The Chapters

She was wakened by Mrs. Medlock shaking her shoulder, not gently, and by the grinding of brakes and the letting off of steam.

"Wake up! Wake up!" said Mrs. Medlock. "We are at Thwaite Station and you have slept the whole afternoon and the stations past York. Rouse yourself!"

Mary sat up and tried to rub her eyes, and her black crepe hat was tipped over one ear and her thin face looked more pinched and yellow than ever. The rain had left off, but the carriage window was blurred and streaming still, and outside it was not day but a sort of heavy evening dusk. The train stood puffing beside a small platform where there was one lamp burning and one porter with a truck, and the air that came in when Mrs. Medlock let down the window was cold and sharp and strange.

"It smells different," said Mary, wrinkling her nose. She had never smelled such air. In India it had been hot and still, even when it rained.

"That's moor air," said Mrs. Medlock, pulling her box forward. "It's cold enough to cut you. Come along. We can't sit here."

On the platform, standing a little apart from the lamp so that his face was in shadow, was a tall gentleman dressed in black. Mary saw him at once because there was no one else to see. The porter touched his cap to him, and Mrs. Medlock gave a start and nearly dropped her umbrella.

"Mr. Craven!" she exclaimed. "I did not expect— I thought you were—"

He lifted his hand just enough to stop her. He was not an old man, but his shoulders had a crooked set under his heavy coat, and his black hair was streaked with gray, and his long face was pale and drawn. He did not look at Mrs. Medlock twice. He looked once at Mary, up and down, as if she had been a parcel someone had left at the wrong house.

"This is the child?" he said.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, and she pushed Mary a step forward. "Miss Mary Lennox."

Mary stared at him because he stared at her. She remembered what Basil had said about a hunchback, and what Mrs. Medlock had said about a sour young man, and she thought that both of them had told the truth. His eyes were dark and unhappy and they did not seem to want to see her at all.

"Come," he said.

He turned toward the station door, and Mrs. Medlock followed quickly with Mary, and the porter followed with the trunks. Outside the station there was a close carriage waiting with its lamps lighted and a pair of horses stamping in the cold. The coachman touched his hat and opened the door.

Mr. Craven got in first without offering his hand to any one. Mrs. Medlock bundled Mary in after him, and then got in herself and settled her purple dress and her mantle with the jet fringe. The door was shut, the coachman climbed to his box, and they drove away into the dark.

For a while no one spoke. Mary sat very upright in her corner, with her thin black-gloved hands folded, and tried not to look at her uncle. He sat opposite, with his hat pulled low and his arms folded, and he looked out of the window at nothing. The road climbed a little and then seemed to go on and on without hedges or houses. The carriage lamps threw two pale shafts upon the ground, and beyond them there was only darkness and the sound of wind.

"What is that noise?" Mary asked at last, because the stillness made her uncomfortable.

Mrs. Medlock glanced at Mr. Craven, who said nothing.

"It's the wind on the moor," she said in a low voice. "There's miles of it. There's nothing else."

Mary had never seen a moor. She pressed her face to the cold glass and tried to see, but there was only blackness that moved and sighed. It frightened her a little because it was so large and so empty. In India the night had been full of servants and smells and low voices. Here there was nothing even to look at, and yet the emptiness seemed to be breathing.

They had driven perhaps four miles when the horses suddenly stopped and the carriage gave a jerk that threw Mrs. Medlock against the side.

"Eh!" she cried. "What's to do?"

The coachman called out something, and got down from his box. Mr. Craven did not move or speak. He kept his arms folded and his eyes upon the window, as if a stop in the middle of the moor were no concern of his.

Mrs. Medlock let down the glass and put her head out into the wind.

"What is it, Wilkins?"

"There's sheep i' t' road, ma'am," said the man. "A lot o' them strayed. I mun drive 'em off or we'll be here all neet."

Mary heard the bleating then, faint and silly in the dark, and the stamp and scrape of hoofs upon the hard road. The wind rushed in through the open window and lifted the limp hair about her forehead. Before Mrs. Medlock could prevent her she had pushed open the little door upon her side and slipped down the step.

"I want to stand a minute," she said.

"Miss Mary! Come back!" cried Mrs. Medlock. "You'll catch your death! Mr. Craven—"

Mr. Craven said nothing. He did not turn his head.

Mary stood upon the moor in the dark for a minute, and the minute seemed very long. The ground under her boots was springy and uneven and smelled of wet earth. A tuft of something rough brushed her ankle. The wind was stronger than any wind she had known, and it pushed her cloak against her thin legs and made her shiver, but it was not disagreeable. The lamps of the carriage showed the white faces of sheep crowded together and the coachman waving his arms to turn them, and beyond that circle of light the moor stretched black on every side, rising and falling like a sea.

She had never been out of doors at night alone before. No one had told her not to go, except Mrs. Medlock, and no one pulled her back. She took two steps away from the wheel and felt as if the darkness belonged to no one and she belonged to no one either, which was a queer and rather lonely feeling, but not altogether an angry one.

"Come back, miss!" called Wilkins. "I am going on now."

Mrs. Medlock leaned out and seized her by the sleeve and dragged her to the step.

"You should not have done that!" she said sharply. "Get in with you!"

Mary got in, and her cheeks were red with cold and her eyes were brighter than they had been in the train. Mr. Craven had not altered his position by an inch. They drove on, and the bleating of the sheep died away behind them in the wind.

Presently they saw lights, low and yellow, twinkling far off.

"That's Misselthwaite," said Mrs. Medlock.

The carriage turned in between two tall stone pillars and rattled along a dark drive. Trees with branches trailing nearly to the ground swept against the windows. Then they stopped before a great house with a broad stone step and a heavy door studded with iron. A manservant opened the door and stood waiting in the light that streamed out into the darkness.

Mary followed her uncle up the step. He walked quickly, as if he wished to be done with the business, and he did not offer her his hand or say that he was glad she had come. In the hall he paused for one moment and spoke to Mrs. Medlock without looking at Mary.

"See that she has what she needs," he said. "Pitcher knows my orders."

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, dropping a curtsy.

And then he walked away down a long corridor where the lamps burned low, and a door closed heavily behind him, and he was gone.

Mary stood and stared after him. She had been told that he would trouble himself about no one, and she saw that it was true. He had scarcely spoken three words to her. She was not sorry, because she did not like him, but she was surprised that a grown-up person who was her guardian should say so little.

The hall was so large that it seemed cold even with the fire that burned in the wide grate. There were suits of armor standing against the walls, and portraits so dark with age that Mary could scarcely see the faces, and a great carved staircase climbing into shadow. The portraits did not look kind. No one smiled.

"Come," said Mrs. Medlock. "You must have your supper and go to bed. You are tired."

She led Mary up the staircase and along passages where their footsteps echoed and the candles Mrs. Medlock had taken from a table flickered in queer draughts. They passed doors, many doors, all shut. Mary counted them to herself because there was nothing else to do. Some of the passages were quite dark except for the two candles.

At last Mrs. Medlock opened a door at the end of a corridor and showed Mary into a room with a fire burning in it and a table drawn near the hearth.

"This is your room," she said. "And that one through the open door is your bedroom. You will stay here. Don't go wandering beyond. Mr. Craven won't have it."

The room was tall and gloomy, with old carved furniture and faded hangings, but the fire made it look warm. On the table there was a tray laid with a white cloth, but no supper upon it yet.

Mrs. Medlock rang the bell.

"You'll have your supper here," she said. "Then I will put you to bed."

A minute later the door opened and an old manservant came in carrying a tray. He was a tall, bent old man with gray whiskers and slow, careful hands. He set the tray down without looking at Mary more than once, and he began to arrange the dishes, speaking as he did so in a voice so broad and thick that Mary could scarcely make out a word.

"Tha'st find t' fire warm, miss," he said. "Set thee down an' eat thy victuals while they're hot. T' moor wind mak's a body hungry."

Mary stared at him and frowned.

"What did he say?" she said to Mrs. Medlock. "I don't understand what he says."

Mrs. Medlock gave a short laugh.

"That's Pitcher," she said. "He speaks Yorkshire. You'll learn it in time, if you stay here. He says you are to sit down and eat your supper."

"I don't understand Yorkshire," said Mary stiffly. "I was not brought up in Yorkshire." She turned to the old man. "I cannot understand you," she said. "Speak properly."

Pitcher looked at her slowly over his whiskers and shook his head.

"Eh, but tha art a young un," he said, and took up the empty cover and went toward the door.

Mary ate her supper in sulky silence. The soup was hot and the bread was fresh, and after the cold drive she was hungrier than she was willing to own. Mrs. Medlock sat in a chair by the fire and watched her, and the red in her cheeks looked redder in the firelight and the purple flowers in her bonnet trembled when she nodded.

"You must not expect to see your uncle often," she said. "He is mostly away, and when he is here he keeps to the West Wing. You must keep to your own rooms and amuse yourself. I have work to do and cannot be with you."

"I don't want you with me," said Mary.

"That's lucky for us both," said Mrs. Medlock.

When supper was done Mrs. Medlock took Mary into the bedroom next door. It was a large room, too, with a great four-post bed hung with dark curtains, and a fire, and tall windows looking upon blackness. A nightgown had been laid upon the bed and a maid Mary never saw must have turned down the covers, for Mrs. Medlock did the rest herself, briskly and without softness.

She helped Mary undress and put on the nightgown, though Mary held herself stiff and would scarcely lift her arms. She was not used to being touched by strange, hard hands. When she was at last in bed Mrs. Medlock drew the clothes up to her chin and looked down at her queer, plain little face upon the pillow.

"Say your prayers, if you have any to say," she said.

"I don't know any," answered Mary.

"Then go to sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, and took up the candle.

Just as she turned to the door Mary heard it. Through the stillness of the great house there came a sound from far away, down some corridor or up some stair. It was low and wandering, rising and falling upon the night, like wind lost in empty rooms, and then rising again, thin and strange. Mary lifted her head.

"What is that?" she said. "What is that sound?"

Mrs. Medlock stopped with her hand upon the door. Her sharp black eyes did not meet Mary's. She listened for a moment with her head on one side, and then she spoke quickly.

"It's the wind," she said. "It's the wind blowing on the moor and round the chimneys. It makes queer noises in such a great empty house. Lie down and go to sleep."

She went out and shut the door, and Mary heard her footsteps die away along the passage.

The fire had burned low and the room was dark except for its red glow. Mary lay still under the heavy covers and listened. The sound came again, fainter this time, as if it had moved farther off, and then it ceased altogether and there was only the sighing of the night wind against the window-panes.

Mary did not believe it was the wind. The wind she had felt upon the moor had been strong and cold and open. This was shut inside walls, wandering and restless, as if it did not know where to go. She thought of the hundred rooms Mrs. Medlock had told of in the train, nearly all shut up and locked, and of the long dark passages she had walked through, and of her uncle closing a distant door behind him.

She was not sleepy, though she was tired. Her thin hands clutched the coverlet and her eyes stayed wide open in the dark. She had been left alone in the bungalow in India and forgotten, and she had been sent across the world to people who did not want her, and she was used to being told nothing. No one would tell her the truth if she asked.

She would find out for herself what the sound was.

I left the Herald with nothing in my pockets but the stub-end of a check and a woman's voice saying ten o'clock.

It was past three when I got to the First National Bank. The afternoon was gray and gritty with mine-smoke. The bank was a squat stone box on Broadway with brass that needed polishing. Inside it smelled of ink and steam heat.

I asked to see somebody about Donald Willsson's account. The girl at the rail went away and came back with a thin man with a yellow mustache and ink on his cuff. He said he was Farr, the assistant cashier, and what could he do for me.

I told him I was working for the Willsson family and wanted to know about a check for five thousand dollars drawn the afternoon before.

Farr looked at me the way bank men look when you ask them something they don't want to answer. He said the bank didn't make a practice of discussing depositors' affairs with strangers.

I showed him my Continental card. It didn't soften him much. I told him Donald Willsson was dead and that the check might have something to do with it, and that the police would be asking anyway, and that he could save everybody trouble by talking now.

He took me into a frosted-glass cage and left me there while he went to look at the books. He came back in five minutes with a ledger slip in his hand.

"Mr. Willsson drew a check for five thousand dollars yesterday afternoon," he said. "It has not been presented for payment. It has not been certified."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Quite sure. Nothing of that amount has gone through this bank against his account in the past week, either by presentation or certification."

"Could it have been cashed somewhere else?"

"It is drawn on this bank. It would have to come through us for collection. It has not."

"Could he have had it certified and then not used it?"

"No. There has been no certification."

"How does his account stand otherwise?" I asked.

Farr shook his head. "I can't give you that information without authority from the estate or a court order."

"Who could give me authority?"

"The elder Mr. Willsson, perhaps, as the probable administrator. Or the widow."

"Did Donald Willsson do much business here himself? Come in often?"

"Rarely. Most of his personal business was done by mail or through the Herald's office. He had been in Paris for years, you know."

"Did he come in yesterday afternoon, say around three o'clock? The girl at the Herald thinks he went out for about twenty minutes with the check."

Farr thought and said he didn't know. He hadn't seen him himself. He could ask.

He asked a teller through the wicket. The teller hadn't seen him either. Farr said the bank was busy between two and three and a customer could have come and gone without being noticed, especially if he didn't stop at a window but went to see one of the officers.

"Which officer would he see?"

"Mr. Elihu Willsson's business is usually handled by the president. The younger Mr. Willsson might have gone to him."

"And the president wouldn't be around now to ask?"

"He is out of town until Monday."

I thanked Farr and tried to get him to guess who the check could have been for. He wouldn't guess. Bank men never guess. I left him polishing his glasses and looking relieved to see me go.

Outside the wind had picked up off the slag heaps. I walked back toward the Great Western with my hands in my pockets and my hat pulled down. Five thousand dollars is a lot of money to draw in cash without a name on the stub and then get killed the same night with the check still out somewhere. If the woman on the phone had named a price for ten o'clock, that would fit. If Thaler had named a price to lay off the reform campaign, that would fit too. If it was blackmail, that would fit as well as anything. But a check that isn't cashed and isn't certified doesn't buy anything. It just walks away.

The Great Western lobby was full of miners killing time and traveling men killing drunks. The clerk leaned over his counter as I came in and said a lady was waiting to see me.

"Where?"

"Up in your room. She said you'd expect her."

I hadn't expected anybody. I said, "Yeah?" and went up.

She was sitting on the edge of my bed when I opened the door. Young Mrs. Willsson. She had a dark coat over a green dress and no hat. Her blonde hair was drawn tight back. She looked younger than she had the night before and more tired. Her eyes went to my face and stayed there.

"You are the detective," she said. It wasn't a question.

I shut the door and hung my hat on the knob. "I'm an operative. What are you doing here?"

"I had to see you. I could not go to your office. I have no office. You came to my house last night. Now I come to you. That is fair."

"You didn't come to tell me that," I said. "Sit comfortable. You'll be here a while."

She didn't move from the edge of the bed. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her left slipper was green. I looked for blood. There wasn't any blood to see now.

"You told lies about me to Mr. Willsson," she said. "His secretary telephoned to my house what you said."

"Stanley talks too much," I said. "What did he say I said?"

"That I telephoned, that I went out in the automobile, that I came back with blood on my shoe, that I killed Donald."

"I told the old man what I saw. I didn't say you killed him."

"You think it."

"I don't think anything yet. I was hired to come here and do a job for your husband. He's dead. Somebody has to find out why before I can know what my job is."

She lifted her chin. Her accent was thicker when she was angry. "You spy on a woman in her own house and then tell her father-in-law she is a murderer."

"I told him what time you went out and what time you came back. Ten-twenty to eleven-five. Your husband was shot at ten-forty in Hurricane Street. You want me to forget that?"

"I went for a drive," she said quickly. "I was worried. Donald did not come home. I drove. I did not go to Hurricane Street."

"Who phoned you at ten-twenty?"

"I do not remember. A friend."

"A man or a woman?"

"A woman, I think. She asked for Donald. I said he was not home. She hung up."

"Then why'd you go out?"

She hesitated. "I was nervous. I wanted air."

"You drove from ten-twenty to eleven-five for air and came back white and told me he wouldn't be home tonight. How'd you know he wouldn't be home if you'd only been out for air?"

"I knew he had an appointment. He told me on the telephone in the afternoon he would be late."

"What appointment? Where?"

"In town. He did not say where."

"Who with?"

"He did not say."

I sat down in the chair by the window and crossed my legs. "Mrs. Willsson,Max Thaler was in your house this morning when I came to see you. What did he want?"

Her face didn't change, but her hands tightened. "Who is Max Thaler?"

"A small pretty boy in brown who talks in a whisper. He went in your front door at eleven o'clock this morning. Don't tell me you don't know him. Everybody in Poisonville knows him."

"I know no one here," she said. "I have been here three months. I know no one. A man came to sell something. Insurance. I sent him away."

"He stayed quite a while for an insurance man."

"I do not remember the time."

"You knew your husband was going to meet a woman at ten last night," I said. "The girl at the Herald heard him say over the phone, 'Yes, I can be there at ten, but I shall have to hurry away.' He said it to a woman. Then he wrote a check for five thousand dollars and went out with it for twenty minutes. Did he tell you about the check?"

"No." Her voice was flat now. "Donald told me nothing about money."

"Did he have enemies? Had anybody threatened him?"

"Everybody hated him because of the newspapers. You have read them. Old Mr. Willsson hated what he wrote. The police hated it. I told him to stop. He would not stop."

"Did you quarrel about it?"

"We quarreled about everything. We were married four years in Paris. We were happy there. Here we quarreled."

"Your father-in-law says you were jealous."

She stood up suddenly. Her cheeks were red. "He is an old beast. He hates me because Donald married a French girl and not some Personville cow. He would like me to be hanged to save his friends."

"Maybe," I said. "But I'm not working for him. I'm working for what Donald hired me for, whatever that was. If you didn't kill him, help me find who did. Where were you driving between ten-twenty and eleven-five?"

"I drove on Mountain Boulevard and on Broadway. I saw no one. I spoke to no one."

"And the blood on your slipper?"

"There was no blood. You imagined it. There was mud from the garage."

I let that lie. She walked to the door and put her hand on the knob. She was breathing hard.

"If you come to my house again I will call the police," she said.

"You do that," I said. "Chief Noonan will love a call from you."

She went out and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the transom. I stayed in the chair and listened to her heels going down the hall. She hadn't told me anything I could use, except that she was scared and that she lied badly. The Thaler lie was the worst of it. A woman who will lie about a man going into her house the morning after her husband is killed is hiding something bigger than insurance.

I washed my face and went down to eat. When I got back to my room there was an envelope under the door. Plain white envelope, no name on it, sealed. Inside was a single sheet of hotel paper with typewriting on it. It said:

"If you want to stay healthy in Personville keep your nose out of the Willsson killing. If you want to make money come to the Silver Arrow at midnight and ask for the kid. Come alone. You won't be hurt if you behave."

It wasn't signed. I didn't need a signature. The clerk said a boy had brought it and said a gentleman in a Stutz had paid him a dollar to deliver it. The boy was gone. The gentleman in the Stutz hadn't come in.

I put the note in my pocket and went out to find a telegraph office. Quint had called Thaler dynamite. Dynamite doesn't send notes unless it wants something. Thaler wanted to see if I was for sale before he decided to blow me up. Midnight at the Silver Arrow could wait. First I had to let San Francisco know where I stood.

The Western Union office was two blocks down, next to a pool hall. I wrote out a day letter and paid for it. I wrote:

"OLD MAN CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO DONALD WILLSSON KILLED TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT HURRICANE STREET BY UNKNOWN PARTIES FROM ALLEY WITH THIRTY TWO CALIBRE STOP HIRED ME BY LETTER AND CHECK TO COME HERE WORK UNKNOWN STOP WIDOW PRESENT WHEN I CALLED AT HOUSE TEN PM LEFT TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE CLAIMED DRIVE NO WITNESSES STOP POSSIBLE BLOOD ON SLIPPER DENIES KNOWLEDGE STOP HUSBAND DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED PER FIRST NATIONAL BANK STOP WIDOW VISITED MY HOTEL UNINVITED DENIES KNOWING THALER THOUGH THALER ENTERED HER HOUSE THIS MORNING STOP THALER SENT UNSIGNED NOTE INVITING MIDNIGHT MEETING SILVER ARROW ALONE STOP ELIHU CLAIMS WIDOW GUILTY DENIES USING SON AGAINST CITY GANG STOP INVESTIGATING POLITICAL ANGLE AND CHECK DISPOSITION STOP ADVISE STOP"

I watched the operator count the words and click it out. It was dark outside by then, raining a little, the neon on Broadway smearing in the wet.

Back in my room I locked the door, put the chair under the knob, and sat on the bed with my shoes off. The note was still in my pocket. Midnight was three hours away. The wire was gone, but the check wasn't. Five thousand dollars drawn to nobody, gone nowhere through the bank, and a dead man who couldn't tell where he put it. That was the knot. Until I found where that check went, I didn't have anything.

The book shook a little in my hands as I read, for the printed words seemed to lift themselves bodily from the page and set themselves beside the picture that was still so fresh and terrible in my mind. Strychnine poisoning, the author stated in dry and clinical language, is marked by convulsions of a peculiar and violent tetanic character, coming on suddenly after an interval, with rigidity of the limbs and an arching of the body backwards until the sufferer appears to rest only upon the head and the heels. There is great flushing of the face, difficulty of breathing, and a stiffness of the jaw that is very painful to witness. The mind, he added, remains clear to the end in the majority of cases.

I shut the book with a snap. The description was too exact, too horridly exact, to be the work of coincidence. What Dr. Bauerstein had hinted at in that sharp, sidelong fashion, what I myself had whispered to Mary Cavendish upon the stairs, was here set down in cold print. I felt the blood beat in my temples. Time, I had said to John, was everything, and time was slipping past while we stood wringing our hands in the dining-room like children afraid of the dark.

I found John and Lawrence where I had left them. John sat with his head in his hands, staring at the untouched breakfast things that Dorcas had laid from mere force of habit. Lawrence stood by the window, smoking cigarette after cigarette and looking out upon the park with unseeing eyes. The morning was close and grey after the heat of the night, with a heaviness in the air as though the expected storm had gathered and yet had not broken.

“John,” I said, and my voice sounded strange even to myself, “I am going for Poirot at once. Every hour counts now.”

John looked up wearily. He was a man of forty-five, heavy and kindly and slow, made for the management of acres and not for this sudden, sordid mystery that had dropped upon his house.

“Yes, yes, Hastings. Go, by all means. You said he was discreet?”

“Discretion itself. He was the pride of the Belgian police. If there is anything to be found, he will find it quietly.”

Lawrence turned from the window with a sharp, impatient movement. His face was still pale and drawn from the terrors of the night.

“I tell you it is all Bauerstein’s doing,” he said. “Wilkins never thought of poison until that fellow put the word into his mouth. Because poisons are his hobby he must see a poisoning in a perfectly natural, if distressing, seizure. My mother—I mean, our stepmother—was an old lady with a weak heart who over-exerted herself. Must we have a detective nosing about the house to gratify a specialist’s fad?”

“We must have the truth,” said John heavily, “whatever it is. Go, Hastings, and bring your friend here. Tell him—tell him I place the house at his disposal.”

At that moment we heard the rattle of the front door and a step in the hall that had not been there all night. Dorcas, white and tear-stained, came hurriedly to the dining-room door.

“Mr. Inglethorp has come in, sir.”

Alfred Inglethorp followed her into the room. I think we all stared at him as though he had been a ghost. He was carefully dressed, as always, but his black beard was a little unkempt and there was dust upon his boots. He showed no embarrassment, only a sort of weary surprise at seeing us assembled so early.

“Why, what is all this?” he said. “John—Lawrence—Hastings. Has anything happened?”

John rose to his feet. He was very pale, but his voice was steady and courteous, as it always was.

“Our mother died this morning, Alfred. At about five o’clock. Very suddenly. In great pain.”

Inglethorp stepped back as if he had been struck. Whether his horror was genuine I could not at that moment decide, for my mind was full of the medical book and of Mrs. Inglethorp’s last strangled cry of “Alfred—Alfred.”

“Dead?” he whispered. “Emily dead? Impossible. Why, I left her last night perfectly well—perfectly well.”

“Where have you been?” asked Lawrence bluntly.

Inglethorp looked at him with something like reproach.

“I walked with Dr. Bauerstein as far as the village last evening, as you know. Afterwards I walked on to Tadminster to see my friend Manning, who has some business for me to look over. It grew late, and the air was so oppressive before the storm that Manning pressed me to stay the night upon his sofa rather than walk back in the dark. I accepted. This morning I caught the early carrier’s cart as far as the cross-roads and walked from there. I let myself in quite quietly with my latch-key at about six o’clock and found the house still and no one stirring, so I went to my room to change my boots. Only just now did I hear from Dorcas—”

He broke off, passing his hand across his forehead.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Dorcas, who had remained by the door twisting her apron in her hands, “but I think you must be mistaken about the time and the door, sir. At six o’clock this morning the whole house was up and lighted, sir, with the doctors here and all, and the front door was bolted on the inside. And your latch-key, sir, was hanging on its hook behind the hall door all night, for Annie wiped the dust off it herself yesterday and I saw it there with my own eyes when Baily went out for Dr. Wilkins.”

There was a dead silence. Inglethorp stared at her, his mouth a little open.

“You must be mistaken, woman,” he said at last, but without his usual pomposity. “I—I may have been a little later than six. One does not look at the time very closely after a broken night.”

“I am sure it was bolted, sir,” said Dorcas stubbornly, with tears running down her cheeks. “Poor mistress, oh, poor mistress.”

John intervened quietly.

“That will do, Dorcas. Leave us for a moment.”

Inglethorp drew a chair to the table and sat down heavily. No one spoke. I felt that if I delayed longer I should be sick with the weight of suspicion and unasked questions. Picking up my cap, I muttered something about losing no time and slipped out into the hall.

The air outside was fresh, though heavy, after the close horror of the house. The drive was damp with dew and the rooks were cawing noisily in the elms. I set off at a brisk walk for the village of Styles St. Mary, taking the short cut across the park that Cynthia had shown me. My heart beat fast. I was going, like a knight-errant, to fetch my friend to unravel this tangle, and yet I dreaded what he might find.

Poirot lodged, as I knew, in a small cottage called Leastways, which Mrs. Inglethorp had taken for some of her Belgian refugees. It was a neat, whitewashed place with a strip of garden, not five minutes from the lodge gates. I knocked eagerly, and the door was opened almost at once by Poirot himself, already dressed and shaved, his moustaches waxed to their usual impossible points, his egg-shaped head polished like ivory.

“Ah, mon ami Hastings!” he cried before I could speak. “I expected you. Enter, I pray you. You come about the sad affair at Styles Court, without doubt.”

I stared at him in amazement upon the threshold.

“You know already? But how? It was only at six that I—”

He tapped himself upon the breast with great dignity and drew me inside.

“Sit down, my friend. Yes, I know. Poor Madame Inglethorp is dead in the night, in convulsions. It is very sad. I know it from Monsieur Baily, the chauffeur, who knocked here before five o’clock this morning on his way to fetch Dr. Wilkins at Tadminster. My excellent hostess, Mrs. Rendell, brought me the news with my chocolate. Baily was in great haste and much agitated. He said the doctors talked of a post-mortem. Is it not so?”

“It is so,” I said, sinking into a chair. “John has consented. Bauerstein suspects poison. I have just read the description of strychnine and—it fits, Poirot, it fits horribly. John has placed the matter in my hands. Will you come?”

Poirot regarded me gravely for a moment, his head a little on one side like a sagacious bird.

“For Madame Inglethorp, who was charity itself to my compatriots, I will come. But, Hastings, you understand, I am no longer of the police. I act only as a friend, to find the truth quietly. If there has been no crime, so much the better, and we shall rejoice. If there has—eh bien, then we shall see.”

He fetched his neat little bag and his cane, left a few precise instructions for Mrs. Rendell, and we set out together up the lane towards Styles. The walk was one I shall never forget, for Poirot made me tell him everything, slowly and in order, interrupting only to make me repeat some small detail. He wished to know exactly who slept where, which doors were locked and which bolted, at what hour the coffee was carried up, who carried it, what Cynthia did with the despatch-case, what Mary wore, what Lawrence looked at upon the wall. His questions were so minute and so unexpected that more than once I laughed in spite of myself.

“You laugh, Hastings? But it is always the little things that are the most important. The big things are seen by all the world. No one observes the small crack in the teacup—until the tea runs out.”

When we reached the house John met us in the hall. He looked older by ten years than on the previous evening. Poirot bowed very low.

“Monsieur Cavendish, I am at your service. Monsieur Hastings has told me of your great loss. Permit me to offer my sincerest sympathies, and to assure you that I will cause as little disturbance as possible.”

John shook his hand warmly.

“Thank you, Monsieur Poirot. The keys are here. Bauerstein locked both my mother’s bedroom and Alfred’s communicating room and asked that they should not be touched. Do as you think best, but—quietly, if you can.”

“Perfectly. I shall be as a shadow upon the wall.”

Mary Cavendish came down the stairs as we spoke, still in her white working smock, her dark head uncovered, her face strained but composed. Cynthia was with her, looking ill and unlike herself. The poor child’s face was still flushed a deep, unnatural red, and she yawned piteously behind her hand. I felt a great pity for her, thrust thus suddenly from sleep into tragedy.

Poirot bowed to them both with old-fashioned courtesy. He looked long and thoughtfully at Cynthia, but he addressed her with great gentleness and, much to my surprise, with only a single inquiry.

“Mademoiselle Cynthia, did you sleep heavily last night?”

Cynthia stared at him with wide, dazed eyes and answered quite simply, without hesitation.

“Yes, monsieur, terribly heavily. I have never slept like that before. Mary had to shake and shake me, and even then I could hardly wake. My head feels thick and stupid even now.”

Poirot nodded slowly, as though her answer were exactly what he had expected and yet gave him no pleasure.

“Merci, mademoiselle.”

He asked her nothing more, to my great disappointment, but turned at once to John.

“Now, if you please, the bedroom.”

We went up in procession, John with the keys, Lawrence following with reluctant feet, Mary with her arm still about Cynthia. At the door of the right wing John paused.

“Poirot,” he said in a low voice, “Bauerstein and Wilkins have been here. Nothing has been moved, except—that we broke in the door from Alfred’s room. It hangs still upon its hinges.”

Poirot inclined his head and took the keys. The corridor door was still unbolted as I had left it. He unlocked it softly and we entered the chamber of death.

Though the gas had been turned out and the morning light filtered in greyly through the half-drawn curtains, the room retained all the disorder of the night. The bedclothes were flung back, the small table beside the bed lay overturned upon its side, and upon the carpet were scattered a cup and saucer, a spirit lamp, and a few charred papers in the grate where a little ash still clung feebly together. Upon the mantelpiece the prim row of ornaments stood undisturbed, and the little clock pointed stubbornly to a quarter past four. The air was close, with a faint, acrid smell that made my nostrils quiver.

Poirot stood for a full minute in the doorway, his nostrils dilating, his eyes travelling slowly round the walls from floor to ceiling and back again, missing nothing. Then he moved forward with quick, neat steps, more like a bird than a man. He examined the bed, lifting the sheets with delicate fingers. He knelt to inspect the overturned table and the cup upon the floor, sniffing at it lightly but setting it down again without comment. He peered into the grate, sifting the ashes with the point of his cane. He studied the mantelpiece inch by inch, bending his great head until his nose almost touched the china. Lawrence watched him with a sneer that ill concealed his nervousness.

“Well, monsieur the detective?” said Lawrence at last. “Do the wise Belgian eyes see murder in a teaspoon?”

Poirot did not answer. He had dropped upon his knees beside the hearth and was picking with infinite care at something half-hidden between the fender and the skirting-board. At last he rose with a small exclamation of satisfaction and held out his closed hand to me.

“Look, Hastings. Look closely, but do not touch, I beg you.”

He opened his fingers. Upon his palm lay a tiny fragment of paper, not larger than a postage stamp, browned and curled at the edges as though it had been snatched from the fire. Upon it, in faded ink, I could just discern two or three words in Mrs. Inglethorp’s large, bold handwriting, but the sense was broken and unintelligible.

“What is it?” I whispered eagerly. “What does it mean?”

Poirot slipped the fragment deftly into a small envelope from his case and returned the envelope to his pocket. His face was inscrutable.

“Ah, mon ami, for the moment I say nothing. Nothing at all. To explain too soon is to explain wrongly. First we must observe, arrange, reflect. Afterwards—perhaps.”

Protesting in vain, I was forced to be content with that. Poirot completed his circuit, tried the communicating door to Alfred’s room, which still hung battered from its forced hinges, glanced into Cynthia’s bolted doorway, and measured with his cane the distance from the bed to the window. Then he requested, very politely, that we should all leave him for a little while, except Hastings, who, he said with a smile, was necessary to his thinking as a kind of sounding-board.

One by one they went out—John reluctantly, Lawrence with ill-concealed relief, Mary with a long, searching look at the little Belgian that I could not interpret. Cynthia stumbled as she went, still yawning, and Mary steadied her. Poirot waited until their footsteps had died away upon the gallery. Then, with great deliberation, he turned the key in the corridor door and put it in his pocket.

It was near eleven o’clock. The house was very still about us, save for the distant clatter of a shutter in the wind that had risen at last. Poirot drew up two chairs to the little washstand, which he had righted, and upon it, between us, he laid the small envelope containing the scorched fragment of paper. We sat facing each other across it in that locked bedroom, alone with the overturned furniture and the stopped clock and the cold hearth.

For a long time he said nothing, but stared at the envelope with his head sunk upon his breast. Then he looked up suddenly, his green eyes snapping with a strange light.

“Eh bien, Hastings,” he said, “the candle sputtered upon the carpet, the coffee grew cold upon the table, and the clock stopped—but the paper remembers what the tongue forgot to say.”

I did not see the first of those missiles fall. I had gone in with my wife after our walk, and being still wakeful with the mildness of the night and with Mars and the talk of Mars yet in my head, I sat for a time at the open window of my study, smoking and looking out over the dark garden towards the railway embankment and the low fields beyond that stretch towards Chertsey.

The night was very warm and still. There was no moon, but the stars stood out with that extraordinary distinctness that comes after a hot day, and the air smelt faintly of cut grass and of the honeysuckle about the porch. From the direction of the station came now and again the dull clank of couplings and the distant whistle of a goods train, and once a dog barked at Ottershaw and was still. My wife had gone upstairs, and I could hear her moving softly overhead. I had my papers on moral progress untouched before me, for my mind would not settle to them, but kept returning to what Ogilvy had said of meteorites and volcanoes upon Mars, and to the little quivering disk I had seen in his telescope, so small and so remote and yet, as Lavelle had shown, capable of casting forth so vast a jet of burning gas.

It must have been a little after midnight, for the church clock at Chertsey had struck some minutes before, when I saw it. A flash of vivid green light passed across the sky, so bright for an instant that it threw a faint shadow of the window frame upon the floor. It came, as nearly as I could judge, from the zenith towards the north-west, and it fell with a swift, steady glide, leaving behind it a train of pale scintillation that endured for two or three seconds after the head was gone. It seemed to drop behind the black line of firs that closes the meadow land between Ottershaw and Chertsey, and as it dropped it brightened to white and then to a reddish yellow before it vanished. I took it for an ordinary falling star, though of unusual brilliance and greenness, and I remember that I leaned out and watched for any rekindling, and that I listened, half expecting some distant report.

Nothing followed. The night remained as warm and silent as before. I finished my pipe, noted the hour and the direction of the fall in the margin of the paper that lay before me, with some vague thought of mentioning it to Ogilvy in the morning, and went to bed. My wife was already asleep, and I undressed in the darkness lest I should wake her, and lay for a while listening to the stillness, and then slept. I dreamed, I recall, of bicycle manoeuvres and of vast photographed disks of Mars revolving slowly in a black sky. So little did I suspect what had come to earth within a mile or two of where I lay.

I was awakened in the morning by a tapping at the bedroom door and by the voice of our servant, who said that Mr. Ogilvy wished particularly to see me. I got up, glanced at the watch upon the dressing table, and found it was a little after eight. The sun was already high and hot through the blind, promising another very warm day. My wife sat up in bed, and I told her jestingly that Ogilvy must have discovered another volcano upon Mars before breakfast.

I found him in the breakfast room, unshaven and muddy to the knees, and in a state of excitement altogether foreign to his usual measured demeanour. He had his hat in his hand and would not sit down.

“Come,” he said. “You must come and see. A meteorite has fallen in the night, out by the gravel pits beyond the railway. A very large one. I was out before six with my birds, and Henderson from Chertsey told me of it.”

I asked him if this had any connection with the green flash I had seen, and described it to him. He nodded eagerly.

“The same, the same,” he said. “It fell there. It lies in the old flooded pit by the meadow path. Come and look at it before the crowd gets there.”

My wife came down as we talked, and heard the news with that mixture of wonder and alarm with which she received all that related to our watches upon Mars. I swallowed a cup of tea, took a crust in my hand, and set out with Ogilvy across the fields, promising her I should be back within the hour and should tell her everything.

The morning was already close. The dew was still heavy upon the hay stubble, and larks were singing high over the meadows. As we crossed the railway by the wooden footbridge and took the footpath that runs diagonally towards Chertsey, we could see a thin column of vapour rising steadily into the motionless air from behind a clump of alders, and Ogilvy pointed to it with his stick.

“There,” he said. “You see the air above it dances. It is still hot.”

A labourer going to his work stood staring at it over the hedge, and two boys in the distance were running towards it and shouting. The vapour increased as we drew nearer, until it became a white pillar, fraying out at the top, and there was a faint hissing sound, as of a kettle long boiled, and a sharp mineral smell, like hot iron and burnt earth.

The old gravel pit to which he led me is one of several shallow excavations made years ago for ballast and since abandoned. The one in question is perhaps forty yards across, with steep banks of sand and gravel grown about with gorse and broom, and at the bottom a pool of stagnant water, seldom more than three or four feet deep after rain, and fringed with reeds. In this pool, half out of the water and half sunk in the black mud, tilted over at a considerable angle to the perpendicular, lay the Thing.

I stopped upon the rim and stared. Even in that first moment, with the steam drifting across it and the water lapping and hissing about its heated sides, I perceived that this was no common stone from the sky. It was cylindrical, perhaps thirty feet in length and fifteen in diameter, with one end, the end that projected from the water towards the Chertsey side, bluntly rounded and deeply scored and pitted, as if it had been fired from some enormous gun and had suffered in its passage through our air. The surface was of a dull brownish grey, flaked in places where the outer crust had cracked with the heat, and showing beneath a pale yellowish metal that gleamed faintly in the sun. The mud about it was heaved up and blackened for many yards round, and the reeds were flattened and scorched, and in some places still smouldering. From the water about its lower edge steam rose continuously in white puffs, and every now and then there came a loud sucking hiss and a fresh burst, as the cold water found some new fissure in the hot crust.

I have said that I stopped and stared. It is difficult to convey the sense of unreality that came upon me. Here was an object of manifestly artificial shape fallen from empty heaven into a Surrey gravel pit, and steaming like some monstrous saucepan left upon a fire. Above it the vapour danced, and swallows darted to and fro through the column, and beyond it the quiet meadows stretched to the church spire at Chertsey, and a cow stood knee deep in the farther brook and regarded us with mild unconcern.

“It is a meteorite,” said Ogilvy, with decision. “An ordinary meteorite, only of unusual size. It will be a fine thing for the museums.”

I turned upon him, for even then the recollection of those ten successive midnight flashes upon Mars was strong in me.

“An ordinary meteorite does not fall in a cylinder,” I said. “Look at its shape. Look at the uniformity of it. This was made.”

Ogilvy shook his head with the obstinacy of a man whose theories are threatened upon his own ground. He walked a little way round the rim, prodding the loose gravel with his stick, and would not look directly at the cylinder for a time.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “you go too fast. Consider the velocity of a meteoric fall. Consider the heat generated. The stone, if stone it be, was white hot in its flight. It would be soft as dough. It would take any shape from the resistance of our denser air, from its own旋, from impact with the wet earth. A cylindrical form is unusual, I grant you, but by no means impossible. I have seen iron meteorites roughly rod shaped. And as for size, the great meteorite of Cranbourne weighed some tons and no one cried miracle at it.”

“Cranbourne did not fall last night out of a green flash from the zenith towards Mars,” I said. “And Cranbourne did not hiss like this for hours together. You yourself told me last night that the chances against anything manlike on Mars were a million to one. Are you so certain still?”

He flushed a little under his sunburn.

“I told you,” he said, “that organic evolution was unlikely to have taken the same direction upon two planets. I hold to that. What you are suggesting is wild. That the Martians, if Martians there be, should fire a gun at us across forty millions of miles of void, and hit a gravel pit by Chertsey — it is preposterous. The thing is a meteorite. It fell, as meteorites do, by chance. The green colour you saw proves nothing. Copper gives a green flame, and there is copper in many meteoric stones.”

“But ten shots,” I said. “Ten successive nights. Lavelle saw the gas. I saw the flash myself through your telescope. You cannot call that chance.”

“I call this chance,” he said, tapping the gravel sharply. “Until it is opened and examined by competent men, it is a meteorite, and to call it more is to invite superstition. We shall have the papers full of Martians by Saturday if we are not careful.”

We argued thus for some minutes about the rim, while the steam rose and the water hissed below us. More than once I caught myself glancing up involuntarily at the pale morning sky, as if expecting another green flash to follow the first. Ogilvy maintained, with increasing warmth, that the heat, the pitting, the very smell, were all characteristic of meteoric iron, and that my notion of a projectile implied a power of gunnery and a knowledge of terrestrial position that no intelligence, however vast and cool, could possess across interplanetary space. I maintained that the symmetry of the object, its behaviour in flight as I had witnessed it, steady and directed and without the customary bursting, and its coincidence in time with the disturbances upon Mars, pointed to design. Neither of us convinced the other, and indeed, looking back upon that dispute from all that has since happened, I am struck by how near the truth I came while yet missing, as we both missed, the essential horror of it. For neither of us then spoke of life within.

By nine o’clock a considerable number of people had gathered. Henderson, who had first told Ogilvy, had brought his wife and two children from Chertsey, and there were three or four navvies off work from the embankment, and a carter, and a couple of boys who had been bird’s nesting, and presently a policeman from Ottershaw, who looked very hot in his uniform and very uncertain what his duty might be in the matter of stones from heaven. They stood about the upper edge of the pit, talking in low voices and pointing, and venturing a few yards down the slope and then coming hastily up again from the heat that rose from the baked earth. The cylinder itself was now more clearly visible, for the steam had lessened somewhat, though the water still boiled angrily where it touched the metal, and a thin scum of some dark powder floated upon the surface.

I left Ogilvy in argument with the policeman, who wished to send word to the county authorities, and walked quickly home to breakfast and to fetch my wife, for she had made me promise I would not keep her in suspense, and I thought the sight, though strange, was safe enough and would interest her. I found her at the gate looking down the lane, with her hat already on.

“It is quite safe, I assure you,” I said, in answer to her questioning look. “It is only very hot and very wonderful. Ogilvy calls it a meteorite, and I call it something else, and you shall judge between us. But wear your thick boots, for the gravel is rough, and bring your parasol, for there is no shade.”

She came with me willingly enough, though she clung to my arm as we crossed the footbridge, for the crowd had increased and there was a hum of voices from beyond the alders. The walk, which I take a dozen times in a year without remark, seemed that morning full of novelty, because I saw it through her eyes and because I knew, as she did not yet fully know, how strangely that familiar hollow was now occupied. I told her of the green flash as we went, and of my dispute with Ogilvy, and she listened gravely, and said that if it came from Mars it frightened her, which I laughed at, though with little heart in my laughter.

When we reached the pit the scene had changed considerably. There must have been thirty or forty people upon the rim, and more arriving every few minutes along the paths from Ottershaw and Chertsey. A ginger beer cart had stopped upon the lane, and its owner had left it to stare with the rest. The sun was now high and the heat in the hollow was oppressive, for the baked banks threw back the glare and the steam added a damp closeness to the air. My wife stood beside me under her white parasol and gazed down at the great brown cylinder lying sullenly in its bath of hissing water, and I saw her face pale a little.

“How large it is,” she whispered. “And how still. It looks — waiting.”

Ogilvy came up to us, wiping his forehead, and renewed his exposition for her benefit, insisting with a kind of forced heartiness that it was an ordinary meteorite and that its interest was purely mineralogical. My wife listened politely and asked if it would explode, at which he smiled and assured her there was no danger whatever, that any explosive gases had long since been dissipated in its flight.

It was then that the accident happened which so clearly proved, to me at least, that the heat was no common heat of a cooling stone. One of the navvies, a thick set young fellow in a blue shirt open at the throat, who had been drinking ginger beer and boasting to his mates that he feared nothing, pushed his way down the slope nearer than any had yet gone, to where a projecting shoulder of the cylinder rose perhaps six feet above the mud and was now bare of water and comparatively free of steam. The policeman called to him to come back, and there was a general cry of warning, but he laughed and, reaching out with his bare hand, laid it flat upon the brown crust as if to test Ogilvy’s assurance.

There was a sharp cry and a smell of burnt flesh. He snatched his hand away and stumbled backwards, clasping his palm and cursing with pain, while his companions caught him by the arms lest he should fall into the water. The surface that looked so dull and cooled was still incandescent enough to burn. My wife seized my sleeve and drew me back.

“You see,” said Ogilvy, disconcerted, coming down a step towards the man. “You see. It is still excessively hot. I warned — I mean, no one should touch it. It will cool in time.” He examined the man’s hand, which was badly blistered across the palm and fingers, and advised him to go at once to Chertsey for ointment and a bandage, and the fellow went off, still swearing, supported by one of his mates, while the crowd drew back several paces and regarded the cylinder with a new respect.

After that no one attempted to descend again, though the talk grew louder and more various. Some held with Ogilvy that it was a meteorite and worth money to a museum, others that it had been sent from Mars and contained messages, and one old man from Ottershaw maintained stoutly that it was a portent and that worse would follow. My wife and I stood a little apart, and I explained to her as well as I could the difficulties of Ogilvy’s view and my own conviction that we had here the first of those missiles whose firing we had watched, though to what end it had been sent I could not yet imagine. She listened, fanning herself with her handkerchief, for the sun was now almost overhead and the hollow was like a furnace, and I could see she was tired and a little faint with the heat and the smell of hot metal and scorched mud.

By noon the crowd had grown to near a hundred, lining the whole rim and overflowing into the lane, and there was talk of sending to Woking for a scientist and of telegraphing to London. The cylinder lay as before, quieter now, with less steam, but still sullenly hot and, to my mind, more mysterious than ever for its stillness. Ogilvy had gone off towards Ottershaw to fetch a thermometer and to telephone, if possible, to the observatory, leaving the policeman in charge, and I remained with my wife among the gazers, answering questions as best I could and watching the<span> change of light upon that strange brown hull.

At last, seeing my wife pale and weary, and fearing the effect upon her of the heat and the crowd, which grew every minute more noisy and less seemly, I urged her to go home and rest and take luncheon, promising to follow presently when Ogilvy returned. She was loth to leave me, and loth to leave the Thing, for like all of us she felt, I think, that change might come at any moment, but I persuaded her that there was nothing to see for hours, that the metal would take long to cool, and that our house was but a short walk and I should be back within the hour. She consented at length, and I walked with her to the top of the lane where the path turns towards our garden, and watched her white parasol diminish along the hedgerow until she passed from sight beyond the railway bridge. I stood a moment in the sudden quiet of the lane, with the clamour of the crowd behind me, and then turned back to the pit, and to my watch beside the fallen star, while the sun stood high and the vapour still rose thinly from the water.

Madame Ratignolle walked heavily upon Robert's arm all the way up the sandy path from the beach. The heat had left a stiffness in her knees, and she complained of it with little sighs that were half laughter, for she was ashamed to be so cumbersome before a young man who stepped as lightly as a boy.

Robert accommodated his pace to hers and switched at the camomile heads with a stick he had picked up below. The children had run on ahead with the nurse-maids, and Mrs. Pontellier followed at some distance with Madame Ratignolle's little girl by the hand, stopping now and again to look back toward the water.

"Your friend is very still to-day," said Madame Ratignolle, when Edna was out of hearing. "She has been talking of Kentucky and of old things that came back to her. The sea makes her dream."

Robert turned his head to look after Edna where she loitered in her white muslin with the brown line running through it, her collar open at the throat and her big straw hat pushed back from her forehead. She was watching the lateen sail that still hung motionless in the direction of Cat Island.

"She has the air of a person who has been listening to the sea a long while," he said, "until she means to go out alone, some day, further than any woman has gone before."

Madame Ratignolle laughed a little and shifted her weight more fairly upon his arm. "You fancy such things of her because she is quiet. It is only that she is not Creole. She keeps everything inside."

They went on without further speech until they reached the shade of the oaks before Lebrun's. The dinner bell had not yet rung, and the gallery of the main house was empty save for old Madame Lebrun shelling peas into a pan. Edna came up presently with the child, her face flushed from the walk, and sat down upon the step to loosen the sand from her shoes.

A negro boy from the village was waiting about the cistern with a yellow envelope in his hand. When he saw Mrs. Pontellier he came forward and gave it to her with a grin and a touch of his cap. It was a telegram, forwarded from the city that morning.

She opened it there on the step, smoothing the paper upon her knee. Business detains me in town. Shall not come out Saturday. Take the boys for a sail. Love to you all. Leonce. The words were in his careful hand, copied by the operator, and they stood very black against the thin yellow sheet.

Madame Ratignolle, glancing over, saw the color deepen a little about Edna's temples.

"He will not come," said Edna. She folded the paper once and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. "Mr. Pontellier is detained."

"Ah, the poor Monsieur," said Madame Ratignolle. "These brokers have no Sunday that one can depend upon. You will be lonely without him, but the week passes quickly with the baths."

Edna made no answer. She did not know whether she was relieved or disappointed. The week had557 shaped itself before her without Léonce, with its long mornings that belonged to no one, and she felt a curious lightness, as if the telegram had removed a duty she had not known she dreaded. She went with the others into dinner, where the children clamored for the olives and the fish, and where Robert told extravagant stories to make them laugh, and she ate without hunger and listened without weariness.

In the afternoon the house sank into stillness. Madame Ratignolle had gone home to her own cottage to lie down with her little ones through the heat. The Pontellier children were put to sleep on the cot in the back room under the quadroon's humming watch. The sun lay white upon the sand path and upon the leaves of the orange trees, and the air trembled with the ringing of cicadas.

Edna had taken off her morning dress and put on a looser wrapper. She sat for a time upon the gallery with a book unopened in her lap, hearing the clock tick and the nurse's low chant from within. The thought of the water came to her persistently, the cool choque of it against her limbs that morning breeze had promised, the long green swell breaking in froth upon the shore. She remembered the motionless sails and the blue reach beyond the ropes where the bathers did not go.

Without forming a resolution she rose, changed to her bathing dress, took her key and a towel, and went out by the back way alone. No one saw her go. The path was deserted, the camomile drooping in the heat, the vegetable gardens shimmering. Her feet sank in the warm sand and her heart beat with a vague expectancy that she did not question.

The beach was empty. The bath-houses stood shuttered and white in the glare, their little galleries throwing narrow strips of shade. Far out the Gulf lay flat and shining, scarcely wrinkled by wind. The children's tent sagged upon its poles. Upon the porch of the neighboring compartment the lady in black sat alone, erect in her mourning dress, her prayer-book closed upon her knees, her eyes fixed upon the distance.

Edna unlocked her compartment, left her towel upon the bench, and walked down to the edge in her bare feet. The water was warm as milk where it lapped the sand, cooler where it deepened. She had never been a swimmer. In the weeks past she had splashed with the others inside the ropes, clinging to Robert's arm or to Adèle's hand, laughing at her own fear, letting the waves take her feet from under her and putting them down again with a gasp.

To-day she waded out slowly until the water reached her chest. She placed her hands upon its surface and felt it bear them up. She recalled the instructions she had been given a dozen times and had never been able to follow, to throw herself forward and strike out and breathe without lifting her shoulders. A sudden comprehension seized her. She let herself go, kicked her feet together, and moved her arms in the rude stroke she had watched the men use at the end of the pier.

She moved. For a few yards she moved without touching sand, her body sustained, her head erect, the water parting before her. Terror and exultation shook her in turn. She turned wildly and regained her footing, stood panting with her hair wet upon her forehead, and looked about to see if any one had witnessed her. There was no one but the lady in black, far away, who had not turned her head.

Edna tried again, and again succeeded in the few clumsy strokes that carried her beyond her depth and back to safety. The power was small, but it was her own. It seemed to her that she had discovered something that belonged to her alone, like a thought she had never uttered. She did not wish to tell it. She stayed a long while letting the little waves lift her, learning the motion, until her limbs trembled with fatigue.

When she came out at last and wrung her hair upon the sand, the lady in black had risen from the porch and was walking slowly down toward the water with her skirts lifted in one hand. Edna had never heard her speak. Morning after morning she had seen her pass to her devotions, a solitary figure whom the other guests left undisturbed out of respect for her mourning.

As they drew near each other upon the narrow strip of hard sand, the lady in black stopped and looked at Edna with eyes that were pale and direct.

"You bathe alone," she said. Her voice was low and without curiosity. "Most women are afraid to be alone with the sea."

Edna, surprised, held her towel against her breast. "I came because it was still," she answered. "I wanted to try what I could do."

The lady nodded, as if the answer required no further remark. She glanced out where the lateen sail had drifted a point nearer shore.

"It remembers nothing," she said, speaking more to the water than to Edna. "That is why it comforts widows. The land keeps everything. The sea keeps nothing. You may leave your thoughts in it in the morning and find them gone at night."

She bowed slightly and passed on, her black dress brushing the sand, leaving Edna standing with the salt drying upon her skin. Edna watched her go a little way and then turned back to her bath-house to dress. The words followed her with an odd distinctness, though she could not have said why she should remember them.

She returned to the cottage by the upper path, her towel damp over her arm, and found Adèle Ratignolle upon her gallery waiting for her, fanning herself and rocking one of the Pontellier boys upon her ample lap while he picked at the ruffle of her sleeve. The other child was building houses of matches upon the floor.

"Behold the bather," cried Adèle gaily. "I woke and missed you. Robert said you had gone to dream again."

Edna colored under the perspiration that still stood upon her upper lip. For an instant she was upon the point of telling what she had done out in the deep water alone, the few strokes that had borne her up. The secret rose to her throat and she swallowed it. She shook out her damp hair and laughed.

"I have been nowhere. Only to walk a little while the children slept."

Adèle set the boy down and rose to straighten Edna's collar with her quick maternal hands. "Robert walked home with me this morning," she said, "and he said a pretty thing of you. He said you had the air of a person who has been listening to the sea a long while, until you mean to go out alone, some day, further than any woman has gone before. I told him you were only dreaming of Kentucky."

Edna stood very still while Adèle smoothed the muslin at her throat. The phrase repeated itself in her mind with the rhythm of the water she had felt against her chest. She looked past Adèle toward the west, where the sun was beginning to lower, and she felt again the buoyant support of the sea and the terror of having no sand beneath her feet.

"He fancies such things," she said at last, lightly. "It is because I say so little."

They had supper early, the children clamorous and sandy still from the morning, the quadroon bringing stewed shrimp and bread and blackberries. Robert came to the door with a basket of oranges from Madame Lebrun and stayed to peel one for each of the boys, telling them how the orange trees on the mainland bore all winter. He did not look often at Edna, and when he did his glance was merry and without meaning.

After supper Adèle took her brood homeward in the fading light, the nurse-maids trailing, the little girls singing. The Lebrun house lit its lamps one by one. The night fell warm and starless, with a low wind moving in the oaks and the ceaseless wash of the Gulf sounding nearer than by day.

The children slept at last in the back room, their breathing even, their hands uncurled. The quadroon had spread her pallet across the doorway. The cottage was quiet.

Edna sat alone upon the gallery in her wrapper, her feet bare upon the cool boards, her hair loose about her shoulders. The telegram lay unopened upon the table beside her, its message already learned by heart. She did not think of Léonce detained in town, nor of the lady in black and her saying about the sea that kept nothing, nor of the few solitary strokes whose secret she had told no one.

What remained with her, returning with each lifting of the wind and each distant break of water, was what Adèle had repeated in the afternoon, laughing as she smoothed her collar. Robert had said she had the air of a person who has been listening to the sea a long while, until she means to go out alone, some day, further than any woman has gone before.

The consultation which Sir Walter and his eldest daughter had determined to seek was not delayed beyond the necessities of civility and distance. Lady Russell, who was within a walk of Kellynch Hall, and Mr Shepherd, who was within a ride, were both entreated to give their attendance on the same morning, that the embarrassments of the family might be laid before them without reserve, and some scheme of retrenchment struck out which should relieve the present difficulty without exacting any unbecoming sacrifice. The morning appointed was fine for the season, and brought the two counsellors to the house at their respective hours, with a punctuality which Sir Walter, who loved order in all things that flattered himself, was pleased to commend.

They were received in the morning-room, where Sir Walter and his two daughters were already assembled. Elizabeth sat by her father with the composure of one who presides; Anne sat a little apart, as one who listens, with her work in her hands, and with no expectation that her opinion should be required. Sir Walter opened the business himself, with that felicity of expression which made all disagreeable truths appear only as the errors of other people. He spoke of the times, of the demands of his situation, of the impossibility of supporting the dignity of Kellynch upon an income which had been rendered inadequate by no fault of his own, and of his desire to retrench in such a manner as should be least felt by his daughters and least observed by the neighbourhood. He concluded by entreating Lady Russell and Mr Shepherd to speak with freedom, and to be assured that whatever they should suggest would receive the most impartial consideration.

Lady Russell spoke first, as became her sex, her age, and her long intimacy. Her plan had the merit of affection and of respectability, and had evidently been formed with a sincere wish to preserve as much of comfort as was consistent with prudence. She advised that the annual excursion to London, with its train of lodgings, servants on board wages, and dress for two seasons, should for the present be relinquished; that the number of horses in the stable should be reduced from four to two; that the useless footman, retained only for show since the winter before last, should be discharged; and that the table should be supplied with a frugality unknown at Kellynch since Lady Elliot's death, but which, under the direction of so elegant a mistress as Miss Elliot, could never descend to meanness. By these means, she computed, with a precision which did honour to her understanding, that nearly a third of the present expenditure might be saved, and honour preserved entire.

Sir Walter heard her to the end with an air of increasing coldness, and answered without hesitation. He thanked Lady Russell for her friendship, but he must observe that her plan was altogether impracticable. To give up London was to give up everything. It was there that his daughters were seen, that his own consequence was maintained among his equals, that the distinction of the family was kept alive in the memory of the great world. A baronet who ceased to appear in town ceased, in a certain sense, to be known as a baronet at all. As to his horses, they were such as became a gentleman of his station, and to lessen their number would be to invite comparison with the attorney who kept one, and the farmer who kept none. His servants were already so few as to occasion remark; and for his table, he flattered himself that no person who had dined at Kellynch had ever found it otherwise than exactly what it ought to be. He could not consent to any alteration which should publish his difficulties to the county. Lady Russell's scheme, therefore, though well intended, he must reject outright. It would not do.

Mr Shepherd was next invited to deliver his sentiments, and he did so with the diffidence of a man of business who knows the value of softening unwelcome counsel. His plan differed from Lady Russell's in going less to show and more to substance, as was natural in his profession. He proposed that Sir Walter should discharge two of the gardeners, whose labours, in his opinion, exceeded the real wants of the grounds; that a part of the home farm, now unprofitably held in hand, should be let upon a fair lease; that the quit-rents and other small dues should be more strictly collected; and that his own charges as agent should be diminished for the two ensuing years, in testimony of his respect for the family. By these retrenchments, joined to a more exact payment of ready money to the tradespeople of the market town, he apprehended that the debt might be gradually reduced without any retrenchment of splendour which the world could perceive.

Sir Walter's countenance did not relax as Mr Shepherd proceeded, and his answer, when it came, was still more decided than before. To turn off his gardeners was to suffer his shrubberies to run to waste, and to make Kellynch Hall resemble a farm-house. To let any portion of his land for the accommodation of tenants' crops was to introduce confusion into an estate which had descended entire from father to son. To dun his own tenants for a few shillings at Lady-day or Michaelmas was the office of a steward, not of a gentleman. And as to Mr Shepherd's handsome offer respecting his own agency, Sir Walter could not think of accepting a sacrifice which must lower the agent in the eyes of the neighbourhood, and by consequence lower himself. He was sensible of Mr Shepherd's zeal, but his plan, like Lady Russell's, he must decline altogether. It would not answer. It was not to be thought of.

There was a short silence, during which Elizabeth looked mortified and Lady Russell grieved, and Mr Shepherd turned his hat in his hands with the air of a man who has another expedient behind which he scarcely dares to produce. Anne, who had hitherto sat silent, as became the youngest and, in her father's estimation, the least important person present, then laid down her work, and with a colour which betrayed her sense of the unusualness of her conduct, spoke aloud, and in company, for the first time on the subject.

She begged leave to observe, she said in a low but steady voice, that if retrenchment were indeed necessary, it would be better to retrench effectually and at once, than to attempt small savings which left the evil untouched. Both the plans which had been proposed would lessen comfort without lessening danger. To keep up the appearance of affluence while the substance was wasting seemed to her the most expensive economy of all. If the family were to remain at Kellynch, as undoubtedly they must, let them remain with a determination to live within their income in the strictest sense. Let the London house be given up entirely, not for one year only; let the horses be sold, except a pair for the carriage; let every unnecessary servant be dismissed at Michaelmas; let the shoot be reserved and the wine-cellar unreplenished; let presents, parties, and new furniture be forsworn until the debts were cleared. A strict and open economy, pursued for two or three years with resolution, would do what partial savings could never do, and would in the end preserve, rather than injure, the credit of the family.

Anne ceased, astonished at her own temerity, and expecting reproof. To the surprise of every one present, and to the utter astonishment of Anne herself, she found a supporter where she had least reason to hope for one. Elizabeth, who had listened with an attention very unusual to her when Anne was the speaker, turned to her father and declared, with a firmness which partook equally of sisterly condescension and of wounded pride, that Anne was in the right. She had herself been thinking, she owned, that half measures would expose them to remark without affording relief. If they retrenched at all, let them retrench handsomely, and shew the world that they could command themselves. She would rather give up every indulgence at once, and live for a time like a private gentlewoman, than submit to be pitied for expedients which every body must see through. Anne's plan was severe, she allowed, severer by far than either Lady Russell's or Mr Shepherd's, but it had at least the merit of honesty, and she was not ashamed to second it.

Lady Russell looked at her god-daughter with affectionate wonder, and Mr Shepherd stared with professional admiration at a scheme which, though ruinous to his own expectations of employment, had the clearness of arithmetic to recommend it. Sir Walter alone seemed unmoved by the novelty of this alliance between his daughters. He praised Elizabeth's spirit, he smiled at Anne's earnestness, and dismissed the whole with the remark that young ladies were admirable judges of distress when distress was imaginary, but that the management of an estate like Kellynch required riper experience. Anne's plan, severe as it was, he must reject as decidedly as he had rejected the others. To live like a private gentlewoman in his own house was a contradiction in terms. He would not hear of selling his horses, or shutting up any part of his establishment. Such a proceeding would be known in half an hour throughout Somersetshire, and would bring more discredit upon his name than ten times the amount of his debts.

Mr Shepherd, thus encouraged by the failure of every proposal of mere economy to open his lips once more, cleared his throat, and with many apologies for the liberty he was about to take, observed that there remained one expedient which had not yet been named, and which in some families of rank under temporary embarrassment had been found effectual without any visible diminution of dignity. If Sir Walter could be prevailed upon, for a term of years, to let Kellynch Hall to a tenant of unexceptionable character and fortune, and to retire himself to a smaller residence, the rent received, joined to the savings in housekeeping, servants, and grounds, would in a very short period restore his affairs, while the Hall itself would suffer no dishonour by being occupied in the interim by a person of condition.

He had scarcely pronounced the word tenant when Sir Walter started from his chair with an indignation which silenced every other feeling in the room. Tenant! he repeated. Was he to be told, in his own house, that he should admit a tenant into Kellynch Hall, suffer his lawns to be trodden by strange feet, his walls to echo to the voices of persons unknown to the Baronetage, his own name to be second in his own village? He desired that the word might never be spoken again in his presence. He would rather quit Somersetshire for ever, he would rather suffer any privation, than submit to so degrading, so intolerable a measure. No tenant should ever cross the threshold of Kellynch while he lived to prevent it. The very suggestion was an affront, and he must insist that it be forgotten as soon as uttered.

Mr Shepherd bowed himself into silence, Lady Russell cast down her eyes, Elizabeth coloured with resentment at the check her father had sustained, and Anne resumed her work with trembling hands, convinced that further argument would be vain. The conference, which had begun with such fair hopes of accommodation, was now at an end, though the company still remained together from want of resolution to separate. The debts were precisely where they had been at breakfast, not a shilling provided for, not a shilling of expenditure curtailed, every plan proposed and every plan refused.

It was in this state of suspended decision that the party was interrupted, about the middle of the afternoon, by the arrival of the post. Among the letters brought in was one in a hasty female hand, superscribed in the well-known characters of the youngest daughter of the house, and addressed to Miss Anne Elliot, Kellynch Hall. Anne broke the seal with the eagerness of one who seldom receives particular attention, and found within a complaint and a entreaty expressed with all the freedom of sisterly confidence.

Mary, who wrote from Uppercross, described herself as very ill-used and very unwell. She had caught a cold which had settled upon her spirits; the servants neglected her; her husband was out with his dogs from morning till night; her children plagued her beyond endurance; and Mr Musgrove and Mrs Musgrove, though very good sort of people in their way, had no idea of the attention due to a delicate constitution like hers. She wanted Anne, and nobody but Anne. Elizabeth might be too fine, and Lady Russell too busy, but Anne could come, and Anne must come. Charles joined, or would join if he were at home, in begging her to come for a week or two, and take her share of the nursing and the scolding. In short, unless Anne came immediately, Mary did not know what she should do, and had no comfort to look to in life.

Anne read this letter twice over, with feelings divided between habitual indulgence and present perplexity, and then, as it related to herself alone, put it into her pocket without communicating its contents, except by a brief intimation to Lady Russell that Mary was unwell and wished for her company at Uppercross. The conversation languished after this interruption. Lady Russell shortly afterwards took her leave on foot for the Lodge, with a melancholy shake of the head at the failure of her counsel; Mr Shepherd departed on horseback for the market town, carrying with him his rejected plans and his forbidden word; Elizabeth retired to her own room to lament over the Baronetage in solitude; and Sir Walter withdrew to his study to console himself, as usual, among the earliest patents and the endless creations of the last century.

The evening closed in quietly upon Kellynch Hall. The candles were lighted in the drawing-room, the shutters were closed against the summer dusk, and Anne, left at last entirely alone, sat for some time in silent reflection upon the events of the day. The question of the family's debts was still entirely unsettled, not advanced a single step by all the wisdom and all the affection that had been exerted. No retrenchment was adopted, no expedient approved, no future meeting appointed. Her father's pride, her sister's delicacy, Lady Russell's prudence, and Mr Shepherd's ingenuity had all proved unequal to the evil. She foresaw renewed applications, renewed evasions, and the gradual accumulation of difficulties which no one had courage to meet.

For herself, her resolution was taken. She would go to Mary at Uppercross. The invitation, querulous as it was, was the only call of usefulness which had reached her, the only opening for that quiet exertion of duty in which she had always found her truest satisfaction. To nurse a fancied illness, to mediate between carelessness and discontent, was a small office, but it was one which she could perform, and which no other person seemed willing to undertake. She determined, therefore, to set out on the following morning, if her father would spare the carriage, and to remain at Uppercross so long as her presence should afford comfort, leaving Kellynch and its embarrassments behind her for a season, but carrying with her the uneasy knowledge that they remained precisely as she left them, without plan, without relief, and without hope of speedy settlement.

I doubt if Mr. Franklin ever squeezed the breath out of a man quite so completely before as he squeezed the breath out of me on that slope of sand. I lay gasping under his arm like a fish on a beach, and when I got my wind again the first use I made of it was to give him a pat on the shoulder with my stick by way of reproof for such foreign manners.

“Gently, Mr. Franklin, gently!” I says. “You have had your education abroad, sir, and I am an old Englishman. A shake of the hand will do for me.”

He laughed, and shook my hand till my wrist ached, and then plumped himself down again in the sand beside me as if we had parted only yesterday. Rosanna was gone, fluttering away over the sandhills in her grey cloak, before I had breath enough in my body to call after her. Mr. Franklin looked where she had vanished, with that ready smile of his still bright upon his face.

“You spoke of seven-and-sixpence just now, sir,” I says, to bring him back to business, for my legs were stiff with sitting and my mind was all in a hurry to know how he came to drop upon us from the clouds. “May I ask how I come to be your debtor in that sum?”

“Don’t you remember, Betteredge? When I was a boy you lent me seven-and-sixpence to buy a donkey on the sands at Brighton. I never paid you back.”

“I remember it well, sir,” I says. “And a very obstinate donkey it was, too, if my memory does not play me false.”

“You shall be paid, this time, with interest,” says Mr. Franklin, pulling out his purse. “But first tell me — am I expected? Am I too soon?”

“Four good hours too soon, sir, if the truth must be told,” I says. “My lady looked for you by the evening train, close on dinner-time. It is scarce three o’clock now, and here you are sitting by the Shivering Sand with an old man who was sent out to fetch his second housemaid in to her dinner.”

You, who read this, will laugh at an old fellow who makes a mystery out of a railway train, and I do not blame you. An express train that comes four hours before its time, in these days of punctuality, seems like nonsense. But Mr. Franklin had his answer ready, and it put nonsense quite out of the question.

“It is my aunt’s doing, Betteredge,” he says. “I had a letter from her in London, yesterday morning, that turned my plans upside down. Read it, and judge for yourself.”

He took a letter from the breast-pocket of his fawn-coloured coat, and put it into my hand. The paper was my lady’s own paper, the hand was my lady’s own hand, and the seal was my lady’s seal — for I know them all as well as I know my own name. I put on my spectacles, which offended Mr. Franklin mightily, for he said a man of my age had no business to want spectacles in the open air, and I read as follows, word for word:

“MY DEAR FRANKLIN, — I write a line to beg that you will travel to us on Thursday by the early train, which leaves London at one o’clock and reaches our station at half-past two, instead of by the evening train as we had arranged. I have a particular reason for wishing to see you privately, before the family are assembled for the birthday. The carriage shall meet the early train, and you will please to consider this note as strictly private between you and me, and to say nothing of the change to any one until we meet. Your affectionate aunt, JULIA VERINDER. P.S. — Come by the sands walk if the day is fine, and enter by the terrace. You will thus avoid observation.”

“There, Betteredge!” says Mr. Franklin, when I had done. “That is why I am four hours early. I took the one o’clock train, I left the carriage at the lodge gate that I might have a walk and a smoke, and I came round by the beach because her ladyship told me to do so. Is her ladyship at home?”

“Her ladyship and Miss Rachel were out at luncheon when I last heard, sir,” I says. “But her ladyship will surely be back by now.”

Mr. Franklin sprang to his feet, light as a boy, and then gave me his hand to help me to mine. Getting on my legs from a slope of sand, at my time of life, is, I can tell you, a slow business. He waited patiently, looking out the while at the quicksand, which was then in the very height of its shivering. The broad brown face of it heaved and dimpled in a manner most unwholesome to see at close quarters.

“What a dismal place!” says he. “And what a strange girl, to come and sit here alone! What did she call it? The Shivering Sand? I should have thought the lass was frightened of it.”

“She is drawn to it, sir, as she herself says,” I says. “But there! We will leave Rosanna for the present, if you please. She is late for her dinner, and Nancy is waiting to scold her. Let us get back to the house.”

We took our way up through the sandhills, and then through the melancholy plantation of firs, Mr. Franklin talking all the while in that pleasant, rattling, foreign way of his, asking after my lady and Miss Rachel and Penelope and every soul in the house except Rosanna, whom he had already forgotten. I had something on my own tongue’s end all the way — namely, what Penelope had told me that morning about the Indians and the boy and the ink in his hand. I had promised my daughter to put Mr. Franklin up to it, and I felt bound to keep my word. But there is a time for all things, and I thought the time would come better after we were under shelter, and not while I was puffing and blowing uphill among fir-trees with my stick.

When we came out upon the terrace, the house looked quiet enough. No carriage at the door, no ladies on the lawn. The servants’ dinner, I knew, would be over and done with by this time, and Nancy, having a fine appetite, would have forgiven Rosanna already for keeping her waiting.

Mr. Franklin stopped short at the terrace steps, and drew from the inside breast-pocket of his coat a small packet, not above four inches long, sealed in three places with black wax, and tied round with a bit of twine.

“Betteredge,” he says, lowering his voice, though there was not a soul within hearing, “I want you to do me a service. Lock this up to-night in the plate-room, or in any other safe place of yours, and keep it there till I ask you for it again.”

“To-night, sir?” I says. “Why not now?”

“Because I must see my aunt first, and speak to her alone, as her letter bids me,” says he. “When that is over, I will come to you myself. Will you take charge of it for me till then?”

I looked at the packet. It was light enough to have nothing in it but paper, for all I could tell by the feel. What was in it, whether a letter or a keepsake or money, I no more know to this hour than you do.

“Is there any answer to take back, sir?” I says, in my character of steward.

“No answer but this — that it is to be locked up, and that no eyes but mine and yours are to know where it is locked,” says Mr. Franklin. “Put it in your pocket now, and say nothing to any living soul.”

I put it in my pocket accordingly. It went against me, I own, to be made a party to secrets in my lady’s house, and I told him so plainly.

“My lady trusts me, Mr. Franklin,” I says. “I have served her since I was a boy, and I have never had a secret from her yet.”

“You shall have no secret from her now,” says he. “When I have seen her ladyship, she shall know all about it, if she wishes. Till then, I ask you, as a favour to an old friend, to hold your tongue and keep the packet.”

Well, there was no resisting that. I have dandled Mr. Franklin on my knee when he was a child, and I love him, I may say, as if he was my own son. I promised.

We went in by the side door, quiet as mice, on account of her ladyship’s postscript about avoiding observation. The passage brought us past my own sitting-room, which was handy for our purpose, for I keep the plate-room keys in a cupboard there. But I did not lock the packet away then and there, thinking I should have more leisure when Mr. Franklin had gone upstairs to my lady. We passed on to the hall, where who should we meet but my daughter Penelope, coming down with Miss Rachel’s parasol in her hand, and looking as white as the wall.

“Bless me, Penelope!” I says. “What brings you here with that face? Where is my lady?”

“My lady is in the morning-room, father, waiting for Mr. Franklin,” says Penelope, dropping a curtsey to him that would have done your heart good to see. “She came back from luncheon half an hour since, and Miss Rachel has stayed behind to dine with her friends and will not be home till the evening.” Which was a great relief to me, I own, for I was in no humour to have more surprises sprung upon me before dinner.

Penelope looked hard at Mr. Franklin, as if she would have spoken to him then and there about the jugglers on the terrace. I gave her a nudge with my elbow to keep her quiet, for I wanted to tell that story myself and in my own way. She understood me, and held her tongue.

“But, father,” she says, “have you seen nothing of Rosanna? She has never come in to dinner. Nancy says you went to fetch her from the sands.”

“So I did,” I says. “I found her there, and Mr. Franklin found us both together. She ran away from us, my dear, without a word, as if she was frightened. Has she not come back since?”

Penelope shook her head. “Susan saw her from the upper window, father, ten minutes since, making for the footpath to Cobb’s Hole as fast as she could go. She had changed her cloak, and she had her work-basket on her arm. She has not come back to the house, but has gone on to Cobb’s Hole.”

To Cobb’s Hole! To see the only friend she had in our neighbourhood — a lame old fisherman, of whom I shall have more to say hereafter. At three o’clock in the day, with her dinner untasted, and her work to do in the house! I did not like it. Mr. Franklin did not seem to attend much, being eager to get to my lady. He asked me to show him the way to the morning-room, which I did, leaving Penelope in the hall with her trouble about Rosanna still dark upon her face.

My lady was sitting alone, with a book in her lap which she was not reading. She rose up with a cry of pleasure when Mr. Franklin came in, and ran to meet him like a young woman. I followed with his travelling-bag, which he had left with me, and set it down inside the door, as an excuse for being present at the first words between them.

“My dear Franklin! How good of you to come early!” says my lady. “Did you get my note?”

“I got it, aunt, and here I am,” says Mr. Franklin, kissing her hand. “I have brought the —” He stopped short, catching my eye, and remembered the packet in my pocket.

My lady looked at me, and then at him. “Betteredge may leave us,” she says. “What you have to say to me, Franklin, may be said before my old servant.”

“It is what I hoped,” says Mr. Franklin. “Aunt, you desire me to keep your note private, and I have done so. Betteredge himself showed me the way here by accident. May he remain?”

My lady nodded kindly to me to stay. Then she drew herself up, and spoke in a manner which I had never heard from her before, and which took Mr. Franklin himself, I think, a little by surprise.

“Franklin,” she says, “before we speak of anything else, I have one condition to make with you under my roof. The name of Colonel John Herncastle is never to be mentioned in this house — not by you, not by any one. What he was, and what he did in India, and what enmity there was between him and others of our family, are subjects which I forbid, once for all, to be discussed within these walls. Do you agree to this?”

There was a dead silence for a moment. Mr. Franklin’s bright face clouded a little, but he answered frankly and at once, like the gentleman he is.

“I agree, aunt. Whatever my private feelings may be, you shall never hear the name from my lips while I am your guest. I give you my word of honour.”

My lady held out her hand, and Mr. Franklin kissed it again in token of the bargain. I felt the packet in my pocket grow heavier, if such a thing can be, while this was going on, though why I should have thought of it just then I cannot say.

“That is settled,” says my lady, with a sigh of relief. “Now sit down and tell me of your journey.”

I left them together, as I saw I was no longer wanted, and went back to my own room to lock up Mr. Franklin’s packet before the servants’ tea. On my way I met Penelope again in the passage, still anxious about Rosanna.

“Has she come back, my dear?” I asks.

“No, father,” says Penelope. “I have been to her room. Her bonnet for afternoons is gone, and her shawl is gone. Limping Lucy at Cobb’s Hole will keep her gossiping till nightfall, I doubt.”

“Send word to me the moment she sets foot in the house,” I says. “And say nothing to the other servants. Least said is soonest mended where Rosanna is concerned.”

Penelope promised, and I shut myself into my sitting-room. I took the little sealed packet from my pocket, where it had lain warm against me all through my lady’s reproof about Colonel Herncastle, and I looked at it again in private. Three black seals, a twist of twine, and no direction of any sort upon the outside. I weighed it in my hand. Light — as light as vanity, as my poor dear wife used to say. What was inside it I neither knew then nor know now, and, being bound in honour to Mr. Franklin, I made no attempt to guess.

The plate-room at our house is a strong little closet built into the thickness of the wall on the ground floor, with an iron door and a patent lock of my late Sir John’s own choosing. Nobody keeps the key but myself, and nobody enters but myself and my lady, when the plate is wanted. I lighted my candle, unlocked the iron door, laid the packet by my own hand upon the middle shelf, between the silver teapot and the christening cup, locked the door again, and put the key back into my cupboard. Done, and done honestly, without any prying or peeping. If you think an old steward is easily trusted with a secret nowadays, you do not know the servants of the present generation, and so I tell you.

The rest of the evening passed quietly enough till dinner-time. Miss Rachel not being at home, my lady and Mr. Franklin dined alone together upstairs. What passed between them about the birthday, or about the packet, I cannot say, for I was not present, and Mr. Franklin never came to me afterwards in my room as he had promised to do. Penelope waited at table, and told me after that my lady was in good spirits, and that Mr. Franklin kept her laughing all through dinner with stories of his life in foreign parts.

It was nine o’clock before the house was quiet. I went my rounds as usual, tried all the doors, and looked in at the servants’ hall, where Nancy was darning stockings and talking loud about Rosanna’s airs in staying out after dark. I said nothing to encourage her, but I looked into Rosanna’s empty place by the fire, and my heart sank a little in spite of myself.

At half-past nine Penelope came to my room in her nightgown, with her candle in her hand.

“Father, she is not come back,” says my daughter in a whisper. “Rosanna is still not back in the house.”

I sent Penelope to bed, telling her the girl was old enough to take care of herself, and that Limping Lucy would give her a bed at Cobb’s Hole if she was afraid to walk home in the dark. But I did not half believe my own words as I spoke them.

It is late that evening now as I write, or rather as I think over what I am to write to-morrow, sitting in my beehive chair with Robinson Crusoe open on my knee at the place where I always leave off — at the part where Crusoe ponders on his solitude. The house is abed. The little sealed packet lies locked away safe in the plate-room. And Rosanna Spearman, with her dinner untasted and her work undone, is still not back in the house.

Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.

27 May.

My dearest Lucy,--

Your long letter has given me more pleasure than I can tell you, and I have read it three times over. I do indeed sympathise with you, though you must allow me to laugh a little, even whilst I scold you, at THREE proposals in one day. You dear, thoughtless, tender-hearted thing, to cry over your conquests. Only you could be at once so happy and so miserable in the same hour, and make me love you the more for telling me.

I congratulate you with all my heart, if indeed I may do so before you have told me in plain words what I already guess. Your postscript tells me everything, though you try to hide it in confusion. Dear Lucy, I am not blind. Mr. Holmwood has spoken at last, and you are happy. I wish you every blessing that a good girl deserves, and I know you will make him a true and loving wife. You are quite right, a woman ought to tell her husband everything, and I am sure you will, for you have always told me.

You ask me to tell you what I think. I think Dr. Seward acted as a gentleman, and Mr. Morris as something even better than a gentleman, if there can be such a thing. His speech to you, which you set down so faithfully, quite made me cry over my dinner. Give him one kiss indeed! You did quite right, and Arthur, I am sure, will not grudge it when you tell him, as tell him you must.

As for myself, I have little news. My school work goes on as ever, and Miss Blakeley says my shorthand improves, though my wrist aches with the typewriter in the evening. I practise that the stenographic signs may come readily when Jonathan wants me to be useful to him. He and I have had such pleasant fancies of our future home, with him dictating and me writing down, that I will not let my hand grow idle whilst he is away.

I have not heard again from Jonathan since those few hurried lines from Transylvania of which I told you. He said then he would be returning in about a week, and now more than a fortnight is gone. I try not to be anxious, for the posts abroad are so uncertain, and legal business will keep a man beyond his time, but I confess the days seem very long. Mr. Hawkins speaks kindly when I call, but he has had no instructions, and can tell me nothing. Write soon, dear, and tell me all about Arthur. I long to see you both.

Ever your loving MINA.

Dr. Seward's Diary.

(Kept in phonograph)

27 May.--Last night's little dinner at Morris's rooms has left me with much to turn over, and as sleep will not come I set down the record whilst the impression is fresh.

We met at half-past seven, Morris having taken a private room at the restaurant in Albemarle Street, very quiet and well ordered, with a round table for three and no waiters lingering to listen. Art arrived first, looking better than I have seen him since his father's illness, and shook us both by the hand as if we had been brothers returned from a voyage. Morris was in great spirits, and received us with that hearty Western welcome which makes a stranger feel at once at home.

There was no affectation of forgetting why we were met, for Morris gave the health at once, standing with his glass raised: to the happiest man in all the wide world, and to the lady of his choice. We drank it standing, Art colouring to the temples and protesting that he did not deserve such friends, and then we sat down and fell to with excellent appetite, at least on the part of the other two, for my own stomach is still rebellious.

Art bore his honours modestly. He told us, what indeed we knew, that Miss Westenra had accepted him yesterday evening, and that Mrs. Westenra had given her blessing. He spoke of her with such reverence and such boyish delight that even I, with my empty feeling upon me, could not grudge him his fortune. He is to wait upon her mother formally to-morrow, and there is talk of a settlement in the autumn. Morris clapped him upon the shoulder and swore he would dance at the wedding though he should have to ride from Texas to do it.

We parted a little after eleven, all in kindly humour. Morris walked with me as far as Cavendish Square, talking of Art's prospects and of his own intention to remain in London for some weeks. He is a gallant fellow, and bears his refusal like a man. For myself, I found the evening less bitter than I had feared. Work and friendship remain, and I am resolved to make them suffice.

Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.

17, Chatham Street, 28 May.

My dearest Mina,--

Your sweet letter has just come, and I have kissed it for your sake. You dear, solemn, wise little Mina, to congratulate me in such proper fashion when I have not yet had the courage to write the words plainly. Well, I will write them now. Arthur spoke yesterday evening, quite late, after mamma had gone to rest, and I have promised to marry him. There. It is written, and I am not ashamed of it. I am the happiest girl in London, and I want all the world to know it, except, of course, two poor fellows whom I would spare if I could.

Mamma is delighted. She has always liked Arthur, and says his family and position are all that could be wished. He came to lunch to-day, and was so kind and so attentive to her that she declares she has gained a son already. We go a good deal to the park in the afternoons, for the weather is very fine, and Arthur walks with us and tells mamma all the news of the county families. He does not use slang, Mina, not even to please me, but I do not mind it now. I like his grave way best.

Arthur tells me he dined last night with Mr. Morris and Dr. Seward, and that they drank my health, which made me blush and laugh together. I am glad they are friends still, for I should have been miserable if my happiness had made mischief between them. Arthur says Dr. Seward looked pale and tired, and ate nothing, and I am sorry for it. Will you tell me, Mina, ought I to write to him? Arthur says it would be kinder to leave him quiet for a little, and men know men best, so I shall do nothing, though it goes against me.

You must not be anxious about Jonathan. I am sure legal business in those out-of-the-way places is full of delays, with strange posts and strange hours, and he will come back all the prouder of having finished his work well. When he does come, you and he must come to us at once, and Arthur shall show him the picture-galleries, which he pretends to understand.

Write by return, dear, and believe me

Ever your loving LUCY. P.S. Mamma sends her love, and says she hopes your school work is not too tiring in this heat.

Letter, Sister Agatha to Miss Mina Murray.

Convent of St. Mary, Buda-Pesth, 28 May.

Dear Madam,--

I write at the request of Mr. Jonathan Harker, of Exeter, England, who is now under our care in this house, to inform you that he has been delayed upon his journey and cannot at present return to England as he had hoped.

Mr. Harker reached our town ten days since by diligence from the interior, much exhausted by travel and by close attention to business, and suffering from a sharp attack of brain fever. He was for some days quite unable to give any account of himself, and had no letters or papers upon his person by which we might learn his friends, save only an envelope directed to yourself which he held fast in his hand. Upon his amendment he recollected your name and address, and entreated me, as he is yet forbidden by our physician to write himself or to bear any fatigue, to send you these few lines to relieve your anxiety.

Be assured, dear Madam, that he is now doing well. The fever has abated, his sleep is natural, and his strength returns a little each day. Our good doctor orders only quiet, nourishing food, and rest for some weeks before any further travelling is attempted. He is very patient and grateful, and speaks often of his home and of yourself. He begs me to say that you are not to be uneasy on his behalf, and that he will write himself so soon as he is permitted.

Trusting this will find you in good health, I remain, dear Madam,

Yours faithfully in Christ, SISTER AGATHA.

Dr. Seward's Diary.

(Kept in phonograph)

29 May.--I went down amongst the patients early this morning, hoping by strict attention to routine to drive away the restlessness which has pursued me since the dinner.

Renfield afforded me fresh matter for study. I found him seated in his room, quite calm, his hands folded, his eyes fixed upon the window, though there was nothing to see beyond the yard wall and a strip of grey sky. He had eaten his breakfast with unusual neatness, and greeted me civilly, which is not always his humour.

I asked him after his sleep, and whether his fancies troubled him less. He answered readily enough upon indifferent matters, speaking of the weather and of a spider which he had spared in the corner, a clemency quite new in him. Then, without any leading from me, and looking me straight in the face in a manner which reminded me, oddly enough, of my own habit as Lucy once described it, he put to me this question:--

Doctor, is it true that Miss Westenra is to be married soon?

I confess I was startled, for I had never mentioned Miss Westenra's name within his hearing, nor, to my knowledge, has any attendant done so. I asked him, keeping my manner as indifferent as I could, what put such a thought into his head. He smiled, and tapped his forehead with his finger, saying that little birds carried news, and that ladies who were kind to the afflicted deserved to be happy. He would say no more, though I pressed him, but returned to his contemplation of the window, and would not be drawn again.

(Mem., how could he have learned the name? Inquire of attendants whether any newspaper has been left in his way, or whether the men gossip in the corridors. His acuteness at times is remarkable, and suggests that even in fixed ideas the mind retains avenues of observation which we too readily deem closed.)

He remains quiet, and gives no trouble. I have ordered his diet to be continued, and shall observe him further to-morrow.

Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.

30 May.

My dearest Lucy,--

You will have wondered at my silence, and I must ask you to forgive me, for I have had a great shock, and only now can bring myself to write it plainly.

Yesterday morning there came to my lodgings a letter from abroad, from a stranger, which I enclose herewith for you to read and return to me, for I know you will treat it tenderly. It is from a Sister Agatha, of a convent at Buda-Pesth, and tells me that Jonathan has been delayed upon his journey and lies ill of brain fever in their house, unable to write himself.

Oh, Lucy, my first feeling was one of thankfulness, sinful as it may seem, for I had feared I know not what, and to know that he lives, and is under kind and holy care, seemed for a moment enough. Then came the terror of the words themselves. Brain fever. For some days quite unable to give any account of himself. Forbidden to write or to bear any fatigue. Ordered quiet and rest for some weeks before any further travelling is attempted. I read the letter over until the lines danced before my eyes, and then I sat down and cried, not for grief alone, but for relief that I might at last cry with reason.

I have written this morning to Sister Agatha, thanking her with all my heart, and begging her to tell Jonathan that I am well and do not grieve more than I can help, and that he is to obey the doctor in all things and not to hasten his return by a single day upon my account. I have written also to Mr. Hawkins, who was much moved, and promises to keep Jonathan's place open and to send him word of our inquiries. Dear Mr. Hawkins is himself far from strong, and I fear this news has agitated him.

Do not think me faithless, dear, if I say that waiting now seems harder than before. Whilst I thought him merely kept by business I could picture him well and busy, and could laugh at my own impatience. Now I picture him pale in a strange bed, amongst strangers, holding fast my envelope in his hand, as the good Sister says he did, and my heart aches to be with him. Yet I know nursing strange fevers is not for the untrained, and that my presence might hinder rather than help. I must be patient, and practise my shorthand, that I may be the readier to work for him when he needs me.

Pray for him, Lucy, and for me. I shall go to you so soon as I can leave my class, for I long for your dear company. Give my duty to your mamma, and my kindest regards to Arthur. Tell him I envy him his health and strength, which permit him to guard those he loves.

Ever your loving MINA.

Telegram, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.

31 May.

Jonathan safe in London. Delay mistaken. Come to me to-morrow. Mina.

Eve stood for a moment on the pavement in Shaftesbury Avenue, looking first at the umbrella and then at the sky, with the air of one who has received a favour from Providence and does not quite know what to do about it.

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. That brisk, decided shower which had driven her under the awning of Messrs. Thorpe and Briscoe had blown away eastward towards the City, leaving a blue sky washed clean and a pavement that steamed gently in the returning sun. Her hat, that supreme hat of soft dull satin with the black bird of Paradise feather, had not suffered in the least, thanks entirely to the promptitude of a hatless young man with a monocle. And Eve, who had been brought up by a father who held strong views on the subject of debts of honour, felt that the thing could not be allowed to rest where it was.

It is all very well to accept umbrellas from heaven, but common decency required that they be returned to heaven with thanks. The difficulty was that heaven, in this instance, had a very precise local habitation. The young man had dashed across Dover Street into that gloomy building opposite Thorpe and Briscoe's, which could only be a club. Eve had observed its door during her vigil, and had seen a steady procession of well-fed young men go in and out with that air of having nothing in particular to do and plenty of time to do it in which marks the London clubman. She did not know its name, but a club is a club, and porters are porters, and a note left with a porter is as good as a registered letter.

Having arrived at this conclusion by that swift feminine logic which makes men look like fumbling amateurs, Eve glanced at her wrist-watch, found that she had still an hour to spare before the appointment which had brought her to London, and hailed a bus with the courage of one to whom a penny fare is a serious consideration. She was borne westward again, clutching the umbrella as if it were a sceptre, and presently found herself once more in Dover Street, contemplating the impassive frontage of Thorpe and Briscoe's and, immediately opposite, the no less impassive frontage of the club.

It was, indeed, the Drones Club, as a single glance at the brass plate beside the door informed her. A stout porter in a braided coat regarded her with that polite absence of curiosity which is the hall-mark of his profession.

"If you please," said Eve, "a gentleman belonging here very kindly lent me this umbrella this morning. I sheltered under the awning over there, and he came across and gave it to me. I did not even have time to thank him properly. Would you be so kind as to see that it is returned to him?"

The porter took the umbrella with the reverence due to a familiar object.

"Very good, miss," he said. "If you would leave your name, miss?"

Eve hesitated. She had a schoolgirl's dislike of being conspicuous, and the episode still struck her as absurdly romantic.

"Would you just put a note with it?" she asked. "Have you a pencil and paper?"

The porter, like all porters of well-conducted clubs, produced both from some mysterious recess of his box, and Eve, laying the paper against the wall, wrote rapidly.

"Thank you a thousand times for your great kindness to a damsel in distress under a coal-merchant's awning. The hat is quite dry. I am more grateful than I can say. — E. H."

She folded the note and handed it over with a smile which quite undid the porter, a married man of twenty years' standing.

"Put it in the umbrella, please, so that he will be sure to find it," she said. "And — you won't forget? It is a very nice umbrella."

"Very good, miss," said the porter. "I will attend to it immediate."

Eve nodded cheerfully and walked away towards Piccadilly, feeling that her account with Providence was balanced. She did not give her name, and the porter, having been dazzled at the crucial moment, omitted to ask for it again.

Psmith, meanwhile, having performed his act of chivalry, had returned to the smoking-room window of the Drones with the satisfied air of a man who has done a good deed before luncheon and feels entitled to lounge. He had resumed his study of the street with a certain tender interest, had observed the damsel's departure under his — or, to be strictly accurate, another's — umbrella, and had then applied himself to the serious business of the morning, which consisted of doing nothing in particular with a good deal of grace.

It was perhaps half an hour later that his solitude was broken. There entered, with the purposeful stride of one who seeks and means to find, a young man of substantial build and pink countenance, who stopped before Psmith's chair and spoke with ill-concealed emotion.

"I say," said the newcomer. "Have you seen my umbrella?"

Psmith regarded him through his monocle with that grave friendliness which so often disarmed criticism.

"Comrade," he said, "umbrellas are the will-o'-the-wisps of our modern civilization. They come and go. They flit. Tell me more. What was your umbrella like, and when did you last see it go?"

"My umbrella," said the other impressively, "was a silk umbrella with a gold band and a partridge-wood handle. Walderwick's my name. The Honourable Algernon Walderwick. I left it in the cloak-room this morning. Benson, the attendant, says you took it."

"Benson is quite right," said Psmith cordially. "I did. I never deny an action which my conscience approves. The circumstances were exceptional."

"Exceptional? Dashed exceptional, I call it, pinching a chap's umbrella!"

Psmith waved a long, white hand deprecatingly.

"You misjudge me," he said. "It was not a pinch, it was a rescue. Picture the scene. Across the way, beneath the awning of those coal persons, there cowered a young woman of surpassing — I may say — of almost distressing beauty, marooned by the elements, unable to proceed to her destination for lack of a stout roof to her head. What was I to do? Was I to remain aloof, practising the cold detachment of the philosopher? No. I borrowed — for the moment, mark you — the nearest sound umbrella, which happened to be yours, and placed it in her hands. A simple, human action."

Mr. Walderwick stared.

"You gave my umbrella — my best umbrella — to a girl you never met?"

"Your summary is masterly," said Psmith. "You seize the essence."

"But, dash it! It cost me three guineas! And it's raining — or was — and I wanted to go to Bond Street!"

Psmith reflected. He disliked explanations, as savouring of the fish business, from which he was that very night to resign. He preferred the short, clean cut of finance.

"Comrade Walderwick," he said, producing a pocket-book, "this painful misunderstanding can be healed in an instant. Your umbrella, I admit, was admirable. It answered every test. I formed for it, in the brief moment of our association, a deep affection. Permit me to purchase it from you outright, on the spot, without further haggling. Shall we say — ten pounds?"

"Ten pounds?" faltered Mr. Walderwick. "For an umbrella?"

"For that umbrella," said Psmith firmly, counting out the notes. "It has associations. It has played its part in a romantic episode. From henceforth it is historic. Ten pounds is, if anything, an under-estimate."

Mr. Walderwick took the notes with a dazed air, as one who feels that the world has shifted oddly beneath his feet but not altogether to his disadvantage.

"I say, thanks," he said. "I mean — no hard feelings and all that. Only — it was a topping umbrella."

"It still is," Psmith assured him. "And now, by a simple commercial transaction, it is mine. Should it return to the club — as umbrellas, like homing pigeons, sometimes do — kindly direct the porter to retain it for me. I shall call for it this evening."

Mr. Walderwick promised, and withdrew, still looking at the notes as if to make sure they were real. Psmith resumed his seat, well pleased. He had solved the matter without tedious elaboration, without dragging Beauty's name into a cold club-room discussion, and without revealing his own part beyond what was necessary. The thing had cost him ten pounds, but, as he justly reflected, chivalry cannot be had at bargain prices.

It was at about half-past three that same afternoon that Fate, which had been keeping an eye on the proceedings, arranged the second meeting.

The English summer, having repented for an hour or two, had relapsed. A second shower, sharper and more spiteful than the first, had sent the shoppers in Regent Street scurrying for cover, and Eve, emerging from a tea-shop where she had prudently lunched off a bun and a cup of coffee, found herself once more confronted by that liquid enemy against which hats, however supreme, have no defence.

She had taken refuge in the doorway of a print-seller's, and was contemplating the racing clouds with disfavour, when a tall figure detached itself from the crowd and paused beside her, also seeking shelter. It was a very tall, very thin young man, very well dressed, with a monocle in his right eye. He carried no umbrella — a fact which, had Eve been in a calmer frame of mind, might have struck her as significant — and he regarded the rain with an air of gentle reproach.

Eve looked at him, and looked away, and looked again. There was something oddly familiar about that gaunt grace, that solemn, amiable face. Her heart gave a sudden leap.

"Surely," she said, before she could stop herself, "we have met before?"

Psmith bowed with perfect courtesy. Inwardly he was conscious of a dexterous thrill, such as comes to the angler when the fish rises. Outwardly he was marble.

"Possibly," he said. "My face, I am told, has that oddly familiar quality. At school I was constantly being mistaken for the junior mathematics master. Strangers stop me in the street to ask if I was not at Winchester with them. I have grown resigned."

Eve laughed, but persisted.

"This morning," she said, "in Dover Street — under an awning — a man — very like you — lent me an umbrella. He had no hat. But —"

"Ah, Dover Street," said Psmith thoughtfully. "A delightful thoroughfare. Coal merchants, clubs, and what-not. I was in Dover Street myself this morning. At my club. The Drones. Between ourselves, I seldom leave it. The place has become a sort of ivory tower. But lending umbrellas in the rain without a hat? No. That is not my custom. My medical adviser forbids it. He says I must avoid chills."

"You are sure it was not you?" said Eve, peering.

"Positive," said Psmith with regret. "Had I seen a damsel in distress beneath a coal-merchant's awning, nothing would have kept me from rushing to her aid. But the facts are against it. At half-past ten this morning I was engaged in beating my friend Walderwick at squash, a game at which I am almost embarrassingly proficient. He will vouch for me."

This was, strictly speaking, an improvisation, but Psmith delivered it with such earnest conviction that Eve's certainty wavered. After all, all tall men with monocles look very much alike when one has seen them for only a moment in the rain.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "It was stupid of me. Only — whoever he was, he was very kind, and I have just taken the umbrella back."

"A noble action," said Psmith warmly. "The unknown gentleman, whoever he may have been, is doubtless touched to the core. Umbrellas lent lightly in the morning are so often mourned as lost by nightfall."

They stood for a while in silence, watching the rain. Eve, stealing another glance at her companion, decided that, whether umbrella-lender or not, he was a pleasant person to be rained up with. There was something restful about his drawl.

"Horrible weather, is it not?" she said.

"Pernicious," agreed Psmith. "England is a land of showers. One goes about expecting the worst. Have you far to go?"

"I have an appointment at half-past four," said Eve, "quite near here. If the rain stops —"

"It will stop," said Psmith reassuringly. "These cataclysms never last. In a moment the sun will smile again, and you will proceed to your appointment radiant and unbedraggled."

"May I ask —" began Eve, and stopped. She had been about to ask his name, for Miss Clarkson's pupils had been well brought up. But the young man forestalled her with a deft change of subject, pointing with his cane at a passing omnibus which had splashed a peer of the realm to the knees.

"A pretty sight," he said. "Our admirable municipal system at work."

By the time Eve looked round again, the shower had thinned to a drizzle, and her companion, with another courteous bow, had strolled away towards Piccadilly, leaving her with the curious feeling that she had been talking to somebody unusual and had somehow missed her opportunity of finding out who.

She glanced at her watch and hurried eastward, for her appointment was important. It was, indeed, the appointment on which, as she had told Miss Clarkson, so much depended — the interview with her prospective employer about the cataloguing of the Blandings Castle library.

Lord Emsworth received Miss Halliday in the sitting-room of his suite at the Savoy Hotel at twenty minutes to five that afternoon, under conditions which could hardly have been less favourable to a business-like discussion.

His lordship, who had come up to town that morning in a state of considerable mental confusion, having mislaid his pince-nez twice on the journey and having spent the luncheon hour in trying to remember whether he was to meet a poet or a parson on the morrow, was at his worst without those aids to vision. He peered at Eve over the edge of an arm-chair as she entered, and was immediately aware of two things — that his visitor was young and female, and that she wore upon her head something large and dark which, to his defective eyesight, bore a disquieting resemblance to a bird.

It was the bird of Paradise feather that undid the interview.

"Good heavens!" said Lord Emsworth, starting. "Shoo! Shoo!"

Eve stopped in the middle of the carpet.

"I beg your pardon?" she said.

"Your — ah — your hat," said his lordship, recovering himself with difficulty and fumbling for the cord of his missing pince-nez. "For a moment, you know, I thought — The light is bad — Blame my eyes — You are Miss — ah — Miss —"

"Halliday," said Eve. "Eve Halliday. About the library catalogue."

"Ah, yes, yes, to be sure. The library. You are very kind to come. My sister — Lady Constance — spoke — That is to say, Baxter — my secretary, you know, a most efficient fellow — wrote — You understand cataloguing?"

"Yes, indeed," said Eve brightly. "I was very fond of books at school, and my father was a writer, and I have done a good deal of indexing —"

"Canadian poetry," interrupted Lord Emsworth, who had suddenly remembered the morrow's luncheon and wished to show that he was abreast of literary matters. "Very remarkable. Mr. McTodd — Ralston McTodd — lunch to-morrow. You know his work? Pines and prairies and what-not? My sister admires it greatly. Mrs. McTodd — poor woman — deserted, I hear — sad, very sad —"

Eve, who knew Cynthia's story only too well from Miss Clarkson, opened her mouth to speak, but his lordship, having lost the thread, had risen and begun to potter about the room in search of his pince-nez, which were reposing, as usual, in his waistcoat pocket.

"Baxter! Baxter!" he called. "Where — Ah, here — No — Dear me!"

In the course of these manoeuvres he backed heavily into a small table, overturning a cup of tea which the waiter had just brought for the visitor. The tea spread in a brown flood across some papers relating to Jersey cows, and Eve sprang forward to rescue them.

"Oh, please don't trouble —" cried Lord Emsworth, bending at the same moment, with the result that their heads met with a smart crack over the table-edge. His lordship sat down abruptly, clutching his forehead. Eve, flushed and laughing and apologetic, held out the rescued papers.

"I'm so sorry —" she began.

"Not at all, not at all," said Lord Emsworth gallantly, though dazed. "My fault entirely. Without my glasses I am — positively — My dear Baxter finds them — usually down my back — Ha! Ha!"

He chuckled vaguely, and Eve chuckled too, because it was impossible not to like this amiable, flustered old gentleman, even though as an employer he was unlike anything she had imagined.

"About the catalogue —" she ventured.

"Yes, yes," said Lord Emsworth, "the catalogue. Very important. Psmith — no, Baxter — will show you — My sister Constance will write — Come down on Monday, if convenient — Blandings — Shropshire — my sister will arrange — Delightful —"

He beamed at her without seeing her at all clearly, and Eve understood that, by some miracle, she had not been turned down. The interview had gone completely wrong — she had been mistaken for a student of Canadian poetry, had been asked to shoo her own hat, had upset tea and bumped her prospective employer's head — and yet the post was still, in some nebulous way, hers. Lady Constance would write. She was to come on Monday.

She left the hotel in a whirl of amusement and relief, stepping out into a clear evening with the sun low over the river, and made her way homeward to think over the bewildering day.

The Drones Club smoking-room at eleven o'clock that night presented a picture of peace. The nightly rubber was over, the last roar of laughter from the billiard-room had died away, and Psmith sat alone by the window that overlooked Dover Street, twirling thoughtfully between his fingers a silk umbrella with a gold band and a partridge-wood handle.

The porter, true to his word, had retained it for him. With it, folded neatly into the ribs, had come Eve's note — "Thank you a thousand times... — E. H." — which Psmith had read twice and placed carefully in his pocket-book, not as evidence but as a memento of a morning well spent.

He was still musing, when old Benson shuffled in with the evening's final duties, followed by young Walderwick himself, who had looked in for a night-cap and paused at the sight of the umbrella.

"Hullo!" said Walderwick. "So it came back after all! Porter told me some girl brought it round this afternoon. Pretty girl in a black dress, he said. Left a note. Name of Halliday, he thinks. Eve Halliday, or something. I say, Psmith, you are a lucky chap. Ten quid and the brolly too!"

Psmith smiled gently, balancing the umbrella across his knees. Through the window the lamps of Dover Street shone on the quiet awning of Thorpe and Briscoe, empty now in the night.

"Eve Halliday," he said softly to himself, committing the name to memory. "Eve Halliday."

The taxi jerked and then got into gear and went down the dark street toward the Pantheon. Brett was leaning back in the corner with her eyes closed. I sat beside her with my hands in my pockets and watched the street go by.

"Oh, darling, I've been so miserable," Brett said.

"It's all right," I said.

"No. It's not all right. You know it isn't all right."

"We're out away from them," I said.

She opened her eyes and looked at me and then closed them again. The cab went over a bump and her shoulder touched mine and then moved away.

"Are we going to the Parc Montsouris?" she said.

"I told him that."

"I don't want to go there." She sat up. "Tell him to go somewhere else."

"Where?"

"Take me to Les Halles," she said. "Take me to get onion soup. I want to sit somewhere quiet and get soup."

I leaned forward and spoke to the driver through the opening. He nodded and turned off at the next street to go back toward the river. It was a warm night and the streets were empty except for taxis coming back from Montmartre with the flaps down.

"That's better," Brett said. "I couldn't stand the park."

"You were happy enough back there," I said.

"Lovely," she said. "I was having a lovely time."

"You like them all right."

"They're darlings," she said. "They're sweet."

"They dance well," I said.

"Oh, they dance too marvellously."

We did not look at each other. The cab went fast down the hill past the shuttered shops and crossed the Rue Saint-Jacques. I felt hollow and tired and fond of her and sick of everything we said.

Brett put her hand on my arm. "Don't be rotten, Jake."

"I'm not."

"You're being superior."

"No. I'm sleepy."

"You were cross at the bal."

"I was bored."

We crossed the Seine at the Pont Neuf. The river was dark and the lights of the bateaux were in the water. A horse-cab was going across ahead of us and we could hear the horse's feet on the wood pavement. Brett leaned back again and shut her eyes.

"I met a man last week who would have liked you," she said.

"Who?"

"Stanley Keppel. He was buying champagne for everybody at Zelli's. He has pots of money. He owns mines or something."

"I never heard of him," I said.

"No one has. That's the charm. He just came to Paris. He told me he wants to meet clever people."

"Did you tell him about me?"

"I told him you were very clever and very wicked."

"What did he say?"

"He said he would like to buy us both dinner. He has a motor-car with a chauffeur."

The driver turned into the big open square by Les Halles. The pavilions were dark and the street was full of carts with vegetables and men carrying sides of beef. The lights were on in the all-night restaurant and the steam was coming out of the kitchen door. We got out and went in and sat at a long wooden table with the market men.

"What will you have?" I asked.

"Soup," Brett said. "Onion soup and beer."

We ordered and the waiter brought the soup in earthen bowls and the cheese was browned on top. Brett took off her hat and put it on the bench beside her and brushed her hair back with her hands. She looked very tired and very handsome in the white light.

"Eat it," I said. "It will do you good."

"It's good," she said. "You eat yours."

"It's good."

"You never eat," she said. "You only drink."

"I eat."

We ate the soup and drank the beer. The market men were shouting outside and a truck backed up with a grinding of gears. A man in a bloody apron came in and stood at the counter and drank white wine.

"Stanley Keppel said he never saw a woman look so fine as I did last week," Brett said. "He said it twice."

"Did you believe him?"

"I liked it."

"He has money," I said.

" pots of it," Brett said. "What do you think of that?"

"I think it's fine."

"You're not jealous?"

"No."

"You ought to be."

"I'm not."

She looked at me over the bowl. "You don't say what you mean, do you, Jake?"

"You don't either."

"No," she said. "I suppose not."

I wanted to tell her that none of it made any difference and that I wanted her to be happy and that I was happy sitting there with her, but what I said was, "Have another beer?"

"Yes."

I ordered two more beers. The waiter set them down and wiped the table with his cloth. Brett held her glass in both hands and looked at it.

"I wish we could have stayed out at the park," she said. "It would have been quiet."

"You wanted soup."

"I know. I always want something else."

We drank the beer. It was cold and good. Outside the carts were unloading and the pavements were wet from washing. It was getting late and the men were beginning to shout prices.

"I left fifty francs at the bal," I said. "I left it in an envelope for Georgette."

"The girl you brought?"

"Yes."

"That was sweet of you."

"I ought to go back and see she gets it. The patronne may not give it to her."

"You paid for your dinner?" Brett said.

"Yes. I paid for everything."

"You're a good chap," Brett said. "Will you go back now?"

"If you don't mind. I'll come back here."

"Don't be long. Or go to Zelli's after. They'll all be at Zelli's. You can find me there."

"I'll come back here first."

"You'll lose me," she said.

"No."

She smiled. "Go on, then. Go and be noble about the fifty francs."

"I won't be long."

"Take a taxi," she said. "Don't walk."

I paid and went out and found a taxi waiting by the vegetable carts. The driver was asleep with his cap over his face. I woke him and told him the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève.

The bal was empty when I got there except for Georgette and the daughter of the house and the proprietor. The accordion was on a chair by the dancing-floor and the benches were pushed back against the wall. The policeman was gone from the door. Georgette was sitting at one of the tables with her hat off and a glass of beer in front of her. She looked up when I came in.

"Well," she said. "The fiancé returns."

"Hello," I said. I sat down. "Did you get my envelope?"

"What envelope?"

I called the patronne. She came from behind the zinc bar wiping her hands.

"Monsieur left an envelope?" she said. "Yes." She went behind the bar and brought it out of a drawer. It was sealed and the fifty-franc note was still inside. "Mademoiselle went out with no one, so I kept it."

"Good," I said. I took the envelope and opened it and put the note on the table in front of Georgette. "That's for you."

"For me?" she said. "What for?"

"For dinner. For the evening."

"I thought you were gone with the English lady."

"I was."

"She is very beautiful," Georgette said. "And chic. You like her better than me."

"Don't be a fool."

"I am not a fool. I know. It's all right." She picked up the note and put it in her bag. "You are a good type," she said. "You are serious."

"Did you dance?"

"Yes. I danced with all of them. They are funny. They bought me drinks. Then they went away."

"To Montmartre."

"Yes. To Montmartre. The tall blond one wanted me to go. But I stayed. I was tired."

The daughter brought me a beer without being asked. The proprietor was sitting on his high stool smoking a cigarette. The bells were still tied around his ankle.

"You did well to stay," I said.

"I am tired of dancing," Georgette said. "I dance too much for money. Now I dance for nothing and I am tired."

We drank the beer. The room was cool now and the wind came in from the street. From the next bal we could hear the music starting.

"You are sad?" Georgette said.

"No."

"You look sad."

"I'm sleepy."

She touched my sleeve. "You are a good man. You take me to dinner and you come back. Most men go away."

"It's nothing."

"It is something to me." She finished her beer. "Now I go home. I live near here."

"Shall I get you a taxi?"

"No. I walk. It is close." She put on her hat and stood up. "Good night, Jacob."

"Good night."

She went out the door and I watched her go up the steep street toward the Pantheon. The daughter began to stack the glasses. I finished my beer and paid and said good night to the patronne and the proprietor and walked out.

I took a taxi from the corner by the Pantheon and told the driver to go to Zelli's. The streets were empty and the taxi went fast down the Boulevard Saint-Michel and across the river and up through the dark streets to Montmartre. The lights were still on at Zelli's and I could hear the jazz from the street. Inside it was crowded and hot. Lett and the tall blond youth were at a table with two girls I had never seen. Brett was not there.

"She was here," Lett said. "She went out with Stanley Keppel."

"When?"

"Half an hour ago. He took her to eat soup. He heard about the soup."

"Did they say where?"

"Les Halles, I think. He has a motor-car."

I stood by the table a minute. The music was loud and every one was dancing.

"Will you have a drink?" Lett asked.

"No," I said. "I have to go."

I went out and got into the taxi that was still waiting. We drove back down the hill and across Paris to Les Halles. The sky was beginning to get light over the roofs on the right. Brett was sitting at the same table where I had left her, with a man in a dinner jacket I had never seen. There was a big black motor-car with a chauffeur standing at the curb.

"Hello, darling," Brett said. "This is Stanley Keppel."

"How are you?" Keppel said. He was heavy and red-faced and cheerful. "Have a drink."

"No thanks," I said. "I have to go."

"Don't go," Brett said.

"I have work in the morning."

Keppel laughed. "Work in the morning. That's good. I like that."

Brett stood up. "I'll drive you home," she said to me.

"You stay here," I said.

"No. I'm going." She said good night to Keppel and told the chauffeur to wait. We walked out to the street where my taxi was still waiting. The sky was pale gray and the carts were going away empty. The smell of vegetables and wet pavement was in the air.

"Send him away," Brett said, meaning my taxi. "We'll take Stanley's car."

"I have my taxi."

"Please send him away."

I paid my taxi and he drove off. We got into the back of the big car. The chauffeur stood by the door.

"Where to, my lady?" he said.

"Drive around," Brett said. "Drive up by the river."

The car started smoothly and went through the empty streets toward the Seine. Brett sat in the corner with her hat in her lap. I sat at the other side and looked out at the market halls going by.

"I'm sorry, Jake," Brett said. "I'm so sorry."

"It's all right."

"No. Don't say that. I hate that."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Say you hate me."

"I don't hate you."

"You ought to."

We drove along the Quai de la Mégisserie. The river was gray and the light was coming up behind Notre-Dame. The houses were still dark. A barge was going downstream with its lights still on.

"Stop here," Brett said to the chauffeur. She touched my arm. "Don't come. I'll go on alone."

"All right."

"You aren't angry?"

"No."

She looked at me. The chauffeur opened the door and stood waiting. The dawn was white on the river and the bridges were sharp against the sky.

"Good night, Jake," she said.

"Good night."

She got in and pulled the rug over her knees and the chauffeur shut the door. I told him the address she gave and he nodded. The car moved away along the quay and I stood and watched it go. Then I turned and started to walk home along the river.

The dawn was coming fast now and the water was light. The trees on the Quai were black against the sky and the streets were empty. A man was washing the pavement in front of a café. I walked with my hands in my pockets and the wind was cool off the river. I was alone and the stones were wet under my feet.