and simple that made her look thinner and younger. Her face had color enough for health and not enough for happiness. Her eyes were dry.

She said: “I hope you will forgive me.”

I shut the door.

“For coming in, or for saying I expected you?”

“For both, perhaps.”

“Sit still. You look better there than I do.”

She did not smile. I put my hat on the bureau, sat on the bed, and looked at her shoes. They were black. No green slipper showed.

“You are very direct,” she said.

“I get paid for it when I get paid. What do you want?”

“To know why you did not come this morning.”

“I started. You had company.”

Her eyelids moved a little.

“Company?”

“Max Thaler.”

She turned her face to the window. There was enough light on the side of her throat to show a pulse working.

“He came to see me,” she said.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“How else should it be put?”

“That depends on what he wanted.”

She faced me again.

“He wished to offer his condolences.”

“Whisper is a polite boy.”

She looked puzzled for half a second, then understood.

“That is what they call him?”

“That is one thing.”

“He was a friend of my husband.”

“He has friends in odd places.”

“My husband knew many people. He believed it was necessary to understand the city.”

“That’s a nice word for it.”

Her hands tightened together in her lap. She had small strong hands. There was no ring on one finger where a ring had been. I didn’t ask where it was. There were enough things missing already.

She said: “You think I killed Donald.”

“I think you went out at ten-twenty, came back at eleven-five, and had blood on your slipper. I think your husband was shot at ten-forty. Thinking isn’t charging.”

“It was not his blood.”

“Whose was it?”

“A dog’s.”

I looked at her until her mouth hardened.

“A dog in Hurricane Street?”

“No. On Mountain Boulevard.”

“Big dog or little dog?”

“I don’t know. I did not stop to measure it.”

“Dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hit by your car?”

“I think so. I was frightened. I had had a telephone call.”

“From whom?”

“I do not know.”

“Man or woman?”

“A man.”

“What did he say?”

She drew one hand out of the other and rubbed her left wrist as if a bracelet were too tight on it, though there was no bracelet.

“He said Donald was hurt. He said I was to come at once. He gave me an address.”

“In Hurricane Street?”

She nodded.

“Eleven-hundred block?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that last night?”

“I was afraid.”

“You’re still afraid. It hasn’t made you talk any straighter.”

Her chin came up.

“I went there. I found Donald on the sidewalk. I bent over him. There was a man there. He had been there before me. I do not know who he was. I could not see his face. He said Donald was dead. Then there were windows opening, voices. The man said: ‘Go, if you do not want to be found here.’ I went.”

“And the man?”

“I suppose he went also.”

“You suppose a lot.”

She said nothing.

“Did you touch your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Get blood on your hands?”

“Yes.”

“On your slipper?”

“No. That was from the dog.”

“It’s a useful dog.”

Her eyes got angry then. They were better angry than scared.

“You are brutal.”

“Not yet. What became of the blood on your hands?”

“I washed them when I returned home.”

“Before you told me he wouldn’t come?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you tell me that instead of telling me he was dead?”

“I could not. I did not know who you were. I did not know what you had to do with him.”

“You had time to ask me before you went out.”

She looked away again.

“Who telephoned him at the Herald yesterday afternoon?” I asked.

“I do not know.”

“You telephoned him?”

“No.”

“At ten?”

“No.”

“He had an appointment at ten with a woman. Was it you?”

“No.”

“You knew he had one?”

“No.”

“You knew he had an appointment with me?”

“No.”

“Did Max Thaler know?”

She leaned forward.

“Why do you bring him always into it?”

“Because he keeps walking in.”

“He did not kill Donald.”

“That a fact?”

“I know it.”

“How?”

She leaned back. The little flare went out.

“I know him.”

“You knew Donald too.”

She took that without blinking.

“Donald had enemies. He was foolish. He thought printed words were bullets. He thought if he told people what they were, they would stop being it. He would not believe me when I said that men who live by stealing cities do not give them back because a newspaper asks prettily.”

“That sounds like a speech you had polished.”

“It is true.”

“Did Donald draw a five-thousand-dollar check yesterday?”

Her eyes moved, not much.

“I do not know.”

“Did he give you one?”

“No.”

“Did he give Whisper one?”

“No.”

“Did he owe Whisper money?”

“No.”

“You’re doing fine. You don’t know anything and can say no to the rest.”

She got up. The black dress fell straight around her. She wasn’t tall, but she knew how to stand.

“I came here because I thought you might be honest,” she said. “I see that you are only suspicious.”

“That’s as honest as I get.”

She went to the door, stopped with her hand on the knob, and said without turning:

“If you are wise, you will leave Personville.”

“Everybody keeps telling me that. It makes the place feel like home.”

She opened the door. A boy in buttons had his hand up to knock. He gaped at her and then at me. She went past him down the corridor.

The boy put an envelope in my hand.

“Man downstairs said to give you this.”

“What man?”

“Just a man.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was kind of middling.”

“That’s a large class. Brown clothes?”

The boy shook his head.

“Gray.”

“Fat?”

“No.”

“Thin?”

“No.”

“You ought to be in the identification bureau. Who paid you?”

He showed me a quarter.

“Keep it,” I said.

He kept it and went away.

The envelope was cheap and clean. My name was on it in block letters made with a soft pencil. Inside was a half sheet of hotel stationery. It said:

Keep away from Mrs. Willsson. You will not like the next warning. M. T.

There was no signature except the initials. They were enough.

I read it twice, then held it by one corner and looked at the paper as if it could blush. It didn’t. I put it in my pocket. Whisper had not had to come himself. Personville had enough legs to run his errands.

Downstairs I asked the clerk who had brought the note. He had not seen any note. A man had come in. Men came in and went out. This one might have been gray and might not. He might have had a hat. He had not registered. He had not asked for a room. The clerk was sorry, and hoped nothing was wrong. I told him everything was wrong, but not with him yet.

I went out again.

There were places I could have gone. I could have gone back to Hurricane Street and measured darkness. I could have gone to Mountain Boulevard and asked the widow how a dead dog bled on a green slipper and left no mark in her story. I could have found Bill Quint and bought more whiskey and union politics. I could have sat in the hotel window and waited for somebody to make the next move.

Instead I went to the telegraph office.

A yellow-haired operator with no name useful to me pushed a blank across the counter. I wrote on it, counting words because the Old Man didn’t like buying adjectives.

The wire said:

OLD MAN CONTINENTAL SAN FRANCISCO STOP DONALD WILLSSON CLIENT MURDERED LAST NIGHT HURRICANE STREET SHOT FOUR TIMES THIRTY TWO STOP HAD APPOINTMENT WITH ME TEN HIS HOUSE DID NOT KEEP STOP WIFE LEFT HOUSE TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE WITH BLOOD ON SLIPPER CLAIMS SUMMONED BY UNKNOWN MAN FOUND BODY AND FLED STOP MAX THALER VISITED WIDOW TODAY SENT ME WRITTEN WARNING KEEP AWAY FROM HER STOP WILLSSON DREW FIVE THOUSAND CHECK YESTERDAY PAYEE NOT ON STUB CHECK NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED FIRST NATIONAL BANK STOP POLITICAL ANGLE STRONG FATHER HOSTILE AND USELESS STOP STAYING TO LOOK AROUND UNLESS RECALLED STOP

I signed it with the agency name and my room number.

The operator read it because operators do. His face said he would have liked to read it aloud to the first six men who came in. I watched him until he began sending. Then I paid and went back to the hotel.

Night had come down hard by then. Personville at night was no improvement on Personville by day. The lights made yellow holes in the smoke. Cars crawled through them and went out again. Somewhere a whistle blew long and lonesome from the works. Men stood in front of poolrooms and said nothing with their mouths.

In my room I turned on the light, locked the door, and pulled the shade down. The bed had been made by somebody who hated beds. I took Whisper’s note out and put it on the bureau beside a glass with a crack in it. I took off my coat, hung it on the back of a chair, and sat by the window where the widow had sat.

She had lied some. Maybe all. Whisper had warned me away from her. Maybe because she needed warning away from me. Maybe because he did. Elihu Willsson wanted her in jail because hatred is easier to handle than doubt. Miss Lewis knew more about office habits than murder. Albert Galt knew the bank had not seen the check.

That was the cleanest fact I had.

Donald Willsson had written five thousand dollars on paper and walked out with it. He had talked to a woman who wanted him at ten. He had meant to see me at ten and had not. He had died at ten-forty with two strangers bending over him, unless one of them was no stranger. The check had not become money, and it had not come back to the bank.

I sat there alone, with the wire gone west to the Old Man, and wondered where the check had gone.

I naturally asked Mr. Franklin what brought him to us four hours before his time.

He took a letter out of his pocket, and put it into my hands. “There is my reason,” says he. “Read that, Betteredge; and then lock up for me, till to-morrow morning, the little parcel which I have brought in my travelling-bag.”

I read as follows:

“Sir,—A person, whose name it is needless to mention, has discovered that you leave London this morning, carrying with you an object which certain other persons are deeply interested in following. If you value your own peace, and the peace of the house to which you are going, travel earlier than you have intended, and trust nobody on the road. You are watched. Burn this when read.”

There was no signature. There was no date, except “Wednesday night.” I looked at Mr. Franklin. He looked at me.

“Did you burn it, sir?” I asked.

“You see I didn’t,” says he. “A man of my foreign education is not to be ordered about by an anonymous letter. I changed my hour, nevertheless; and here I am.”

“Meaning no offence, Mr. Franklin,” I said, “I should call that being ordered about, with a flourish of your own put to it afterwards.”

He burst out laughing, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Dear old Betteredge! you have hit the blot in me already. Come! where is the house? and where is my aunt?”

I made bold to say that my lady was not expected home for another half-hour at least; and that, in the meantime, he had better come up by the sands with me, instead of going round by the drive. He gave me his arm, as if I had been a lady, and we took the path through the fir plantation.

On the way I told him of the three persons who had been to the house that afternoon, and of what Penelope had heard from the boy. Mr. Franklin’s face, which could be as light as a feather one minute, became as serious as a judge’s the next. “They are before me,” he said. “I made sure I had given them the slip.”

I asked who “they” might be.

“Never mind now,” says he. “The less said, the better, till I have spoken to Lady Verinder.”

That was foreign again. An Englishman, if he has got anything upon his mind, eases himself of it, commonly, by putting it on the mind of his neighbour. A foreign-bred man buttons it up, and walks quicker. Mr. Franklin walked quicker accordingly, and I, being over seventy, and no walker at that pace, let him go on in front, and followed with my stick.

We found his travelling-bag waiting for him in the hall. The groom, it appeared, had brought it up from the station in a cart, while Mr. Franklin, with his restless ways, had struck across the country on foot. Out of that bag he took a small packet, wrapped in paper, sealed in several places with red wax, and tied round with white tape. There was writing on the outside; but he kept his hand over it.

“Betteredge,” he says, “you have a plate-room?”

“I have, sir.”

“And you keep the key?”

“I do, sir.”

“Lock this up there, and keep it locked till I ask you for it to-morrow morning.”

“Is it to go with the silver, Mr. Franklin?”

“With whatever is safest,” says he. “Only be sure of two things: first, that nobody sees where you put it; secondly, that you don’t ask me what it is.”

This last condition suited me exactly. When a gentleman puts a secret into a sealed paper parcel, and then tells you not to ask questions, there is but one answer for a respectable servant. “Very good, sir.”

I took him straight to the plate-room. He waited outside. I went in alone, locked the packet in the inner iron cupboard, turned both keys on it, and put the keys in my own pocket. There was no knowing, mind, what I had locked up. I mention this particularly, because many persons, after the event, were pleased to say, “You must have guessed.” I guessed nothing. Guessing is a poor trade, and badly paid. I locked up a sealed packet for Mr. Franklin Blake; and if the packet had contained a muffin, I should have been just as wise about it as I was then.

We had hardly got back into the hall before Penelope came to me, with her face full of news.

“Father,” says she, “Rosanna has not come in to dinner.”

“I know that,” says I. “She left me on the sands.”

“She has not come back to the house,” says Penelope; “Nancy saw her afterwards taking the lower path to Cobb’s Hole.”

This vexed me. Cobb’s Hole was no place for a housemaid at dinner-time, with my lady expected home and a visitor in the house. Still, there was the poor girl’s only friend living there; and there was her unquiet mind, as she had called it, driving her one way when common sense drove her another. I told Penelope to keep the matter quiet among the servants, and to send Rosanna to me the moment she returned.

Mr. Franklin heard this, and asked who Rosanna was. I told him shortly. He listened, and said, “The odd girl on the sands?” Then he looked away towards the window, as if the matter had passed out of his head. Young gentlemen have a great convenience in this respect. They can forget a poor woman at a moment’s notice, especially when the poor woman has remembered them too much.

My lady’s carriage came round the turn in the drive while we were still speaking. Mr. Franklin stepped out to receive her. I followed, at a proper distance, being anxious to see how my lady took his unexpected arrival.

She was surprised, and pleased too; but I observed that she looked at him sharply, after the first greeting was over. My lady had a way of finding out that something was wrong before other people had made up their minds that anything was wrong at all.

“You are early, Franklin,” she said.

“I had my reasons, aunt.”

“Family reasons?” says my lady.

Mr. Franklin bowed.

“In that case,” says she, very quietly, “we will understand one another at once. There is a subject connected with my brother, Colonel Herncastle, which I will not have discussed under my roof. No name belonging to him, no act of his, no legacy of his, is to be made a topic here, if I can prevent it. You know my feeling. Respect it.”

Mr. Franklin turned serious in an instant. “I do know it,” he answered; “and I will respect it.”

“Entirely?” says my lady.

“Entirely,” says Mr. Franklin.

There was an end of that, as far as words went. But I noticed that my lady gave him her hand again, after he had made the promise; and I noticed also that Mr. Franklin, for all his foreign polish, looked a little relieved when the subject was closed. Being only the house-steward, it was not my place to notice anything. I noticed it, nevertheless.

The rest of the day went smoothly enough on the surface. Mr. Franklin was shown to his room. My lady sent for me, and gave her orders about dinner and the bedrooms. Miss Rachel, I understood, was in her own part of the house, and I had no occasion to see her. The servants were all in a flutter, as servants will be when a young gentleman arrives with fine clothes, pleasant manners, and a travelling-bag which has already made more stir in the establishment than a travelling-bag has any right to make.

Towards evening I went my rounds. The plate-room was fast. The cupboard inside it was fast. The keys were in my pocket. The anonymous letter, which Mr. Franklin had left in my charge for the time being, was put away separately in my desk. I did not like the look of that letter. It had the nasty anonymous smell about it, though there was no smell to the paper. A man who writes without signing his name is, in my opinion, a man who knocks at your door in the dark and runs away.

At supper-time, Rosanna had not returned. Nancy made much of this, in the wrong direction; Penelope made little of it, in the right one. “She is at Cobb’s Hole, father,” says my daughter. “Let her be till she comes back.” I growled, because growling is expected of a man in authority; but I took Penelope’s view in my own mind.

Late that evening, when the house was quiet, I went out again into the back court, and settled myself in my beehive chair. The May night was soft; the sea was to be heard, now and then, in the distance; and the firs made their old dismal whispering together whenever the wind touched them. I had Robinson Crusoe on my knee, opened, as well as I remember, at that comfortable part where he begins to make himself at home on the island. There is nothing like Robinson Crusoe when your mind wants steadying. You may take my word for it, reader, that a good book is a better lock to a man’s thoughts than any key ever forged for a plate-room.

Still, for all that, I found myself listening between the leaves. The sealed packet was locked away. Mr. Franklin was under our roof. My lady had forbidden Colonel Herncastle’s name and belongings to be stirred. And Rosanna Spearman had not come back to the house.

We were yet upon the road, within sight of our little gate, when the thing came.

It was no larger, to the eye, than any other falling star; only it passed slowly, and with a greenish splendour altogether unlike the momentary white scratches to which I had been accustomed. It seemed to descend out of the very quarter of the sky where Mars burned redly, and to travel in a long, oblique curve towards the low country beyond Ottershaw. For an instant the roofs and chimney-pots before us were edged with a faint and ghastly light; then the meteor vanished behind a clump of trees, and after a perceptible interval there came a dull concussion, more felt in the chest than heard by the ear, and a quiver of the ground beneath our feet.

My wife caught at my arm.

“What was that?” she said.

“A meteor,” said I, though even then there was a chill of uncertainty in my answer.

The singing excursionists had ceased their noise. Far away a dog barked furiously, and then another. A window was thrust up in one of the cottages, and a man’s voice cried something indistinct. The night resumed its tranquillity, but it was no longer the same tranquillity. I stood for some minutes staring over the black mass of the trees, expecting I know not what recurrence of light or sound. Nothing followed. Mars shone, small and red and steady, above the houses.

My wife was for going in at once, and I, after one more look into the darkness towards the Chertsey meadows, followed her. We spoke of it as we prepared for bed, and I remember making quite a little lecture of the matter, estimating its probable distance and size with a confidence that seems to me now almost comic. I said it had most likely fallen in some field, and that in the morning the local people would find a stone still warm from its passage through the air. My wife asked if there were any danger in such things, and I reassured her. Yet for long after the lamp was out I lay awake, listening to the night sounds, and once or twice I fancied I heard a remote hissing, like steam escaping very far away.

I was out of bed soon after six. The morning was fresh and colourless, with a thin white mist lying in the hollows and a promise of heat in the clear upper sky. From my window I could see a faint vapour, a mere upright smear against the grey, rising from the direction in which the meteor had vanished. I dressed hurriedly and went down. My wife, hearing me move about, came to the stairhead with her hair about her shoulders and asked where I was going.

“To see what has fallen,” I said.

“At this hour?”

“It cannot be far. I shall be back before breakfast.”

But she would not be left behind. There was in her, beneath her gentle ways, a very sufficient share of curiosity; and presently we were walking together along the lane, she wrapped in a shawl and I carrying my stick, towards the low ground between Ottershaw and Chertsey. The village was already astir with rumour. A gardener told us that something had fallen into old Hobbs’s flooded clay-pit near the Bourne, and that the water there was “boiling like a kettle.” A boy, running barefoot and buttoning his jacket as he ran, confirmed this with additions plainly of his own invention.

We came presently to the place, a disused excavation half-hidden by alders and rank grass, where water had collected after the spring rains until it made a black, still pool perhaps forty yards across. On the farther side the bank had been smashed and scorched, and the wet clay flung up in a crescent. In the water, half-submerged and partly buried in the ooze, lay the Thing.

It was cylindrical, though so encumbered with mud and steaming water that at first I could make little of its precise shape. Its visible portion was perhaps thirty yards in length, rounded at the nearer end, and of a dull, brownish-grey colour, not unlike oxidised iron. From it rose a continual vapour with a faint, peculiar smell, metallic and bitter. The water lapped against it with little clicking sounds, and now and then a bubble broke beside it and sent up a puff of steam. The grass around the pit was beaten down where the first comers had stood, but as yet there were not above twenty people there.

Ogilvy was among them, kneeling at the edge of the broken bank with his sleeves turned back, his boots deep in mud, and an expression of extraordinary animation upon his face. He had a handkerchief tied about one hand, and with the other he was prodding the clay with the end of a surveyor’s rod. When he saw me he scrambled up and came towards us.

“You saw it fall?” he cried.

“Plainly,” said I. “Last night, just after we parted.”

“It is the most interesting aerolite that has been seen in England in a century,” he said. “A prodigious mass! Prodigious! I have sent a boy to the station for a telegram form. We must have men down from London.”

“You think it a meteorite?”

“What else should it be?” he answered, almost sharply. “It has fallen from space, it is heated by its flight, and it lies here. Observe the torn bank, the angle of descent, the fused surface. What else should it be?”

I do not know what prompted my hesitation. Perhaps it was the regularity of the outline, which seemed too deliberate for any natural stone; perhaps the memory of those flashes upon Mars, and of Ogilvy’s own excitement over them, had awakened some obscure apprehension in me. “It is very cylindrical,” I said.

Ogilvy laughed, but uneasily. “Chance shapes, my dear fellow. You know well enough that fracture and fusion will do strange things. The water magnifies it, too. We see only a portion.”

“It came,” said I, “from the direction of Mars.”

“So does half the sky to a man who has Mars in his thoughts,” he retorted. “Do not let fancy outrun observation. The papers will have madness enough over this before evening without our furnishing them with interplanetary travellers.”

My wife had been standing a little behind us, looking intently at the steaming mass. “But could a stone be so large?” she asked.

“Madam,” said Ogilvy, with that courteous dogmatism which scientific men sometimes assume before women, “the heavens have thrown us many stones, though few so notable as this. Size is only a question of fortune. It may be chiefly metallic. Indeed I expect it is.”

He turned from us to shout at two labourers who were venturing too near the margin. “Keep back there! The water is scalding. Have you no sense?”

One of the labourers grinned and withdrew, but the other, a broad, red-faced man whom I knew slightly as Henderson’s carter, declared that he had handled hot iron many a time and knew what was what. The surface of the cylinder, where the steam thinned upon its upper side, looked dull and even cold. He picked his way along a ridge of fallen clay, balanced himself with comical care, and, before any of us could prevent him, reached out and laid his palm upon the exposed metal.

His yell brought every head about. He staggered back, slipped knee-deep into the muddy water, and came floundering to the bank clutching his hand against his breast. The smell of singed flesh mingled horribly with the vapour. My wife turned white, and I helped to pull him up while Ogilvy, forgetting his meteorite for the moment, tore away the man’s neckcloth and wrapped the injured hand in wet linen from his own pocket. The fellow cursed and groaned, and his palm, when for an instant I saw it, was blistered and grey in patches as though it had been pressed upon a stove.

“That will teach you,” said Ogilvy, though not unkindly. “Get him to Harris the surgeon. At once. Not the pump-water first; do as I say.”

Two men led the carter away, his face damp with sweat and his bravado quite gone. This incident, trivial in itself compared with the enormities that were to follow, made a strong impression upon the little company. A sort of ring formed at a respectful distance from the edge. Even the boys ceased throwing clods into the pit.

The sun had now risen above the trees, and its light fell across the vapour in pale shafts. More people were arriving every minute: cottagers, a butcher’s boy with his basket still on his arm, two cyclists from Chertsey, and an elderly gentleman in a straw hat who announced that he had once seen a meteor in India and began at once to instruct everybody within hearing. A rumour spread that the thing was full of diamonds; another, that it was a shell fired by the Germans. Ogilvy moved among these notions in a fever of contradiction.

“It is a meteorite,” he said again and again. “An aerolite of unusual magnitude. Nothing more mysterious is needed.”

“But those eruptions on Mars,” I said to him, when we stood apart for a moment.

He looked at me with impatience. “My dear man, Mars is forty million miles away.”

“Yet you yourself spoke of gases rushing towards us.”

“I spoke of spectroscopic appearances, not of cannon practice across the solar system.”

“But suppose,” I persisted, “suppose their mathematics—”

He stamped his muddy boot. “Suppose a civilisation in Sirius, and suppose a railway to the moon! You are letting analogy intoxicate you. Because a gun throws a shell a mile, you imagine a planet throwing one millions of miles. The thing is not reasonable.”

“No,” said I slowly, looking at the vast wet curve in the pit, “it is not reasonable.”

And yet I could not rid myself of the thought. There lay the object, with steam rising from it in the quiet English morning, while larks sang above the meadows and the roofs of Ottershaw showed through the thinning mist. It had come from the sky; that much was certain. It had come at the appointed season, after the ten nights of flame. Its shape, so much as the water revealed, was not the shape of a stone. I remember a curious double consciousness: on the one hand I accepted Ogilvy’s assurances, and even repeated them to my wife; on the other, some deeper faculty in me watched and waited in dread.

At about eight o’clock Ogilvy borrowed my pencil and wrote a message upon a scrap of paper, asking that it be telegraphed to the Astronomer Royal and to several scientific acquaintances in London. He gave this to a sharp-faced lad with sixpence and instructions to run. Then he and I made a cautious circuit of the pit. At the rear the ground was ploughed up for many yards, the clay baked in places to a brick-red hardness and in others splashed over the grass in wet lumps. The object had struck the earth obliquely, torn through the bank, and come to rest in the water. Had the pit been dry, I believe the heat of the mass would have set fire to every bush thereabouts; as it was, the water hissed and steamed perpetually, and a whitish deposit gathered on the reeds nearest to it.

My wife followed us only a little way, then remained with Mrs. Hillyer, who had come from the cottage by the lane. They spoke in low voices, glancing now and then at the pit and at me. Presently my wife called that breakfast would be cold, and I realised with astonishment that ordinary appetite still existed in the world. I promised to return in half an hour, but did not go. One discovery followed another: a patch of surface smoother than the rest; a line that might be a crack and might be only adhering clay; a faint vibration underfoot which Ogilvy declared to be the boiling of water beneath the metal. Each little observation held us.

By ten the crowd had trebled. A public-house keeper from Chertsey brought sandwiches and ginger beer in a handcart, and did a brisk trade. Several gentlemen with field-glasses appeared. A policeman came and, after looking helplessly at the object and receiving several contradictory accounts of the accident to the carter, stationed himself at the narrowest part of the path and told people to keep back. They obeyed him for some minutes and then flowed round him like water round a stone. Children climbed the alders. A small dog ran barking to the edge, yelped at the heat, and retreated with its tail between its legs, to the great amusement of the boys.

Ogilvy grew more and more possessive and irritable. “They will destroy every trace,” he said to me. “Look at that fellow walking across the scored clay! This is invaluable evidence. Invaluable!”

“You had better have the place roped off.”

“With what? A philosopher’s shoelaces?” He thrust both hands into his hair. “And where are the men from London? They should have special trains for such occasions.”

Despite his vexation he returned always to his contention. Once, when the elderly gentleman in the straw hat suggested that the cylinder might be artificial, Ogilvy burst out so vehemently that several people laughed. “Artificial! Why, sir, you might as well call the Giant’s Causeway artificial because it has regularity. Nature is full of regular forms. Crystals, basalt columns, shells—”

“Shells!” cried someone in the crowd. “There, you hear? It is a shell!”

This raised a great shouting and laughter, and for a time the whole assembly seemed to take the matter as a holiday spectacle. I cannot convey now the grotesque incongruity of that mood: the ginger-beer bottles, the Sunday hats, the muddy boots, the jokes, the bargaining for a better view, all about that half-drowned cylinder from the abyss. Had it then opened, had any sound but the hissing steam come from it, I think the crowd would still have stared first in mere amusement.

But it did not open. It lay inert, monstrous, and silent, save for the water boiling about its sides.

Towards noon the heat grew oppressive, and the vapour rose straighter in the still air. My wife, who had endured the scene longer than I expected, came to me and laid her hand upon my arm. Her face had lost the first animation of curiosity. The burn to the carter had shaken her, and the increasing press of people made her uneasy.

“Come home,” she said. “There is nothing more to see.”

“Presently,” I answered. “Ogilvy may need help keeping them back.”

“He has half the parish to help him if he will ask sensibly. You have had no breakfast.”

I smiled at that, and would have yielded had not Ogilvy at that moment called me to look at a fresh subsidence of the bank near the object. I went, and when I returned she was still waiting, but with the patient look I knew so well. I saw then that my staying troubled her more than she wished to say.

“It is only a meteorite,” I told her, echoing Ogilvy’s words with an assurance I did not feel. “There is no danger if one keeps at a distance. Go back, and I will follow before long.”

“You promise?”

“Before one,” I said.

She looked once more at the steaming pit, at the crowd thickening along the bank and in the lane beyond, and then she consented. I walked with her as far as the turning by the alders, where the path ran back towards Ottershaw. There she left me, turning once to wave her hand before the hedge hid her from view. I stood a moment watching the place where she had vanished, with a sudden unreasonable sense of separation; then a shout from the pit recalled me, and I went back alone into the growing crowd.

Lady Russell and Mr Shepherd were accordingly desired to attend at Kellynch the next morning; and Anne, who had been accidentally present when the summons was resolved on, was not excluded when they came. Sir Walter liked her attendance no better than usual, but it gave him no trouble to forget that she was there; and Elizabeth, in the importance of arranging chairs, screens, and the proper degree of fire for a July morning, had not leisure to object to any body who could be useful and silent.

Lady Russell’s plan was of that temperate kind which might be called severe by those who had never practised self-denial, and easy by those who had. It spared Sir Walter all that could be supposed essential to the master of Kellynch Hall; it allowed him his place, his consequence, his principal servants, his carriage on occasions, his table for real hospitality, and every distinction which a reasonable friend could consider as attached to his rank. But it required method. It required accounts to be looked into monthly; the stables to be reduced; the London journey to be given up for one spring; the dinners to be fewer, and the charities, though not ostentatiously enlarged, not to be made the first sacrifice. Lady Russell spoke with gentleness, but with decision; and though she was aware that every article was a pang, she had hopes from having made them as few as conscience permitted.

Sir Walter heard her to the end, because Lady Russell was Lady Russell; but his answer was ready before she had half concluded.

“My dear madam, I am perfectly sensible of your kindness; nobody can doubt your good intentions. But you must allow me to say, that you have formed a very inaccurate notion of what is due to a man in my situation. Kellynch Hall is not a cottage. Sir Walter Elliot cannot live as a private gentleman of no family. My table has never been more than proper; my servants have never been more than necessary; and as for the stables, I believe there are few baronets in England who do so little. To give up London would be to publish distress. I should be pointed at. No, Lady Russell; I honour your motives, but the thing is impossible.”

Mr Shepherd, who had waited with all the humility of a man prepared to be wiser by being second, now unfolded his own scheme. It was longer, more minute, and, in his opinion, more practicable, because it entered into figures. He had brought papers; he had estimates; he had comparisons between the present expenditure and that of several very respectable families, not indeed baronets, but people of fortune. He proposed certain dismissals below stairs, certain abatements in the garden, a very material reduction in wines, and an arrangement with tradesmen by which, if punctually adhered to, time might be gained and clamour avoided.

Sir Walter’s complexion heightened.

“Tradesmen! Mr Shepherd, I must beg that you will not talk to me of tradesmen as if they were to regulate my establishment. I have no objection to paying every body; nobody can have less objection to it than myself; but I cannot submit to have Kellynch Hall measured by the economy of families who, perhaps, never had a grandfather.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, smiled, and entreated pardon. He was only anxious, very anxious. Nobody could feel more deeply than himself what was due to Kellynch. But circumstances were stubborn things; and though he would be the last man in the world to recommend any degradation, he could not conceal from Sir Walter that something more than common retrenchment must be devised, unless Sir Walter would permit him to hint at a resource which had sometimes, in families of the first consideration, been found neither discreditable nor inconvenient.

Sir Walter looked alarmed and offended.

“If you mean selling, Mr Shepherd, I have already told you my resolution. The estate shall go entire to my successor. I will not be the first Elliot that lessened Kellynch.”

“By no means selling, Sir Walter. I should abhor the idea. But there are cases in which a gentleman, retaining every acre, every right, every consequence, may derive advantage from allowing another respectable person, for a term, to occupy the house. A tenant—”

“A tenant!” cried Sir Walter, rising. “Mr Shepherd, I must request that word may never again be spoken in my presence. A tenant at Kellynch Hall! I am astonished. I am wounded. I had not supposed that any friend of mine could have conceived such an indignity.”

Mr Shepherd’s bow was now almost as low as his spirits ought to have been. Lady Russell was grieved, Elizabeth indignant, and Anne distressed; but Anne’s distress had in it less of surprise than of pain. She had long seen that nothing gentle would do; and now, while all were silent from embarrassment, and Sir Walter, having walked to the glass, was recovering himself by ascertaining that agitation had not injured his appearance, she ventured to speak.

“Since my father rejects both these plans,” said she, “may I be allowed to mention one which goes farther, and which, if followed exactly, might perhaps answer the real necessity better? We ought, I think, to have no London this year, nor next, unless our circumstances are quite altered; no new carriage, no new furniture, no needless additions of dress, no entertainments beyond what neighbourhood and civility absolutely require. The number of servants should be reduced to what the house cannot do without; the horses to what is indispensable; and every bill should be known, arranged, and lessened by immediate sacrifices. It would be painful for a time; but the pain of doing right cannot be equal to the pain of increasing debt.”

There was a pause. Sir Walter turned from the glass with an air of cold amazement. Lady Russell looked at Anne with affectionate sorrow and approbation. Mr Shepherd’s eyes brightened with professional hope. But the greatest wonder was Elizabeth.

“I must say,” she cried, colouring, “that Anne is right. I do not mean that all these things can be borne precisely as she states them; but something of the kind must be done. I had rather give up London, much rather, than hear such a proposal as Mr Shepherd’s again. Kellynch must be kept as it is. If there is any mode by which we may remain here, and silence these odious bills, without bringing strangers into the house, I am sure it ought to be tried.”

It was a support which Anne had not expected, and Lady Russell had scarcely dared to wish. Elizabeth’s motives were not Anne’s; they had more of pride than principle; but they were useful motives for once, and therefore valuable. Sir Walter, however, was not to be won by a confederacy, especially when one of the confederates was Anne.

“Upon my word,” said he, “I am to be pitied. When my eldest daughter talks of giving up London, and my second daughter of reducing me to a style of life which would make Kellynch unrecognisable, I hardly know where I am. Elizabeth, you cannot be serious. You would not have me supposed unable to support my station?”

“I would not have Kellynch talked of,” replied Elizabeth, with more warmth than filial caution. “I would not have Mr Shepherd driven to repeat what he has just said. I would do any thing proper to prevent that.”

“Proper!” repeated Sir Walter. “There is the whole question. It is never proper for people of rank to make themselves remarkable by shabby economies. A curtailed establishment is always observed. A gentleman may be ruined by looking poor before he is poor. No; I will consider; I will think; but I cannot pledge myself to any violent measures. Anne’s plan is a very young lady’s plan, though Anne is not so very young either. It has all the harshness of theory.”

Anne made no reply. She knew that to have been heard was something; to be approved by Elizabeth, more than she could soon comprehend; but to convince Sir Walter was not to be expected in a morning.

The conference broke up with nothing settled. Lady Russell, before she went, pressed Sir Walter to permit another meeting; Mr Shepherd gathered his papers with many assurances that every thing should remain most profoundly confidential; and Elizabeth, though dissatisfied with every body, was yet sufficiently pleased with herself for having spoken nobly, to be in better humour than might have been looked for. Sir Walter alone was decidedly injured. He had been advised, contradicted, and shocked; and though he had escaped concession, he had not escaped the consciousness that people thought concession necessary.

They were scarcely gone, and the family had but just dispersed from the breakfast-room, when a letter was brought in from Uppercross. It was directed to Anne, but Mary’s handwriting being always a claim on general attention, Elizabeth desired to know its contents as soon as the seal was broken.

Mary wrote in all the misery of a person who had no illness too serious to be described at large.

“MY DEAR ANNE,

“I am very unwell, and Charles is gone out shooting, and I have nobody to speak to who understands me. I have had a pain in my side all the morning, and last night I slept hardly at all, though they say I did, which is always the way here. Mrs Musgrove is very good-natured, but she thinks every body as strong as herself; and the children are so noisy that I am quite worn out. I wish you would come directly, for I am sure I am not fit to be left to myself; and if you cannot come, I do not know what I shall do. Pray do not delay. I am sure you can be spared better than any one. Yours affectionately,

“MARY.”

Anne read, and felt the usual mixture of concern, patience, and doubt, which Mary’s complaints were formed to inspire. She believed her sister uncomfortable, perhaps more from temper than disease; but she also knew that Mary, when she fancied herself neglected, could make discomfort spread through a house with uncommon activity.

Elizabeth listened with composure.

“It is very inconvenient,” said she. “But I dare say you had better go. Mary is always fancying herself ill, and nobody can persuade her out of it so well as you. Besides, after what has passed this morning, we shall have quite enough to think of here, and you would only be made unhappy by it.”

Sir Walter asked whether Mary looked very ill when Anne had last seen her; and on being told that she had then appeared much as usual, observed that Mary’s constitution was probably better than her style of writing, and that Uppercross was a very good sort of place for people who liked noise and children. He had no objection to Anne’s going, if Lady Russell’s carriage could take her, or if the Musgroves sent for her; but he could not have the Kellynch horses taken out on every little alarm. This was economy, he added, with a look at Elizabeth, and might serve to shew that he was not unreasonable.

Anne quietly undertook to arrange her conveyance. Lady Russell, on being applied to, would certainly assist her; or a message might be sent to Uppercross. The distance was nothing formidable, and the duty plain. She had no wish to remain at Kellynch to hear further disputes in which her opinion would have no influence; but leaving it so, with the evil exposed and no remedy adopted, was a melancholy relief.

The remainder of the day passed in that languid irritation which follows an ineffectual alarm. Sir Walter shut himself up with the Baronetage, but did not find it entirely restorative; for even the page of his own history could not erase the recollection of Mr Shepherd’s offensive word. Elizabeth wrote notes, rang bells, countermanded a small order from the upholsterer, and then repented of having done so. She talked once of beginning immediately upon Anne’s plan, and twice of its being impossible to begin till they knew what was really necessary. Lady Russell returned for half an hour in the afternoon, saw Anne alone, approved her going to Mary, and promised the means for the next morning; but she went away with a heavier heart than she brought, for Sir Walter had avoided her, and Elizabeth had been stately and unsettled.

By evening the house had resumed its outward elegance. The dinner was as handsome as if no bill had ever been unpaid; the servants moved as numerous and as well-dressed as before; the plate, the lights, the long mirrors, and all the quiet testimony of expensive habit, told the same flattering story to the eye. But Anne could not be deceived by brightness. She saw only the contradiction between appearance and truth, and felt that the very order and grace around her had become part of the danger.

When she withdrew to her own room, Mary’s letter lay on her table, with Lady Russell’s note promising the carriage early. Anne read both again, folded them, and sat for some time without moving. She was resolved to go to Uppercross. Mary wanted her, or believed she did; and to be useful where she could was the comfort most within Anne’s reach. But Kellynch, with all its claims, follies, and distresses, held her thoughts still. Nothing had been decided. No retrenchment had been accepted; no debt diminished; no pride subdued. The day which had begun with consultation ended in uncertainty; and Anne, alone in the summer twilight, could only hope that absence might not make her more powerless than presence had done.

She awakened when the train was slackening speed and Mrs. Medlock was putting on her gloves.

"This is Thwaite Station," she said. "Wake up and don't sit staring. We have a drive before us."

The door was opened by a porter, and a gust of wet, cold air blew in and made Mary draw back. Upon the platform, under a lamp which flared and smoked in the wind, stood a tall thin gentleman in a dark coat. One shoulder looked higher than the other, and he held his head rather bent, as if he had long ago grown tired of looking straight before him. His face was pale and narrow, and his black eyes rested on Mary for one moment only.

"This is Miss Lennox, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, in quite another voice.

Mr. Archibald Craven looked down at the small black figure.

"Come," he said.

That was all. He did not offer his hand, and Mary did not offer hers. She followed him and Mrs. Medlock through the rain to a closed carriage, feeling very much as if she were a parcel being taken to some place where no one wanted it.

The drive was long and dark. The lamps showed only wet stones and tossing hedges, and then, after a time, nothing but a great black open place on both sides of the road. The wind rushed over it as if there was no house or tree in the world to stop it.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock.

Mary pressed her face against the glass. "I don't like it," she said.

"Nobody asked you," answered Mrs. Medlock.

Presently the carriage gave a sudden jerk and stopped. The coachman shouted, and Mr. Craven leaned forward sharply.

"What is it?" he demanded.

"Summat i' th' road, sir," came from outside.

A man got down with a lantern, and for a minute the door stood open. Mary, who wanted to see, slipped out before Mrs. Medlock could stop her. She found herself standing on the road with the wild wet dark all round her. The moor seemed to breathe and move. Something white and rough-backed scuttled away from the lantern-light into the heather, and the horse snorted.

"Get in," said Mr. Craven's voice behind her.

Mary got in. Her feet were wet and cold, and her heart had begun to beat rather fast, though she would not have owned it.

When they reached Misselthwaite Manor she saw only a great black shape, with windows here and there shining yellow through the rain. She was taken through a huge door into a hall so big and dim that the light of the fire seemed lost in it. Mr. Craven did not come in after her. He spoke a few words to Mrs. Medlock in a low voice, turned away, and was gone.

"Now, then," said Mrs. Medlock, "I'll take you to your room and you'll have your supper there. You're tired, whether you know it or not."

Mary was led up broad stairs and along corridors where their footsteps sounded hollow. There were pictures on the walls, but she could not see their faces clearly, and she did not like the way they seemed to look at her from the dark. Her room was large and had heavy furniture and a fire burning in the grate. It was not a child's room, and it was not like any room she had ever slept in.

A manservant brought her supper on a tray. He was a square, elderly man with a solemn face, and when he set down the dishes he said something which sounded to Mary like, "Tha'll happen want nowt but a sup o' warm broth, an' happen tha'll sleep sound enow."

Mary stared at him.

"I don't understand what you say," she said.

He looked at her as if he were not surprised.

"Eh! tha's fra' foreign parts," he answered; "an' Yorkshire's Yorkshire."

Then he went away, and Mary ate her supper crossly because she was hungry and because everything was strange.

Afterward Mrs. Medlock came to see that she was in bed. The wind was beating against the house and roaring down the chimneys. Just as Mary lay down, there came, from somewhere far off in the great house, a sound unlike the wind. It rose and fell and was gone.

Mary sat up.

"What is that?" she said.

Mrs. Medlock was fastening the curtains.

"It's the wind," she answered quickly. "You'll hear plenty of it here. Lie down and go to sleep."

Mary lay down, but she did not go to sleep. The fire sank lower, the room grew darker, and the house seemed larger and emptier every minute. She lay awake in the dark, with her eyes wide open, and she made up her mind that, wind or no wind, she would find out for herself what that sound was.

The rain had slackened a little when Eve reached the street, and was now falling with that air of lazy persistence which rain assumes when it has made up its mind to stop eventually but sees no reason for hurrying. She stood for a moment under the shallow shelter of Miss Clarkson’s doorway and regarded the umbrella with mixed feelings.

An umbrella, especially a large and handsome umbrella with a silver band round its middle and an air of having been accustomed from infancy to the best society, is not a thing which the possessor of a hundred and fifty pounds a year lightly puts away from her. There was a suggestion about this one of solid comfort, of taxis taken without counting the shillings, of well-ordered houses where luncheon was a meal and not an experiment. Eve felt that it and she had been very happy together. Nevertheless, the thought that somewhere in London there might be a young man, however eccentric, who had deprived himself of shelter for her sake, pricked her conscience. And the further thought that the umbrella might not have been his to deprive himself of pricked it still more sharply.

She reopened it and set off down Shaftesbury Avenue.

The porter of the Drones Club, a man whose manner indicated that he had seen almost everything which a world populated by members of the Drones Club could provide, received her with a gravity which would have done credit to a bishop.

“Would you mind giving this,” said Eve, “to a tall gentleman with a monocle who was in one of your windows this morning? I don’t know his name.”

“Very good, miss.”

“And this note, please.”

She had written the note on a sheet torn from the little memorandum-book in which she kept a record of those financial disasters which were too large to be trusted to memory. It ran as follows:

“To the gentleman who so kindly lent me this umbrella when I was imprisoned by the rain under a coal-merchant’s awning. It has saved the hat, and I return it with many thanks and apologies for the trouble I may have caused.”

The porter took the umbrella and the note. His expression did not change, but he was conscious of a mild intellectual stimulus. Tall gentlemen with monocles were fairly common at the Drones, but even at the Drones the practice of lending umbrellas through club windows to young ladies under coal-merchant’s awnings had not yet become general.

“Very good, miss,” he said again.

Eve went out into Dover Street feeling virtuous and rather damp about the ankles.

* * * * *

It was some little time after this that Psmith, who had lunched at the club with the restrained appetite of a man whose future, though full of promise, is for the moment not overburdened with cash in hand, was discovered in the smoking-room by the Honourable Mr. Walderwick.

The Honourable Mr. Walderwick was not looking his best. He was a young man who, in favourable circumstances, had a pink and polished appearance, like something in a confectioner’s window; but at the present moment the rain had dealt austerely with him. He approached Psmith with the air of one who has been brooding on a wrong.

“I say, Smith.”

“The P,” said Psmith gently, “is not actually sounded, though much prized by the family. You were observing?”

“You took my umbrella.”

Psmith inclined his head.

“There,” he said, “you touch on a subject of singular delicacy.”

“The cloak-room man says you walked off with my umbrella.”

“His statement, while bald, is substantially accurate.”

“Well, why the dickens did you do it?”

Psmith raised a hand.

“My dear Walderwick, there are moments when explanations, however lucid, merely thicken the atmosphere. Let us not rake among the dead leaves of the morning. Let us rather proceed at once to the practical side of the affair. What was the cost of this umbrella?”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Everything. I am a business man. At least,” said Psmith, “I was one until late yesterday evening. The habit clings. Name a figure.”

“It cost me seventeen and sixpence.”

“An unworthy sum for so noble an object. I will give you ten pounds.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Ten guineas, then. I should not like you to feel that you had been overreached.”

Mr. Walderwick stared. He had come prepared for apology, evasion, possibly an explanation which would enable him to spread in the club later a story beginning “You’ll never guess what that chap Smith did this morning.” He had not come prepared to sell at a profit of something over eleven hundred per cent. His grievance, though still warm, began to cool at the edges.

“Ten guineas?”

“Ten guineas,” said Psmith. “Cash, cheque, or, should you prefer it, a carefully worded bond promising delivery of the amount at some future date when the stars are more propitious.”

“A cheque will do.”

Psmith wrote one with a flourish and handed it to him.

“There,” he said. “The transaction is complete. You have parted with a useful but perishable article; I have acquired a memento. In later years, when you are sitting by the fire with your grandchildren clustered about you, you will be able to tell them how you once received ten guineas for an umbrella. They will probably doubt your word, but that is the penalty of having moved in stirring times.”

At this point the porter appeared in the doorway.

“Umbrella has been returned, sir.”

“Admirable,” said Psmith. “Place it by my chair. Was there any communication from headquarters?”

“A note, sir.”

Psmith took it. Mr. Walderwick, whose interest in the umbrella had revived now that it had ceased to be his, lingered for an instant as if hoping to share the contents. Psmith, however, having glanced at the sheet, folded it and placed it in his waistcoat pocket.

“A private matter connected with the estate,” he said. “Good afternoon, Walderwick. Spend the money wisely.”

Mr. Walderwick withdrew, murmuring that some fellows were dashed odd; and Psmith, picking up the umbrella, examined it with approval. It was, he felt, an umbrella with a future.

* * * * *

Eve, meanwhile, had lunched in a tea-shop off Regent Street on a meal which, though described on the bill of fare as nourishing, seemed to her to owe more to imagination than to science. She emerged from this repast at about half-past two with a resolute mind. Her interview with Lord Emsworth was fixed for three-thirty at the Senior Conservative Club, and she had decided to spend the intervening hour in making herself look as much like a capable cataloguer as her hat would permit.

With this end in view she drifted towards Charing Cross Road and paused before the window of a second-hand bookshop. There was displayed there a dusty volume entitled “Hints on Library Arrangement,” price one shilling. Eve was considering whether a shilling spent in this manner would be an investment or merely another of those financial excesses which make old family solicitors shake their heads, when a voice at her side said:

“I should avoid it.”

She turned. The tall young man with the monocle was beside her, regarding the book with solemn disapproval.

“It has the appearance,” he said, “of a work which would sap the morale. A friend of mine once read a book of hints on poultry-farming and has never been the same since.”

Eve looked at him steadily.

“Haven’t we met before?”

“Possibly,” said Psmith. “London is full of these curious coincidences. One is always meeting people whom one has met before, especially if one moves about.”

“This morning,” said Eve. “In Dover Street.”

Psmith adjusted his monocle.

“Dover Street? A pleasant thoroughfare. I have often noticed it.”

“You gave me an umbrella.”

Psmith considered this.

“Umbrellas,” he said, “are coming very much to the front to-day. They seem to thrust themselves into every conversation. Was it a good one?”

“A beautiful one.”

“Then let us hope that the unknown benefactor came by it honestly.”

“I returned it.”

“An admirable action. It restores one’s faith in human nature, which, between ourselves, has been looking a little seedy since breakfast.”

Eve laughed.

“You are not going to admit it?”

“My dear young lady, in these delicate matters admission is the first step towards a correspondence in the newspapers. I merely say that, if some public-spirited person did assist you in a moment of meteorological stress, he has my warm approval.”

“And who are you, when you are not approving public-spirited persons?”

“A wayfarer,” said Psmith. “A pilgrim. A man who, having lately severed his connection with commerce, is endeavouring to discover some less clammy walk in life.”

Eve remembered Phyllis’s Mr. Smith, the friend of Mike’s who was in the fish business, but the memory came only as a faint echo and passed. There are many Smiths in London, and few of them look as if they had been designed by Providence to lean against mantelpieces.

“I am going to be interviewed,” she said, “by an earl.”

Psmith’s face showed respectful concern.

“Then allow me to offer one word of advice. If he says anything you do not understand, say ‘Quite.’ It is a word which has carried many a man through the most searching social examinations.”

“It is about cataloguing a library.”

“In that case,” said Psmith, “you are saved. Earls, I believe, are seldom at their strongest among books. You have merely to preserve a cool head, look as if you knew the difference between a folio and a what-not, and refrain from placing Shakespeare under Plumbing. Success will be assured.”

“I wish I felt as confident.”

“Confidence,” said Psmith, “is a plant of slow growth, but a little monocled encouragement will often do wonders. I shall watch your career with interest from afar.”

“You might at least tell me your name.”

Psmith shook his head.

“Not to-day. To-day I am living incognito. It adds a touch of colour to what might otherwise be a drab existence. Besides, you will find that names are greatly overrated. They lead to introductions, and introductions lead to tea, and tea leads to a weakening of the tissues.”

Eve looked at him with amusement and some exasperation.

“You are the most extraordinary person I have ever met.”

“Spoken,” said Psmith, “with the generous warmth of one who has still some way to go in London. You will meet many others. Some of them will make me appear almost commonplace.”

At this moment a clock over a neighbouring shop reminded Eve of her appointment. She gave a little cry.

“I must fly.”

“By all means,” said Psmith. “And remember: ‘Quite.’ A simple word, but of proved value.”

He raised his hat, and Eve hurried off towards Pall Mall. Psmith watched her go, then turned and entered the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau with the air of a man about to confer a benefit on organised labour.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club, when Eve reached it, seemed to have been built by someone who had wished to express in stone the opinion that young women applying for posts as cataloguers were a regrettable modern innovation. The porter, while admitting her, contrived to suggest that this was not the sort of thing the founders had had in mind. She was conveyed to a small room on the ground floor, where several arm-chairs, a writing-table, and a portrait of a statesman with whiskers combined to produce an atmosphere of solid gloom.

Lord Emsworth came in after five minutes, carrying a bundle of papers and looking as if he had been mislaid by his keeper. He blinked at Eve with mild benevolence.

“Ah! How do you do? Miss--er--”

“Halliday.”

“Quite. Quite. Yes. Capital. My sister--Lady Constance--said--or perhaps it was Baxter--somebody, at any rate, said I was to see you. About the library, yes. Dear me, yes. Do sit down.”

Eve sat down.

There was a sharp crack.

Lord Emsworth started.

“God bless my soul!”

Eve sprang up. On the chair, where he had apparently placed them a moment before, lay the remains of his pince-nez. One glass had split across with the neatness of a map-line; the other had removed itself altogether from the frame and was glittering on the carpet.

“Oh, I’m so dreadfully sorry!”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Lord Emsworth, peering helplessly. “My fault entirely. Put them down somewhere. Always putting things down somewhere. Baxter warned me. Most unfortunate. Can’t see a thing without them. Still, never mind, never mind.”

He felt for the chair, found it after one false attempt, and sat down on the extreme edge. Eve, crushed by the thought that she had begun her professional career by destroying the eyesight of her prospective employer, stood before him like a prisoner awaiting sentence.

“I am so sorry,” she repeated.

“Eh? Oh, yes. Quite. No consequence. There was something Baxter told me to ask you.” He unfolded the papers and held them close to his face, then at arm’s length, then upside down. “Can’t read a word. Very small writing. Baxter writes a most damnably small hand. Would you mind--?”

He gave her the top sheet. Eve took it and read:

“‘Memorandum for Lord Emsworth. Interview with Miss Halliday. Ascertain: One, previous experience in library cataloguing. Two, knowledge of accepted systems of classification. Three, references. Four, whether willing to reside at Blandings Castle during period of work. Five, salary.’”

“Ah, yes,” said Lord Emsworth, relieved. “Very clear. Baxter is a capable fellow. Too capable sometimes. Well?”

“I have not had much actual experience,” said Eve honestly. “But I am fond of books, and I am accurate when I am not sitting on people’s glasses. I can learn any system of classification if someone tells me what it is, and I am quite willing to live at Blandings while the work is being done.”

“Excellent, excellent.”

“My references are Miss Clarkson of the Ada Clarkson Bureau and Mrs. Jackson of West Kensington.”

“Jackson?” Lord Emsworth knitted his brows vaguely. “Knew a Jackson once. Or was it Jukes? Kept bees. No, not bees. Something in jars. Well, well. Salary, yes.” He peered again at the paper, though Eve still held it. “What does Baxter say about salary?”

“He doesn’t say anything here.”

“Then we shall have to settle it without him,” said Lord Emsworth, with the furtive satisfaction of a man who has found a gate open. “My sister will know. Or Baxter. Somebody will write. You had better come down next week. The library is in a shocking state. Books everywhere. On shelves, you know, and tables, and in rooms where one doesn’t expect them. I have wanted somebody to attend to it for years.”

Eve’s spirits, which had been lying stunned among the fragments of the pince-nez, rose with a bound.

“Then I may consider that you--that I am not unsuitable?”

“Unsuitable? No, no. You read Baxter’s writing perfectly. That alone would be of the greatest service in the country. And you have a sensible manner. My sister likes sensible people. At least,” said Lord Emsworth, reflecting, “she says she does. Yes, yes, you had better come. Baxter will arrange everything. Most unfortunate about the glasses, but quite my fault. I remember now putting them there. Foolish place to put glasses. A chair is for sitting on.”

He shook hands with her warmly, missed the door once, found it, and vanished, leaving Eve with the comforting conviction that the interview had gone disastrously in every possible way except the essential one.

* * * * *

At a few minutes past seven that evening Psmith sat in the smoking-room of the Drones Club. The rain had ceased, and the window opposite Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe showed a pale, washed sky; but the umbrella rested across his knees. From time to time he tapped its handle thoughtfully. On the table beside him lay the unsigned note.

He had dined alone and sparingly. Miss Clarkson, while impressed by his manner, had been unable to offer him anything except a post assisting an elderly gentleman in the compilation of memoirs, and Psmith had felt that his soul, though elastic, was not equal to elderly gentlemen’s memoirs. He was considering the future with his customary calm when a page entered.

“Mr. Jackson on the telephone, sir.”

Psmith went out and returned after some minutes with a look of deeper meditation on his face. Mike, telephoning from West Kensington, had had little to say beyond the fact that he could not come to the club that night; but Phyllis, speaking over his shoulder and finally taking possession of the instrument, had supplied news. Her friend Eve Halliday had secured, or at any rate had not failed to secure, the Blandings Castle post; she had broken an earl’s glasses, been forgiven, and was in excellent spirits. She had also, Phyllis added, encountered in the course of the day a mysterious young man with a monocle who went about lending umbrellas and declining to give his name.

Psmith had listened gravely, and had asked for the friend’s name to be repeated.

Now he was alone again in the smoking-room. He picked up the umbrella and regarded it with a new respect.

“Eve Halliday,” said Psmith thoughtfully.

He leaned back in his chair, the umbrella still across his knees, and smiled gently at the ceiling.

It afforded me but little enlightenment, and a good deal of horror. I thrust the volume back upon the shelf, and, snatching up my hat, set out at once for the village.

The morning was of that still, oppressive kind which follows a night of thunder. A faint mist hung over the fields, and the very birds seemed to sing in a subdued and drowsy fashion. I walked rapidly, for my mind was in a ferment. The words I had read, dry and technical as they were, had yet called up with hideous vividness the scene through which we had just passed.

Poirot was lodging with a Mrs. Oddly, a little way down the village street. I found him already dressed, exquisitely neat as usual, and with his moustaches arranged to a nicety. He came forward quickly.

“Ah, mon ami, I expected you.”

“Then you know?”

He inclined his head gravely.

“But yes. It is very sad. I have already heard. It was Baily, the chauffeur, who told me. He drove past here on his way back from the doctor’s, and seeing me at the window, he stopped for one instant. He is a good fellow, that Baily, but he has not the nerves of steel.”

“Poirot,” I cried, “you must come at once.”

He laid his hand on my arm.

“I am at your service. But one moment. Tell me, as shortly as you can, exactly what has happened.”

I gave him the facts as well as I was able. He listened with an attention that missed nothing, occasionally interrupting me by a sharp question. Had Mrs. Inglethorp locked both doors herself? Had Mr. Inglethorp’s bed been slept in? Had I noticed the state of the coffee-cup? Had any one touched the medicine bottles? To some of these queries I could give no answer, and he clicked his tongue impatiently.

“It is always so. People run, they exclaim, they move things. The little grey cells, they arrive too late, and the feet have been there before them. Come, Hastings, we will go.”

As we passed out into the street, however, Poirot paused.

“I have sent for my hat and stick,” he explained, with an air of apology. “In an affair of importance, one must be correctly equipped.”

In spite of my impatience I could not help smiling. Yet there was something in the little man’s gravity which impressed me. In a few minutes we were walking briskly up the road to Styles.

We had not yet reached the lodge gates when we heard the sound of wheels behind us. A dog-cart came round the corner at a smart pace, and in it, sitting very erect, with his black beard and singularly impassive face, was Alfred Inglethorp.

At sight of us he pulled up.

“What has happened?” he demanded. “I met Baily just now, and he told me some incoherent tale.”

“Mrs. Inglethorp is dead,” I said bluntly.

For a moment he stared at me. Then he put his hand to his forehead.

“Dead! Emily dead! My God!”

His emotion, whether real or assumed, was sufficiently convincing. He descended from the dog-cart with some difficulty, as though his limbs refused their office.

“I must go to her. Why was I not sent for?”

“You were not in the house,” I said.

He turned on me sharply.

“No. I was detained. Most unfortunately detained.” Then, appearing to recollect himself, he added: “A terrible thing. Terrible! Poor dear Emily!”

Poirot said nothing. He was looking, not at Mr. Inglethorp’s face, but at his boots, which were thickly splashed with mud.

We walked on together, Mr. Inglethorp leading the horse. At the door John met us. He was very pale, but self-controlled.

“So you have come back,” he said.

“My dear John!” Mr. Inglethorp’s voice was full of reproach. “Do not speak to me in that tone at such a moment. I have had a most unfortunate adventure. After leaving Dr. Bauerstein I walked on for some way, feeling the air oppressive, and wishing to compose my thoughts. I took the lower road by the woods. There I missed my way in the darkness, and finally reached Denby’s Farm, where I knocked them up. Denby himself came down, and, seeing my exhausted condition, insisted upon my lying down in their parlour until morning. I slept heavily, and only started home when the household was astir. I had no notion—no notion—”

His voice broke. John said coldly:

“You had the latch-key.”

“I had. But what was the use of a latch-key when I was five miles away and unable to find my road?”

At that moment Dorcas, who had come into the hall, uttered an exclamation.

“Denby’s Farm, sir? Begging your pardon, sir, but Denby’s folks went to market yesterday, all of them, and were to stay the night with Mrs. Denby’s sister at Much Benham. I had it from their girl myself, when she brought the eggs.”

There was a dead silence.

Mr. Inglethorp turned on her with dignity.

“You must be mistaken, Dorcas.”

“No, sir. I don’t think so, sir.”

“Possibly,” said Mr. Inglethorp, after a pause, “it was not Denby’s Farm. In the darkness I may have mistaken the place. I was considerably upset. It was some farm in that direction.”

No one answered. John’s face had grown a shade sterner. Poirot, still silent, had his eyes fixed upon the hall table, where lay a pair of gloves, a riding crop, and a heap of letters. His silence struck me as more significant than any speech.

Mr. Inglethorp passed his hand across his brow.

“I am dazed,” he murmured. “Where is she?”

John answered briefly:

“The room is locked. The doctors have the case in hand. They will not allow any one to enter without good reason.”

“But I am her husband.”

It was Mary who answered. She had come down the staircase so quietly that none of us had heard her. She looked very white, but quite composed.

“For the present, Alfred, I think we must all submit to what the doctors have thought best.”

He looked at her, and there was a curious gleam in his eye which I could not interpret.

“As you wish,” he said. “In this house my wishes have never counted for much.”

He moved away into the library. John followed him, and I could hear their voices, low and constrained.

Poirot turned to Mary with a little bow.

“Madame, permit that I offer you my sympathy.”

“Thank you, Monsieur Poirot. Hastings has told you?”

“He has told me what he saw. But there are always other things. May I ask, where is Mademoiselle Cynthia?”

“In the morning-room, I think. She is quite overcome. We have made her drink some tea.”

“May I speak to her, for one little minute only?”

Mary hesitated, then led the way.

Cynthia was sitting in a big chair by the window, looking very young and bewildered. Her fair hair was rough, and her eyes had the vacant, heavy look I had noticed before. She smiled faintly at me.

“Oh, Captain Hastings, it is too awful. I can’t believe it. It is like a nightmare.”

Poirot went up to her very gently.

“Mademoiselle, I will not distress you. I ask you one question only. Last night, did you sleep more heavily than usual?”

She opened her eyes a little wider.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I did. I remember Mary shaking me and shaking me. I thought I should never wake. I had been so tired after the dispensary, and I suppose the heat made me stupid.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle.”

He bowed and withdrew. Outside in the hall he drew me a little aside.

“You see?”

“I see that Cynthia slept heavily.”

“Precisely. You see what you see. That is always something.”

It was no use trying to get more out of him. He became suddenly absorbed in the pattern of the stair-carpet, and mounted the stairs with an expression of the deepest interest.

On the landing John met us. The keys which Dr. Bauerstein had given him were in his hand.

“Monsieur Poirot,” he said, “Hastings tells me that you have had considerable experience in these matters. I should be grateful if you would look round. Of course, I don’t know whether it is regular.”

Poirot drew himself up.

“I am not of the police, monsieur. I am here as a friend, if you permit it. Later, the police may come. For the moment, we disturb nothing that can matter, and we observe all that may disappear.”

John unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room. He turned the key with a hand that shook slightly, and then stood aside.

The room looked curiously peaceful after the terrible scene of an hour before. The blinds had been drawn up, and the early sunshine lay across the carpet in long yellow bars. Yet the disordered bed, the overturned table, and the broken fragments of china on the floor told their own story. The air smelt faintly of drugs, and of the stale, heavy odour left by a lamp which has burned low.

Poirot did not at once enter. He stood on the threshold, looking from right to left. Then, with a warning gesture to me to keep behind him, he advanced on tiptoe, though why tiptoe should be necessary I could not imagine.

“Nothing has been moved?” he asked.

“Only what the doctors touched,” said John. “And Annie brought the brandy.”

“Where did she put it?”

“On the washstand, I believe.”

Poirot nodded. He went first to the bed and stood looking down at the still figure. I turned away. Whatever my suspicions, whatever excitement the affair aroused in me, I could not forget that this had been the kindly, autocratic old lady who had welcomed me only a few days before.

Poirot crossed himself. Then the detective in him resumed command. He examined the overturned table without touching it, bent over the hearth, picked up the fragments of the broken coffee-cup, and put them down again exactly as he had found them. He scrutinised the mantelpiece, the medicine bottles, the cocoa cup on a little table near the bed, the candle-grease on the carpet, and even the fire-irons. He opened the door into Mr. Inglethorp’s room and looked at the broken lock with attention.

“Who broke this door?”

“John, Lawrence, and I.”

“Ah! And the other door?”

“It was unbolted by me after we got in.”

Poirot nodded. He knelt down by the hearth, and I saw his hand go forward with that neat, birdlike precision which characterised all his movements. From among the ashes, where it had lain half hidden near the fender, he picked up a small object. He held it for a second in the palm of his hand, then slipped it into an envelope which he had taken from his pocket.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He put the envelope before my eyes. Inside lay a little fragment of green paper, scorched at one edge, and twisted as though it had formed part of some small packet or wrapper.

“You perceive it, Hastings?”

“Yes, but what is it?”

“A little object,” said Poirot.

“That is obvious.”

He smiled, but would say no more.

John, who had been standing by the door, spoke abruptly.

“Do you find anything?”

“I find many things, monsieur. Whether they are of importance, that is another affair.”

“Do you think—” John stopped. “No, I suppose you cannot say.”

“I should prefer not to say anything yet. May the room remain locked?”

“Yes. Bauerstein advised it.”

“He was right.” Poirot’s tone was dry. “For the present, let no one enter. Have you sent for the police?”

John flushed.

“Not yet. The doctors said there must be an inquest.”

“There will certainly be an inquest,” said Poirot quietly.

We left the room, and John locked the door. In the corridor Lawrence was waiting. He started when he saw us, and his eyes went at once to Poirot’s face.

“Well?” he demanded.

Poirot spread out his hands.

“Monsieur, I am at the beginning.”

“I daresay there is nothing to find,” said Lawrence harshly. “It is all a horrible mistake.”

Poirot looked at him with mild surprise.

“You are a doctor, I think?”

“I qualified, but I have never practised.”

“Ah! Then you will understand that in medicine, as in detection, one must not make the facts fit the theory. One must make the theory fit the facts.”

Lawrence turned away impatiently.

Downstairs the household had gathered in scattered groups, speaking in whispers, with that strange excitement which death brings into a house. Mary had disappeared. Mr. Inglethorp was in the library, pacing up and down; through the half-open door I caught a glimpse of him, his hands clasped behind his back, his head sunk upon his breast. Dorcas was crying quietly in a corner of the servants’ hall, and Annie went to and fro with swollen eyes and trembling lips.

Poirot asked to see Dorcas, and John sent for her. The old servant came, wiping her eyes with her apron.

“You were devoted to your mistress?” said Poirot kindly.

“Indeed I was, sir. Twenty years I’ve been with her, and never a kinder mistress breathed, though masterful at times.”

“You noticed last night that she was upset?”

“Terrible upset, sir. After the quarrel and all.”

“With Mr. Inglethorp?”

Dorcas pursed her lips.

“I’m not one to repeat what I oughtn’t, sir. But there was words, and loud ones.”

Poirot did not press her. He merely asked a few questions as to who had been up and about, who had carried the coffee, and whether any one had entered Mrs. Inglethorp’s room after she had gone upstairs. Dorcas could tell little more than we knew already, but she repeated with great firmness her statement about Denby’s Farm.

“I don’t say Mr. Inglethorp didn’t pass the night at some farm, sir. I wouldn’t presume. But Denby’s it could not be, unless their plans was changed after half-past seven last evening.”

“That is very clear,” said Poirot. “You have an excellent memory.”

Dorcas looked gratified in spite of her grief.

It was now past nine o’clock. The sun had gained power, and the house, with its closed doors and whispering inmates, seemed intolerably oppressive. Poirot accepted a cup of coffee in the dining-room, drinking it in small sips, while his eyes wandered incessantly round the room. I knew him well enough to realise that, behind his apparent tranquillity, his mind was working at high pressure.

Presently he rose.

“I must return once more to the room.”

John gave him the key without a word.

“Come, Hastings.”

We went upstairs together. At Poirot’s request John did not accompany us. The little man unlocked the door, and when we had entered, locked it again on the inside.

“Why do you lock us in?” I asked.

“Because, my friend, I desire that we shall be alone with the facts.”

He drew the envelope from his pocket and laid the small scorched fragment upon the table. The green of it showed oddly vivid against the polished wood. He bent over it, his eyes narrowing.

“You attach importance to that?” I asked.

Poirot did not answer. He was standing in the middle of the room, turning slowly, as though comparing each object with some plan in his mind. At last he came back to the table and tapped the envelope lightly with one finger.

“This,” he said, “is not where it should have been.”

I stared at him.

“Where should it have been?”

Poirot looked at me. His face was very grave, and yet there was in his eye that faint spark which told me his little grey cells had begun their orderly march.

“My dear Hastings,” he said softly, “sometimes the thing that has been burnt is less important than the thing that has refused to burn.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “We’re going to the park.”

“No. Don’t let’s go to the park. Take me to Zelli’s.”

“All right.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He turned his head, his cap showing black against the light from a kiosk.

“Rue Fontaine,” I said. “Zelli’s.”

He nodded and turned the cab sharply at the next corner. Brett sat back in the shadow. The lights moved over her face and then were gone. She looked very tired.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.”

“It’s a beastly place.”

“Then we ought to go.”

“I told some one I’d be there. I don’t want to go alone.”

“That’s all right.”

“You’re nice, Jake.”

“No.”

“Yes, you are. Don’t be difficult.”

We drove up through the traffic. There were people sitting out in front of the cafés, and the waiters moved among the tables with trays held high. It was warm and there was a smell of dust and gasoline and flowers from a woman’s cart at a corner. Brett looked out and did not say anything. I could see her profile when we passed under a light. She was looking straight ahead.

“Who is the some one?” I asked.

“Oh, nobody. A man I met last week. Count Mippipopolous.”

“I never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t. He has rather a lot of money.”

“What does he do?”

“Spends it, I imagine. He’s awfully nice.”

“That makes it better.”

“Don’t be rotten.”

“I’m not.”

“He’s going away tomorrow. Or the next day. He asked me to look in. I said I might.”

“You are very exact.”

“I know. I’m splendid that way.”

The cab turned into the glare of the Place Blanche. The Moulin Rouge was lighted and there were soldiers and girls and small dark men in soft hats standing along the curb. The driver stopped in front of Zelli’s. Inside it was close and smoky. There was a jazz band at the end of the room, and a girl in a white dress was singing something in English that nobody listened to. The waiters were very busy and pleased with themselves. We found a table against the wall.

“Champagne?” Brett said.

“Why not?”

“Don’t say why not. It always sounds poor.”

“All right. Champagne.”

The waiter brought it, very cold, in a silver bucket. Brett drank hers quickly.

“Is the count here?” I asked.

“No.”

“You can tell already?”

“Yes. He would have seen me.”

“That saves us.”

“You’re an amiable companion tonight.”

“I’m getting on.”

“You’re not angry?”

“No.”

“Neither am I.”

“That’s fine.”

We sat and watched the people dance. Brett held her glass by the stem and turned it slowly on the table. There was a party of Americans near us, talking very loudly. One of the women had a laugh that came out before the joke. The band played fast and the floor was crowded.

“Are you happy, Jake?” Brett asked.

“Rather.”

“So am I.”

“Good.”

I loved her and it made me feel empty.

Brett looked at me and then looked away. “It’s awful to be a woman,” she said.

“It’s probably awful to be anything.”

“You say the nicest things.”

“I try.”

“No, you don’t. That’s why they’re nice.”

We had another bottle. Brett was not drunk. She was steady and bright and her face had the hard, clean look it had when she had been drinking and was keeping ahead of it. The man with money did not come. Or if he came we did not see him. Brett seemed glad he did not come, and disappointed too.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Not here.”

Outside the air felt cool. It was not really cool, but it felt so after the room. The taxis were waiting in a line. Brett took my arm.

“You left that money for your little friend,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Go back and get it.”

“It may be gone.”

“Then you’ll have done a noble thing.”

“I don’t feel noble.”

“Go back anyway. I want to see if she’s still there.”

“You would.”

“Of course I would. I’m a woman.”

We took a taxi down the hill. Brett did not talk. When we came to the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève the bal was still open, but the street was quiet. I paid the driver and told him to wait. Brett stayed in the cab.

“Don’t be long,” she said.

Inside, the room was hotter than before and stale with smoke and sweat and spilled drink. The accordion was still going, but not so hard. There were only a few couples on the floor. The policeman was gone. The patronne was behind the bar, counting saucers. She saw me and smiled.

“Monsieur returns.”

“For the envelope.”

“Yes. I have it.”

She reached under the zinc and brought it out. The seal was still on it.

“The young lady did not ask?”

“No, monsieur. She is there.”

Georgette was sitting at a table by the wall with her hat on the bench beside her. Her hair was damp on her forehead. She was drinking beer with the proprietor’s daughter. When she saw me she lifted her glass.

“Hello, Jacob,” she said. “You come back for me?”

“For the money.”

“That is better. Money is more faithful.”

The patronne laughed. I put the envelope in my pocket.

“You had a good evening?” I asked.

“Not bad. Your friends are funny. They dance like women and they do not pay like men.”

“That sounds like them.”

“You left me.”

“You were occupied.”

“I was occupied, yes. I am still occupied.” She drank some beer. “Where is the beautiful lady?”

“Outside.”

“Ah. That one. She looks expensive.”

“She is.”

“For you?”

“For everybody.”

Georgette laughed and showed her bad teeth. She was not pretty now. She was tired and good-natured and hard.

“Buy me a beer, Jacob.”

I bought her a beer and one for the proprietor’s daughter. The accordion stopped and the room was suddenly dead. Then it began again, softly.

“You are not angry?” Georgette said.

“No.”

“You are funny. You bring me, you leave me, you come back for the money, and you buy me beer. You are a good fiancé.”

“The best.”

“Go to your beautiful lady. She will be impatient.”

“She is always impatient.”

“That is because she is beautiful.”

I went out. Brett was leaning back in the cab with her eyes open.

“Was she there?”

“Yes.”

“And the money?”

“I got it.”

“Splendid. You’re a practical man.”

“Very.”

“Did she curse you?”

“No. I bought her a beer.”

“Darling Jake.”

The driver looked around. “Where now?”

Brett looked at me. “Where now, Jake?”

“We might go to Les Halles.”

“Yes. Let’s go where people are working. It’s always restful.”

We went to Les Halles. The streets were wet from washing and the carts were coming in. Men in blue blouses carried crates and baskets, and women with shawls over their shoulders stood by piles of vegetables. There was a smell of earth and leaves and fish. The cafés were open and full of men having white wine and coffee.

We sat at a zinc bar and had coffee and rum. Brett looked very clean and strange there among the market people. No one paid any attention to us. A man with a red face ate onion soup beside me. The steam went up into his moustache.

“This is better,” Brett said.

“Yes.”

“I’m not miserable now.”

“No?”

“No. I shall be later.”

“That’s something to look forward to.”

“You’re a brute.”

“I know.”

She put her hand on mine on the bar. Her hand was cool. We sat that way for a while. Then she took it away and lit a cigarette.

“Don’t look like that,” she said.

“How?”

“As though everything had happened already.”

“Hasn’t it?”

“No. Not quite.”

We drank the coffee. Outside the sky was getting pale behind the market roofs. The men unloading the carts shouted to each other and the horses slipped a little on the stones.

“I must go,” Brett said.

“Where?”

“Home. To sleep. Or not sleep. It’s all the same.”

I found her a taxi by the curb. She got in and I stood with the door open.

“You won’t come?”

“No.”

“That’s right,” she said. “You’re quite right.”

“Where shall he take you?”

She gave an address to the driver. Then she looked at me.

“Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Brett.”

“Don’t be unhappy.”

“I won’t.”

She smiled, and the taxi started. I watched it go down the street and turn by the market. The sky was light now. I walked toward the river. The quays were empty and the water was gray under the bridges. It was dawn, and I walked home alone along the river.

Robert assisted Madame Ratignolle back to the house, moving with that indolent solicitude which sat so easily upon him.

“She is not like the others,” he said, presently, speaking of Mrs. Pontellier.

“Who? Edna?”

“Yes; Mrs. Pontellier. She listens as if she heard something far away, and is trying to decide whether it calls to her.”

Madame Ratignolle laughed softly, not ill pleased by the fanciful turn of the remark, and pressed his arm a little because the sand was heavy under her feet.

Edna did not hear this. She had gone among the children under the awning, where Raoul was digging furiously with a broken spade. The sea kept up its restless calling, and once, when she turned toward it, the thought came to her that the meadow in Kentucky had never ended. It had merely changed color and sound.

At the noon dinner a yellow envelope was brought to her. It was from Mr. Pontellier. Business would detain him in the city over Sunday. She was not to expect him till later. He sent affection to the boys.

She read the message twice, then folded it and slipped it beneath her belt. There was no disappointment in her face; neither was there gladness. She only felt, with a slight start of wonder, that something had been loosened for a little space about her.

In the afternoon, when the others were sleeping or idling, she went down alone to the beach. The bathers had not yet gathered. The water was rough enough to seem alive, but not threatening. She put on her bathing dress slowly, and went out where the little waves broke about her knees, then her waist. A fear seized her, as it always did, but there came with it another sensation, keener and more imperious.

She struck out suddenly. For an instant she floundered, blinded and breathless. Then her body remembered some secret it had never learned. She made three strokes, perhaps four, and the shore moved away from her by the merest space. She stood upright, trembling, with the water streaming from her face and hair.

No one had seen. She looked about quickly, almost guiltily. The lady in black sat near the bath-house, her beads hanging motionless from her fingers.

“You are very brave, Madame Pontellier,” said the lady in black.

Edna colored. “No; I am very foolish.”

The lady’s eyes rested upon the water. “It is much the same thing sometimes.”

She said no more, and Edna went back to her bath-house with the secret beating in her like a hidden heart.

Later, on the gallery, Madame Ratignolle came to sit with her a while. She spoke of her children, of her limbs that still ached, of the heat, and finally of Robert.

“He said a curious thing of you this morning, ma chère. He said you listened as if you heard something far away, and were trying to decide whether it called to you.”

Edna laughed, but the laugh did not sound quite natural to herself.

“What nonsense Robert talks!”

“Yes,” said Adèle, smiling, “but sometimes his nonsense is pretty.”

That night, when the children were asleep and the house had grown still, Mrs. Pontellier sat alone upon the gallery of the cottage. The telegram lay on the table beside her. From the beach came the long murmur of the water. Robert’s remark, as Adèle had repeated it, would not leave her.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*27 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have had such a strange letter that I hardly know whether I am glad or sorry. It came this morning, foreign stamped and oddly directed, but plain enough after all. I send you a copy, for I know you will feel with me over it. Do not be alarmed, dear. The writer seems a respectable man, and writes courteously; only I cannot help wondering why Jonathan did not write himself.

“Here is the letter:--

“‘*Hotel König von Ungarn, Klausenburg.*

“‘*21 May.*

“‘Honoured Miss,--

“‘I take the liberty to write to you, as I find your honoured name and address in the papers of Mr. Jonathan Harker, solicitor, of Exeter, who has been for two days in my house. The gentleman is well, but much fatigued by travel and by business matters in the interior, and has begged that, should any letter be needed, I should say that he has been delayed unexpectedly upon affairs connected with his journey. He cannot at present fix the exact day of his departure, but trusts that within a little time he shall be able to proceed westward.

“‘Mr. Harker has been much occupied in arranging certain memoranda, and has asked particularly that no anxiety should be felt by his friends. He has gone out this afternoon with a gentleman who speaks English imperfectly, in order to see about railway communication and the forwarding of luggage. As he was pressed for time, and as the foreign post is irregular here, I write at once lest silence should cause uneasiness.

“‘I have the honour to remain, honoured Miss,

“‘Your obedient servant,

“‘FRANZ KLEIN,

“‘Proprietor.’”

“There, dear, you have it all, even to the strange turns of phrase. It is kind of him to write, and yet I wish Jonathan had written only one line with his own dear hand. I am ashamed to be nervous, for he said himself that he would be away longer than at first he expected, and business men must attend to business; but one grows foolish where one loves.

“How happy you must be! I read and re-read your last letter, and I cried over it and laughed over it, and kissed it, which was very silly. You know I think Arthur noble, and your happiness is as dear to me as my own. I long to see you both together. Give him my warmest congratulations when you may. I shall not tell any one your three proposals, though I am dying to tease you about them. Poor Dr. Seward! poor brave Mr. Morris! Yet they are better for loving you, dear, even though they suffer.

“I shall write to Mr. Klein to-night, and also to Mr. Hawkins, for perhaps he has had news. I will not be uneasy. There, I have written it down, and that is almost like making a promise.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--The dinner last night at Morris’s has done me good, though I write the words with a certain reluctance, as if pleasure were treachery. Holmwood came in radiant, and I think no man could see him and bear him malice. Morris met us with both hands out, and with that frank look of his which seems to clear the air. He had ordered a little dinner, simple but excellent, and such wine as I have rarely tasted outside a cellar with a history.

“At first we were constrained. Each of us knew what had happened, and each wished to spare the other two. It was Morris who solved the difficulty. He filled our glasses and said, with more tenderness than lightness, ‘Gentlemen, here’s to her; and here’s to the man she has made happy; and here’s to the men she has made honest.’ We drank standing. Holmwood’s hand shook, but his voice did not when he thanked us. Then the ice broke. We talked of old times, of Korea, of Quincey’s impossible adventures, of Art’s coming duties, and of my patients, though I took care to say little that was professional.

“After dinner Morris would have a fire, though the evening was mild, because, he said, a camp-fire was a state of mind and not a temperature. He made Holmwood sit in the great chair, and then accused him before me of being the most fortunate gentleman in Europe. Art took it well. He said very gravely that he knew it, and hoped God would make him worthy. This silenced us for a moment. Then Quincey struck his glass with a knife and declared that melancholy was bad manners after the second bottle.

“I walked home late, and found my house quiet. Work again to-day. Renfield has been singularly alert. He has kept a number of flies in a little paper box, which he guards with jealous care. I questioned him, but he showed irritation, and I did not press him. He knows more of the attendants’ movements than I like.

“Most curious incident. When I had turned to leave him, he said quite suddenly, and without any leading from me:--

“‘Doctor, is Miss Westenra happy?’

“I confess the question startled me. I asked him what he knew of Miss Westenra.

“He smiled, a sly, inward smile, and answered, ‘Nothing. I only asked if she was happy.’

“I said that, so far as I knew, she was very happy.

“He clapped his hands softly, not like a child, but with a satisfaction almost judicial. ‘Then she has chosen,’ he said. ‘Women choose. Men wait.’

“I could get no more from him. He returned to his flies, counting them with minute care. I must inquire whether any attendant has been gossiping in his hearing. The name should not have reached him from me. Mem., speak to Simmons and Hardy separately.

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*28 May.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“How vexing about poor Jonathan’s delay! But you must not be frightened, dear. Foreign people write so strangely that they always seem mysterious when they only mean to be civil. If Mr. Klein says Jonathan is well, then well he is; and if he is delayed by business, you must remember that this is his first important journey for Mr. Hawkins, and that he will be the prouder to come back when all is finished. I can preach very wisely, can I not? I dare say if Arthur were delayed in the next county I should imagine every post-boy in England had conspired against me.

“I told Arthur your congratulations. He looked so pleased, and said that Miss Murray had always been his ally, though he had never had the happiness of meeting her as often as he wished. He is to write to you himself when he has my permission; is it not grand to have a permission to give? Mamma is very pleased, though she cries a little when she talks of my leaving her some day. I am not to leave her yet, and Arthur is all consideration. He says that love which begins by making others unhappy is a poor thing. Was there ever any one so dear?

“I saw Dr. Seward yesterday for a few minutes. He was quite calm, and so kind that I could hardly bear it. He congratulated me as if he had never wished anything for himself. Mr. Morris sent a great bunch of flowers, and on the card he wrote, ‘From a friend who has found his place.’ Oh Mina, men are better than we deserve; and yet I suppose women are better than men know, or they would not care for us so much.

“You must tell me instantly when you hear again. I shall think of you every post-time. Keep up your heart, dear, and practise your shorthand, and remember that Jonathan is thinking of you, wherever his stupid trains and hotels may detain him.

“Your ever loving

“LUCY.”

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

“*29 May.*

“My dear Quincey,--

“I cannot let another day pass without thanking you for last night. You did the thing like yourself, and there is no higher praise. It might have been a bitter meeting, and you made it one which I shall remember while I live with gratitude and pride.

“I have written to Jack also. He bore himself splendidly. I had dreaded meeting him almost more than I dreaded anything in my life, for I knew his worth, and I knew what my own happiness had cost him. But he took my hand as frankly as ever, and if there was pain behind his eyes he kept it for himself. You too, old fellow, had your own hurt, and yet you jested us all into comradeship again. I am richer than I knew, in friends as well as in her.

“I went to see Lucy this morning. Mrs. Westenra was in the room part of the time, and Lucy was making tea with an air of domestic command which became her mightily. She asked after both of you, and spoke so sweetly that I could not answer for a moment. When Mrs. Westenra left us she put her hand in mine and said she hoped my friends would always be hers. I told her they were already devoted subjects, and that you had both pledged fealty over a bottle of your best. She laughed, and then looked grave, and begged me never to let anything come between us three. I promised her. I know you will help me keep that promise.

“My father is not so well to-day. I may have to go down to him shortly, but for the present he will not hear of my leaving town. Pray look in on Jack when you can. Work is his medicine, but too strong a dose of it may poison a man.

“Yours always,

“ARTHUR.”

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

“*30 May.*

“No direct news. Received foreign letter explaining delay. Do not be anxious. Will inform you instantly on hearing more.

“HAWKINS.”

*Miss Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*30 May.*--I begin this journal as I told Lucy I would, though I had meant to begin it when we were together, with sunshine and idle talk and practice in descriptions. It seems odd to write of oneself in shorthand and then copy it out, as if one were both interviewer and interviewed; but it steadies me.

Mr. Hawkins’s telegram came this morning. I went to school afterwards and heard lessons in geography and dictation, and marked copy-books, and all the while I saw the words “Do not be anxious” as plainly as if they had been written on the slate. Why do people say that? It is like saying, “Do not breathe,” when one is running. Yet I will not be unjust. Dear Mr. Hawkins is all kindness, and if he had thought there was anything wrong he would have said so, I believe.

I wrote to the Hotel König von Ungarn, asking Mr. Klein to beg Jonathan to write one line by the quickest post. I hope I did not show anxiety unbecomingly. I said that Mr. Harker’s friends were naturally eager for news after so long a journey. I also asked whether letters should still be addressed there. I shall post it myself, for then I shall know that much is done.

At dinner Mrs. Harker--I mean Mrs. Harker that is to be, for I wrote it by mistake and felt my face grow hot though no one saw--had a little private talk with herself and decided to be brave. Jonathan would laugh at me tenderly if he knew how I magnify delays. He would say, “Why, Mina, you are making a legal case out of a late train.” And then he would explain all the causes, and I should be ashamed and comforted.

I have put Mr. Klein’s letter in my work-box with Jonathan’s other letters. The foreign paper has a scent of tobacco and some spice I do not know. How far away he seems! Yet a letter can cross the distance, and he is under the same heaven. I shall say my prayers and sleep, if sleep will come.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*31 May.*--Renfield more excited. He has progressed from flies to spiders. The development is logical from his point of view, though revolting. There is method in the accumulation of life by successive devouring forms. I begin to discern a scheme, crude but consistent. He asks for sugar, not to eat, but to bait his flies. Refused him more than a small quantity.

I examined Simmons and Hardy. Both deny mentioning Miss Westenra. Hardy knew the name through the newspapers’ paragraph of the engagement; Simmons says he heard two nurses talking. This may explain it. Yet Renfield’s manner in asking was not that of a man repeating gossip. It had aim. When I casually introduced the name to-day, he became instantly guarded.

Said I, “You asked me yesterday about a lady, Renfield.”

He answered, “Did I, sir?”

“About Miss Westenra.”

“Ladies are not for men like me,” said he; “nor happiness neither, except what we can catch.” He then shut his mouth obstinately.

The phrase “what we can catch” is significant. His mind reduces all good to acquisition. Not affection, not duty, not service, but possession, incorporation. A selfish centre indeed. I must watch the transition. There may be danger when his desire passes from small things to larger.

I dined alone and worked late. No letter from Morris. I hope he is not gone off upon some mad expedition. Holmwood writes generously. It is strange how affection for one woman can knit three men together when it might, in meaner natures, have divided them.

*Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Miss Lucy Westenra.*

“*1 June.*

“My dear Miss Lucy,--

“Art has given me leave to write, and I take it kindly of him, for a man likes to say his say once in a way, even when the trail he is following belongs to another rider. I want you to know that our little dinner came off in fine style. There were three of us there, and only one heart worth drinking to, which made the arithmetic easy.

“Art behaved like the gentleman he is, and Jack like the gentleman he is, and I--well, I did my level best not to disgrace the company. We drank your health standing, and if good wishes were marketable you would be the richest lady in England. I told Art that if ever he failed in his duty to you he would have to answer to me and Jack; and he said, as steady as a church, that he counted on us to remind him of it. That was a good answer.

“I am not going to make a long letter, for long letters are traps in which a fellow catches more of himself than he meant to show. I only want to thank you for having dealt square with me. There is a kind of hurt that leaves a man cleaner, and I reckon mine is of that brand. When you and Art set up your camp, I ask leave to ride up now and then and sit by the fire. I shall bring no shadow with me if I can help it.

“Give my respectful duty to Mrs. Westenra, and believe me,

“Your faithful friend,

“QUINCEY P. MORRIS.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*2 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have had no answer yet, but it is too soon, and I am schooling myself to patience. Your letter was a comfort. I read it in the playground while the children were at drill, and it brought the town and you and Arthur quite close to me. I am so glad your three gentlemen are friends. It seems like a story, only better, because every one behaves nobly.

“I have written to Jonathan care of the hotel, not in shorthand this time, but in plain writing, lest any foreign post-office should be puzzled. I told him nothing of my fears, only all the little home news I could think of, even to the geranium on the schoolroom window which has put out three new buds. Men like to hear small things when they are far away, I think. It makes home real.

“Mr. Hawkins has written kindly. He says such delays are not uncommon when titles and conveyances have to be examined abroad, and that Jonathan is zealous enough to overwork himself rather than leave anything incomplete. That is true. I can see him bending over his papers with that little frown between his brows. Oh, Lucy, I love even the frown.

“I shall come to you as soon as my duties here can be arranged. Until then write often, if only a line. Your happiness helps me to be brave.

“Ever your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*3 June.*--A sharp scene with Renfield. He had concealed a number of spiders in a match-box, and one of the maids, finding them, raised an alarm. When deprived of them he became violent, then suddenly quiet. This alternation grows marked. He has the obedience of calculation, not submission.

In the afternoon, while I was making notes at the table, he said:--

“Doctor, would Miss Westenra give away what she had chosen?”

I answered with assumed indifference, “Why do you ask?”

“Because some keep, and some give. The best keep for one.”

“What should she keep?”

He laughed softly. “Her happiness,” said he. “It is meat and drink to them as have none.”

There again: the name, and connected always with choice and happiness. The explanation may be the newspaper paragraph acting upon a mind absorbed in acquisition. Yet why this lady rather than another? Perhaps because he heard her name in association with myself, and some obscure jealousy or curiosity was stirred. I must be more guarded in my own speech. The phonograph is a good confessor, but a poor counsellor.

*Letter, Franz Klein to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Hotel König von Ungarn, Klausenburg.*

“*4 June.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“I have received your letter of the 30th ultimo, and hasten to reply. Mr. Jonathan Harker is no longer in my house. He returned late on the evening of the 21st, after my former letter had gone to the post, and appeared more wearied than before, but quite collected in speech. He asked for the earliest train westward, and was advised to rest until morning. On the next day he left, having paid his account and given instructions that any letters arriving should be forwarded.

“He did not leave a forwarding address with sufficient clearness. He spoke of Buda-Pesth, and also of Vienna, but I could not certainly understand which was his first destination. His luggage was small, and one portmanteau, expected by diligence, had not arrived when he departed. Should it come, I shall retain it until I hear from him or from you.

“I regret much that I cannot give better information. The gentleman was courteous and anxious not to trouble any one. He said more than once that his friends must not be alarmed by irregular correspondence. I therefore believed I was fulfilling his wish in writing to you.

“I remain, honoured Miss,

“Your obedient servant,

“FRANZ KLEIN.”

*Miss Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*8 June.*--Mr. Klein’s second letter has come. Jonathan has left Klausenburg. This ought to comfort me, and yet I am more restless than before, because now there is no place to which I can write with certainty. Buda-Pesth or Vienna! The names look grand in print, but to me they are only two doors, both shut.

I took the letter to Mr. Hawkins. He read it twice, very slowly, and then walked to the window. When he turned round he was cheerful, but I could see that the cheerfulness was made for me. He said, “My dear, our boy is a capable fellow. If he has gone on, he has gone on for good reason. We shall have a wire from him before many days.” Then he patted my hand and told me to leave the inquiries to him. Dear old man! He looked tired after I left, and I fear I have troubled him.

I have written to the British Consul at Buda-Pesth and to the post restante at Vienna. It seemed bold to do it, but in shorthand practice one learns that exactness saves time, and perhaps in life it is the same. I enclosed descriptions, but it hurt me to describe Jonathan as if he were a missing parcel. “Tall, young, fair, clean-shaven, except small moustache”--how cold words are when they stand for the dearest face in the world!

No more to-night. I must keep my courage for use, not waste it in writing.

*Telegram, British Consulate, Buda-Pesth, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*10 June.*

“Harker arrived fevered. Under care of Sisters of St. Joseph. Sends no letters. Condition serious but hopeful.”