The Chapters

When Mary woke, the train had stopped, and the carriage was full of a gray light she did not recognise. Mrs. Medlock was already on her feet, pulling on her gloves and shaking out the purple folds of her skirt, and the velvet flowers on her bonnet trembled as though they had been waiting all the journey to be useful.

"Come along," she said. "Look sharp, and don't dawdle on the platform."

Mary got down. The air was cold and wet and smelt of coal smoke, and under the smoke was something sharper, green and bitter, that she had never smelt before. Above the station roof there was nothing but sky, very wide and very low. The rain had stopped for the moment, but everything dripped.

She had expected a crowd of porters and a great many people in a hurry, as there had been in London. The platform was almost empty. A few men with carts were loading sacks at the far end, and a dog was sniffing along the rails. Standing a little apart, beside a closed carriage with two dark horses in the traces, was a man.

He was not tall. He wore a long coat of dark cloth with the collar turned up, and he held himself very stiffly, one shoulder higher than the other, so that even standing still he looked as if he were bracing himself against a wind. He did not come forward. He only looked at her. Mary had been stared at a great deal, by people who wished to be polite and by people who did not, and she found that she did not know what to make of this look at all. It was not kind and it was not unkind. It was the look of someone who had been told to expect a parcel and had found that it had arrived.

"This is the child," said Mrs. Medlock, as if it needed saying.

"Yes," said Mr. Archibald Craven.

That was all. He turned, the carriage door was opened by a driver in a caped coat, and Mary was handed in after Mrs. Medlock while her small trunk was strapped somewhere behind. Her uncle got in last and sat opposite her with his back to the horses. He did not look at her again and he did not speak. Mary had been prepared to dislike him, and she was surprised to find that she could not decide whether she was glad of the silence or angry at it.

They left the town and the houses fell away, and then there were no houses at all. The road climbed up and up over a country she could not see. Through the little window she could make out nothing but a grayness that seemed to go on forever on either side, a line of low stone wall now and then, and once a single light far off that went out as they passed it. The evening was coming on. Mrs. Medlock had lit the carriage lamp, and its yellow glow turned the windows into mirrors, so that Mary saw her own sallow face and her uncle's pale profile side by side in the glass. She turned her eyes away from both.

"Moor," said Mrs. Medlock, nodding at the window, as if Mary had asked. "That's the moor. You'll see it in daylight, if you're lucky. It's no great shakes to look at."

Mary did not answer. She was thinking that it was just as dreary as she had supposed, and she was determined not to say so.

The carriage had been climbing for what seemed a long time when it stopped so suddenly that Mrs. Medlock was thrown against the cushions with an exclamation. There were voices outside, and the horses snorted and stamped. Mr. Craven leaned forward and let down the window on his side, and the cold came in like water.

"What is it?" he said. It was the first thing he had said in an hour.

"Summat in the road, sir," the driver called back. "Looks like a great bough come down. Or it's sheep. Can't tell in this light."

Her uncle said nothing. He opened the carriage door and got out, and after a moment a lantern swung away into the dark and she heard his voice, low, speaking to the driver. Mrs. Medlock tutted and settled her bonnet. The horses stamped again.

Mary did not stop to think about it. She opened the door on her own side and got down.

The wind met her at once. It was not like the hot breath of India, which pressed on everything like a hand. This wind came from nowhere and went everywhere, and it cut through her thin black frock and dragged at her hair until it stung her eyes. For a moment she could see nothing. Then she saw that the sky was not black, as she had thought, but a deep blue-gray full of pale clouds racing very fast, and a little light came through them from somewhere, enough to show her the land.

It went on and on. There was no wall anywhere, and no tree, and no house. There was only a great rolling emptiness covered in something low and dark that rustled and bent under the wind. It rose in long swells to the edge of the sky, and beyond the nearest rise there was nothing whatever. It was so large that it made her feel very small indeed, and she did not like it. And yet she stood still and looked, because she had never in her life been anywhere with so much room and so few people in it. Her breath came fast. The sharp green smell was stronger here, and under it was something like damp earth.

She counted to thirty, and then to sixty. Nobody called to her. Nobody seemed to have noticed that she was gone.

Then the lantern came back toward the horses, and her uncle's voice said, quite shortly, "Get in, child. You'll take cold."

She got in. To her annoyance she found that she was shaking, and she folded her hands tightly in her lap so that no one would see. Mr. Craven climbed in after her and drew the door to. The carriage lurched forward. He did not say anything about where she had been.

It was very late when they reached Misselthwaite. Mary knew this only because Mrs. Medlock said so, in a tone which suggested it was somebody's fault. A few windows glowed in a great dark mass that rose against the sky, and the driver swung the horses round into a courtyard where the wheels rang on stones. A man came out with a lantern and a dog. Her uncle got down without a word and went away into the house by another door, and his stooped shape was swallowed by the shadows almost at once.

Mrs. Medlock led her through a heavy door, up a broad stair and along a passage where their footsteps echoed, and at the end of it into a small room with a fire burning low. A tray had been set on the table. There was bread, and cold meat, and a jug of milk, and a dish of something under a cover that had been kept warm.

"Your supper," said Mrs. Medlock. "Sit and eat it."

A manservant came in with a second dish, a broad, red-faced young man with large hands and a cap he had forgotten to take off. He set the dish down, straightened, and looked at Mary as though she were something he had been sent to fetch.

"Aye, there's thi tea, miss," he said. "Ah've brought t'pie up hot, an' ye'll find t'milk's still warm. Ye'll want to eat it while it's bi' hot, like."

Mary stared at him. She had understood the words "tea," "pie" and "milk," and that was all.

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

The young man looked surprised. Then he grinned, and that made her angrier than anything had yet. "Nay, ye'll learn," he said cheerfully. "Ah'll say it slower, if ye like. Eat yer pie."

"I cannot understand one word you are saying," said Mary, very distinctly, so that there could be no mistake. "You talk in a queer way. I shall not know what you mean unless you speak properly."

Mrs. Medlock made a noise like a snort. "That'll do, Thomas. Off with you." The young man touched his cap and went, still grinning, and Mrs. Medlock looked at Mary sideways. "Folk talk different up here," she said. "You'll get used to it, or you won't. It's nowt to make a fuss about."

Mary ate her supper because she was too hungry not to, and she did not say that the pie was good, because she did not intend to. When she had finished, Mrs. Medlock took her along the passage to a room at the end of it. It was cold, with a window that rattled a little in its frame, and a fire in the grate that gave out more smoke than warmth. Mrs. Medlock turned down the bedclothes, looked at them as if they were a personal disappointment, and said that Mary was to go to sleep at once and not to get up in the morning until she was called.

"Will anyone call me?" asked Mary.

"Somebody will," said Mrs. Medlock. "Get into bed."

Mary got in. Mrs. Medlock took up the candle and went to the door, and then she turned and held the light so that it fell over the bed, and looked at the small plain face on the pillow for a moment without speaking. Then she went out and drew the door shut, and her footsteps went away along the passage, and the light went with them.

Mary was alone in the dark.

For a long time she lay still and listened to nothing but the rattle of the window and the hiss of the wind outside. The sheets were cold and smelt of lavender and damp, and the room was so black that she could not see her own hand when she held it up. She thought about India, and the heat, and her Ayah's cool fingers on her forehead. She did not think about her mother. She thought about the hunchback, and how he had not looked at her once, and how he had gone away into the house without a word, as though she were a parcel that had been delivered and signed for.

Then she heard it.

It was very faint at first, so faint that she thought it must be the wind after all. It came from somewhere above her and far off, through the thick walls, a low and uneven sound, like something being dragged slowly over a bare floor. It stopped. It began again. Then came a soft heavy thud, as if something had been set down, and after that a thin, rustling, scraping sound that went on and on and then ceased all at once.

Mary sat up in bed with her heart thumping.

"Mrs. Medlock," she called, in a voice that was sharper than she meant it to be.

There were quick footsteps in the passage, and the door opened, and the candle came back with the purple bulk of the housekeeper behind it. "What is it now?"

"There is a noise," said Mary. "Somewhere in the house. Listen."

They both listened. The window rattled. The fire settled in the grate with a small sigh. For a moment there was nothing else at all.

"It's the wind," said Mrs. Medlock flatly. "This old house makes all manner of noises when the wind's in this quarter. You'll hear worse before you've done. Lie down and go to sleep." She looked at Mary for a moment longer, then went out with the candle and shut the door, and the dark closed over the room again.

Mary lay down. She pulled the blankets up to her chin and stared into the blackness where the ceiling must be. The wind rose and the window rattled, and for a while the sound was lost in it. Then, when the gust had passed, it came again, and this time she was almost certain that it was not the wind at all. The wind did not drag things across floors. The wind did not set them down.

She thought of Mrs. Medlock's face in the candlelight, and the quick way she had said "It's the wind," as though it were a thing she had been told to say. She thought of how she had been told a great many things in her life that were not true, and of how nobody had ever troubled to tell her anything she could believe.

She would not get up tonight. She would wait until the house was quiet and the candle was far away, and then she would find out for herself what the sound was.

I put my arm around her and she settled against my shoulder with her eyes shut. The cab went down the steep Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève and out onto the boulevard. The driver had heard me give the Parc Montsouris, and he turned his head to see what we wanted.

“Not the park,” Brett said, without opening her eyes. “Tell him Montmartre.”

“Which part?”

“The Pigalle. The little place at the top of the Rue Fontaine. They know us there.”

“It’s a long way.”

“I know it’s a long way. I’m not getting out of this cab until I’ve had a drink that doesn’t taste of somebody’s hair oil.”

I told the driver. He said “Bien” without enthusiasm and slid the window shut. We went up the Boulevard Saint Michel and across the river and up through the lighted streets past the Opéra, where the cafés were emptying and a few women stood in the doorways under the electric lights and watched the cab go by. Brett did not talk. Once she put her hand on my knee and left it there, and then she took it away and lit a cigarette and looked out at the dark buildings. The cab labored up the Rue Lafayette in second gear. The streets narrowed and the air got cooler, and at the top of the hill the lamps were fewer and the shutters were down over most of the windows.

The place was a small bar at the corner of the Rue Fontaine, with a piano in the back room and a zinc counter still wet from the evening. The pianist was playing something from a musical comedy, slowly, with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip. Nobody was listening to him except the barman.

“Scotch,” Brett said. “Two. And don’t be mean with the soda, Eugène.”

She drank hers standing up, all of it, and put the glass down on the zinc very carefully, as though it might go off.

“I met a man last week,” she said.

“Did you?”

“At the Crillon, in the bar. He’s an American, from Cleveland or somewhere, and he has pots of money. He keeps a yacht at Cannes that he never goes near. He has the most ghastly teeth, and he’s been frightfully decent.”

“What’s his name?”

“Stroud. Edward Stroud.”

“I never heard of him.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. He doesn’t go about with newspapermen. He thinks you’re all dreadfully vulgar.”

“Is he?”

“He’s rather sweet when he’s had a few. He cries in taxis.” She turned her glass on the zinc and looked at the ring it had left. “He wants me to go to Cannes with him in August.”

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know. Would you want me to?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“No, it isn’t, is it?” She laughed, and there was not much in it. “You’re very correct tonight, Jake. Where’s your fiancée?”

“Having a success, I should think.”

“Poor girl.”

The barman brought two more. The pianist went into something slower, and a man at the far end of the bar with a yellow scarf put his head down on his arms. Brett looked at the mirror behind the bottles, where the two of us were reflected small and grey, and she did not look at me.

I thought about the envelope, and about the fifty francs in it, and about the patronne with her hand out for the next customer.

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

“What on earth for?”

“I left fifty francs with the patronne. In an envelope. For the girl.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I know.”

“Is it worth it?”

“No.”

“Then why go?”

“I don’t know. I’d rather go and get it than sit here.”

She looked at me then, for the first time since we had come in. Her face was tired under the make-up and her mouth was not quite steady.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Go and get your fifty francs.”

“You’ll be here?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

I went out to the street and found a cab on the corner. The driver was cross about it. He had to go back down the hill and across the whole of Paris for a fare that would take him nowhere, and he said so at length. I gave him a franc over the fare, and he stopped complaining and drove very fast.

The Bal was nearly empty when I came in. The lights were up full and the benches had been pushed back against the walls. The accordion was silent. The proprietor sat on his high stool beside the dancing-floor with his feet up on the rung, the string of bells still on one ankle, and he was asleep. The policeman was gone from the door. The wife of the proprietor was behind the zinc, counting something on the counter, and she looked up when I came in and her face changed.

“Ah, Monsieur. You have come back.”

“For an envelope.”

“Mademoiselle has been waiting for you. She says you are a liar.” She went to a drawer under the bar and came out with my envelope, unopened, and gave it to me. “She has not asked for it. You see, she did not ask.”

Georgette was at one of the long tables near the back. She sat alone with a glass of something yellow in front of her and her hat on the bench beside her, and she had her chin in one hand. She saw me come across the room and did not get up.

“You went away,” she said.

“I came back.”

“Why?”

I held up the envelope.

She looked at it for a while. “That is for me?”

“It was for you if you asked for it.”

“I did not ask.”

“No.”

“You are a funny one, Jacob.”

“Where are the others?”

“Gone. The tall one said he would come back, and the blond one said he would come back too. Nobody comes back.” She drank what was in the glass. “They are very nice, all of them. They pay for the drinks.”

I sat down across from her and opened the envelope, and took out the fifty-franc note and put it on the table between us, and then I folded the empty envelope and put it in my pocket.

“There’s your taxi,” I said.

“That is a lot of money for a taxi.”

“It’s the most I’ve got.”

She laughed then, and showed all the bad teeth, and she reached out and took the note and folded it into her bag without looking at it.

“You are not a bad type,” she said. “I told you that.”

“You did.”

“Good-bye, Jacob.”

“Good-bye, Georgette.”

“Hobin,” she said. “My name is Hobin.”

I went out into the street. The air was cool now, and the sky over the roofs of the Pantheon quarter had begun to lose the colour of the night. I found a cab at the Place and gave the driver the Pigalle, and he did not say anything about it at all.

Brett was still at the bar. The pianist had gone and the room was empty except for the barman, who was wiping glasses, and the man in the yellow scarf, who was asleep. Brett had her back to the door. She turned when she heard me and did not seem surprised.

“You came back,” she said.

“I said I would.”

“You said you wouldn’t, if I remember.”

“Did I?”

“Give the chap another brandy, Eugène. And one for Jake, who has been to see a girl about some money.”

We sat there until the windows went grey. The barman put the chairs up on the tables one at a time and then gave up and came and sat at the end of the bar and smoked. Brett talked a little about Cannes and the yacht, and a little about a house in Biarritz that belonged to a woman she had known at school, and a little about nothing at all. I did not say much. Once she started to say something, and stopped, and looked at her hands on the zinc, and I waited, and she said it was nothing. I think it was nothing she could say.

When the light came up grey and cold through the shutters, she put on her hat in the mirror, turning it slightly, and then she said she had had enough of Montmartre.

“I’ll go home now,” she said.

We walked down the hill to the rank at the Place Blanche. The market carts were already coming in from the country, big horses steaming in the cold, and their drivers were asleep on the sacks. A single taxi stood under the trees with its engine running. I opened the door for her, and she got in and sat in the corner and looked up at me.

“Will you see him?” I asked.

“Stroud? I expect so. Probably at lunch.”

“Good.”

“Will you see Georgette?”

“Hobin,” I said. “No.”

She laughed, and it was a real laugh this time, and for a second she looked like herself. “Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Brett.”

She put her hand out through the window and touched my face once, lightly, and then the window went up and the taxi moved off down the hill. I stood on the pavement and watched it turn at the bottom of the slope and go out of sight toward the Boulevard.

I was jealous of Edward Stroud, whom I had never seen, and I was in love with her.

I stood there for a while. Then I turned and walked down through the Place Pigalle, where the shutters were coming down on the last of the bars and a street-cleaner was working along the gutter with his hose, and I went down the Boulevard de Clichy and across to the Rue Lafayette and so to the Opéra. The street was empty and the shopfronts were dark. The clocks in the window of the *Herald* were all showing different times, and I looked at them without knowing which one was right.

I went on down the Rue de Rivoli under the arcades, past the shut shops and the bakers with their lights on, and through the gate into the Tuileries. The gravel was wet and the trees were dripping and there was nobody in the gardens but a man sweeping leaves into a pile. I crossed the bridge and came out on the quai. The sky over the Left Bank had gone from grey to pale yellow, and the river was high and brown and moving fast under the arches. Along the wall the bookstalls were shut and chained, and the green boxes were locked, and the lamps were going out one at a time as the light came up.

A barge came down under the Pont Royal with a man in a knitted cap steering it and a dog asleep on the coal. The man lifted one hand to me, and I lifted mine.

I walked along the river toward home. I did not hurry.

It was not in Eve's nature to keep what did not belong to her, and she had no doubt at all that the umbrella belonged to somebody else. It had been put into her hands by a stranger in a hurry, and the least she could do was see that it found its way home. She had no idea who the stranger was, beyond that he was tall and thin and wore a monocle, which narrowed the field only to about half the men in London.

So, at a quarter to twelve, she walked back up Dover Street, under a sky that had cleared to a watery and uncommitted blue, and stopped before the gloomy building into which he had vanished. A porter in a long frock-coat, who had clearly seen a great many things in his time and been surprised by very few of them, came out to meet her on the steps.

"I think this must be yours, sir," said Eve, which was not quite accurate, but she could hardly have explained.

"Madam," said the porter, with a glance at the umbrella and the faint softening of a man who has seen a pretty girl in a remarkable hat, "you will be wishing to leave a message?"

"Yes, please."

She had come prepared. On the back of an envelope she had written a few lines, and she now added a last sentence in pencil and handed the envelope to him with the umbrella.

"It is for the gentleman who lent it me. He ran off before I could thank him."

"Very good, madam. I will see that it reaches the proper owner."

The envelope was sealed, and Eve, who would have been annoyed to learn that she had signed herself with the first thing that came into her head, went down the steps feeling that a debt of honour had been honourably discharged. She had not given her name. It had not occurred to her that a gentleman who had lent a stranger an umbrella might be interested in it.

* * * * *

Psmith was in the smoking-room, reading the Morning Post with the detached interest of a man who has nothing particular to do before lunch, when the porter came in and stood at his elbow with the air of one bringing news of a death in the family.

"Mr. Walderwick, sir, asked me to say he would be obliged if you would step into the hall."

"Mr. Walderwick," said Psmith, laying down his paper, "is a man of unexampled good sense. I will step."

The Honourable Mr. Walderwick was waiting in the hall, and in his hand, furled and dripping slightly onto the linoleum, was the umbrella. He had the look of a man who has been obliged to think, and who does not enjoy it.

"Look here," he said, "this umbrella was left with the porter a few minutes ago, by some girl. She wouldn't give her name. She had a note for me." He pulled out the envelope and read from it with an air of deep suspicion. "'Dear Sir, you lent me this in Dover Street yesterday, when it was raining and I had no other means of keeping dry. I return it with my grateful thanks to the gentleman with the monocle, who vanished before I could give them.' And there's a postscript. 'I suspect he is a member of your club, as he went into it.'" Mr. Walderwick looked up. "Gentleman with the monocle! There are about thirty of you in this building. Did you take my umbrella yesterday?"

Psmith put up his monocle and regarded the umbrella with the tender gravity of a connoisseur examining a Old Master. He said nothing.

"Well?"

"Walderwick," said Psmith at length, "I have been studying that umbrella since half past ten yesterday morning. I have formed the highest opinion of it. I should like to buy it."

"Buy it? You've got an umbrella of your own."

"Not one that I would care to be seen with."

"What on earth would you give for it?"

Psmith considered this with a judicial air. "Twenty pounds."

Mr. Walderwick's mouth opened and remained open for some seconds. "Twenty pounds! The thing's a seven-and-sixpenny job from a shop in the Strand."

"Then you will be making a handsome profit," said Psmith. "Shall we say thirty?"

"You're mad."

"Quite possibly. It is a question on which the medical profession would be the best judges. Thirty pounds?"

Mr. Walderwick, who was not a man to refuse thirty pounds for anything, however absurd the reason, struggled visibly with his bewilderment and his greed and found that greed, on this occasion, had the advantage. Psmith took a folded wad of notes from his breast-pocket, counted out the sum with deliberate precision, and received the umbrella in exchange.

"Thank you," said Psmith. "You have been most helpful."

"But what the devil is it all about?"

Psmith had already turned toward the smoking-room. He paused on the threshold, looked back with an expression of grave and unfathomable friendliness, and said, "I am sure that some day you will understand. Good morning."

* * * * *

Eve, meanwhile, had found the afternoon less accommodating than the morning. The sun, having made its one attempt, had withdrawn again, and she stood on the kerb at the corner of Piccadilly, with her interview at half past three in Half Moon Street and not a cab in sight, feeling that London had been unfair to her for quite long enough.

A tall figure came along the pavement toward her, moving with the unhurried gait of a man who had never in his life been late for anything. He saw her, stopped, and raised his hat.

"Good afternoon," he said. "I fear you are finding the traffic unsympathetic."

"I'm finding everything unsympathetic," said Eve. And then she looked more closely at the monocle, and her eyes widened. "You!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're the man who gave me the umbrella."

Psmith looked mildly distressed, as though she had accused him of stealing spoons. "Umbrellas are lent in London with the utmost freedom," he said. "I could not undertake to remember every one."

"You remember this one. You went straight across the road into the Drones Club."

"Dover Street," said Psmith, with the air of one considering a pleasant thoroughfare, "is a very agreeable street. I pass through it frequently."

"I returned the umbrella this morning. I left a note with your porter."

"I have no doubt the owner was delighted."

"The porter told me it belonged to a Mr. Walderwick."

"A most reliable man, the porter. Nothing escapes him."

Eve laughed in spite of herself. "You aren't going to admit it, are you?"

"I could not dream of it," said Psmith gravely. "Such a confession would be most unbecoming in a man of my years. Ah." He lifted an arm, and a taxi, which had been approaching at its own speed, swerved to the kerb as though it had been summoned by some ancient and irresistible authority. "Your cab."

"Thank you. You must be very used to being obeyed."

"By taxi-drivers, only. Women I have found less tractable." He opened the door for her with a bow. "I hope your interview goes well. You will forgive me for saying that you look far too well dressed for it."

"That," said Eve, climbing in, "is the nicest thing anybody has said to me all week, and I'm not sure it was meant as a compliment."

"It was meant as an observation," said Psmith. "I have always been a poor hand at compliments."

The cab drew away. Neither of them had thought to mention a name, which, Psmith reflected as he watched it go, was either a pity or a mercy, according to how one chose to regard it.

* * * * *

The rooms in Half Moon Street were on the second floor of a private hotel that had seen better days and had decided, on the whole, to make the best of the present ones. Mr. Rupert Baxter received her in a small sitting-room which had been converted, with some severity, into an office. Papers lay in exact piles upon the table. A pen had been set at precisely the angle of a ruler. Mr. Baxter himself, a sharp, neat young man with an air of constant disappointment at the state of the world, looked at her as a conscientious sentry looks at a stranger approaching the gate.

"Sit down, Miss Halliday. You are punctual, I observe. That is a point in your favour."

Eve sat down. She was feeling rather pleased with herself for having arrived at all, and she had composed herself into what she hoped was an attitude of efficient and serious interest. Mr. Baxter took up a sheet of paper.

"You have, I understand, some experience of cataloguing?"

"A little," said Eve. "I catalogued the books at a rather dreadful school library once, and then I catalogued my father's books, which were in worse order still, and then I had the most frightful row with the vicar about the parish registers."

"The parish registers are not in question. Kindly tell me how you would classify a folio of early sermons, of which the title-page is missing and the binding is detached."

Eve, who had never classified anything in her life, thought hard. She had a vague memory that the answer had something to do with the date, and another, rather stronger, that the people who invented these systems had been men with nothing better to do. "I should look at the paper," she said at last, "and then I should look at the printer's mark, and then I should decide whether the wretched thing was worth the trouble at all. Frankly, Mr. Baxter, I should probably classify it under 'Sermons, Dull,' and be done with it."

Mr. Baxter's face closed like a door. He made a note.

She had not meant to be flippant, and she tried to retrieve herself by leaning forward eagerly, in the manner of a girl who is genuinely interested in books. The movement was a mistake. The soft satin hat, which had survived the rain and the morning without complaint, was not designed for eagerness. The bird of paradise feather, which had been held in place for some time by hope and a good deal of hairpin, came loose, drifted down through the warm air of the room, and settled with great precision upon the sheet of paper Mr. Baxter had been about to write on.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Mr. Baxter removed the feather between two fingers, as though it were a dead insect found in the soup, and laid it on the corner of the table.

"Miss Halliday," he said, in the voice of a man who has been patient for several minutes and is no longer certain he can continue to be, "his lordship's library is a place of serious study. It is not a music-hall. I must ask you to remove your plumage before you enter it, since books and feathers are natural enemies. The dust alone is most injurious."

"I'll leave it on the hat-stand," said Eve meekly, and then, because the whole thing was so absurd, she could not help adding, "It's been a very feathery day, I'm afraid. I seem to be losing things all over London."

"I have no time for levity." Mr. Baxter tapped the table with his pen. "I shall lay your application before his lordship. I will not conceal from you that your manner this afternoon has given me some concern. However, his lordship has expressed a wish for the library to be put in order, and I am not in a position to refuse an applicant with a reasonable degree of knowledge merely because she has been unfortunate in her method of expressing it. You will hear from me."

"Thank you, Mr. Baxter," said Eve, and found, rather to her surprise, that she meant it. She picked up the feather, held it between two fingers in imitation of him, and deposited it in her handbag. "I'll try to be duller next time."

Mr. Baxter did not smile. But he did, after a moment, make another note, and Eve, going down the dingy staircase into Half Moon Street, decided that the note had not been a bad one.

* * * * *

The smoking-room of the Drones was empty but for Psmith when the evening came on, and the lamps had been lit, and the club had settled into its customary calm. He sat in the deep leather chair by the window, with the umbrella leaning against his knee, examining it from time to time with an expression of quiet contentment.

Mike Jackson came in at half past seven, looking hot and rather harassed, as a man does who has been looking for work all day and has been unsuccessful in the usual way.

"Comrade Psmith," he said, dropping into the chair opposite. "You are a sight for sore eyes. I've been in the most ghastly series of offices, and every one of them wanted to know whether I'd ever done anything useful. What the devil are you doing with that?"

"An umbrella," said Psmith. "A most distinguished one. I bought it this morning for thirty pounds."

"Thirty pounds! For an umbrella?"

"It is a question of its associations," said Psmith. "Tell me, how is Phyllis?"

"Oh, Phyl's all right. She's had tea with an old school friend, a girl called Eve Halliday. You'd have liked her, I think. She was the tallest girl in Wayland House and always in trouble for it. She's absolutely broke, poor thing. Her father used to write articles against the clock, apparently, and now she's trying to earn her keep. Phyl says she's got the job of cataloguing some library in Shropshire, a castle or something, and she's made to go round there and be interviewed by some dreadful secretary johnny, who I gather is a sort of human filing cabinet." Mike paused and looked at his friend with mild curiosity. "Why? You've gone very quiet."

"Halliday," said Psmith.

"Eve Halliday. Yes. Why?"

"I was merely wondering," said Psmith, "whether she had a hat."

Mike stared at him. "How the devil should I know? Phyl says she wears the most astonishing things, though. She told me Eve had come to tea in a hat she couldn't possibly afford, with a feather on it the size of a turkey. Why on earth do you want to know?"

But Psmith had leaned back in his chair, and was looking out of the window toward the lamplit street and the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, folded now and dark against the evening sky. He did not answer. He reached out instead and laid one long hand upon the handle of the umbrella, with the air of a man who has come into a valuable and unexpected inheritance.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith softly, to nobody in particular.

Lady Russell came early, and she came with a plan. She had given the matter several days' reflection and had brought her conclusions to Kellynch folded small in her reticule, as a lady carries a thing she means to produce at the proper moment. Anne saw the carriage come up the avenue from the window of the breakfast-room, where she had been sitting with a book she had not turned a page of since the post came in, and she went out to meet her friend in the hall, because it seemed that nobody else would.

“My dear Anne,” said Lady Russell, kissing her cheek, “you look fatigued. Is your father within?”

“He is in the library, ma’am, with the Baronetage.”

“Then we must hope he has reached the end of the Stevensons, and will be in a humour to listen.”

Sir Walter, however, was in a humour to be pleased by any visitor who came to him with a face of respect, and he received Lady Russell with the warmest civility, handed her to the chair nearest the fire though the day was warm, and inquired, before any other subject could be introduced, whether she had seen the new carriage-lamps at Mr Shepherd’s, which he had heard were very handsome. Lady Russell, who had not, and who had no wish to speak of carriage-lamps, let the question pass, and waited until Anne had taken her seat at the far end of the room, with her work, before she unfolded her paper.

“I have put down a few things,” said she, “which I think might be done without any sensible loss of consequence to yourself or to Elizabeth. I have considered them very carefully, Sir Walter, and I believe that most of them would hardly be noticed beyond this house.”

“Let us hear them,” said Sir Walter, with the air of a man who would be generous enough to hear anything.

“The London visit, first. I know how much you value it, and how much Elizabeth does; but if it were suspended for one year only, the saving would be very considerable, and the neighbourhood would not suppose you less a man of fashion for having passed one spring at home. Next, the second carriage. You have the chaise and the barouche, and the barouche is seldom used but when you go to the assemblies at Taunton, which are not many. The greys might go with it. Then the stables might be reduced by half, the upper footman dismissed, since the house is so quiet, and the second gardener’s boy. I have also thought that the two greenhouses might be left unheated through the winter, and that the wine-cellar might be made to last rather longer than it does.”

She paused, and looked up over her spectacles.

Sir Walter had listened with an expression that grew more wounded with every item, until, at the mention of the footman, he rose from his chair and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to the room.

“Lady Russell,” said he at last, turning round, “you are very kind, and I do not doubt very sensible. But you propose that the Elliots of Kellynch should be seen going about the county in a single carriage, with one man behind it, and that my own table should be served by a cook and two girls. I must suppose you would have me appear before the gentlemen of Somerset as a man in difficulties.”

“I would have you appear as a man who has put his affairs in order.”

“My affairs are in order. They are only a little disarranged by the pressure of other people’s bills, which is a very different thing, and which no footman in the world could set right.” He took his seat again, and smoothed his coat. “No. I cannot consent to any of it. I will not give up the London visit, I will not part with the greys, and I will not have it said in this neighbourhood that the Kellynch servants are reduced to a boy and a girl because Sir Walter Elliot could not keep his carriage. You must think of something else.”

Lady Russell folded her paper again, with a patience that Anne admired and had seldom seen tried so little. “Then I must leave the rest to Mr Shepherd,” said she, “who will, I daresay, be able to suggest what I have not.”

Mr Shepherd came at noon. He was a neat, careful man, who had served the Elliots for a great many years and had learned, in that time, to lay his opinions before Sir Walter in such a way that they could be taken for Sir Walter’s own. He bowed to the ladies, admired the room, and was then shewn into the library, where he remained for above an hour; and when Anne passed the door on her way up to her own room, she heard her father’s voice raised once, and then the agent’s, soft and reasonable, going on.

Mr Shepherd’s plan, when it came out, was chiefly concerned with the woods. A portion of the timber on the eastern side of the park was mature, he said, and would fetch a very good price; the mortgages might be called in at the lower rate, now that money stood so easy; and the rents on the two farms whose leases were soon to fall in might be raised a little, without any hardship, to what the land would fairly bear.

“You propose I sell timber from the Kellynch woods,” said Sir Walter, “which my grandfather planted, and which have stood in that park since before the Revolution. I will not have it, Mr Shepherd. Nor the farms, nor the mortgages in any manner that would give the lender the advantage over me. You must find me a remedy that does not require me to sell my name.”

“Sir Walter, I hope I have never—”

“I am sure you have not. Nor can I think you would be so ill advised as to mention anything of the kind again.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and was silent for a moment, as a man is who has come to the end of his own list and means to produce the one item he had hoped to keep back. Then he said, in a voice a little lower than before, “There is one resource, Sir Walter, which I have hesitated to name, because I know how much you feel the attachment of the family to the Hall. But the house is a noble one, and the grounds are very fine, and in the present state of the country there are gentlemen of large fortune, who would be glad to take it for a term of years, and would pay a rent that would make a very considerable difference to your—”

“A tenant,” said Sir Walter.

“A tenant, Sir Walter, I believe, would answer very well—”

“Mr Shepherd, you will oblige me by never using that word again in my hearing. I have been called on to bear a great deal this summer, and I will bear a great deal more before I hear of strangers walking through the rooms my wife furnished. Kellynch Hall is not to be let. It is not to be let to a tenant, to a gentleman, or to any other person. We will hear of anything else.”

It was at this point that Anne, who had said nothing all morning, found that she had been looking at her father with a kind of attention she did not usually give him, and that she was not at all surprised by what she had seen. Elizabeth had turned very pale, and then very red. Lady Russell, who had been sitting quietly in her chair, closed her eyes for a moment, as though a particular sound had been unpleasant to her.

Sir Walter, having finished, looked round the room and said, with great dignity, “Mr Shepherd, you will dine with us. We are none of us in a condition to decide anything before dinner, and I hope you will make a fuller trial of the wine.”

So the company gathered at five o’clock, as the company of Kellynch always did when the house was in a state of trouble: Sir Walter at the head of the table, Lady Russell on his right, Elizabeth at the foot in the place of her mother, Mr Shepherd beside Anne, who had been placed there, as usual, where she could be most easily overlooked. The dinner was good. Sir Walter ate with the appetite of a man determined that nothing should be altered in his own person, and the conversation went round the old ground of carriages, servants, and the impossibility of economy without vulgarity, until Anne, who had been silent through the soup and the fish, found that she had quite made up her mind.

She had not meant to speak. She knew how it would be received. But the sum that stood against the family was not going to be made smaller by anybody’s silence, and it seemed to her, sitting at the end of that long table with its silver and its two candles, that the question had been too long asked by everyone except the person who could answer it.

“Papa,” said she, “if we are to retrench at all, I think we ought to do it entirely, and not by halves. Lady Russell’s plan keeps the greys and the London visit, and Mr Shepherd’s keeps the woods, and I do not think either of them would be enough. Let us give up the second carriage altogether, and sell the horses that go with it. Let us keep no more servants than the house requires, and not one for the sake of appearance. Let us not go to town next spring, nor the spring after that. We might dine at home every day, and send the money we should have spent upon the coachmaker and the tailor to Mr Shepherd, so that he might begin upon the smallest of the debts, and clear them one by one, before the larger ones grow any bigger. And I would take no new clothes this year, nor any new furniture. I have nothing I need that I have not already.”

There was a short silence. Sir Walter had set down his glass, and was regarding his youngest daughter with the look of a man who has been offered an unexpected and rather impertinent piece of advice by a particularly disappointing servant.

“Anne,” said he, “you would have us appear before the county as paupers.”

“I would have us appear as people who pay what they owe, Papa.”

Lady Russell had turned in her chair and was looking at Anne with a warmth that made her blush. Mr Shepherd, beside her, looked down at his plate and then up again, with an expression of such careful neutrality that Anne suspected he thought the plan a very good one.

And then Elizabeth spoke. Anne had not expected it. She had not expected anything from her sister on this subject but a restatement of the drawing-room papers and a complaint about the expense of candles.

“I think Anne is right, Papa,” said Elizabeth, in a voice that was perfectly composed, though her colour was still high from the earlier scene. “I have said so myself, you may recollect, in the spring. If we are to do it at all, we ought to do it thoroughly. It is no use cutting the greys and keeping the coachman, or dismissing one footman while the other is kept in livery for nothing. Anne’s plan is the only one that I think would answer.”

Sir Walter opened his mouth, and shut it again. It was impossible to tell whether he was more offended by the proposal or by the fact that it had been supported by his eldest daughter, who had never in her life before agreed with anything proposed by her younger sister. Lady Russell looked at Elizabeth with approval. Anne looked at her plate, and was aware of a feeling she did not at once know how to name; it was not quite gratitude, and it was certainly not comfort, but it was very like the sensation of having been, for the length of one dinner, of some small account.

“Miss Anne’s plan would certainly answer,” said Mr Shepherd, when the silence had become uncomfortable. He spoke carefully, and with a great appearance of deference. “I would not hesitate to say so. But I think, Sir Walter, that whatever is to be done, the sum must be found from somewhere; and in that case, if I may be permitted, the resource I mentioned this morning—”

“Mr Shepherd,” said Sir Walter, very quietly, “we have agreed that the word is not to be used.”

“Sir Walter, I only meant—”

“I know what you meant. You will be so good as to find some other way of meaning it.”

The cloth was withdrawn soon after, and Mr Shepherd took his leave with many bows, and a promise to draw up a fuller statement of the figures by the end of the week. Lady Russell did not stay to tea. She pressed Anne’s hand at the door and said, in a low voice, “You were quite right to speak, my dear. Do not let them persuade you that you were not,” and then she was gone down the avenue in the carriage, and the house grew quiet.

The letter came at half past seven, brought up from Uppercross by a boy on a pony, who waited in the hall while Anne broke the seal. It was from Mary, and was written, as most of Mary’s letters were, in a hand that sloped more and more steeply as the sentiments grew more pressing.

*My dear Anne,*

*I write in great distress, and I hope you will not think me unreasonable when I say that I have been very ill since Tuesday, with a sore throat that has quite kept me to my bed, and such nervous spasms as I have never known before. Charles is out with his dogs from morning until dark and does not think it worth while to come in to me, though I have told him more than once that I am not well enough to be left alone with the children. The Musgroves are very kind, but they are all so occupied with their own affairs that I hardly see any of them, and Mrs Musgrove has her own complaints, which she is not inclined to give up for mine. Little Charles has been very troublesome, and Walter has had a cold. I do not think I can be properly looked after without you. You have always had such a good hand with the children, and such patience with me, which I know nobody else at Uppercross possesses. Pray come as soon as you are able. I should be so very glad to see you.*

*Yours affectionately,*

*M. Musgrove*

Anne read it twice. The second time she read it more slowly, and found, as she always did, that the complaints were real enough and the reasons for them somewhat less so; that Mary had been ill, perhaps, but not so ill as she supposed; that Charles was doubtless as careless as his wife had said; and that she herself, as she had been for a great many years, was wanted, and would go.

She sent the boy away with a message that she would come, and then she went to the window of the drawing-room, where the candles had not yet been lit. Outside, the park lay grey and still under the evening, the old trees along the eastern side dark against the paler sky, and somewhere beyond them, past the lodge and the road and the long low rise of the hills, lay Uppercross, where nobody would speak to her of carriages.

The debts were still there. Nothing had been settled. Her father had refused the woods, the farms, the mortgages, the tenant, and the carriage, and had not yet agreed to anything at all; Mr Shepherd would draw up his figures, and the figures would be read at Kellynch, and then would be put away again in a drawer of the library, where they would wait, as the Baronetage waited, for the next morning when Sir Walter should be in want of something to take his mind from them. The sum remained exactly what it had been at breakfast. Only the house was not to be let, and that, Anne thought, was the one thing that had been decided by anybody at Kellynch that day, and it had been decided by the person who least intended to think of it.

She stood a little longer, with the letter in her hand, and then she went to find her father, to tell him that she was going to Uppercross in the morning.

I saw it fall. That is to say, I saw the light of it, for the thing itself was far too small and too quick to be seen as anything but a streak. It was the night after our walk, a little before eleven, and my wife and I were sitting out in the garden because the house had kept the day's heat and would not give it up. The air was still and smelt of cut grass and the dust of the lane. Overhead the stars were very clear. I had been pointing out to her the constellation of the Lion, which I am not certain I identified correctly, when a point of green fire went across the sky from the north-east. It was brilliant for an instant, brighter than Jupiter, and it left a trail that hung for a moment like the afterimage of a lamp and then faded. My wife gave a little cry and clutched my sleeve.

"A falling star," I said. "They are common enough in August."

"It was green," she said. "Stars don't go green."

I did not answer her, because I had no good answer. I remember thinking that I ought to tell Ogilvy, and then thinking that Ogilvy would already know, since he and his instruments had been watching the sky for a week as though it owed them money. We went in. I slept badly. Twice I dreamed of a great slow shape turning over in dark water, and twice I woke and lay listening to the trains shunting at the distant station, rumbling and ringing, until the sound grew comfortable again.

In the morning the whole neighbourhood knew of it. The boy who brought the milk had heard from the carter, who had heard from a man at the Chertsey end of the common, that something had come down in the gravel pits beyond the river, and that it had made a hole in the water as large as a chapel and boiled the pond around it. By the time I had finished my breakfast the story had grown another tenth. The boy assured us that it was hot enough to cook an egg upon, and that a dog had gone in after it and not come out.

"We shall go and look," I said.

My wife had already put on her bonnet. I do not think she wanted to see it. But she did not want to be left alone in the house with the thought of it, and so she came, and took my arm as we walked down the lane towards the river with the morning sun already warm on our backs.

Long before we reached the pits we could see the people. They were standing along the edge of the bank in a loose ragged line, the way a crowd gathers at a fire or a fair, with the carts and the bicycles left at the gate and the children pushing forward between the legs of the men. Someone was shouting directions. A constable in his helmet was trying to keep a space clear by the water and having very little success. As we came nearer there was a smell in the air that I did not at first place, a faint scorched odour like a struck match carried a long way, and above the reeds on the far side a thin white vapour was rising and drifting lazily across the morning.

Ogilvy was there before us. I saw his tall figure standing at the water's edge with his hands in the pockets of a coat that was far too heavy for the weather, and when he saw me he came striding round the crowd with an expression of great satisfaction on his face, as if the whole affair had been arranged for his particular benefit.

"Come and see," he said. "You will never see anything like it again in your life."

The pit was perhaps a hundred yards across, one of the old workings where the gravel had been dug out and the hollow allowed to fill with spring water and rain. The bank on the near side had been torn away in a long raw gash, and the grass there was flattened and blackened as though a great hand had swept across it. And in the middle of the water, half submerged, lay the thing itself.

I will try to describe it as I saw it then, without what I have learned since. It was a cylinder, or very nearly so, perhaps thirty yards in length and rather more across, with its upper surface only a few feet above the water, and its lower part lost in the dark mud at the bottom of the pit. It was of a dull greyish colour, the colour of old pewter, pitted and scored where it had struck, and it had a number of curious discs and rings about its ends that looked like great bolts or the caps of rivets. Along one side there ran a faint seam, a line that was almost too regular to be natural, and I thought of the lid of a huge cask that had been hammered shut and then left out in the rain. Steam came off it in a continual slow drift. Where the water touched it the surface hissed and boiled, and the small waves that ran out from it were sluggish and oily.

"A meteorite," said Ogilvy, before I had opened my mouth. "Or an aerolite, if you prefer the older word. Don't look at me like that. Consider the size of it. It has come down from space, through the atmosphere, at a tremendous velocity, and the friction of the air has heated the outside of it to a glow. It struck the ground here, and it is still cooling. There is nothing in the least mysterious about it."

"It is a very regular shape," I said.

"Meteorites are often regular. Iron is regular when it has been fused and run together under pressure. Look at the colour of it. Look at the way the crust has peeled. It is metal, Henderson, nearly pure, I should think, and it has been flying through the void for millions of years. You are looking for a meaning in a lump of iron."

"Then why did it fall on the same night that the gas was blazing on Mars?"

He turned his head and gave me a look of genuine impatience. "Because the planet is the source of a great many things that fall in our direction. The ether is full of them. Did you think the heavens were a locked cupboard? Two events, both real, both on the same night. That is a coincidence, and coincidences are the commonest things in the world."

I did not argue further. I could see that he would not be moved, and besides, I had no better explanation to offer except the one I did not want to say aloud, which was that a thing which had come from so far away would surely have come in a manner that a meteorite does not. I thought of the green light, which had not gone green in any way I could account for. I thought of the seam along the side. But my wife was tugging at my arm, and the crowd was shifting and murmuring behind us, and the constable had given up his attempt at order and was shouting for the people to stand back.

It was then that the young man from Chertsey did what he did.

He was a stout, red-faced fellow in a labourer's jacket, with a broad cheerful manner and a stick in his hand, and he had worked his way down the bank to a point where the mud ran almost to the water. There he stood for a while, looking at the thing with his mouth open, and then he laughed and said something to his friends about the price of a joint of mutton roasted on a Sunday. Someone dared him. He grinned, said nothing, and reached out with the stick and prodded at the nearest end of the cylinder. There was a faint ringing sound, like a bell struck through a blanket. Then, as if he could not resist, he stepped out onto a half-sunk stone at the edge of the water and laid his open palm flat against the metal.

He screamed. It was not a scream of pain alone, but of surprise, the sound a man makes when he has put his hand into something he took for a bowl of water and found it a furnace. He snatched the hand back and held it against his chest, and the crowd gave a great lurch away from the bank. I saw the skin of his palm, when he opened it, already white and swelling, with the marks of the metal's pitted surface printed across it like the grain of a piece of wood. His friends pulled him back up the slope. He was weeping and cursing at the same time, and somebody was shouting for a doctor, and somebody else had a bottle of linseed oil out of a cart and was pouring it over his hand.

Ogilvy had watched the whole thing with the detached interest of a man observing a chemical reaction. "Hot," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Still very hot. Well, of course it is. It has only just come down."

"You see what it does," I said.

"I see that a foolish man has burned his hand. I should have expected it. People will always touch things they have been told not to touch." He looked at me with a sudden sharpness. "Do you want me to be frightened? I am not frightened. A curious object, a very curious object indeed, and I shall write to the Royal Society about it this afternoon. That is all there is to be done."

My wife had gone very quiet beside me. Her hand on my arm had tightened until it hurt, and when I looked at her I saw that she was watching the steam rising from the water with an expression I did not like. "Come away," she said. "Please. I do not want to stay here."

I looked at the cylinder again. The steam was thicker now, or so it seemed, and the hiss of the boiling water had a deeper note to it, as if something under the surface were breathing heavily in its sleep. I could not tell whether the seam along its side had moved. I told myself that it had not, that the light was merely shifting on the metal, that my eyes were tired from the night before. The labourer had been taken away up the lane with his hand wrapped in a sheet. The crowd had grown while we stood there. It was no longer a few curious villagers but a long dark press of people from Ottershaw and Chertsey and Woking, with carts drawn up at the gate and boys clinging to the branches of the willows, and every minute brought more of them down the lane, talking in the bright hard voices that people use when they are frightened and do not want to show it.

By noon the sun was high and fierce, and the common was loud with voices. Somebody had brought a flag, and somebody else had said that the Lord Mayor of London had been telegraphed about it. A man with a camera had set up a tripod on the far bank, and a clergyman was pointing out to his parishioners that the thing had fallen on a Thursday and that this was surely significant. Nobody had gone any nearer to the water, but nobody had gone away either.

"You must go home," I said to my wife.

"And you?"

"I shall stay a little longer. I want to see what they do with it. There will be men from the government here before dark, I should think, and I would rather know what they say than hear it second-hand from the milk boy." I took her hand. "Go and make us some lunch. I will come up within the hour, I promise you."

She looked at me for a long moment, and I saw that she knew very well I did not mean to keep my promise to the hour, and that she would not stop me from keeping it to the afternoon. Then she nodded, once, and turned and went up the lane alone, her bonnet bobbing above the heads of the crowd until the bend of the road took her away from my sight.

I stood on the bank with the sun on my neck and watched the vapour rising from the pit, drifting white across the reeds and dissolving into the blue, and the great grey shape lying in the water like something asleep. Behind me the crowd went on growing, and I heard the constable calling for more men, and the clergyman's voice rising above the rest, and a child asking loudly whether the thing was going to wake up. I did not answer him. I simply stayed where I was, with my hands in my pockets, and waited for whatever it was going to do.

Robert did not come up beside them at once. He walked a little behind, with Madame Ratignolle's hand resting upon his arm, while Edna went on ahead with the youngest of the children clinging to her fingers and the other two running in circles along the sandy path. Once, where the path narrowed between the camomile and the tangled growth, she heard Adèle's laugh rise and fall, low and musical, like a bird calling among the orange trees. She did not hear what was said. It was not meant for her, and she had no wish to stand at the edge of a confidence. She had had enough of confidences for one morning.

When they reached the cottage, Madame Ratignolle sank into the long chair on the gallery with a sigh that was partly for effect and partly for the heat. Robert remained at the foot of the steps, turning his hat slowly in his hands. He looked up at Edna with an expression she could not altogether read. It was not the look of a lover; she was almost certain of that. It was rather the look of one who has said something bold in company and is waiting to learn whether it has been understood.

“You have had a fine walk,” he said.

“A warm one,” said Edna, and went inside to see to the children.

The telegram arrived a little after noon. A barefoot boy from Klein’s brought it up the road, wiping his face with his sleeve while he waited for an answer. Edna tore the envelope open on the top step. The message was brief, as such messages are, and it had been written by a man who paid by the word.

*Business detains me in town. Shall not come out Saturday. Kiss the boys. LÉONCE.*

She read it twice, then folded it along its creases and slipped it into the pocket of her skirt. She searched herself for disappointment, as one gropes in a dark room for a familiar chair, and it was not there. What she felt instead was something lighter and less easily named, a loosening, as if a door she had not known was closed had been quietly left ajar. She did not examine the feeling. She sent the boy back to Klein’s with a coin and a word of thanks, and went to see that the children were washed for their midday sleep.

Afterward the house was very still. Madame Ratignolle had gone across to her own cottage to lie down, and Robert had gone nowhere that Edna could see. The sun stood high and white over the Gulf, and the glare lay so heavily upon the gallery boards that the rail felt warm to the hand. The children slept in their room with the shutters half drawn. Edna sat for a time at the window, listening to the long, unhurried breathing of the water, which came to her through the open blinds like something that had been waiting for her to notice it.

Then, almost without deciding to, she rose, took her bathing costume from its hook, and went down the path toward the beach alone.

The beach was nearly deserted. The lady in black had returned to the porch of her bath-house, where she sat with a book open upon her knee and a parasol tilted against the glare. As Edna came down with her key in her hand, the lady looked up over the rim of her spectacles, and then, with some deliberation, she closed the book upon one finger.

“Madame,” she said, in a voice that was dry but not unkind, “you should not go far out beyond the sand-bar this afternoon. The current sets strongly to the left, and the wind is stiff. It has carried stronger swimmers than you out past the point.”

Edna paused with her hand on the door of her compartment. No one in all her weeks at Grand Isle had ever addressed her in this manner, as though she were a person whose safety might be the concern of a stranger.

“Thank you,” she said. “I shall not go far.”

The lady nodded, satisfied, and opened her book again.

Edna changed quickly and came out onto the sand. The water was warm at the top and cooler below, and the wind whipped little crests of foam against her shins. She waded out slowly, feeling the sand give and shift beneath her feet, until the water rose to her waist and then to her breast. She stood there a moment, her heart beating unevenly, half afraid of the wide green-blue reach in front of her. Then she let herself go forward.

She struck out with her arms as the little girl had done in the meadow in Kentucky, beating at the tall grass, and the water received her. It held her up. She made one stroke, and then another, and a third, and the sea did not swallow her; it only moved beneath her, rocking and lifting, indifferent and kind. She turned over upon her back and lay with her arms flung wide, the sky above her a vast, cloudless blue, the sun hot upon her closed eyelids. For a moment she felt nothing at all except the buoyancy of the water and the rhythm of her own breath. Then she turned and made her way back toward the shallows, slowly, with her heart pounding and a kind of wonder rising in her throat.

She came out on the sand streaming and laughing softly to herself. The lady in black did not look up. Edna dressed in the compartment, her hands unsteady on the buttons, and walked back up the path with the sea still singing in her ears. She did not speak of it to anyone. It was hers, and she held it close, as she had once held the photograph of the tragedian, though this was a thing she would not have been ashamed to show.

Adèle came over in the late afternoon, when the light had turned amber and the shadows of the orange trees stretched long across the path. She sat down upon the gallery with her embroidery and her little ribboned fan, and for a while she talked of the heat, of her children, of a pattern for a christening robe that had gone wrong in three places. Then she paused, and the corners of her mouth lifted.

“Robert has been saying the most absurd things,” she said.

Edna set down the stocking she was darning. “What things?”

“He said”—Adèle lowered her voice, as if repeating a secret that might be overheard by the sea—“that Mrs. Pontellier is like the sea itself. One can never tell whether she is calm, or only waiting for the wind to change.” She laughed softly and bent her head over her needle. “He said it as though he had made a great discovery.”

Edna felt the color rise in her face and was annoyed with herself for it. She laughed too, lightly, and asked Adèle whether Robert had been given too much sun. Adèle only smiled at her, that warm, knowing, unhurried smile, and went on with her stitching, and presently she rose and went home when her husband’s voice came up the path calling for her.

Supper was served on the gallery in the failing light. The children were fed and bathed and carried to bed, and their small voices subsided one by one behind the half-closed door. Edna did not light the lamp. She sat alone in the dusk with her elbows on the rail and her face turned toward the water, which had gone from blue to pewter to a deep, dim silver under a rising moon.

The surf kept up its low, steady murmur. Somewhere along the beach a voice sang a fragment of a Creole song and stopped. A lamp moved along the far edge of the sand, perhaps a fisherman's, perhaps a lover's, and vanished again.

*Calm, or only waiting for the wind to change.*

Edna leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She could still feel the buoyancy of the water beneath her, the sun upon her lids, the strange ease of lying open to the sky. She wondered which of the two she was, and whether Robert, who had said so many things to her this summer and meant none of them, had perhaps said the one thing that was true.

The fir plantation was no cheerier coming back than it had been going out. Mr. Franklin would not let me hurry, and he would not let me sit down, so we went up through the dim trees at the pace of a funeral procession, with his arm under mine and my stick knocking against the roots. He talked all the way, in the free, easy manner that his foreign education had given him, and I listened with the respect due to a young gentleman who is paying for his own dinner in the way of news.

"You will think me a shocking fellow, Betteredge," he said, "turning up four hours before I was expected, and frightening you half out of your wits on the sands."

"You didn't frighten me, sir. You squeezed the breath out of me, which is another matter, and not a kind one at my time of life."

He laughed, and then he grew serious all at once, as foreigners and young men will. "I had a letter this morning. It reached me in London just as I was packing my portmanteau, and it altered all my plans. I took the first train I could get, and I have been travelling since before daybreak. Here, read it for yourself. I want you to tell me whether I am a fool."

We had come to a stop by then, in a patch of sunlight where the trees gave out. I took out my spectacles, which I keep in my waistcoat pocket for the reading of important things, and I put them on, and I read the letter standing up. I shall give it here word for word, because it matters later, and because I have never in my life been able to make a letter sound as sensible in my own words as it does in its own.

“My dear Franklin,” it ran. “I write in great haste, and I ask you to forgive the haste. A communication has reached me this morning, from a quarter I am not at liberty to name, touching the Moonstone, and certain persons now connected with it. I do not yet know what it means, and I will not alarm you with guesses of my own, which may prove worth nothing. I advise only this: go down to Yorkshire at once, and do not wait for the birthday. Say nothing of this upon the road, and carry with you nothing that you would not be sorry to lose. I shall write again when I can. Burn this when you have read it.

“Yours, in great haste,

“Bruff.”

I read it twice, the second time with my lips moving, which I am not ashamed to own is my habit with any paper that frightens me. Then I took off my spectacles and folded them, and I looked at Mr. Franklin, and I said the first sensible thing that came into my head, which was that he had not burnt it.

“No,” says he. “I could not bring myself to do it. Bruff is the last man in England who would waste a sheet of paper on a joke, and I have known him all my life. He has never once frightened me before.”

Now, I have said that I had heard the word *Moonstone* spoken on the terrace not two hours before by a conjuror’s boy with ink in his palm, and I had no doubt the same word was on the tip of Mr. Franklin’s tongue. I thought of mentioning the boy. I thought better of it, for the simple reason that a sensible man does not go out of his way to tell a young gentleman that he has been frightened by a trick; and I put the thought back in my pocket with my spectacles. But I will confess that the cold under the firs had got into me, and that I did not like the way Mr. Bruff had written the word *carry*.

“You have something with you, sir?” I asked, in as careless a voice as I could manage. “Something you would be sorry to lose?”

Mr. Franklin did not answer me directly. He felt in the breast of his fawn-coloured coat, and brought out a small packet, no bigger than a man’s hand, wrapped in brown paper and tied with tape, and sealed at every knot with red wax. He turned it over once in his fingers, and I saw that the seal was pressed with a plain device which I did not know. Then he put it into my hand.

“I want you to lock this up for me tonight,” he said. “In the plate-room, if you have one that is safe. Keep it there until I ask you for it. Do not let anybody else touch it, and do not let anybody ask you about it. Can you do that for me, Betteredge?”

Now, I am a man who has kept the keys of this house for five-and-thirty years, and I have been trusted with the plate, the cellar, the wine, and the lady’s private accounts, and I have never yet been asked to keep a thing I was not allowed to look at. It is not my habit to refuse a young gentleman, least of all one who has squeezed me half to death out of pure affection. I weighed the packet in my palm. It was light. It did not rattle, and it did not shift, and it was as small and innocent-looking as a parcel of lace from a London shop. I did not turn it over, and I did not hold it up to the light, though I confess the temptation was great. I know my duty when it is put into my hand.

“I can do it, sir,” I said. “It shall be in the plate-room before the dinner-bell rings, and nobody shall know it is there but you and me.”

“Thank you,” says he, and he clapped me on the shoulder with real feeling. “I knew I could rely on you.”

I put the packet in the inside pocket of my coat, on the side away from my grease-spotted lappet, and I buttoned the flap over it. Then we went on through the trees, and I did not say another word about it, and neither did he.

We came out at the back of the house a little after two. The kitchen yard was full of the smell of the servants’ dinner, which had been eaten, and the shouts of the boy who washes the pots. I took Mr. Franklin in by the back way, because that is the way that a steward takes a guest who arrives on foot and with no servant to announce him, and because I wished to see the plate-room door before I did anything else. Mr. Franklin said he would go up to my lady at once, and I told him she was in the morning-room, and that she had been expecting him since breakfast, though she would not own it.

I had the packet in the plate-room before he had crossed the hall. The plate-room is a stone chamber at the end of the passage behind the pantry, with a door of old oak bound in iron, and a lock that I would trust against a regiment of burglars. Inside are the shelves for the silver, and the great chest for the best service, and a small iron box with a lid, which the late Sir John had put there for his private papers, and which nobody has opened since his funeral. I laid the packet on the top shelf, behind the cruet-stand, and I did not so much as read the seal again. Then I locked the door, and tried it twice, and put the key on my own ring with the cellar keys, where it has been since. I have been told by several persons in the household that I am a suspicious old man. I say that a suspicious old man is the best guardian a plate-room ever had.

I went up afterwards, out of duty, to see whether my lady wanted anything. I found the morning-room door shut, and I stood a moment outside it, as any good servant would, with my ear to the panel, which is not the same thing as eavesdropping, whatever the housemaids may say. My lady’s voice came through quite clearly. She was not a woman to lower her voice for anybody.

“You have been travelling all night, Franklin,” she said, “and you have come to me four hours before I expected you, looking as if you had seen a ghost. I shall not ask you what has brought you. I shall tell you one thing only, and you will oblige me by remembering it. While you are under this roof, the Moonstone is not to be spoken of. Not at my table, not in my drawing-room, not in the servants’ hall, and not in my daughter’s hearing. I have had enough of that diamond in my house, and in my family, and I will not have it again.”

There was a pause, and then I heard Mr. Franklin’s chair creak, as if he had got up.

“You have my word, Aunt,” says he, quite gently. “It shall not be named by me. I give you my promise.”

“Thank you,” says my lady. “Now go and wash your face, and eat something, and be civil to Betteredge, who has been fussing over you like a hen with one chick since you were in petticoats.”

I took myself off down the back stairs before the door opened, which was the proper conduct of a steward who has heard nothing whatever. I will not pretend I was not thinking hard as I went. My lady had spoken of the Moonstone as if it were a person, and a wicked one, and she had spoken of her own daughter in the same breath. But I had been in this house long enough to know that my lady never spoke an idle word, and that when she forbade a subject, the subject had generally been lying in wait for her. I went to my sitting-room and sat down in my beehive chair, and I did not open my book, because I had a feeling I should want my wits about me.

Penelope came to me at tea-time. She had a tray in her hands, which was an excuse, and a face that was no excuse at all. My daughter has her mother’s way of looking at a thing before she speaks of it, and she set the tray down on the table with great care, as if the teapot might go off.

“Father,” she said, “Rosanna has not come in.”

“Not come in?” I said. “Nancy told me she was at the sands, and I went out and found her there, and brought her as far as the beach, and she told me she would not have her dinner. Surely she has come in by now.”

“She has not,” says Penelope. “I have asked in the kitchen, and in the laundry, and on the back stairs. Nobody has seen her. Then Tom Stroud, from the stable yard, came up from the village with a message for Mr. Franklin’s man, and he says he saw her himself. She walked right past the end of the plantation road, on the sand, going north. She did not turn up through the trees. He says she was going on along the shore, towards Cobb’s Hole.”

“Cobb’s Hole!” I said. “What in the name of all that is sensible should she be doing at Cobb’s Hole, at this time of the day, with no bonnet on her head that I know of, and her dinner getting cold in the kitchen?”

Penelope looked at me very steadily. “She has a friend there, Father. You know that. She goes to see her when she can.”

I did know it. I had heard it said at dinner-time, and I had thought nothing of it. But I thought of it now, with Rosanna’s face in front of me as she had stood among the sandhills, flushed to the roots of her hair, and then white as the sand, and then gone, without so much as a curtsey to the gentleman. I thought of the quicksand, shivering in the turn of the tide, and of the girl’s own voice telling me it looked like hundreds of suffocating people under the surface. And I was ashamed, I can tell you, to find that I did not like the picture at all.

“Well, she is a grown woman,” I said, a good deal louder than I meant to. “She is five-and-twenty, and she is at liberty to go visiting if she pleases, and she need not account to me for her walks. But she will account to me for her dinner, and for the second housemaid’s work, which Nancy will have to do between now and bedtime. Tell Tom Stroud he may go back down to the village, and tell him he is not to say a word about this to my lady.”

Penelope took up the tray again, though the tea was not yet poured. “I will tell him, Father,” she said, and she went out without another word, which was not like her, and which I did not care for.

The afternoon went out as it does in May, slowly, and then all at once. Mr. Franklin came down to the dining-room and was as lively as a cricket at supper, talking of Paris and Rome and the ridiculous ways of the Italian hotel-keepers, and making my lady laugh in spite of herself. He did not once look at the door, and he did not once speak of the Moonstone, and I thought the better of him for keeping his promise so well, though I could see that the effort cost him something. Miss Rachel was not at table. She had a headache, my lady said, and had kept to her own room since luncheon, and Penelope, who had gone up with her supper, reported that the poor young lady had asked for the blinds to be drawn. I did not see her, and I have said that I was not to. I will only add that the house seemed quieter with her away from it, in the way that a clock seems loud when it stops.

At ten o’clock I went round the house myself, as I always do. I saw the doors barred, and the fires drawn in the kitchen, and the lamps put out in the passages, and I tried the plate-room door once more, though I knew it was locked. Then I went to the back door, which I had myself ordered left on the latch for the second housemaid, since she had been out so long and I did not wish her to stand knocking in the cold. I stood on the step and looked out across the dark yard, and then down the long path that goes towards the plantation and the sea. There was nothing to see but the shapes of the trees, and a thin grey line of light where the sky met the water, and the sound of the tide coming in over the Shivering Sand, which I could hear very plainly, though I could not see it.

I went back to my sitting-room and lit my lamp, and I put my feet up on the stool, and I took down *Robinson Crusoe* from the shelf by my chair, where it has stood for forty years, in the same worn binding and with the same brown thumb-mark on the page where the footprint is. I have read that book more times than I have read the Bible, and I have never once been tired of it. There is no man in the world, to my mind, who understands the value of a locked door and a sensible plan better than Crusoe, and I find that a man of my age can take great comfort from a book that tells him so.

I did not read a word that night. I sat with the book open on my knee and the lamp burning low, and I listened for footsteps on the back path. My sitting-room is at the end of the passage, and the back door is not far from it, so I should have heard her come in as plainly as I heard the tide. I heard the clock in the hall strike eleven, and then the half-hour, and then twelve. I heard Nancy go up the back stairs, and Penelope go to bed, and the house settle round me, board by board, the way an old house does when it has nothing more to do for the day.

In the plate-room, behind its iron-bound door, the small brown packet lay on the top shelf, sealed and quiet, with the key to it on my ring in my pocket. And down the long path, beyond the firs and the sandhills, Rosanna Spearman had not come back to the house, and the back door was still standing on the latch for her.

The First National Bank had been built to look as if it would outlast the town. Marble columns held up a ceiling painted with clouds, and behind a brass grille a row of tellers counted money with the faces of men who had never once been tempted by any of it.

I went to the paying window at the far end. The teller there was a thin man with pale hair parted in the middle and steel spectacles, which he took off when he saw me coming, as if he didn't want to be looking through anything while he talked to me. The brass plate on his cage said *L. Dyer*.

I put the stub's number and amount on the marble in front of him. "I'm trying to find out about this check."

He didn't reach for a ledger. He had seen the check, or heard of it, and had been thinking about it since.

"Five thousand dollars," he said. "Drawn by Mr. Donald Willsson, on his personal account, and made out to bearer. Dated yesterday."

"Has it been presented?"

"Not at this window. Not at any window in this bank. We have had no request to certify it, and we have not stamped it."

"Could it have come in some other way? Through a clearing house, or from another bank?"

"It could have. I've checked the clearing sheets for the last two days, and there is nothing on them with that number." He put the spectacles back on, and then took them off again. "I don't say it can't come in. I say it hasn't."

"The balance in the account?"

"More than five thousand. Mr. Willsson kept a comfortable balance here. He never overdrew, not once that I know of." He looked at me directly for the first time. "And the signature is his. I've seen it on a hundred deposit slips. He signed his name with the *W* like a hook."

"Anybody else ask about it?"

Dyer hesitated, which told me the answer before he gave it.

"A man telephoned this morning. He wanted to know whether the Willsson check had been paid. He wouldn't give his name, and when I asked him to, he hung up."

"Did he sound like anybody you knew?"

"He sounded like a man who didn't want to be known. That's all I can tell you." He glanced past my shoulder at the bank's clock, which read a quarter past two. "If you'll excuse me, I have a line."

I thanked him. He nodded once and went back to his counting, and I went out past the marble and into the glare of the street.

So a man had written a check for five thousand dollars, put it in his pocket, and walked out of his office for twenty minutes. He had not gone to the bank. He had not gone to any bank that I knew of. Somebody had been telephoning about it since morning, and that somebody had not wanted to give his name.

I walked back to the Great Western and did nothing useful for the rest of the afternoon. I read the Herald's second-day story on the murder, which said the police had no new information and expected to have some soon. I read the editorial again. It was just as bitter the second time.

At six the desk clerk rang up to my room.

"There's a lady here to see you, sir."

"Who?"

"She didn't give her name. She says she has no appointment, but she would like to see you anyway."

I told him to send her up. He said she was waiting in the lobby, and that he did not think it proper for her to come up to a gentleman's room. I went down.

She was sitting on a plush settee beside a potted palm, in a dark coat with the collar turned up and a small black hat with a veil that was not quite down. She was the slender blonde I had seen at the house on Mountain Boulevard, and she looked more frightened than she had the night before. Her hands were folded in her lap so tightly the knuckles were white.

I sat down on the settee opposite her. "You weren't invited."

"No." She lifted the veil with one finger. Her face was pale under the hat, but her eyes were steady. "I was not invited to my husband's funeral either. I think it is a day for not being invited to things."

"Have they set the funeral?"

"Not yet. Father Willsson will not allow it until he has finished deciding how it will look in the newspaper." Her accent was slight, but it made each word come out separately. "He has told the whole town that I killed my husband. Now he tells you the same thing, I imagine."

"He told me that you were jealous, and domineering, and a few other things."

"And a French hussy."

"That too."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth, but it was not a smile. "He has never liked any of us. He liked Donald for a little while, when Donald was willing to do what he was told. Then Donald was not willing."

"Where did you go last night, at ten-twenty?"

She didn't look away from me. "I went to the telephone. A woman I know called me. She told me something had happened in town, and she did not want to say what it was on the telephone. I went out to find my husband."

"And?"

"And I found the street full of people. Somebody told me it was not a street for me to be in. So I came home." She paused. "I did not tell you the truth when you asked me last night. I was frightened. I am still frightened."

"Of what?"

She stood up. For a moment I thought she was going to walk out without answering, but she bent a little toward me and said quietly, "Of the people who were in the street with him, Mr. Continental. I think they would like it very much if I went to prison, and you would like it too if you were paid to find out what they wanted."

"Nobody's paid me to find out anything but what happened."

"Then I hope you will be paid very well."

She turned away. I watched her walk across the lobby, past the clerk's desk and out through the revolving doors into Broadway. Her shoes were black, and her stockings were plain. I hadn't seen the green slippers. The left shoe had no mark on it that I could see, which meant either that someone had cleaned it or she had bought another pair. I didn't know which I would have bet on.

When I got back to the desk the clerk handed me an envelope with my name written on it in ink.

"A boy left it," he said. "Wouldn't wait for a tip."

The envelope was a light brown, the color of weak tea. Inside was a single card, folded once, the same brown. The writing on it was small and neat, in pencil.

*The Great Western is a comfortable hotel, but Personville is a long town for a visitor who asks questions about the dead. Mr. T. would take it kindly if you went home to San Francisco. He does not like to repeat himself, and he is not a patient man in the matter of hospitality.*

There was no signature. There didn't need to be. Thaler had worn three shades of brown the morning I saw him go into the dead man's house, and he had sent his warning on paper that matched the suit.

I folded the card back into the envelope and put it in my inside pocket. The clerk was watching me with the mild interest of a man who had seen a great many envelopes delivered to a great many guests and did not expect to be told what was in them.

"Who's the best place to send a wire at this hour?" I asked him.

"The Western Union office on Second Street is open until midnight, sir."

I walked over there. The clerk behind the counter was a bald man with a green eyeshade, who read my writing back to me twice and charged me for every word. The wire I sent read:

*CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO. WILLSSON SHOT FOUR TIMES TEN FORTY PREVIOUS NIGHT HURRICANE STREET DIED AT ONCE. HE WROTE FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK TO BEARER THAT AFTERNOON AND LEFT OFFICE TWENTY MINUTES. CHECK NOT PRESENTED NOT CERTIFIED AT FIRST NATIONAL. UNKNOWN MAN TELEPHONED BANK THIS MORNING ASKING IF PAID. WIFE LEFT HOUSE TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE. ELIHU WILLSSON ABUSIVE AND UNHELPFUL. THALER SEEN ENTERING VICTIM'S HOUSE THIS MORNING AND SENT ME WRITTEN WARNING THIS EVENING TO LEAVE TOWN. WIFE CALLED ON ME UNINVITED. NO ARREST. ADVISE WHETHER TO STAY OR RETURN. OPERATIVE.*

The clerk counted the words twice, shrugged, and stamped the form. "It'll go out within the hour, sir."

I went back to the Great Western.

My room was on the third floor at the back, with a window that looked over a row of roofs and a water tank. I didn't turn on the light right away. I took off my coat, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked out at the dark shapes against a sky with no stars in it. Somewhere below, a car horn sounded twice, and then the street went quiet again.

Five thousand dollars. A check written on the afternoon of a murder, by a man who had been shot that same night, and it had not come to any window in any bank in Personville. It had not been cashed or certified or deposited or stamped. It was not in the dead man's desk, and it was not in his wife's hands, unless she had been very clever about it. Somebody had telephoned the bank that morning, wanting to know whether it had been paid, and had hung up when asked his name.

Thaler had sent me a card, and his card had told me exactly one thing I didn't already suspect: that he knew I was asking about the check, and that he did not want me to find it.

I turned on the lamp. Then I took the stub out of my notebook, looked at the figure written on it, and sat for a long time without moving, asking myself where five thousand dollars goes when nobody is willing to spend it.

The sky had not lightened when I set out for the village. The air lay over the fields like a damp cloth, and not a leaf stirred along the drive. Somewhere behind me a door banged, and I heard Lawrence's voice raised in the hall, but I did not stop. I went down the avenue at a pace that was nearly a run, my dressing-gown flapping about my ankles until I remembered to tie it, and I did not slacken until the lodge gates were behind me and the first cottages of Styles St. Mary came into view, their windows still blind.

I had not gone a hundred yards along the village street before I saw a figure coming towards me, bulky and deliberate, with a hand raised as though to hail me. It was Baily. He was hatless, his coat buttoned awry, and he had the look of a man who had been running and was determined not to admit it.

“Mr. Hastings, sir.” He drew himself up, but his voice shook. “Terrible business. Terrible. I was just on my way back from Dr. Wilkins's house.”

“Yes, I know. I am going to fetch Monsieur Poirot.”

“Ah.” Baily nodded slowly, with the air of a man who has been spared a task. “The little foreign gentleman. Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”

I hurried on, and it was not until I had reached the little white cottage at the end of the street, and had knocked twice upon its door, that the full significance of his manner came back to me. Baily had not been on his way back from Dr. Wilkins's house at all, if the doctor had still been at Styles when I left. He had been on his way to Poirot.

The door opened before my second knock had quite died away. Poirot stood upon the threshold. He was fully dressed, from his patent-leather boots to the smallest curl of his moustache, and the only sign of haste about him was a little drop of shaving soap still clinging to one ear.

“Ah, mon ami,” he said gravely. “You come about the so-sad death of Madame Inglethorp.”

I stared at him.

“How in the world——”

“Entrez, entrez. You will take a cup of coffee while I finish my toilet.” He stepped aside to let me pass, and his eyes, I thought, were very bright. “Your Baily, he came to this door at half past five, before the doctors had finished their work. He was too full of his news to keep it to himself, and he has a loud voice and a heavy heart. A bad combination for secrets.”

“Then you knew before I did.”

“I knew what a man who has been up all night would say to the first person he met. Which was me.” He shrugged. “Do not be vexed, Hastings. It is not a crime to be the first in the village to hear of a death. It is only a little—how do you say—indiscreet.”

I was vexed, nevertheless, and I said so. Poirot listened with his head on one side, and when I had finished he merely nodded and disappeared into his bedroom. He reappeared a few minutes later with his little case under his arm, and we set off together up the village street in the grey light, while the first birds began to stir uncertainly in the hedges.

We had not gone far up the avenue when we saw a man coming down it towards us. He walked with his head bent, as though he were examining the gravel, and it was not until he looked up that I recognized Alfred Inglethorp. He was hot and dishevelled, his black beard was dusty, and his face wore an expression I could not read.

He saw us and stopped. For a moment I thought he would turn back.

“Hastings,” he said. “Good heavens. What is all this? Baily came running to me with some story about my wife—” He broke off and passed a hand over his forehead. “I can scarcely believe it. Is it true?”

“I am afraid it is,” I said. “She died in the night. Dr. Bauerstein was with her.”

“Bauerstein?” He looked up quickly. “He was here? I thought—” He stopped again, and then, with an obvious effort, went on. “I was out last night. I walked Bauerstein down to the village after supper. He wished to catch the late train, and I went with him as far as the station gate. I did not care to come back at once. It was a hot night and I walked for some time. I came in by the garden door, about half past eleven, and went straight up to bed. I heard nothing whatever.”

He said it fluently, as a man repeats a thing he has rehearsed on the road. Poirot had not spoken a word. He merely looked at the dust upon Inglethorp's boots and then, politely, at the dust upon his coat sleeves, and I saw Inglethorp's glance follow his.

At that moment Dorcas came hurrying down the drive from the house, her apron still in her hands. She stopped short when she saw Inglethorp, and then dropped a curtsy with a sort of defiant haste.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said. “But you never went up to bed last night. Not in your own room, sir.”

Inglethorp turned on her.

“What do you mean, woman?”

“I turned down your bed myself at ten o'clock, sir, same as always,” said Dorcas steadily. “And when I went up at six this morning, to see if the mistress wanted her tea, it was just as I left it. Smooth as a sheet, sir, and the lamp not lit. Nobody had lain on it.”

There was a short silence. Inglethorp's face darkened, and then, quite suddenly, he shrugged.

“The servants in this house are very careless,” he said. “I may have gone up by the back stairs and sat in the study. I was tired, and I do not recall the precise order of my movements. You may go, Dorcas.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dorcas, and went, but not before she had cast a look at Poirot that was not quite a look of resentment.

Inglethorp went on past us towards the lodge, without a further word, and Poirot watched him until the bend of the drive hid him from sight.

“He does not sleep in his bed,” Poirot murmured, half to himself. “Interesting. Very interesting. And he is a man who cannot quite remember where he has been. Eh bien. Let us go and see the dead.”

John met us in the hall. He looked old and drawn, and he received Poirot's bow with a faint, puzzled courtesy.

“Hastings tells me you can help us,” he said. “I hardly know what to say. It is all so dreadful.”

“I will do what I can, Mr. Cavendish,” said Poirot. “Nothing more, I promise you.”

John drew the two keys from his pocket, the ones Dr. Bauerstein had given him, and handed them over.

“I suppose you had better see the room,” he said. “Lawrence is with my mother's—with the body. I would rather not go in again just now.”

We climbed the staircase together, and along the gallery to the right wing. The corridor was very quiet. Someone had drawn the blinds of the bedroom windows so that the light inside was dim and yellowish, and the broken door, with its splintered frame, hung crookedly on its hinges where John and Lawrence had forced it. Poirot paused on the threshold and looked slowly around him before he moved at all.

The room was in disorder. The little table beside the bed lay on its side, its contents scattered across the carpet. A chair had been pushed back against the wall. The grate was full of cold grey ashes, and on the mantelpiece the row of prim ornaments stood exactly as they had stood the night before, save that one small china shepherdess had been knocked off and lay in two pieces on the hearthstone.

Poirot did not say anything. He went down on his knees beside the overturned table and bent low over the carpet, his nose only a few inches from the pile. Then, with great care, he took from his case a pair of small tweezers and a little pill-box of white paper. I watched him, fascinated, as he moved about the floor, pausing now and again, humming softly under his breath.

At last he stopped by the leg of the table. He leaned forward, lifted something with the tweezers, and held it up to the light from the window. It was a tiny, glittering fragment, no bigger than a grain of rice, and it caught the light in a way that made me think of glass.

Poirot wrapped it in a twist of paper, slid it into the pill-box, and closed the lid with a little click. Then he rose, dusted the knees of his trousers, and turned to me with a look of extreme satisfaction.

“Hastings,” he said, and held up the box. “Look.”

I looked. I saw nothing but a little white box.

“What is it?”

“Ah.” He put the box in his waistcoat pocket and patted it. “That, mon ami, I will not tell you. Not yet.”

“Poirot, really——”

“Not yet.” He smiled, but his eyes were perfectly serious. “A man who explains his discoveries before he has finished making them is like a cook who serves the soup before it has boiled. The result is always disappointing.”

I opened my mouth to protest, and then I closed it again. I knew that tone of old.

There was a soft knock upon the connecting door, which had been bolted from the other side, and then a rattle of the handle. I went across and found Mary Cavendish there, with Cynthia just behind her. The girl's face was very white, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. She looked at Poirot with a kind of bewilderment, as though she could not think why a stranger should be standing in her aunt's room.

Poirot made her a little bow.

“Forgive me, mademoiselle,” he said gently. “I will not keep you long. Only one question, and it is a small one. Last night, when the noise began—did you sleep soundly? Through all of it, from the first?”

Cynthia's colour rose a little.

“Oh, yes,” she said with a rueful, unhappy laugh. “Like a log, I am ashamed to say. Mary had to shake me awake. I didn't hear a single thing until she was standing over me.”

“Thank you,” said Poirot, and he seemed genuinely pleased. “That is very clear. Thank you, mademoiselle.”

Cynthia looked from him to me, and then to the broken door, and her lips trembled. Mary put an arm about her shoulders and drew her gently back into her own room, and the connecting door closed quietly behind them.

Poirot turned back to the room. He walked slowly to the window and drew back the blind with one finger. The sun had come up at last behind a thin veil of haze, and a dull, copper light was spreading over the lawns. Somewhere below, a gardener was raking the gravel, and the rhythmic scrape of it came up to us through the open casement. The air was already heavy again, and the sky over the woods had turned a bruised colour, as though the storm that had threatened all night had merely been postponed.

The little clock on the mantelpiece said twenty minutes to eleven.

I went and stood beside Poirot at the window. I was very conscious of the pill-box in his pocket, and of the splintered door, and of the dead woman's bed behind us, smooth and untouched on one side.

“Well?” I said at last. “What now?”

Poirot did not answer at once. He was looking down at the gravel, where the gardener's rake was making neat, pale furrows in the dust.

“Now,” he said softly, “we know what she was afraid of, my friend. And it was not at all the thing that we supposed.”

“I don't understand you.”

“No.” He turned and looked at me, and there was something almost tender in his expression. “But you will, Hastings. You will. It is a pity the dead cannot tell us which door they locked, and why. The living are so much less obliging.”

He took out his handkerchief, polished the lens of his monocle, which he did not wear, and put it away again, and I had the uncomfortable impression that he had said far more than he intended, and was already regretting it.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--I set this down before the day has got into me, because I want the thing kept while it is fresh. Morris's camp-fire was lit at eight. It was a coal fire in the grate of his rooms, built up as though it were the prairie, with a great deal of ceremony and no regard at all for the chimney. He cooked a steak in a chafing-dish, swearing that no Englishman had ever cooked one properly and that none ever would. Art came late, as a man will who has been sitting over a letter, and his face was so bright that I knew before he spoke what news he carried.

He stood with his back to the fire and told us, in the plain way of a man who has waited an hour to say a thing, that Miss Westenra had accepted him that afternoon. He said it twice, as though the first time had not gone in. Morris rose, shook his hand until I thought the wrist would give, and fetched the bottle he had been keeping for the occasion. I drank with them. I believe I drank more than was wise, and I will be honest in the phonograph if nowhere else: I searched myself for bitterness and found very little. Lucy's three proposals were a thing of one day. I was the first and, I think, the most sensible of the three, and I was not the one she chose. That is all of it, and it is simple enough to be borne.

Morris made his toast "to the happiest man in all the wide world," and drank it looking into the fire. Then he made a second toast, to the lady, and his voice was a little rough on the last word, so I did not look at him. Art talked of his father's land and of a house he means to build in the country, with a window that looks towards the sunrise, because Lucy once said she wanted one. We stayed until past midnight. Morris told us of the landing at the Marquesas and the fever that followed it, and of the lake at Titicaca, where the reed boats are so light that a man can lift one with a finger. At the door he took my hand and said, "Jack, you'll be all right." I said I was all right. I am.

*28 May.*--Renfield quiet all the morning, and then, when I came to his room at four, he asked me a question which I did not expect and cannot yet account for.

He was sitting in the window with his flies in their little box, and he did not look up. He said, "Doctor, is Miss Westenra to be married?"

I asked him what had put Miss Westenra into his head. He said he had heard the name. I asked where. He said he could not remember, only that it had been "about in the air," as he put it. I have never mentioned her to him. Not once, in any of our sittings, not in the notes, not in the careless talk one makes to a patient to keep him easy. As far as I know she has never been within these walls. Her engagement has been known to the four of us since last night and to Mrs. Westenra's household, and to nobody else that I can name.

I asked whether he had seen her. He said no, but that she was very sweet, and that he would like to send her something "to remember him by." I asked what he would send. He thought about it for a long time and then said he could only think of one thing at a time, and that I was interrupting him.

I have put this in the phonograph so that it is exactly as he said it. I shall ask Attendant Hopkins whether any visitor has spoken of her in his hearing. I do not think it will mean anything. I notice, however, that I have been turning the cylinder over in my mind all the afternoon, and that is a thing I do with cases that interest me, and with very few others.

*Letter, Herr Karl Lindner, Notary Public, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Bistritz, 27th May.*

“Honoured Madam,--

“I write to you because I am the notary of this town, and because Mr. Jonathan Harker, your affianced husband, I believe, had his papers in my office before he went to the castle, for the purchase of an English house. I have the honour to be a stranger to you, and I beg you will pardon my English, which is not so good as I would wish.

“Mr. Harker was to have left the castle on the 25th of this month, and a carriage was ordered to meet him at the Borgo Pass on that day. The driver went and came back alone. He says that he waited at the place until the evening, and that no one came down to him, and that he was told at the castle gate that the gentleman was kept there for a little while by his host, who has business of his own that cannot be hurried.

“Two days after this a message came by the same driver. It said that Mr. Harker was in good health and was not in any danger, but that his departure is delayed, and that he could not say when he might be able to travel. The message was not in his own hand. I have seen no letter from him at all since he left this town.

“I do not know what more to tell you, Madam. Perhaps he is only a little delayed, as English gentlemen are sometimes delayed in our country, where the roads are slow and the people are very obliging and do not like to say no. I have sent word to the English office at Exeter, and I will write again the moment I have any further news.

“Pray do not be too much afraid for him. I remain, Madam, with respect,

“Your obedient servant,

“KARL LINDNER.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*2 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I am writing this at the kitchen table, because I could not sit still in the parlour and I did not want to disturb Mother. Your letter came this morning, and I read it twice over before I could take in what it said. I am so glad about Arthur. I always thought that if any man deserved you it would be the one who sat by you at the Pops and never once looked at his watch. Tell him from me that he is to be good to you, or he will have me to answer to, and I am a very much stronger woman than I look.

“But, Lucy, I have had a dreadful shock, and I must tell you about it, because I have nobody else who will understand what it is to be frightened for someone a long way off and not be able to do anything at all.

“I enclose the letter from Bistritz. You can see for yourself how kind it is, and how little it says. I hate it for being so kind. Every sentence of it seems to want to be cheerful, and each one lets in a little more of the dark. A gentleman who is only delayed would be delayed at the hotel, with his trunks about him, and with a letter to write to the girl at home. Jonathan has not written to me since the early days of May. He told me in his last lines that he would be back in about a week, and he meant it; I know he meant it. I am trying not to think about why he has not written, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

“I went to Mr. Hawkins's office in the afternoon, as soon as I could get away from the school, and he was very good to me. He said Jonathan's business was nearly finished, and that a man who is careful with a purchase is often slow with his letters. He is a kind old man and he did not believe a word of what he said, I could see it in his hands. He has telegraphed to Bistritz, and I have telegraphed him to say I will wait at home until I hear from him, and that I shall not sleep much until I do.

“I keep wondering whether I should go out there myself. Mother says it is madness, and I suppose it is. I have never been further than Harwich. I looked at a map of Hungary last night for a long time, and it seemed to me that the roads on it go up into the mountains and then simply stop, as though the mapmaker had lost his nerve.

“Do not come to London to comfort me, dear. You have enough to think about, with your three proposals and your Arthur. I only wanted you to know, so that when you say your prayers tonight you will say one for Jonathan as well. Give my love to your mother, and tell Mr. Holmwood I am very proud of him.

“Ever your loving

“MINA.

“P.S.--I have been writing this for an hour, and the ten o’clock bell has rung twice. I am going to bed now, but I shall not undress.”

*Telegram from Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*3 June.*

“JONATHAN IS WELL STOP HE WILL NOT BE COMING HOME STOP DO NOT WAIT FOR HIM STOP HAWKINS.”