The Chapters

The train slowed, jarred, and came to a standstill at a station where the rain had thinned to a weeping mist and the lamps on the platform glimmered like dull moons in the gray air. Mary woke with a start to find Mrs. Medlock shaking her none too gently by the arm, the purple velvet flowers on the woman’s bonnet trembling with the motion. The child had slept heavily, as she always did when tired and crossing, and for a moment she did not know where she was. Then she remembered the railway carriage, the gray rain-storm, and the long journey from London. She pushed her crêpe hat straight and rubbed her eyes with her thin black-gloved fingers.

“Rouse thee, miss!” said Mrs. Medlock. “We’re here, and there’s a gentleman on the platform as I didn’t look to see. Up with you, and mind your finery.”

Mary stood up and followed the housekeeper out onto the wet stones. The station was small and seemed almost deserted, yet a little apart from the two or three porters stood a man wrapped in a dark traveling cloak. Even in the dim light Mary could see that his shoulders made a strange, uneven line. He wore no hat, and his hair was thin and grizzled. He stood motionless, staring at the carriage as if he expected something unpleasant to emerge. Mrs. Medlock curtseyed, though not deeply.

“Mr. Craven, sir—I’ve brought the little girl from London,” she said.

The man came a step nearer, and then Mary saw his face, which was sallow and hollow, with eyes like cold pebbles. His back was distinctly crooked, one shoulder higher than the other. He looked at Mary as if she were a piece of furniture which had been delivered later than he liked, and then he spoke to Mrs. Medlock, not to the child.

“So this is the girl,” he said. His voice was short and cold. “Get her into the carriage. The trap is waiting outside.”

He turned and walked toward a closed carriage drawn by two horses, his uneven gait making his cloak swing. Mary observed him stealthily as they followed. She had never seen a hunchback before, and she found the sight disagreeable, but she also found that he looked more unhappy than cross, though she would not have admitted that she pitied him for even a moment. She only thought that he was queer, as Mrs. Medlock had said, and that she did not wish to speak to him.

Inside the carriage it was padded and smelled of leather and damp wool. Mr. Craven took the corner opposite, drew his cloak about him, and said no more. Mrs. Medlock sat beside Mary and closed her eyes, though whether she slept or merely rested Mary could not tell. The child pressed into her own corner and watched the man. He never looked at her, never spoke, only stared at the window as if the darkness held something he wished to see. Her black dress made her look yellower than ever in the lantern light, and she felt small and unimportant under his indifference. She had heard Mrs. Medlock tell of his dead wife and his shuttered ways, and for a fleeting instant she recalled the French tale of the hunchback and the princess, but she put the thought away as quickly as it came. He was her uncle, and he was disagreeable, and that was all.

The carriage rolled away from the station, and the few lights of the little town dropped behind. Soon there was nothing but a road that rose and fell with a bleak openness on either side, and a darkness so thick that the windows of the carriage seemed to be shutters against a wall of night. Mrs. Medlock had lit a small lantern that swung from a hook, and by its swaying light Mary could see the manservant who drove them bending to his reins. The moor, for so Mrs. Medlock had called it, was a vast black emptiness where no trees leaned and no flowers grew, as far as Mary could tell. The wind sounded around them like a far-off breathing.

They had gone perhaps an hour, or maybe less, when the horses suddenly checked and the carriage lurched to a halt. Mrs. Medlock, who had been dozing, woke with a jerk. “What’s amiss, coachman?” she called.

“There’s summat in the road, marm,” came the answer. “Can’t rightly see i’ the dark, but it’s big enough to stop us.”

Mr. Craven made no remark. Mary, impelled by a sudden curiosity she did not understand, loosened the door and stepped down onto the moor. The ground was springy and hummocky under her thin shoes, and the darkness was like a thick curtain drawn close about her. She could hear the wind moving over the unseen expanses, and feel it tugging at her black hat. For a minute she stood there, a small black figure in a black dress, alone in the great night, while the men behind her muttered and the horses stamped. The moor air had a smell of wet earth and something wild that she could not name. She could not see what had blocked the way, but the cold and the freedom of the open space gave her a queer, brief feeling of being outside everything that had ever held her. Then Mrs. Medlock’s voice reached her, sharp and practical.

“Get back in, miss! There’s naught for you to see, and the air’s too keen.” Mary obeyed, climbing into the carriage again, and the thing in the road was presently dragged aside—a fallen branch, as it proved—and they went on.

The drive seemed long, but at last the carriage turned and slowed before a great mass of stone that loomed against the sky. Misselthwaite Manor, Mary supposed. There were many windows, some dark, a few showing a faint yellow glow, and a heavy door that opened as they mounted the steps. Inside, the hall was vast and shadowy, with a staircase that curved upward into darkness and walls on which hung pictures whose faces were lost in the gloom. Mrs. Medlock took Mary’s hand in a grip that brooked no lingering, and led her through a passage to a small room where a fire had been lit.

“You’ll sup here,” she said. “It’s a servant’s sitting-room, but it’s warm, and the cook’s left a tray. Don’t go wandering, mind.”

She had scarcely gone when the door opened again and a manservant entered with a tray. He was a lean fellow, older than the coachman, with a weather-beaten face and eyes that looked as if they had seen many storms. He set the tray on the table and spoke.

“Here th’art, lass,” he said. “Ah’ve browt thee a bit o’ warm meat an’ some broth, an’ a hunk o’ bread. Tak’ it while it’s hot, for t’ wind’s keen tonight.”

Mary stared at him. She had understood only a word or two. “I cannot understand you,” she said plainly.

Mrs. Medlock, who had come back to the door, clicked her tongue. “She says she doesn’t know your talk, Thomas. Speak plain if you can, for the child’s from India and knows no Yorkshire.”

The man grinned, unoffended. “Aye, miss,” he said, still broad but slower. “It’s but your supper, miss. Eat it up.”

“I cannot fully understand what he says,” Mary repeated, looking from one to the other. She was not used to being helpless, and the inability to comprehend nettled her. Mrs. Medlock translated the rest, and Mary ate the broth and meat, which were plain but hot. She had not known until then how hungry the journey had made her, and she finished every crumb of the bread.

When the tray was cleared, Mrs. Medlock took her upstairs to a bedroom under the eaves. The room was large and bare, with a narrow bed and a window that rattled when the wind struck it. A fire had been laid but not lit, and the air was chill. “You’re to stay in this part of the house,” Mrs. Medlock said. “There’s near a hundred rooms, but most are shut. Don’t go poking, as I told you on the train. Mr. Craven won’t have it, and I won’t answer for what happens if you disobey.”

Mary said nothing. She was used to being given orders by servants, and she had no intention of obeying them unless it suited her. Mrs. Medlock helped her out of her black dress and left her a nightgown, then blew out the candle and went to the door.

At that moment, before she had slipped into bed, a sound crept through the house—a long, low, wandering note, as if a door far away had been blown slowly to and fro on a hinge, or as if some person had drawn a breath and let it go in a sigh that traveled through the corridors. Mary stood still, her nightgown in her hand.

“What is that?” she asked.

Mrs. Medlock paused with her hand on the latch. “That’s the wind, miss,” she said briskly. “It whistles round the old corners something dreadful. You’ll get used to it, same as the rest of us.”

She went out and closed the door. Mary got into bed and pulled the covers to her chin. The room was dark, save for the faint glow of the dying fire in the grate. She had not been asleep, and she did not mean to sleep at once. The sound came again, a faint, remote cry that might have been the wind, or might have been something else. Mrs. Medlock had said it was the wind, but Mrs. Medlock did not know everything, and Mary had begun to learn that grown people often gave answers without knowing. She lay awake in the great bed, in the dark house with its hundred locked rooms, and she made up her mind that she would find out for herself what the sound was.

It was a few nights after that tranquil walk with my wife, when Mars had crept near the zenith and the excursionists’ songs still echoed in my memory, that I beheld the first visible sign of the coming doom. I had been sitting late in the little study of our cottage near Ottershaw, revising the proofs of a paper upon the development of moral ideas, and the warmth of the evening had tempted me to step outside. The sky was cloudless, and the stars shone with that intense and frosty brilliance which those who live in the neighbourhood of London seldom perceive nowadays. I leaned upon the gate, thinking of the immense distances of which Ogilvy had spoken, and of the careless security of mankind, when suddenly a new light appeared among the constellations.

It was no common shooting star, that swift and ephemeral scratch upon the dark, but a bulky mass that trailed a wake of greenish fire and seemed to hang in the air for the space of several seconds. I remember a faint rustling, as of a distant railway train, that may have been fancy, but the sight was unmistakable. The thing curved slowly downward toward the low lands between Ottershaw and Chertsey, and vanished behind the belt of poplars that fringes the old river course. I stood long after it had gone, peering into the darkness, and then retired to bed with a vague expectancy, but no inkling of the gigantic import of what I had seen. To me, as to every other man upon the earth that night, it was but a falling star, a pretty spectacle for the eye of a philosopher, and no more.

With the first grey of dawn I was afoot, drawn by a curiosity I could not name. The lanes were silent, and a light mist lay in the hollows as I took the path that leads past the ruined brickworks toward the flooded gravel pit where the stream sometimes spreads after heavy rain. A strange odour met me, metallic and acrid, such as one smells in a smithy. Then I saw, above the willows, a thin column of steam wavering in the still air.

The pit was a broad shallow depression, half filled with water from the recent rains, and in its centre lay the object, inclined at a slight angle, with perhaps a third of its bulk above the surface. It was a great cylindrical mass—though I use the word only to describe its form, for it showed no seam or lid that I could discern—some five-and-twenty feet long and perhaps eight feet in diameter, of a dark grey metal that caught the light with a subdued sheen. The water about its base simmered and breathed steam, and droplets upon its flanks flickered into vapour even as I watched. No opening of any kind was visible; its surface was smooth, save for a kind of rippled scarring such as might be forged by intense heat in the upper air. It lay as a man might lie who had fallen exhausted into a bath, half sunk, half rising, while the morning wind drove the steam in ragged plumes across the pit.

I had not long stood there before I heard the familiar step of Ogilvy upon the gravel. He had ridden over upon his bicycle, and was flushed with exercise and excitement. “Ah! you are before me, but I see the truth is out,” he called. He set down his machine and came to the bank, peering at the mass with the eye of a practised observer. “A magnificent meteorite!” he pronounced. “The largest I have ever seen fall in these parts, and singularly well preserved by its watery bed.”

I told him that I had watched it descend from the southern sky, and that its arrival followed within days of the last flame upon Mars. “Is it not possible,” said I, “that this is the projectile those Martian eruptions foretold? The timings align too closely for mere chance.” Ogilvy laughed outright. “My dear fellow, you are letting your imagination run away with your reason. The trajectory of a body falling from Mars would intersect the earth at a velocity and angle wholly different from this gentle plunge. Moreover, the physical character of the object is plainly that of a natural siderite. See the fusion crust, the rounded terminations produced by ablation in the atmosphere. The Martian lights were volcanic, as I have said; this is a coincidence, nothing more.”

“Yet,” I urged, “the markings on the planet, the jets of gas, the ten nights of flame—surely they betoken a directed force, not a random stone.” He shook his head with the gentle tolerance of a scientist for a layman. “The universe is full of coincidences for those who seek marvels. If every falling star were a message from another world, we should be inundated with correspondents. No, it is a meteorite, and I shall write a note to Nature to that effect. The weight, the texture, the very sound it gives under my hammer—” and he struck the exposed flank a smart blow—“mark it as a cousin to the stones that fell at Ensisheim and Wold Cottage. You are a philosopher of morals, not of physics.”

I protested that no natural stone I had ever heard described presented so regular and unitary a shape, lacking any of the angular fractures of common aerolites. Ogilvy merely pointed to the ripples. “A molten mass spinning in flight,” said he, “will round itself as a drop of water does. You mistake the work of heat for the work of hands.” Thus we argued, he with the weight of astronomical authority, I with the uneasy memory of those ten nights of firing and the envious eyes across the gulf of space, until the increasing warmth of the day drove us back from the steaming shore.

About mid-morning I walked back to Ottershaw to fetch my wife, who had heard from a neighbour of the strange sight and was half alarmed. She insisted on coming, despite my assurance that all was harmless, and we proceeded together along the path, she carrying a small parcel of food, and soon joined the trickle of villagers making toward the pit. The morning had brightened, and the distant chimneys of Chertsey threw slender shadows across the road. My wife, ever practical, remarked that the world contained wonders enough without inventing invaders from the planets, and that if the thing were hot she trusted I would not emulate the fool who touches a kettle to see if it boils.

When she beheld the massive object steaming in its bath of water, she stood silent for a moment, then said: “It looks like a great iron pot dropped from heaven, and I trust it will not explode.” I reassured her as best I could, repeating Ogilvy’s opinion that it was but a meteorite, though privately I nursed my own doubts. She regarded it with a woman’s pragmatic eye, and produced from her basket a flask of tea, bidding me drink against the damp of the pit.

By this time a score or more of people had assembled on the higher ground above the pit. There were labourers from the brickfields, children with eager faces, and a brace of policemen from Chertsey who had come to keep order and knew not how. The object, now somewhat cooled but still radiating heat enough to make the adjacent air shimmer, was the focus of all eyes. A young carter, emboldened by the taunts of his companions, climbed down the bank and reached out to touch the dark surface. A sharp cry followed. He snatched back his hand, which bore a vivid red weal across the palm, and sucked at his fingers with a mixture of pain and embarrassment. “Tis hotter nor any stove,” he muttered, and the crowd laughed, though some drew back. My wife produced a handkerchief and a dab of butter from her basket, and bound the slight burn, remarking that folk should know better than to fondle strange iron from the sky. The incident, though trivial, lent a new seriousness to the onlookers; they kept a respectful distance thereafter.

More arrivals swelled the gathering as the hours passed. A photographer from the illustrated paper set up a tripod upon the bank, though the steam misted his lens. Two gentlemen on bicycles, one of whom I recognised as a tutor from the village school, discoursed loudly about the probability of aerial stones. Ogilvy, who had returned with a notebook, renewed his contention to each newcomer that the mass was a meteorite, and grew mildly irate when I silently shook my head. A woman with a basket of apples walked among the crowd, selling her fruit at a penny a piece, and the ordinary life of the Surrey countryside went on about the extraordinary thing that had dropped into its midst.

Thus the morning wore on. The sun climbed, and the steam from the pit took a silvery hue. I remained near the object, pondering the immense journey it must have made, and watching the play of light upon its flanks. My wife, though she stayed by me for a while, began to tire, and the growing press of strangers made her uneasy. About the hour of noon, when the crowd numbered perhaps a hundred, I persuaded her to go home and prepare our midday meal, promising to return before long. She departed with reluctant steps, turning once to warn me against foolishness, and then she was lost among the elms along the lane. I stayed, as I write this, with the steam still rising and the murmur of the crowd about me, little guessing how soon that silent messenger would be joined by others, and what awful intelligences it concealed.

He accommodated his stride to hers, guiding her past the inroads of tangled growth that bordered the sandy path. The sun by now had climbed high, and the camomile acres on either hand sent up a bitter sweetness that hung upon the air. The heat rose from the sand in visible waves, and the distant lemon trees glistened with a metallic light. Madame Ratignolle leaned draggingly upon his arm, complaining softly of the cramp that had seized her limbs and the stiffness that bound her joints. She faltered once, but his support was steady, and they moved on at the slow pace her discomfort dictated.

“You walk too little, Adèle,” Robert said, with the tender familiarity of an old friend. “The sea air is good for you, but you must use your legs more than the sewing-cushion.”

She laughed, a little breathless. “It is easy for you to say, Robert. You do not carry three children under your heart as I have done, nor feel the weight of them in the bones afterward.”

They walked on, the rough bath-houses left behind, the main house of Madame Lebrun appearing through the grove of orange trees. Robert’s tone changed, as if a thought had strayed into his mind and lodged there, unwilling to be dislodged.

“Mrs. Pontellier is a creature apart,” he said, almost to himself, yet loud enough for his companion to hear. “One feels that she is only just beginning to live. She looks at the world with eyes that have not yet learned to close upon themselves.”

Madame Ratignolle made no answer at once; she only pressed his arm lightly, as much as her drag permitted, and smiled a knowing smile. She did not warn him, nor counsel him; she merely stored the words away, as women of her temperament will store a confidence to be delivered later like a small gift.

At the house he left her in the care of her own servant, and went off toward the men’s quarters, whirling his straw hat upon his finger.

Mrs. Pontellier, meanwhile, had gathered the children from the tent and walked back with them to the cottage, the quadroon nurse trailing behind. The little Pontelliers were full of the morning’s adventures, and Raoul demanded to know why his mother had not been present when the lovers were put to flight. She answered him vaguely, her mind still upon the taste of candor that had intoxicated her on the gallery of the bath-house. The memory of her head upon Adèle’s shoulder, of the unaccustomed warmth of the hand-clasp, lingered like a faint perfume; yet she felt no need to speak of it, and the children’s chatter covered her silence. The nurse settled the boys with a quiet that Edna envied; she felt herself an outsider to their small world, yet not discontent.

After a simple midday meal, the children were sent to rest, and the nurse sat with them in the shadow of the porch. Edna took a book upon her knee, but the print swam before her eyes. She was aroused by the sound of footsteps upon the shell path, and a young lad from the village presented her with a yellow envelope. He removed his cap and stood awkwardly until she dismissed him with a coin. She noticed the paper’s sharp crease, the official stamp of the telegraph office in New Orleans.

She broke it open with a certain indifference, expecting some word from Léonce of his Saturday arrival. The message was brief:

“Cannot come out weekend business detains stop wire later stop Léonce.”

She read it twice, feeling a small, undefined relief, as if a doorway had been left unlocked that she had thought barred. No disappointment visited her; only a lightening of the spirit, such as she had known when the children were absent in Iberville. She put the telegram aside, and the book, and sat for a while listening to the buzz of the insects in the myrtle, watching the slow passage of a cloud across the sky.

It was in the slack of the afternoon, when the sun slanting through the pines made long shafts upon the sand, that she found herself walking alone toward the beach. She had told no one of her intent; the nurse dozed, the children slept, and the cottage seemed suspended in a drowsy quiet. The path was familiar, yet seemed new to her, as if the morning’s confidence had washed it clean.

The bath-houses stood open, their galleries deserted. The lady in black was not upon her neighboring porch; or so Edna thought. She unlocked her own compartment, and presently emerged in the cumbersome garment that served her for a bath, a cloak thrown over it. She went down to the water’s edge where the choppy wind of the morning had given way to a lazy ripple.

She had never before attempted more than to wet her feet and watch the others sport. But now, with no eyes upon her, she waded in until the water reached her waist, then with a timorous movement of her arms she lifted herself and managed a few strokes, awkward, uneven, yet undeniably borne forward by her own effort. The water was cooler than she expected, closing about her like a hand. She remembered the meadow in Kentucky, the grass beating her sides as she walked; here it was the wave that beat, and she answered with her arms. The salt touched her lips; she tasted it as she had tasted the unaccustomed candor of the morning—with a start of discovery. She came ashore quickly, lest any should come upon her in this new act, and told no one.

As she was drawing the cloak about her shoulders, a voice spoke from the gallery of the adjoining bath-house. It was the lady in black, who had been seated there unseen, a book of devotions upon her lap. Edna had hitherto seen her only as a figure of black among the colored umbrellas, a silent worshiper; now the voice humanized the mourning.

“You were brave to go in alone, Madame Pontellier,” she said. Her face was long, her eyes mournful but not unkind. “The Gulf is deceitful; yet it gives more than it takes, to those who respect it.”

Edna, surprised that the silent woman should address her, made a slight inclination of the head. “I have only just learned to move my arms, Madame. It was nothing.”

“It is never nothing, the first time,” returned the lady in black, and she opened her book again, as if the exchange were concluded.

Edna walked back slowly, the damp garment hidden under the cloak, her mind upon the feel of the water and the sound of that unexpected voice.

Toward evening, when the shadows lengthened and the heat had softened, Madame Ratignolle sent a message that she would call upon her friend. She came, fresh in a lawn gown, her hair smoothed, and seated herself upon the cottage gallery where Edna rocked in a low chair. A firefly or two drifted across the boards; the scent of night jasmine rose from the border.

“I have something Robert said to me on our walk from the beach,” Adèle began, with a little laugh. “He declared you a creature apart, ma chère, only just beginning to live, with eyes that have not learned to close upon the world. I thought it pretty, and true.”

Edna felt the words like a faint breath upon her cheek. She did not answer at once, but looked out where the sea was a dim line beyond the trees. “Robert sees too much,” she said at last, with a half smile.

Madame Ratignolle did not press the matter; she spoke of the children, of the cramp that still lingered, of a seam she must finish. Then she rose and took her leave with a gentle nod, trailing her gauze veil behind her.

Night came, with a moon that hung low and a warm breeze that stirred the palmetto. Somewhere a dog barked on the main road, and a late sail leaned toward Cat Island. The children slept within; the nurse had gone to her quarters. Edna sat alone on the gallery of the cottage, a shawl about her shoulders, the telegram forgotten upon the table. In her mind lingered Robert’s remark as Adèle had repeated it: a creature apart, only just beginning to live. The phrase pulsed like a tide, carrying her out beyond the familiar shores of her days.

The advisers, whose counsel had been so earnestly solicited, were not persons to neglect the concerns of a friend of consequence. On the afternoon of the very day which had seen Sir Walter Elliot compelled to confess the extent of his embarrassments to Elizabeth, a confidential servant announced Mr Shepherd, the agent from the market town, and Lady Russell, the steady and valued friend of the family; and they were immediately admitted to the library at Kellynch Hall, where the baronet and his eldest daughter awaited them with the air of persons entitled to be delivered from every difficulty by the mere superiority of others’ understanding.

Sir Walter rose with his customary grace, for even in the midst of debt he was a very fine man, and greeted them with a cordiality that subtly implied they were come to rescue him from a plight for which he was not to blame. Elizabeth, wearing her black ribbons for the wife of Mr William Walter Elliot with a seemly mixture of resignation and elegance, disposed herself to listen, while Anne, who had been engaged at the window with some slight piece of needlework, quietly placed herself within the circle, though none thought her presence of weight, and her father would as soon have consulted the mantelpiece as his youngest surviving daughter.

Lady Russell, whose steady age and character gave her an ascendancy which Sir Walter was willing to acknowledge in a friend though not in a daughter, began with a measured tone. She laid before him a plan of retrenchment which, however mild in her own estimation, struck at the root of several indulgences. She proposed that the annual visit to London should be shortened by a fortnight, and the lodging there taken in a less conspicuous street; that one of the under-housemaids and the second footman should be discharged; that the frequent entertainments of the neighbourhood should be reduced to two solemn dinners in the season; and that the purchase of new books, prints, and trifles for the drawing-room should cease. She concluded with the assurance that such measures, while they would little impair the dignity of Kellynch, must sensibly diminish the bills of the tradespeople, and permit the Baronetage to be opened without the recollection of Mr Shepherd’s hints.

Sir Walter heard her with a polite but unmistakable repulsion. His baronetcy and his person were blessings inferior only to each other, and to curtail the observances due to either was impossible. “My dear Lady Russell,” said he, “your kindness is equal to your judgment, but you do not consider what is due to the name of Elliot. The Elliots of Kellynch have never been hidden from the world; we cannot, at my time of life, begin a retreat which would seem to proclaim poverty. The London visit is a necessity; the servants are already fewer than our consequence admits; and as for entertainments, they are the very means by which we maintain the respect of the county. I must reject your plan entirely. It is retrenchment without honour.”

Lady Russell, though grieved, was not surprised. She looked towards Elizabeth, who merely shook her head with an air of one who found the sacrifice too great, yet who, unlike her father, was not wholly unconscious of the peril.

Mr Shepherd, a man of business accustomed to speak plainly to those who employed him, then presented his own scheme. He suggested that the timber in the home wood might be fell’d without lasting detriment; that certain small rents in the village could be collected with stricter punctuality; and that the allowance to the poor, which Sir Walter had ever thought a matter of honour, might be silently withdrawn for a twelvemonth. He added that the carriage horses might be reduced from four to two, and the chaise used only for necessary journeys, while the yearly present to Anne, which had been omitted of late, should be formally discontinued.

Sir Walter’s indignation at this was yet more marked. “Mr Shepherd,” he said, “you touch the very foundations of my situation. To sell timber is to mutilate the estate; to press the tenants is unbecoming a gentleman; and to withdraw charity is a confession of distress which I will not make. The carriage is a part of the establishment without which I should be nobody. Your plan, sir, is as inadmissible as Lady Russell’s, and I wonder that you could propose it. I have asked for relief, not for disgrace. The Kellynch estate shall be transmitted whole and entire, as I received it.”

Thus were both plans rejected outright, as the father and daughter had secretly feared, yet they had hoped that the advice of others would open some path which did not involve the loss of indulgence. Sir Walter, indeed, felt himself blameless; his expenses had been those of a man of rank, and rank required them. Elizabeth, for her part, said nothing, but the consciousness of being nine-and-twenty, and the dread of approaching years of danger, gave her a vague uneasiness that even her father’s refusal could not dissipate.

It was at this juncture, and in a silence which threatened to become uncomfortable, that Anne, who had been hitherto as unobserved as the furniture, lifted her eyes and spoke. She had no weight in the family, but the urgency of the moment, and the sight of her father’s unavailing pride, gave her a gentle resolution. “If I may be permitted to say a few words,” she began, in her low, even voice, “there is a plan of economy stricter than either that has been offered, which would yet preserve the name of Elliot from the world’s censure, because it would be practised in retirement. We might close the east wing of the house entirely, keeping only the rooms necessary for our own use; we might dismiss all but the indispensable servants; we might give up the London journey for several years, and live quietly at Kellynch, seeing only such neighbours as come of their own accord. The table might be plain, the wardrobe renewed only when necessity compels, and the charities, though reduced, need not be wholly abandoned. Such a course would reduce the expenditure by more than one half, and though it is not pleasant, it is possible, and it leaves the Hall in our own hands.”

She ceased, expecting the usual overlooking of her speech. But to the astonishment of all, Elizabeth, who had been tracing the pattern of her ribbon with a thoughtful finger, looked up and said, “I think Anne is right. Something of this kind must be done, or we shall be ruined. I should not like to go to London in a diminished state, but I would sooner stay here in quiet than be hounded by tradespeople. Anne’s plan has sense in it.” Sir Walter stared at his eldest daughter as if she had uttered a foreign tongue; that Elizabeth, who had presided with such self-possession and decision, who had walked immediately after Lady Russell out of every drawing-room in the county, should second the insignificant Anne, was a phenomenon to which he could assign no cause. Lady Russell regarded her god-daughter with affectionate surprise, and Mr Shepherd, though he judged the scheme extreme, inclined his head at the unexpected support.

Before Sir Walter could frame a reply, the agent, encouraged by the turn of the conversation, and forgetting perhaps the rebuff he had already received, ventured upon a suggestion which had evidently been in his mind though unspoken. “Since the family is loath to diminish its style while resident,” said he, “there remains the possibility, if the Hall were let to a tenant for a term of years, of removing to a smaller residence, whereby the income from the estate would—”

He got no further. Sir Walter rose from his seat with a flush of genuine anger, his handsome features distorted by an emotion deeper than vanity. “Mr Shepherd,” he cried, “hold! Not another syllable. The word tenant shall never be spoken in my presence again. I will not hear it. Kellynch Hall is not to be desecrated by the occupation of strangers; it is transmitted whole and entire, and I will sooner perish than permit the idea. Let the word be erased from your vocabulary when you address me. I have said it: the word tenant is forbidden.” The agent bowed in confusion, and Lady Russell sighed, for she saw that the obstinacy of rank was impregnable, and that no plan, strict or mild, would be embraced that day.

The conversation flagged after this, and shortly the visitors took their leave, having effected nothing. Sir Walter, though relieved to have silenced the odious notion, was still oppressed by the heavy bills which Mr Shepherd’s hints had not banished, and Elizabeth, torn between her new approbation of Anne’s plan and her horror of its details, relapsed into discontent. Anne withdrew to the window again, possessing that inward consolation which a clear judgment and an elegant mind bestow, though her word had no weight.

They had not long been left to themselves when a servant entered with a letter bearing the Uppercross seal. It was addressed to Miss Anne Elliot, and she, with a slight apology, broke the seal and read. The letter was from her sister Mary, Mrs Charles Musgrove of Uppercross, and ran in the following strain:

“My dear Anne, I am excessively unwell, with the headache and a bilious complaint that renders me quite unable to bear the noise of the children. Charles is gone to the market town and will not return till late, and the servants are so careless that I have no comfort. The nursery maids are stupid, and little Walter cries without cease. I cannot tell you how wretched I am, and I must beg you to come to Uppercross as soon as you can, for you are the only one who knows how to manage me and the house. Pray do not delay, for I am sure I shall be worse if left alone, and there is no one here who sympathises. Mary Musgrove.”

Anne read this with her customary tenderness towards a sister who, though coarse and self-occupied, was yet her sister. She saw in the complaint the usual mixture of exaggeration and real indisposition, but felt that the request should be complied with. She made known the purport to Elizabeth, who, absorbed in her own cares and indifferent to Anne’s absence so long as it did not affect the dignity of the house, readily gave permission, observing only that she hoped Mary would not expect Anne to stay above a month.

The remainder of the day passed in the uneasy atmosphere which debt and pride together produce. Sir Walter took up the Baronetage, but found no solace in its pages, for the sight of his own name only reminded him that the heir presumptive was distant and the present owner distressed; and though he could plainly see how old all the rest of his family were growing, his own reflection in the glass still satisfied him. Elizabeth sat by the window, contemplating the approach of the years of danger with more uneasiness than she would confess, and occasionally glancing at Anne with a new, if reluctant, respect. No further mention was made of retrenchment, for the proposals lay rejected, and the forbidden word tenant hung like a cloud over any future counsel.

When the evening closed, and the family were dispersed to their separate apartments, Anne found herself alone in the small room which she occupied, with the letter from Mary still in her hand. She had resolved to go to Uppercross on the morrow, to fulfil the sisterly office, and to withdraw for a time from the scene of Kellynch’s perplexities. Yet as she looked out at the summer dusk, she reflected that the question of the family’s debts remained entirely unsettled; her father’s refusal to yield, and Elizabeth’s strange support of a stricter economy which he would not adopt, left matters precisely where they had been. The advisers had been heard and dismissed, the tenant had been proscribed, and the estate stood as proud and as embarrassed as before. With a quiet sigh, Anne prepared for her journey, conscious that though she could relieve Mary’s ailments, she could not heal the disorders of Kellynch, nor reconcile vanity with ruin.

Mr. Franklin, releasing me from that foreign hug, seated himself cross-legged on the sand as if he had been born to it, and looked about him with the cheerful air of a traveller who has reached his journey’s end. I, being a heavier man by some thirty years and a good deal of Yorkshire beef, got upon my legs with more difficulty, and shook the sand from the lappet of my coat which Rosanna had but lately pointed out to me as the place that showed.

“Four good hours before we looked for you, sir!” says I, when I had fetched my breath. “What’s brought you by the early coach, instead of coming at close of day as the little drummer’s boy foretold?”

He laughed, and tapped the rose in his button‑hole. “The boy was wrong by a matter of four hours, Betteredge; and I owe my punctuality to a sheet of paper, not to a trance. Read this, and you will know as much as I do.”

He took from the breast of his fawn‑coloured waistcoat a letter, somewhat creased, and handed it to me. I put on my spectacles (for I am not ashamed to own that my eyes, like the rest of me, have felt the wear of time) and read what follows. You, who are used to the lightning speed of the modern post, and to letters that tell everything and mean nothing, will perhaps smile at the gravity with which an old steward in the year ’48 received a few lines from the capital; but I beg you to remember that a sheet from London was a rarity in our house, and that, when it came, it was read as solemnly as a chapter from the Bible.

The letter ran thus:—

“London, 22nd May 1848.

“My dear Franklin,

“A matter has arisen which makes it desirable you should arrive at your aunt’s house some hours earlier than you proposed. Pray take the morning coach instead of the evening. Bring with you the enclosed sealed packet, and deliver it to old Betteredge to lock in the plate‑room overnight. Mention this to no one for the present, and keep the packet about your person until you reach Yorkshire.

“Your faithful servant,

“MATTHEW BRUFF.”

I handed the letter back, with the respect due to Mr. Bruff, who is a lawyer of standing in Lincoln’s Inn, and no writer of idle words.

“Mr. Bruff’s hand is as plain as his meaning is dark,” says I. “And the packet, sir? Has it travelled in your pocket from London town?”

Mr. Franklin felt in the breast of his coat again, and produced a small object wrapped in brown paper, sealed at both ends with a spot of red wax, and tied about with a string. It was no bigger than a snuff‑box, and weighed, to my judgement, as light as a feather.

“Here it is,” he said. “I was charged to give it to you, Betteredge, and to ask that you would put it under lock and key in the plate‑room for the night. I know no more of what is inside than you do; and, between ourselves, I have not the least wish to know. Mr. Bruff’s commands are to be obeyed, not questioned.”

“The plate‑room is the safest corner in the house, sir,” says I, taking the packet as gingerly as if it had been the egg of a humming‑bird. “Save for my lady and Mr. Blake and myself, no soul sets foot there without my key. It shall lie among the silver dishes and the Queen Anne candlesticks, and not a mouse shall nibble at the string.”

Here I must beg you to jog on with me a step or two, while I explain, for the benefit of strangers, that the plate‑room of which I speak is a small closet off the back passage, lined with shelves of oak, and guarded by a lock that defied the ingenuity of the village smith when he tried his hand at it one holiday. I have carried the key these twenty years, and I carry it now in the same pocket as my bandanna, though the bandanna is cleaner.

We set off together across the sandhills, Mr. Franklin humming a tune from abroad, and I pondering on the ways of lawyers. Penelope met us at the edge of the plantation, with her eyes round at the sight of the gentleman from foreign parts; but Mr. Franklin only smiled and kissed her cheek, which made her blush as red as the rose in his button‑hole, and sent her off to tell my lady that her nephew was come.

I went straight to the plate‑room, unlocked the door, and placed the sealed packet on the middle shelf, behind the great silver punch‑bowl that was my lady’s wedding gift. The key turned with its accustomed click. I put it back in my pocket, and felt, I own, a small thrill of importance. A man past seventy does not often have a mystery handed to him before dinner.

When I returned to the hall, there was Penelope waiting, not with a message from my lady, but with a face that told me something had gone wrong among the women.

“Father,” says she, “Nancy says Rosanna never came in to dinner at all. I met the boy from Cobb’s Hole, and he tells me he saw her on the path beyond the sands, walking towards the village as bold as you please. She must have gone on to Cobb’s Hole, instead of coming back to the house.”

“Rosanna at Cobb’s Hole?” says I, as soon as I could pick up my wits. “Why, the girl has neither eaten nor asked leave, and the mutton is cold!”

“She took nothing from the kitchen, that’s certain,” Penelope answered. “And she said no word to me, though I passed her on the stairs not an hour since, looking as if she had seen a ghost. Father, what’s come over Rosanna?”

I recalled the girl’s confusion when Mr. Franklin appeared, and the strange talk about the Shivering Sand lying in wait for her grave. But it is not the part of a steward to spread fancies among the maids; so I only said, “The poor soul is melancholy, Penelope, and her friend at Cobb’s Hole is the only creature she cares for in these parts. Let her be for the present. If she is not home by bedtime, we will think again.”

Penelope went away, shaking her head; and I, having no other call just then, proceeded to the drawing‑room to announce Mr. Franklin to my lady.

My lady was seated by the window, with her needlework, looking as calm as a summer sea. She rose at the sight of her nephew, and gave him both hands—a compliment she paid to few. Mr. Franklin kissed her cheek, and she bade him welcome with a warmth that showed the foreign education had not spoilt him in her eyes.

“You are earlier than we counted on, Franklin,” says my lady, when he had seated himself. “But four hours are as nothing to a family that loves you. There is one thing, however, I must beg of you, and I beg it before we go a word further. I must forbid the subject of my brother Herncastle to be discussed under my roof. You will understand, as a gentleman and a kinsman, that I will not have his name, nor his affairs, nor any breath of the old scandal, spoken of in this house. Do I have your word?”

Mr. Franklin’s bright face clouded for a moment, as a cloud passes over the sun on our Yorkshire moors. But he answered readily, “You have my word, aunt. The subject shall be as though it had never been.”

My lady smiled, and the cloud passed. “That is well,” she said. “Now tell me of your journey, and of the sights you have seen in those strange countries abroad.”

They fell into talk of Paris and Rome, and I withdrew, having no call to listen to matters above a steward’s sphere. But I noted, as I closed the door, that Mr. Franklin’s eyes turned once, as if by habit, towards the window that looks on the sands; and I wondered, not for the first time that day, what string of events had been set a‑moving by the letter in his pocket and the packet in my plate‑room.

The remainder of the afternoon wore on in the usual way. The servants had their dinner (Nancy making up for Rosanna’s absence by a second helping of pudding), and I sat a while in my sitting‑room, with my eyes on the clock, half‑expecting the grey cloak to flutter through the gate. But the clock struck five, six, seven, and no Rosanna.

I took the opportunity, as the shadows lengthened, to step down to the plate‑room once more, only to assure myself that the key was where it ought to be, and that the brown‑paper packet sat unmolested behind the punch‑bowl. There it lay, a little silent thing, charged with I knew not what; and there, says I to myself, it shall lie until Mr. Bruff or Mr. Franklin calls for it.

When the house had settled for the evening, and my lady and Mr. Franklin were at their cards (for he had taught her a new game from across the water), I betook myself to the back court, where the beehive chair awaited me, and where Robinson Crusoe lay on the little table, just as I had left him when the kitchen‑maid Nancy broke in upon my doze.

I lifted the book, and opened it at the dear familiar passage where the man makes his mark upon the post. The bees hummed drowsily about their hive; the sun was down; the air was cool; and the quiet of the yard was only broken by the distant murmur of the sea, which, if you listen rightly, always seems to be saying something you cannot quite catch.

I put it to you, good reader, whether a Christian man, past seventy, with a sealed mystery in his plate‑room and a missing housemaid on his conscience, could have found a better end to his day than to sit in that chair, with Crusoe for company, and the keys of the house safe in his pocket. As for Rosanna Spearman, she was still not back in the house; and though I own I felt a tug at my heart for the girl, I could do no more than trust she was warm at Cobb’s Hole, and leave the rest to the morning.

The packet was locked away. The chair was comfortable. Robinson Crusoe was in my hand. And there, with the bees going to rest and the stars coming out over the Yorkshire coast, I close my account of this Thursday, the 25th of May, 1848, hoping you will be as patient with me in the chapters that are to come as you have been in the chapters that are past.

Letter, Mr. Eugene Foster of Bistritz to Miss Mina Murray.

“*22 May.*”

“Dear Miss Murray,--

“I trust this letter finds you in good health and spirits, though I fear the news I bear may cause you some uneasiness. My name may be unfamiliar to you, yet I have become acquainted with your fiancé, Mr. Jonathan Harker, during his sojourn in this region of Transylvania on a matter of legal business. I am an English subject long resident here as agent for several commercial houses, having come to Bistritz two-and-twenty years since and married the daughter of a respectable merchant of the town. Mr. Harker lodged at the inn of the Golden Krone in Bistritz before proceeding to the interior, and it was there that I first made his acquaintance, being myself a guest at the same board.

“It is with reluctance that I write, but as he entrusted me with a note for you which he later asked me to hold, and as days have passed without his return to the town, I feel it my duty to apprise you of his circumstance. Mr. Harker came back to Bistritz some ten days since in a state of some agitation, though he would not speak of the cause. He informed me that his departure for England had been delayed by the failure of a local carrier, whose cart had broken an axle on the mountain road, and by the necessity of settling certain papers with the district magistrate, who had been from home upon official business. He expressed his earnest wish to be with you, and said that he hoped to sail within the week. However, three days ago he set out again for the mountains on what he termed a final errand, and has not since revisited the town. The landlord of the inn reports that he left word he would be delayed yet longer, perhaps a fortnight, on account of a slight injury to his hand which makes writing painful. He bade me tell you that he is well in body, and that his affection for you is unchanged.

“I enclose the note he gave me, though it is but a few lines, and I copy its purport for your reassurance: ‘My own dear Mina,--Business detains me, but my heart is with you. Expect me when you see me; I am well.--J.H.’ The original I retain lest the post miscarry. I trust you will not alarm yourself overmuch; the roads here are rough but the people hospitable. The weather has been fine, with clear skies and a warmth unusual for the season, so travel is not unpleasant. The market square is bright with blossom, and the church bells ring as in any English parish. If I learn more I shall write again without delay.

“I remain, dear Miss Murray, your obedient servant,

“EUGENE FOSTER.”

Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.

“*28 May.*”

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I must confess that your last letters have been a great comfort to me, even as my own news is of a less cheerful sort. You, who are basking in the light of promised happiness with Arthur, will perhaps lend a sympathetic ear to the anxieties of a poor schoolmistress whose lover is far away and strangely hindered.

“Only yesterday I received a letter from a Mr. Eugene Foster, an English gentleman resident in Bistritz, in Transylvania, whom I do not know but who has been kind enough to write on Jonathan’s behalf. I enclose no copy, for the original is now worn with my reading, but the substance is that Jonathan has been delayed. He had expected to return by this time, as he wrote me from Bistritz some weeks ago, but business and a slight hurt to his hand have kept him back. Mr. Foster says he is well, and that his heart is unchanged; yet I cannot help a woman’s foolish worry. The days pass, and the post from abroad is slow. I practise my shorthand and my typing as he would wish, but the empty chair opposite me at supper is a poor companion.

“The girls at the school are as noisy as ever, and the mistress grows more exacting. I have taken to keeping a journal in shorthand, as I told you I would, and I find the exercise soothes my mind. Yesterday I wrote a full page describing the cherry blossoms in the square, and the organ-grinder’s tune that put me in mind of an old Exeter hymn. In the evening I walked in the park and watched the children sailing boats upon the pond, which reminded me of our own childhood games. If Jonathan were here he would laugh at my efforts, but he would approve the industry.

“Your accounts of Mr. Holmwood’s devotion and of the comical proposal of good Mr. Morris have made me smile through my clouds. I am glad that Dr. Seward bore his disappointment like the gentleman he is, and that Mr. Morris has become your friend. What a tangle of hearts! I pray daily for your happiness, dear Lucy, and for the blessing of a safe return for my Jonathan. Tell me, I beg, of your wedding plans: have you chosen the dress? Will it be lace or simple muslin? I long for the day when we may sit together by the fire as in childhood, and compare our married fortunes.

“Write soon, and do not spare the details, for they are my window on a happier world.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.

“*29 May.*”

“My dear, dear Mina,--

“Your letter of yesterday found me in the midst of a dress-fitting, and I fear I laughed and cried together at the thought of you writing your shorthand journal while the cherry blossoms fall. How I wish I could be with you! But Arthur has persuaded Mamma that we should be married from this house in early July, and there is so much to arrange that my head spins.

“I am sorry for your anxiety about Jonathan, yet Mr. Foster’s letter seems reassuring. A delay of a fortnight is nothing in the great scheme of things, and a hurt hand will heal. You must not fancy ghosts in the Transylvanian hills, my dear; remember how the peasants at Bistritz fabled about wolves and such, but you said yourself Jonathan found the country folk kind. Keep busy, as you do, and the time will fly.

“As to my own joy, it grows daily. Arthur brought me a letter from his man of business yesterday which he says will make his ears tingle, though I am not to know the contents until the settlements are signed. Mr. Morris called this afternoon and presented me with a bunch of roses, saying they were ‘a trifle from the prairies to the little girl that cracked the nut.’ He is a dear, and Dr. Seward has been to see Mamma about a charitable matter, and looked in to wish me well. Both are brave men, Mina, and I count them among my truest friends. Mamma sends her love and bids me tell you that the spare room shall be yours whenever you visit.

“We have ordered the cake, and the linen is being aired. I have decided on a simple gown, for Arthur says I need no finery to please him, and indeed I think he would prefer me in my old blue. The invitations are written, and the cook promises a feast such as Chatham Street has not seen. I am blushing even to write it, but I am so happy that I fear sometimes it is a dream. Pray that it may be lasting.

“Your ever affectionate

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Do tell me if Jonathan sends word. I shall keep your secret as you keep mine.

“L.”

Dr. Seward’s Diary. (Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--The work of the asylum proceeds with its customary routine, and I find in the recording of these notes a certain steadiness that my spirits lacked a few days since. The dinner at Morris’s rooms last night, of which I shall write separately, lifted the cloud considerably; but this morning my thoughts were turned to my more singular patient, R. M. Renfield.

I visited him at nine o’clock. He was seated on the floor of his cell, as is his wont, engaged in the construction of a lattice from straws and the wings of a fly he had captured. I took down his words as he murmured, meaning to trace the thread of his delusion. I had been speaking of the weather and of the gardens, making no reference to any person outside these walls, nor to any lady of my acquaintance. Suddenly, and without any preamble or inquiry from me upon the subject, he raised his head and fixed me with a bright, unnatural eye.

“Dr. Seward,” said he, “might I ask you a question concerning a lady of your acquaintance, Miss Westenra? Is she well, and is her heart disposed to marry?”

I confess I started, for I had not uttered that name, nor spoken of Miss Westenra to him at any time. I replied as lightly as I could that the young lady was in excellent health and soon to be wed to a most worthy gentleman. He smiled in a way that suggested some private satisfaction, and then resumed his weaving without further comment. I record the incident precisely, for it is the first time he has shown knowledge of any name beyond those of the attendants. Whether it be mere chance or some stray word overheard in the corridors, I cannot say; but it is worthy of note.

The rest of my round was uneventful. The quieter patients responded well to the mild weather, and I deposited this cylinder with a lighter mind. I have directed the attendants to note any future mention by Renfield of persons in the outer world, that we may trace the source of such fancies.

Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Miss Lucy Westenra.

“*27 May.*”

“My dear Miss Lucy,--

“I promised myself the pleasure of writing to you after last night’s gathering, and though I am no hand with a pen compared to you ladies, I reckon you’ll forgive a Texan’s bluntness for the sake of the news.

“Arthur and Jack Seward came to my rooms in Chatham Street a little after seven. The dinner was plain but hearty: a roast fowl stuffed with sage, some early peas from the market, a dish of potatoes, and a bottle of the old port that I keep for friends. The table was laid with my mother’s silver, which I fetched from the chest for the occasion. Arthur looked as happy a man as ever walked, and he lost no time in telling us that the settlements were signed and the date fixed. Jack was in better cheer than I have seen him since his disappointment; he drank to your health with a will, and said that if every patient in his asylum had a friend like Arthur, the world would be a saner place.

“We lit cigars on the balcony afterwards, and watched the carriages go by. I proposed a toast: ‘To the finest girl in England, and the man who won her, and the two old pals who wish them well.’ Arthur laughed and said I was a fool, but he wrung my hand all the same. Seward told a story of a patient who thought he was a sunflower, which made us merry. I sang a verse of an old trail song, and Arthur joined in, though his voice is more suited to the church than the prairie. There was no sadness in the room, Miss Lucy; only a warm fellowship such as I have known in many a camp, but seldom in a London parlour.

“Arthur showed us the message he had sent me by wire, the one he said would make my ears tingle. It was that you had chosen the first of July for the wedding. I whooped aloud, and Jack clapped him on the back. We three sat late, and parted with promises to meet again before the day.

“I write this, little girl, just to let you know that your lovers and your friends are all in accord, and that if ever you need a champion beyond Arthur, you have two others who count it honour.

“Your obliged and faithful

“QUINCEY P. MORRIS.”

Telegram from Mr. Eugene Foster to Miss Mina Murray.

“*30 May.*”

“Jonathan Harker arrived Southampton today stop well and taking train Exeter stop”

I left the Herald office and stood on the corner of Broadway and Laurel, breathing air that tasted of soot and spite. The dead man, as his secretary said, had been a good hand at keeping his affairs to himself.

That $5,000 check stub stuck in my mind like a burr. A man doesn’t write a five-thousand-dollar check on the afternoon he dies and then just misplace it, not a publisher with an account at the First National Bank. The Lewis girl had said he went out for twenty minutes a little before three, check in hand, long enough to reach the bank and back. If he had cashed it or certified it, the money would have moved. If he had given it to someone, that someone ought to have brought it in by now. Two days had passed since the shooting in Hurricane Street. I wanted to know where that paper had gone.

I caught a Broadway car down to the square of gray buildings near the mine offices. The car was warm with the smell of wet wool and chewing tobacco. Through the window I watched the streets of Personville slide by: saloons with painted windows, boarding houses with limp washing on the lines, a church with a broken steeple. The town looked as if it had been built overnight and left to rot in the rain. A Stutz touring car stood outside a pool hall, but I didn’t see who was in it, and I wasn’t looking for Max Thaler just then.

The First National occupied the ground floor of a granite block with a bronze owl perched above the door. I went in past marble columns and the smell of varnish and watched the clerks bent over their ledgers like monks over psalters. A guard with a walrus mustache directed me to the assistant cashier. A lean man with a narrow face and gold-rimmed spectacles came out from behind a brass grille. I showed him my Continental card, not the false I.W.W. slip that named me Henry F. Neill, seaman.

“My name’s Neill,” I said, using the surname on the card. “I’m looking into the murder of Donald Willsson. He drew a check for five thousand dollars on this bank the afternoon before he was killed. I need to know if it’s been presented or certified.”

The assistant cashier, a man named Leonard B. Pratt, blinked at the card and then at me. “Continental Detective Agency,” he read. “Very well, Mr. Neill. One moment.”

He disappeared into a back room and returned with a ledger bound in green cloth. He set it on the counter and ran a thin finger down a column of figures, lips moving. The only sound in the marble hush was the scratch of his nail on paper.

“Mr. Willsson’s personal account,” Pratt said at last. “No item of five thousand dollars has been presented since the date you mention, nor any certification of such a sum. I’ve checked the probate hold placed after his death; nothing of that amount is pending. The check has never been presented or certified.”

“You’re certain?” I asked. “A man could certify a check at one window and have it not show in this book for a day.”

“Our books balance to the penny each night,” he said stiffly. “Had the instrument been negotiated, we would show it. It is still outstanding. Whoever holds it has not brought it to us.”

I thanked him and left. Outside, the wind threw cinders in my face. So the check was still out there—in a pocket, a drawer, a dead man’s fist, or the hands of whoever bent over Willsson on the dark sidewalk. The police hadn’t mentioned a check; maybe they hadn’t looked. The widow might have found it. Or Thaler. Or the woman who had been with the man in Hurricane Street. The old man’s roar that his daughter-in-law had killed his son sounded like the noise a sick bear makes when robbed of a cub, but it didn’t settle the matter.

I went back to the Great Western Hotel. The clerk at the desk nodded as I crossed the lobby, his eyes sliding over my shoulders as if he expected someone behind me. I took the elevator to the third floor and sat in my room with the blinds drawn against the flat afternoon light. The bed was soft, the wallpaper stained with old tobacco smoke, the pitcher on the washstand chipped. I went over the facts again, arranging them like pieces of a bloody puzzle.

Donald Willsson had telephoned me in San Francisco, sent a check for the Agency, asked for a man. I came. He told me to his house at ten. At two he took my call at the Herald and confirmed the hour. That same afternoon he dictated letters, took a phone call from a woman who fixed a meeting at ten, went out and wrote a five-thousand-dollar check, came back, and later went to dinner with his father’s secretary. At ten I sat in his living room with his wife. She took a call, left at twenty past ten, came back at five past eleven white-faced with what looked like blood on her left green slipper, saying her husband wouldn’t be home. At ten-forty he was shot four times in Hurricane Street. Next morning I saw Max Thaler, alias Whisper, slip into the widow’s house. Old Elihu blamed the French hussy. The Herald blamed the gang. Bill Quint blamed the gang and the old man who hired them. The check blamed nobody, but it was a loose end worth pulling.

The knock came after the shadows had lengthened and the street lamps outside the Great Western had flickered to a sickly yellow. I opened the door on a slender blonde with a slight accent and a coat drawn tight across her chest. Mrs. Donald Willsson, uninvited and unsmiling.

“You are the man from San Francisco,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

I stepped back. “Come in. I was about to say the same of you.”

She entered, glancing at the blinds, the rumpled bed, the chair where I’d thrown my coat. She sat on the edge of the wooden chair, knees together, green slippers showing under the coat hem. I noted the left one: no blood now, just a dark stain where something had been scrubbed hard.

“Why have you been asking about me?” she asked. Her voice was low, the accent thinning but not gone.

“Because your husband was killed the night you left the house and came back with a red shoe,” I said. “Because you told me he wouldn’t be home when he was already dead in Hurricane Street. Because Max Thaler walked into your house this morning while I was across the street.”

She flinched at the name. “Mr. Thaler came to offer sympathy. I did not invite him. He was at the door when I woke, and he left before I could refuse him properly.”

“You didn’t invite me either, but here you are.”

She studied her hands, the fingers long and restless. “I went out that night because a voice on the telephone told me Donald was in trouble. I drove to Hurricane Street. I saw—I saw nothing. I came back. The blood on my slipper was from a cut I got on the gear shift. You think I killed him.”

“I think you know more than you’ve said. What was the phone call you took while we waited?”

“A friend. A woman. She said something foolish. I went to see. It was foolish.” She lifted her chin. “If I had killed him, would I have come back to tell you he was dead? I could have stayed away.”

“People do queer things. The check your husband wrote for five thousand dollars that same afternoon—where is it?”

Her eyes widened, the blue careful. “I do not know any check. Donald never spoke of such a thing. If he wrote it, it was not to me. He kept his papers as he kept his thoughts, locked.”

I let that lie stand. “Thaler,” I said. “What does he want with you?”

“He wants what everyone wants. To be left alive in this city.” She stood, pulling the coat around her. “I came to tell you to go back to San Francisco. You are a stranger and this is Poisonville. The dead are not avenged here; they are forgotten. My husband is dead. The men who run this town will still run it when you are dumped in the river.”

“I’ll remember that.”

She left, the green slipper tapping down the hall, the other silent on the carpet.

I sat with the room darkening and the bourbon bottle from the desk drawer. Nobody had been shot today, but the air was full of guns not yet fired.

An hour later the bellboy knocked. He was a thin kid with a cap too big for him. He handed me a sealed envelope, said “A gentleman left this at the desk, mister,” and vanished before I could tip him.

I broke the seal. The note inside was printed in block letters on a torn page of a notebook, the handwriting sloping and untaught:

WHISPER SAYS YOU’RE STEPPING WHERE YOU’LL GET HURT. STAY OUT OF HURRICANE STREET AND THE WIDOW’S HOUSE. TAKE THE MORNING TRAIN WEST. A FRIEND.

No signature. No initial. Max Thaler had sent his message without showing his face, exactly as the rules of this town required. I tossed the paper on the table. The warning was crude but not empty; a man who could have his rivals shot in an alley didn’t need to deliver threats in person.

I went down to the telegraph office in the hotel lobby and wrote out a wire to the Old Man in San Francisco. The clerk slid a blank toward me and I printed in the form, weighing each word as a man weighs shot:

CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO FROM OP PERSONVILLE GREAT WESTERN STOP CLIENT DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD HURRICANE STREET NIGHT OF DECEMBER TWENTIETH STOP SON OF ELIHU WILLSSON CZAR OF CITY STOP FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK DRAWN DAY OF DEATH NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED STOP WIDOW VISITED HOTEL UNASKED DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF CHECK STOP THALER SENT WARNING VIA NOTE TO STAY CLEAR STOP GANG AND CZAR STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL STOP OP CONTINUING INVESTIGATION STOP

I handed the blank to the clerk. He counted the words, named a price, and I paid in bills. He tapped the key, the sound thin in the tiled room, and the message went west over the wires.

Back upstairs, night had shut the window glass to black. The street light threw a yellow slice across the floorboards. I sat on the bed with my shoes off and the bottle within reach, alone in the small room. The wire was sent. The widow had come and gone. Thaler’s note lay on the table like a snake’s shed skin. And the question of where the five-thousand-dollar check had gone remained open, a hole in the story that no amount of talking had filled.

That was the shape of things as the city buzzed and hated outside my door.

I closed the book with a snap, and stood for a moment in the dim library, the description of strychnine poisoning vivid in my mind. The convulsions, the terrifying arching of the body, the locked jaw and the successive paroxysms—all fitted only too well with what we had witnessed in that tragic room. According to the volume, death from that agent was agonising and often swift once the spasms began, and the victim remained conscious almost to the end. I recalled poor Mrs. Inglethorp’s strangled cry of “Alfred—Alfred—” and a cold fear clutched at my heart. The illustrations of the spasmodic posture were crude but unmistakable. I returned the book to its shelf, though I kept its grim lesson in my memory, and set out without further delay.

It was close upon six o’clock. The house was still hushed, though below stairs the servants were astir. I passed through the hall, where John and Lawrence stood in low-voiced conference, and went out into the dewless morning. The air was heavy and warm; the storm that had been prophesied overnight had not broken, but a sullen heat lay over the lawns of Styles, and the trees hung motionless as though waiting. A faint redness in the east proclaimed the sunrise, but the light was pallid and oppressed.

The walk to the village of Styles St. Mary was a matter of some twenty minutes. I took it briskly, my mind a tumult of suspicions. Alfred Inglethorp’s absence, Mrs. Inglethorp’s dying cry, the strange agitation of Lawrence, the sudden appearance of Dr. Bauerstein—all pointed to some hidden evil that I was ill-equipped to unravel alone. I thought of my friend Poirot, with his methodical little mind and his triumphant record in the Belgian police, and I blessed the chance that had brought him to our very doorstep.

As I turned in at the little gate of the cottage where Poirot lodged among the Belgian refugees, I was surprised to see the small man himself upon the threshold, his moustaches neatly waxed, his attire already immaculate despite the early hour. A cup of chocolate steamed on a table beside him, and an old woman of the household was sweeping the step.

“Ah, Monsieur Hastings!” he cried. “You come to me, but I am already informed. It is a sad affair, is it not?”

“Then you have heard?” I exclaimed. “But how? We only discovered the tragedy scarce half an hour since, and the doctors have but this moment left.”

“Your Baily, the coachman, halted at my door as he drove the motor to Tadminster for Dr. Wilkins. With many gestures and much puffing, he told me that the poor lady was dead, and that Dr. Bauerstein had locked the doors and sent for the police doctor. A good fellow, Baily, though he wastes fuel in his engine and emits too much noise for the tranquillity of the morning.”

So that was the source. I pressed him no further, but urged him to accompany me back. He fetched a small valise of instruments and fell into step beside me, his little legs keeping pace with my longer stride.

We had gone perhaps halfway up the drive when a figure emerged from the morning haze. It was Alfred Inglethorp. His black beard was disordered, his clothing dusty, but he carried himself with a sort of dogged composure.

“Thank God you are come, gentlemen,” he said, mopping his brow. “I have been walking since before light. After I left Dr. Bauerstein at the gate of the vicarage last night, I went on to the ‘Feathers’ inn in the village, where I sat with the landlord over a pipe until past two o’clock. Then, being weary, I threw myself on the bench in the parlour and fell asleep. I knew nothing of this horror until I walked back now and met you.”

Poirot regarded him with bright, intelligent eyes, but made no comment. We continued to the house. In the hall we found John, Lawrence, and Dorcas the parlourmaid, who was arranging a tray with a trembling hand.

As Inglethorp repeated his account for John’s benefit, Dorcas looked up sharply.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. Inglethorp,” she said, “but the Feathers has been shut up this fortnight. The landlord’s sister is ill, and the house is under repair. I had it from the niece only yesterday when she came for the mistress’s subscription. There’s been no fire in its parlour for a month, sir, nor any lodger in the bench you speak of.”

Inglethorp flushed. “Perhaps I mistake the name,” he muttered. “It was a little house with a signboard, anyway. I was half asleep and the village is dark.” But the contradiction hung in the air, and I saw Poirot’s eyebrows lift the fraction of an inch.

John, looking harassed, turned to me. “Well, Hastings, you have brought your friend. The doctors locked the rooms, but I have the keys.” He drew them from his pocket. “You may examine the boudoir and bedroom, if you wish.”

Poirot bowed. “We shall be most careful, Monsieur Cavendish. The hour is early, but time is of the essence.”

We ascended the staircase, traversed the gallery, and reached the right wing. The broken door had been temporarily wedged; with the key Poirot opened the communicating door from the corridor. The room was much as we had left it: the bed disordered, the mantelpiece with its row of prim ornaments, the faint ashes in the grate. A faint smell of brandy lingered.

Poirot moved with quick, precise steps. He examined the lock, the carpet, the overturned table. Suddenly he stooped by the skirting near the mantelpiece.

“Ah!” he murmured. He picked up a small object and held it to the light. It was a tiny button of black enamel, such as might be sewn upon a lady’s shoe or glove. He placed it on his palm and showed it to me.

“See, my friend,” he said.

I took it, turning it between my fingers. “What of it, Poirot? Does it belong to Mrs. Inglethorp?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Not yet, Hastings. I do not explain. Later, perhaps, when the threads are drawn together.” He slipped the button into a small envelope and put it in his pocket.

We continued the survey. Poirot tested the window fastenings, peered at the empty cup that had held the coffee, and noted the position of the despatch-case Cynthia had brought. He asked no questions of me, but hummed a little tune.

Presently we descended. In the hall, Cynthia Murdoch was sitting with a cup of tea, looking pale but composed. Mary Cavendish stood nearby, still in her white smock, her face drawn.

Poirot approached the girl. “Mademoiselle Cynthia,” he said gently, “at what hour did you fall asleep last night?”

She looked up, surprised. “I went to my room at half-past nine, Mr. Poirot, but I read for a while. I think I did not truly sleep until near eleven. Then I knew nothing until Mary shook me awake.”

Poirot inclined his head. “Merci, mademoiselle. That is all.”

He said no more, and I forbore to question him.

The morning wore on. John had ordered that the house be kept quiet. Lawrence wandered the garden, smoking; Alfred Inglethorp had gone to his own room, claiming a need for rest, though his story lay under Dorcas’s quiet contradiction.

By half-past ten, Poirot requested the keys again. We returned to the bedroom, and this time he locked the door behind us. The small envelope lay on the table between us. He opened it and placed the black button precisely in the centre of the walnut surface.

The church clock chimed the half-hour after eleven. Late morning light slanted through the curtains.

Poirot leaned back, his eyes twinkling. “Mon ami,” he said, “the symphony of the sleeping and the waking has a missing note, and the little pigeon does not nest where one expects.”

I stared at him, utterly at a loss.

The taxi went along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the lights of the city swinging past the windows, the trees black against the sky. Brett opened her eyes and sat up. She looked out at the empty street, her face pale in the light from a shop sign.

“Take me to the Café de Dôme,” she said. “I can’t stand being shut in. I want to see people.”

I leaned forward on the strap and told the driver. He nodded and turned the cab toward the river.

We crossed the Seine by the Pont Saint-Michel. The water was black and the lamps on the bridge made long streaks that wobbled when a bateau passed. Brett watched the river and said nothing. On the other side we went up the Boulevard Raspail. The night was warm and the chestnut trees were in leaf, the shadows of their branches moving on the pavement as we passed the lights. The Dôme was open, its awning up, tables outside with small lamps. A few people sat drinking, their voices low, and a couple walked by with a dog that stopped to smell the table legs.

We got out and sat at a table near the edge. A waiter in a white jacket came. Brett ordered a brandy and soda. I took a beer. The waiter went off and we looked at the street.

At the next table two students argued about painting, one waving a pencil. A woman in a fur coat laughed too loud and lit a cigarette. The smoke went up in the lamp light.

“You look well,” Brett said.

“You look all right,” I said.

She smiled and turned to watch a taxi pull up. A man got out, drunk, and the driver helped him straighten. Brett looked away.

“There’s a man I met last week,” she said. “Name of Howard T. Filmore. American, from Akron. Made his money in rubber. He’s got pots of it, and he’s taken me about.”

I shook my head. “Never heard of him.”

“He’s not famous yet,” Brett said. “But he will be, the way he spends. Gave me a bracelet, then took it back because he said it didn’t go with my eyes.” She laughed. “Men with money are all the same.”

The waiter brought the drinks. Brett lifted her glass. “Well, here’s to money.”

“To money,” I said.

We drank. The night was warm and the street quiet except for the talk at other tables and the clink of spoons in cups. A girl in a red dress went by with a man in a cap. The waiter watched them and then looked away.

“It’s a fine night,” Brett said.

“Yes.”

“You’re not saying much.”

“Just listening.”

She smiled. “You always were a one for listening.”

I watched the light on her face. She was beautiful and I wanted to be with her, but I knew that was not to be.

“I was in love with Brett and it made me feel hollow,” I said.

She finished her drink and set the glass down. “I think I’ll stay here a while,” she said. “You go on and do what you need.”

I remembered the envelope I had left at the bal musette. “I left something back there,” I said. “I’ll go get it.”

“Don’t be long.”

I found a taxi at the corner and gave the driver the address on the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The cab went back across the river and up the hill to the Pantheon. The streets were empty now, the lights fewer, and the driver hummed a tune as we climbed. The windows of the buildings were dark, and a cat crossed the road in front of us.

The bal musette was still open. Music came from the door, the accordion and a banjo, and the sound of feet on the floor. I went in. The room was hot, the benches along the wall crowded with young men and girls, some in jerseys, some in shirt-sleeves. The proprietor was up on his stool by the dancing-floor, the bells on his ankle ringing as he played. The daughter of the house stood at the bar, wiping her hands on her apron, and a policeman sat near the door, his cap on his knee.

The patronne was behind the zinc bar, wiping glasses. She saw me and smiled.

“Monsieur is returned,” she said.

“I left an envelope,” I said. “For the girl I came with.”

“Ah, the envelope.” She looked toward the dancing-floor. “The girl is still here.”

Georgette sat at a table with the tall blond youth. She wore her hat pushed back, and she was laughing at something he said. When she saw me she waved.

“You came back,” she said.

“I came for this.” I took the envelope the patronne handed me. It was sealed, the fifty-franc note inside.

“You thought I’d gone off with one of these,” Georgette said. “But I’m resting. They dance too much, and the dark one pinches.” She touched her arm. “See, it leaves a mark.”

The blond youth smiled vaguely and went to the bar.

“You want the envelope?” I asked Georgette.

“Keep it,” she said. “You paid for the dinner. This is for me, no?”

“It’s yours if you want it.”

She took it and put it in her bag. “You’re a good type,” she said. “Sick, but good.”

I stood there. The music started again and a couple came onto the floor. The proprietor pumped the accordion, his foot beating time. A girl in a blue skirt danced past with a boy who held her too tight, and the smell of wine and sweat came from the crowd.

“I should go,” I said.

“Go on,” Georgette said. “Your friend at the Dôme will wonder.”

I went out to the street. The taxi was waiting. I told the driver to take me back to the Boulevard du Montparnasse.

The Dôme was still bright. Brett sat where I had left her, talking to a thin man in a coat. She saw me and waved him off. The man shrugged and walked away.

“Got your thing?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Sit down. It’s near morning.”

We sat. The sky over the roofs turned from black to grey. A milk cart went by, the horse’s hooves hollow on the pavement. The waiter brought coffee without being asked. Brett lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at the lamp.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Put me in a taxi, will you?”

“Sure.”

I stood and hailed a cab. It pulled up. Brett got in. She leaned out.

“You’re a good chap, Jake.”

“So long, Brett.”

The taxi moved off. I turned and walked toward the river.

The streets were empty. I went down to the Quai and walked along the Seine. The water was grey with the first light. A barge went by, its wake soft under the banks. The booksellers’ boxes were closed, their green shutters locked. I passed the Pont Neuf, the statues dark on the parapet. A woman with a dog came the other way, and we nodded.

I walked with the river on my left, the buildings dark behind me. The dawn came slow, the sky pale, then pink over the Île de la Cité. The bells of Notre-Dame sounded faint across the water. A fisherman set up his rod on the wall, his line dropping into the current. Further on, a policeman stood by the parapet, watching the light grow. The chestnut trees on the embankment moved a little in the breeze.

I was alone and I felt the cold of the morning.

The door closed behind her with a soft click that seemed to Eve Halliday, in her present frame of mind, the very syllable of finality. She stood for a moment in the narrow passage, the closed umbrella in her hand, reflecting that the world was a place where even employment bureaux had no posts but plenty of anecdotes about absent fathers and deserted wives. Then, with the philosophical shrug which had carried her through many a wet morning, she descended the stair to the street.

The rain had ceased, leaving London with that washed, faintly surprised look it wears after a summer shower. Eve, directing her steps toward Dover Street, perceived that the umbrella, though no longer needed, must be returned without delay. It would not do, she felt, to go about armed with a club ornament that was not hers; and the quiet, grave young man who had bestowed it upon her beneath the Thorpe & Briscoe awning deserved at least a word of thanks, even if that word must be delivered through a porter.

At the Drones Club, opposite the coal merchants, the portals were guarded by a porter of the type that knows everything and tells little. Eve approached him, umbrella in hand.

“Good morning,” she said. “A little while ago a gentleman from this club gave me this umbrella in the street. I should like to return it, with a note.”

The porter, who had observed her earlier from his post and formed his own conclusions, accepted the object with a dignified inclination.

Eve produced from her bag a pencil and the back of an envelope, and scribbled: *To the unknown gentleman who sheltered me from the rain—many thanks. E. H.* She folded this about the handle. The porter stored umbrella and note in his cubby-hole, and Eve, feeling that a small civic duty had been discharged, resumed her journey with a lighter step.

* * * * *

In the smoking-room of the Drones Club, Psmith, lounging in the same window from which he had lately observed the Thorpe & Briscoe frontage, was devoting a thoughtful half-hour to the Morning Globe. He had laid aside the paper, however, and was regarding the ceiling with the air of a man who has solved a problem of some difficulty, when the door opened and the Honourable Mr. Walderwick entered in some agitation.

“See here, Psmith,” said Walderwick, a young man of slender means and excitable temperament, “I have just been to the cloak-room, and my umbrella is missing. The attendant tells me he saw you take it not two hours since. What’s the meaning of this?”

Psmith lowered his monocle and inspected Walderwick with grave friendship.

“My dear Walderwick,” he said, “you labour under a misapprehension. The umbrella to which you allude is, I admit, a possession of rare beauty. It came into my hands by a chain of circumstances too involved to recount. But if you assert ownership, I could not think of depriving you. Indeed, the only civilised course is for me to buy it from you, thereby removing any shadow of dispute.”

Walderwick blinked. “Buy it?”

“Precisely. Name your sum. I am in a generous mood.”

“Well, I paid a guinea for it, but—”

“A guinea! A sum wholly unworthy of the article. Let us say three hundred pounds, and call it a bargain.”

Walderwick’s jaw dropped. “Three hundred—!”

“I will write you a cheque at once,” said Psmith, producing a cheque-book with the smooth efficiency of one who has resigned from the fish business and has money to burn. “It is a small price for peace of mind and a really topping umbrella.”

The cheque changed hands. Walderwick, perceiving that the world contained stranger philanthropists than he had supposed, withdrew to celebrate. Psmith, now sole proprietor of the umbrella, restored it to the cloak-room rack with a satisfied smile.

* * * * *

Eve, meanwhile, had an appointment which she could not afford to neglect. The catalogue of the Blandings library was not to compile itself, and the prospective employer—a certain elderly nobleman lately arrived in London—had fixed the hour of half-past two at his hotel suite off Pall Mall.

She presented herself punctually, a neat figure in the black crêpe frock and the whale of a hat. A prim secretary showed her in, and closed the door.

The room was occupied by a mild, absent-eyed gentleman who sat peering at a blank wall. His pince-nez, Eve noticed, were not upon his nose but lay glinting on the carpet where they had evidently slipped. He gazed at her vaguely.

“Ah, my good girl,” he said, “there you are at last. The bedroom is in a frightful state. Just run in and fetch my pince-nez from the dressing-table, will you? I can’t see a thing without them.”

Eve, recognising the symptoms of a household governed by absent-mindedness, suppressed a smile and did as she was bidden. She returned with the glasses. The gentleman placed them on his nose, looked at her, and started as if shot.

“Good heavens! You are not the chambermaid!”

“No, my lord. I am Miss Halliday, come about the library cataloguing.”

“Eh? Cataloguing? Bless my soul, so you are. Sit down, Miss Halliday, sit down. Most extraordinary lapse. I mislaid the things this morning, you know, down my back, and Baxter had to fish them out. Now where were we? Ah, the library. You come recommended by my son Freddie—odd fellow, Freddie—and my sister Constance thinks well of you. Can you tell a folio from a quarto?”

“I believe so, my lord.”

“Capital. The pay is small, but the books are dusty. You’ll start Monday. Don’t mention to Baxter that I mistook you for a housemaid; he’d only lecture me about efficiency. There—engaged. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must lie down. The journey from Shropshire quite unfits one for interviewers.”

Thus Eve’s interview, though it had begun in a manner singularly wrong, ended with her firmly engaged and not at all turned down. She withdrew, reflecting that eccentric employers were preferable to none.

* * * * *

The afternoon had mellowed into that benign period when London streets are pleasantly uncrowded. Eve, having lunched lightly on a bun and a letter of thanks to Cynthia, found herself passing once more through Dover Street. She had barely reached the Thorpe & Briscoe awning—now bereft of her presence—when a hatless young man emerged from the club doorway. He wore a straw hat now, and the monocle gleamed in the mild sun. It was unmistakably the gentleman of the umbrella.

Eve halted. “Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”

Psmith raised his hat with courteous distance. “Madam?”

“The gentleman who so kindly lent me an umbrella this morning. I returned it to your porter, with a note.”

“An umbrella?” said Psmith, with the air of one recalling a dim and无关 incident. “I fear you confuse me with some rival philanthropist, madam. I am but a humble member of this club, and I have not issued umbrellas all day. A pity, for the weather has been capricious. Good afternoon.”

He replaced his hat, gave a grave nod, and strode off in the direction of Piccadilly. Eve stared after him, half convinced she had been mistaken, yet oddly certain she had not. But as the brief forbade the gentleman to admit anything, and he had not, she could only shrug and proceed.

* * * * *

Evening found Psmith alone in the Drones smoking-room, the purchased umbrella leaning against his chair like a faithful dog. The day’s adventures had left him contemplative. He was debating whether to ring for tea when the porter entered with a small slip of paper.

“Beg pardon, sir, but about the umbrella Mr. Walderwick sold you. The young lady who returned it left this note, and the desk recalls her name. She is Miss Eve Halliday, sir. Said you’d know from the note.”

Psmith took the envelope scrap, read the “E. H.”, and smiled a slow, tolerant smile. So that was her name. Eve Halliday. He repeated it under his breath, as one tests a rare wine, then dismissed the porter. The smoking-room relapsed into its pleasant gloom, and Psmith, with the umbrella beside him and the name newly learned, gave himself up to the gentle art of thinking about nothing in particular.