The Chapters

Madame Ratignolle did not talk of her cramp for long. Before they had passed the first of the vegetable gardens she had let the subject drop, as she let most subjects drop, without ceremony and without regret, and was asking Robert why he had troubled himself to hunt the two women out when he might have gone in bathing with the Farival twins.

“I was not hunting for you,” he said. “The children were hunting for their mothers. I was merely the animal that carried them.”

“You were hunting for Mrs. Pontellier,” said Madame Ratignolle placidly.

He did not deny it. He walked a little way in silence, kicking at the tufts of camomile that grew in the path, and then he said, as though he were finishing a sentence which he had begun a long while before, and to himself:

“She is beginning to wake up. I have watched it all summer. She has been asleep her whole life, like the rest of them, and now she is beginning to wake up, and I do not think there is anybody here who knows it but me.”

Madame Ratignolle turned her face toward him under the gauze veil. She was a woman of the most transparent honesty, and her first impulse was to laugh, which she did.

“You talk like a book, *mon ami*. She is beginning to be sunburned; that is all I have noticed.”

“Well,” said Robert, laughing too, but not so heartily, and he shifted the little girl to his other arm.

It was very warm on the sandy path. They said nothing more about it, and at the house Madame Ratignolle thanked him and complained again of the stiffness in her joints, and went in to the children.

The telegram was brought over from the Bayou Brulow landing a little before noon. Edna was in the tent with the children when the boy came, and she read it there, standing, with the sand blowing against her ankles and the little Pontelliers hanging upon her skirts. Mr. Pontellier would not come out on Saturday. Business detained him; he would try for the following week; he sent his love to the boys.

She read it twice, and was aware of nothing at all except a curious slackening, as though someone had untied a string somewhere and left an end of it hanging loose.

“Is it from father?” asked the older boy.

“Yes,” said Edna. “He is not coming.”

“Will he send us anything?” The child was thinking of the box of *friandises*, of which the memory was still green.

“I dare say,” said Edna, and folded the yellow paper into a small square and put it into her pocket, where it stayed all day.

At luncheon Madame Lebrun heard of it and was full of sympathy, and Monsieur Farival said that the men of New Orleans had no more sense than to kill themselves in July for the sake of stocks, and the lady in black, who sat at the end of the table, said nothing at all, but bent her head over her plate. Edna received the sympathy with a proper face. She was ashamed to find that she had none of the emotion which was expected of her, and she was more ashamed still, later, in her room, when she caught herself humming a little as she took off her collar.

After the early dinner the island went to sleep. The heat lay white upon the sand. Madame Ratignolle had been carried off by her cramp to lie down; the children were with their nurse; Robert had gone in the *lugger* with Beaudelet to see about a hamper of shrimp, and there was no one in the world who wanted anything of Edna Pontellier for three hours.

She went down to the beach alone.

All that summer the men and women had been trying to teach her to swim. They had gone about it as they went about everything, with a great deal of laughter, holding her, letting her go, catching her again, so that the sea had come to be for her a thing full of hands, and full of a childish, ungovernable fear of being left in it. That afternoon there were no hands. There was nobody in the water at all. The water was the color of the sky and quite flat, moving in long slow shoulders that broke lazily and ran up the beach and slid back.

She waded out. She had no thought whatever of swimming; she had, in truth, no thought of anything, unless it was of the field in Kentucky, and the grass higher than her waist, and the sunbonnet that shut out everything but the green ahead. She went on until the water stood at her breast, and then, because it seemed to her ridiculous to be afraid of a thing that was holding her up so easily, she gave a little spring from the bottom and struck out.

She did not sink. That was the whole of it. She made four or five strokes, feeling the water part before her hands with a soft, unresisting sound, feeling herself carried, and then her foot found the sand again and she stood up, panting, with her hair streaming and the salt in her mouth.

There was no one to tell. She turned her face out to where the lateen sails were and laughed aloud, and then looked quickly along the beach to see whether anybody had heard her; but there was only the empty line of the bath-houses, and the tent hanging slack, and a gull walking at the edge of the froth. She would not have told anybody for a great deal. It was hers; it was the first thing in a long while that had belonged to nobody but herself, and she felt for it a jealousy that surprised her, and that she did not examine.

She went up the beach and dressed, and it was as she came out upon the gallery of the bath-house, wringing the water out of her hair, that she found the lady in black sitting there in the shade with her beads in her lap.

The lady in black had been at Grand Isle as long as anyone could remember, and had never, so far as Edna knew, addressed a word to her. She lifted her eyes now, which were black and perfectly quiet, and said:

“You have been in the water alone.”

Edna felt the blood come into her face like a child caught out.

“Only a little way,” she said. “Only where I could stand.”

“It is not good to be in the water alone,” said the lady in black. “The current runs out beyond the second bar and it does not tell you when it takes you.” She let the beads slip through her fingers, one and then another. “When I was a girl I went in alone, at Chênière, and I thought I could not be drowned because I did not wish to be. It is not a thing one settles by wishing.”

“I shall be careful,” said Edna.

The lady in black looked at her a moment longer, and something that was not quite a smile passed over her face and was gone. “You are like all of them,” she said. “Go and drink something hot; the sun is going.” And she bent her head again over the beads, and Edna understood that she had been dismissed, and went away up the sandy path feeling absurdly young.

Toward evening she went over to the Ratignolle cottage, where Adèle sat with her needlework and the baby asleep across her knees, and they talked of the telegram, and of Janet's engagement, and of a pattern for a small blouse. And it was there, quite suddenly, in the middle of the blouse, that Adèle laid down her work and said:

“Do you know what Robert said of you this morning, coming up from the beach?”

“No,” said Edna.

“He said that you were beginning to wake up. That you had been asleep all your life, like the rest of us—that was his word, the rest of us—and that you were waking, and that nobody knew it but himself.” Adèle laughed comfortably and took up the blouse again. “There is a boy for you. He reads too many novels in that office of his. I told him you were beginning to be sunburned.”

Edna laughed also, and said that Robert was very foolish, and asked whether the sleeves were to be gathered or plain; and a little afterward she said that the children must be got to bed, and went home.

She put them to bed herself. They were sandy and cross and wanted the box that their father had not sent, and she was patient with them beyond her custom, and sat by them until they slept, the older one with his fist shut against his cheek.

Then she went out and sat on the gallery.

The night was warm and enormously still. Someone was playing at the house, very far off, and there was the other sound underneath everything, which one ceased to hear at Grand Isle and then heard again all at once, the sound of the sea, unresting and without hurry. The telegram was still in her pocket; she had forgotten it. She sat with her hands lying open in her lap.

*She is beginning to wake up.* She turned it over and over, as one turns a strange coin, looking for the head of it. It seemed to her both impertinent and true, and she did not know which of the two things offended her; and it seemed to her, too, that Robert had said it to Adèle, and Adèle had said it to her, and that in this way a thing had been carried a long distance around and put into her hand which she had been holding all the time herself, that afternoon, in the water, alone.

It was still raining when she awakened. The train had stopped at a station and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm.

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

Mary stood up and tried to keep her eyes open while Mrs. Medlock collected her parcels. The little girl did not offer to help her, because in India native servants always picked up or carried things and it seemed quite proper that other people should wait on one.

The station was a small one and nobody but themselves seemed to be getting out of the train. The station-master spoke to Mrs. Medlock in a rough, good-natured way, pronouncing his words in a queer broad fashion which Mary found out afterward was Yorkshire.

"I see tha's got back," he said. "An' tha's browt th' young 'un with thee."

"Aye, that's her," answered Mrs. Medlock, speaking with a Yorkshire accent herself and jerking her head over her shoulder toward Mary. "How's thy Missus?"

"Well enough. Th' carriage is waitin' outside for thee."

A brougham stood on the road before the little outside platform. Mary saw that it was a smart carriage and that it was a smart footman who helped her in. His long waterproof coat and the waterproof covering of his hat were shining and dripping with rain as everything was, the burly station-master included. But it was not the footman she looked at when she came out under the lamp. There was a gentleman standing a little apart from the carriage, with his back half turned, and when he moved to face them Mary saw that his shoulders were high and one of them was higher than the other, and that his head was set low between them.

"My word!" said Mrs. Medlock under her breath, and Mary heard her draw in her breath sharply, as if she had not expected him and was not pleased.

He came forward two steps and no more. He was a tall man with black hair streaked with white and he had a strange, dark face which looked as if it were made of something that had been worn thin. He looked at Mary from her black crêpe hat to her small black-gloved hands. He looked at her a long moment—longer than any one had ever looked at her, she thought—and she stared back at him in her stiff, unresponsive way, because she did not know what else to do.

"So this is the child," he said.

His voice was low and it sounded as if he were tired of speaking.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock.

"Get in out of the rain," he said. And that was all. He turned and got into the carriage himself and sat in the far corner with his hat drawn down, and Mrs. Medlock made a little sound of astonishment in her throat and pushed Mary in before her.

Mary sat in her own corner, with the wet leather smell of the carriage all about her and the rain running down the glass, and she thought that this was her uncle and that he had said seven words to her and had not asked her one single question, not even whether she had been ill on the ship or whether she was hungry. She was not hurt by it, for nobody had ever asked her such things and she did not know that people did; but she was very curious. She stole one look at him. He was sitting with his eyes shut as if he did not intend to see anything at all, and there was something in his still, dark face which made her feel that if she spoke he would not hear her. So she did not speak. Nobody spoke. The horses went splashing off through the wet, and Mary sat and looked out of the window and watched the lights of the little grey stone cottages go by until they had left the village behind and there was nothing whatever to look at but darkness and rain.

"Are we near the moor?" she said at last to Mrs. Medlock, because the silence had begun to be more than she could bear.

"We're on it," said Mrs. Medlock shortly, and glanced at the corner where Mr. Craven sat, and said no more.

They drove a long time. The road climbed and went down and climbed again, and the rain thinned and stopped, and the wind began instead. Mary could hear it going by outside like something running past the carriage and never getting tired. Then, quite suddenly, the horses stopped with a jerk and there was a shout from the driver's box.

Mrs. Medlock let down the window with a rattle and put her head out.

"What's to do, John?"

"There's sheep i' th' road, ma'am," the coachman called back. "Th' wall's down yonder an' they're all over. We mun wait till they're shifted."

The carriage door on Mary's side had a handle, and Mary, who had been sitting still for so many hours that her legs ached, and who was besides possessed by an obstinate wish to be out of that silent corner where her uncle sat, turned the handle and got out into the road before any one could tell her not to.

"Come back this minute!" said Mrs. Medlock. "Whatever——"

But Mary had already put both feet on the wet grass at the road's edge, and for a moment nobody came after her.

She had never in her life been in such a place, and she stood quite still because of it. There was no house, no light, no tree—nothing but the great dark, going away and away on every side of her farther than she could think, and the sky over it low and full of hurrying clouds with a little wet moon showing and hiding among them. The air smelled of something clean and cold and bitter which she did not know the name of and which was heather and wet earth and moor water. And all round her, low down and everywhere at once, was the sound of the wind going through something growing—a great soft rushing noise, coming and dying away and coming again, like a huge creature breathing. The sheep were grey blurs in the road, and a dog ran round them, and a man called to it in a voice which the wind carried off.

Mary stood in the middle of it for perhaps a minute. She did not think it was beautiful; she thought it was the most dreadful place she had ever seen, and she wanted to be inside the carriage again; and yet, oddly enough, she did not move until Mrs. Medlock's hand came out of the door and took hold of her arm.

"Get in with thee," said Mrs. Medlock, forgetting her fine speech in her annoyance. "Standing out on th' moor in th' night like a lost lamb! I never saw such a child."

Mary got in. Her uncle had not opened his eyes at all, or if he had she did not see him do it. The sheep were driven through a gap in the tumbled wall, the carriage went on, and no one said anything more until at last they turned in between two great gate posts, and drove a long way up an avenue where the trees almost met overhead, and came out into a wide space and stopped before an immensely long, low-built house which seemed to straggle round a stone court.

There were so few lighted windows that Mary had at first thought all the windows were dark. The door was thick and made of oddly shaped panels of oak studded with big iron nails, and it opened into a huge hall which was so dimly lighted that the faces in the portraits on the walls and the figures in the suits of armor made Mary feel that she did not want to look at them.

Mr. Craven had got out of the carriage first. He stood on the stone floor of the hall while an elderly man-servant took his coat from him, and he looked once at Mary, standing small and yellow-faced in her black clothes with her boots wet from the moor.

"Take her to her room," he said to Mrs. Medlock. "I don't want to see her. I am going to London in the morning."

Then he went away through a door at the far end of the hall and it shut behind him, and that was the whole of Mary's first meeting with her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven.

Mrs. Medlock stood a second staring after him with her lips pressed together.

"Well," she said. "You're to have a room and you're to keep to it, and that's plain enough for anybody."

She took Mary up a broad staircase and down a corridor and up a few steps and through another corridor and another, until doors were opened and shut behind them and Mary had lost all idea of which way they had come. At last a door was opened into a room where there was a fire and a supper laid on a table.

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

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

She was sitting on the hearth-rug pulling off her wet gloves when there was a knock and the door opened and a young man-servant came in carrying a tray with a covered dish upon it. He was a big, red-cheeked young fellow in a striped waistcoat, and he did not seem to be at all in awe of her; in fact he grinned at her broadly as he set the dish down.

"Tha'll be clemmed after that ride," he said. "Cook's sent thee a bit o' hot stuff. Eh! but tha's a little 'un. Tha mun get some flesh on thee up here. Th' moor wind'll fair blow thee away."

Mary stared at him with her disagreeable little face.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said.

"What's that?" said the young man, stopping with the cover in his hand.

"I don't know what you are saying," repeated Mary. "You don't speak English. I can't understand a word of it. What is clemmed?"

The young man-servant laughed out loud, as if she had said something very entertaining, which offended her extremely.

"That's Yorkshire, that is," he said. "Clemmed's hungry. Tha'lt hear worse than that afore tha's done. Us all talks it here—all but Mrs. Medlock when she's got her London bonnet on."

"Then somebody had better talk something else to me," said Mary coldly, "because I don't intend to learn it."

"Nay, tha'lt learn it fast enough," said the young man cheerfully, quite unabashed, and he went out and shut the door.

Mary ate her supper because she was hungry, though she thought the food strange. Afterward a stout housemaid whose name she did not ask undressed her and put her into a big bed with four posts, and the fire had burned low and the candle stood on the table, and Mary lay and looked at the tapestry on the wall opposite, which had a forest worked upon it with people in it, and thought of the moor lying black outside all round the house.

It was then that she heard it.

At first she was not sure that it was anything at all. It was a very small far-away sound, and it came and went, and it was not the wind on the window, because she knew that noise by now. It seemed to come from somewhere along the corridors—thin, and rising and falling, and going on and on, as if it were not going to stop.

Mary sat up in bed. She was not a nervous child, but she felt her heart beating quickly.

The door opened and Mrs. Medlock came in with a candle, looking cross at being still on her feet at that hour.

"Are you awake?" she said. "You should be asleep."

"There is somebody making a noise," said Mary. "Listen. Do you hear it?"

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still with the candle in her hand, and her face, in the light of it, seemed to Mary to change—only a little, only for a second.

"That!" she said. "That's th' wind. It's the wind in the corridors. This is a lonesome house on the edge of a moor, and there's a hundred rooms in it with the windows shuttered, and the wind gets into them and goes crying about in the passages. You'll hear it every night of your life while you're here, and you may as well get used to it."

"It doesn't sound like the wind," said Mary.

"It sounds like whatever I say it sounds like," said Mrs. Medlock briskly, and she pulled the door to and shut it fast, and Mary heard her go away down the corridor.

The sound had stopped, and the room was quite dark now, because the fire had sunk to a red glow. Mary lay down again and put her cheek on the pillow. She thought about the station and the seven words her uncle had said, and about the great dark thing breathing on the moor, and about the young man who had laughed at her; and then she thought about the sound, and about the way Mrs. Medlock's face had looked in the candle-light while she was saying that it was the wind.

She was quite sure that it was not the wind at all. And lying there with her eyes wide open in the blackness, obstinate little Mistress Mary made up her mind that she would find out for herself what it was.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*30 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Three proposals! And I am to be told of two of them at length and of the third not at all, which is exactly as it should be, for the third is the only one that is your own and not to be shared even with me. I read your letter twice at breakfast and once again in the little interval between the third form and the fourth, and I am afraid the third form got the better of me in consequence. I am so glad, dear, that I do not know how to write it. I shall say it all to you when we meet.

“And now I must be a little serious, for I have had a letter which has troubled me, and I want to write it out to somebody who will not laugh at me. It came this morning, from abroad, and it is not from Jonathan. Here it is, copied word for word, for I have read it so often that I know it, and I want you to read it as I did and tell me if I am foolish:--

“‘*Hôtel Royale, Klausenburgh*,

“‘*20 May*.

“‘*Honoured Miss*,--

“‘You will pardon that a stranger writes to you, but I am charged so to do, and I do it with pleasure. There has lodged in this house an English gentleman, Mr. Jonathan Harker, of Exeter, who is travelling in the interests of his house upon business with a nobleman of this country. He has departed from us on the 15th day of this month, going onward into the mountains, and before he went he did request me, if any letters should come for him, to keep them safely and to write to Miss Wilhelmina Murray, at the address which he gave, that she may not be uneasy.

“‘He bids me say that the affairs of his client are of a magnitude which he had not looked for, and that they will detain him some weeks longer than he had thought--it may be until the end of August. He is well, and in good spirits, and he ate a good dinner. He desires me to say that the posts in that district are very bad, and that if she does not hear it is the fault of the post and not of him, and that she is not to fret herself.

“‘I have the honour, honoured Miss, to be your obedient servant,

“‘ANTON KOHL,

“‘*Proprietor*.

“‘P.S.--The gentleman left with me a small portmanteau, which I hold to his order. It contains nothing of value, but he was particular that I should say it is here.’

“There, Lucy. Now what am I to make of it? Herr Kohl is evidently a good, kind man, and it was thoughtful of Jonathan to think of me before starting, and to send word by another when he had not the time to write himself. But, my dear, I cannot get it out of my head that Jonathan *has* the time. He has never in his life been too busy for a line to me; when he was working eighteen hours a day at Mr. Hawkins’s office before his examination, he wrote to me every second day upon the backs of blue draft-paper, and told me he had done it standing. And why until the end of August, when he told me a week? And why a portmanteau left behind? Jonathan is the neatest and the most careful of men. He would no more part with his belongings and go up into the mountains with nothing than he would go into court without his papers.

“I dare say I am making mountains myself, and out of nothing at all. It is the way of women who have nothing to do but their duty, and I have plenty of that just now, with the examinations coming on. I have written to Mr. Hawkins to ask if he has heard, and I shall not fret till I have his answer. Only, dear, I do not like a strange hand writing to me about Jonathan. It is like hearing news of one’s own house from a passer-by in the road.

“I have been practising my shorthand for an hour every night, and my speed is much improved. When Jonathan comes back with a whole journal of travels for me to copy out, I shall be equal to him. That is what I keep saying to myself.

“Write to me soon, and tell me when you go away for the summer, and whether Mr. Holmwood--I shall have to learn to say Arthur--is to come too. Bless you, my dear, and I am so happy for you that it makes my own small anxiety seem smaller.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Renfield again, and Renfield with a difference. I set down the facts while they are fresh, for I begin to suspect that my own memory of what he says is not to be trusted; I find myself smoothing his sentences into sense when I recall them afterwards, and the interest of the case lies precisely in the places where they do not make sense.

He has now, by my count, five spiders, and has ceased to feed the flies to them for the moment, being occupied with a new device: he has taken to catching the flies with a lump of sugar which he begs from the attendant, and to keeping them in an old pill-box, and he counted them over to me this morning as a miser counts. When I asked him what he wanted with so many he said, with that queer air of a man explaining the obvious to a child: “Life, sir. There is life in them, and it all tells up.” I have his phrase exactly. *Mem.*, a zoöphagous--life-eating--maniac? The thing is grotesque, but I know of no name for it, and the man is perfectly logical within his own postulate; his arithmetic is sound, it is only his axiom which is mad.

Then came the thing which I have been thinking of all day. He put his box down on the sill, and looked at me sideways--he has a trick of not looking straight at me when he means to be attended to--and said, in the flat, civil voice which he keeps for the world outside his own affairs:

“Is Miss Westenra strong, sir? Is she a strong young lady?”

I hope I did not show what I felt. I said something--I do not remember what; I think I asked him what he knew of any lady of that name. He was not to be drawn. He rubbed his hands together and said that he supposed she would be, being young, and that strength was a thing that took a great while to gather and no time at all to spend, and then he went back to his flies and would say nothing more to me for half an hour, though I stayed. When I was going he said, without turning round: “I hope no harm will come to her, sir. You may tell her that from me.”

Now, how does the man come by the name? I have taken pains to be sure that I have never spoken it in the house--and being sure of that is exactly what I cannot be. It is not impossible that I have said it aloud to myself; a man alone in a room with a phonograph acquires habits of speech he does not suspect, and my cylinders of the 25th are not fit for any ear but mine. Hardy sits with him for two hours in the afternoon and reads him the newspaper, and there is more of Berkeley Square in the newspapers than I care to think of; Mr. Holmwood’s father is a great man, and his son’s name is not a private possession. Or the patient may have heard a word between the attendants; the servants of a house know its master’s business before he knows it himself.

That is three natural explanations, and I have written them all down, and the fact remains that I did not like it. There is my honesty for the cylinder, since it is to have everything. The truth is that the sound of that name in that room affected me as a piece of one’s own life carried off by a stranger. I have no rights in it whatever, and no man knows better than I that I have none, and I stood in the passage afterwards for a full minute before I could go on with my rounds.

Work is the cure. I said so two days ago and I say it again, and I shall test my hypothesis about the spiders by a series of observations, which I shall record.

Later.--Quincey’s dinner was last night, and did me more good than a week of my own reasoning. Of that I shall say nothing here; Art will have told it better, and I am too much of a coward to hear my own voice telling it.

*Letter, Arthur Holmwood to Lucy Westenra.*

“*27 May.*

“My own dearest,--

“You told me that I was to write and tell you everything, and that I was not to leave out the parts I thought you would not care about, because those are the parts you care about most. So here is Quincey’s dinner, and you shall judge whether I have obeyed.

“He had it in his rooms, which are the strangest rooms in London: two Mexican saddles, a bear-skin with the head still on it and a very bad temper in the head, a rifle over the chimney-piece which he says has done more for him than his relations, and, on the table, plate that would not have disgraced my father’s house, because Quincey does that sort of thing properly or not at all. He gave us a dinner such as I have not eaten since the *Korea*, and he waited on us himself half the time and sent his man away, so that we could talk.

“Dearest, this is the thing I want to tell you, and I hardly know how to do it without seeming to boast of my own happiness at another man’s cost. Jack Seward came in at eight, and I knew the moment I saw his face; and I believe Quincey knew, and I know that they both knew about me. And not one word was said that could have made any one of the three of us wince. Quincey filled the glasses and stood up and said, ‘Boys, we’ve drunk healths in some queer places, and here’s one that beats them all. Here’s to the happiest man in the world, and God bless the lady that made him so’; and Jack stood up and drank it, and looked me straight in the face while he did it--you know his way of looking--and said, ‘With all my heart, Art.’ And then he sat down and told us about a patient of his, a man who collects flies, and made us laugh till Quincey had to put down his glass.

“I have known those two in places where a man’s quality comes out whether he wills it or no; I have seen Quincey carry Jack half a day’s march with a bad arm of his own; and I never thought so well of them as I did last night in a warm room in Jermyn Street, when they had every excuse to be less than they are. When Quincey was seeing me down the stairs he said, ‘Art, if ever you want anything done that you can’t do yourself, or that you’d rather not ask a Christian to do, you know my address.’ It was said in fun. I do not think it was meant in fun.

“So there is your dinner, and you are not to be sorry for anybody, for they would hate it, and I should hate it for them. But you may be glad, as I am, that the men who wanted what I have got are the sort of men they are.

“I shall be with you on Thursday, if your mother will have me, and I want to speak to her about the autumn. Till then, and always,

“Your own

“ARTHUR.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*2 June*.

“My dearest Mina,--

“You are not foolish, and you are not to say so of yourself again. If a strange innkeeper wrote to me about Arthur, and Arthur said nothing, I should be in a fever by luncheon and in a decline by tea, and I should not have written you so sensible a letter as yours. So do not pretend to me.

“All the same, dear, do think of the sensible side of it, for that is generally the true one. Foreign business is slow--mamma’s man of affairs was three months in Vienna over nothing at all but some papers that had to be signed by a person who was always away--and a nobleman with an estate to sell must be the worst of all clients, because he has nothing to do himself and cannot believe that anybody else has. As for the portmanteau, my dear, if a man is going up into the mountains he takes what he wants and leaves the rest, and I dare say Jonathan was proud of himself for being so practical and means to tell you about it at length.

“Mr. Hawkins will know. Men of business always know, and they never tell one until one has stopped asking. Write to me the day you hear.

“I have your letter about the shorthand, and I have decided that when we are all married I shall be the only useless woman in England, which is a distinction of a kind.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Arthur dined with Mr. Morris and Dr. Seward, and has written me an account of it which has made me cry twice, and I am not going to send it to you, because it is mine.”

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

“*4 June*.

“Letter from Klausenburgh a fabrication. Hotel of that name closed since March. Harker never lodged there. Come to me at once.”

The First National Bank was a brown stone box on Broadway, four blocks from the Herald. I got there at half-past eleven and asked a floorwalker in a cutaway who took care of Donald Willsson's account. He passed me along to a teller's cage at the end of the line, and the teller passed me along to a young man at a flat-topped desk behind the railing.

His name-plate said Robert Albury. He was a blond youngster of twenty-five, with a pink face, a chin that hadn't much work to do, and clear eyes that looked straight at you while he decided what you were worth. He got up when I gave him my card and shook hands as if he meant it.

"The Continental Detective Agency," he read off the card. "Then it's about Mr. Willsson."

"It's about a check he wrote yesterday afternoon. Five thousand dollars."

Some of the pink went out of his face and came back again. He put the card down on the blotter and squared it with the edge.

"You'll understand I can't discuss a customer's account with everybody who walks in off the street."

"I'm not everybody," I said. "Your customer sent to San Francisco for me and paid the agency's retainer in advance. He had a date with me at ten last night. He kept a different one, in Hurricane Street. If you want to be careful about it, telephone the chief of police and tell him what I've asked you, and let him come down and ask you the same thing. It'll be in the papers tomorrow either way. I'd rather have it now."

He thought that over, looking at me the whole time with the clear eyes.

"There isn't a great deal to be careful about," he said finally. "I can tell you this much without going out on any limb, because you can find it out from the bank examiner or from Mr. Willsson's estate in a week anyhow. No check of that size has come through against his account."

"Presented for payment?"

"Not presented, not cleared, not certified. I know, because I looked. I looked yesterday afternoon and I looked again this morning after I read the paper."

"Why yesterday afternoon?"

He unsquared the card and squared it again.

"Because he came in and asked me to look at his balance. A little before three. He stood where you're standing. He had his check book in his hand and it was open, and he'd already written the check—I could see the ink was wet where he was holding it against his thumb. He asked me what he had. I told him a little over eleven thousand in the checking account. He said, 'That's ample,' and thanked me and went out."

"He didn't cash it here?"

"No. He didn't offer it. He didn't ask for certification, which I thought was odd, because if a man is going to hand over five thousand dollars to somebody who doesn't know him he generally likes the bank's name on it. I offered to certify it for him. He said no, that wouldn't be necessary."

"See the name on it?"

"No. He held it against his coat. I wasn't trying to read it."

"How long would it take a check like that to get back here, if it was deposited somewhere in town this morning?"

"If it was deposited in this bank, an hour. If it went into any other bank in Personville, it would clear through today. If it was mailed out of the city, two or three days. But nothing's come in."

"Anybody ask about it? Anybody in to see if his account was good?"

"Not to me." He hesitated, and then said, "There's no reason you shouldn't know that a good many people telephoned this morning about his affairs. Reporters, mostly, and one or two who wouldn't give names. Nobody asked about a check."

"He have a safe deposit box here?"

"Yes. It hasn't been opened since the tenth of last month."

"Much in his account before yesterday?"

"He hadn't been in this country long enough to build up much. His father's arrangements were separate. Eleven thousand and some odd dollars was most of what he had that wasn't tied up."

So Donald Willsson had gone out of the Herald office twenty minutes after a telephone call from a woman, with five thousand dollars of the eleven thousand he owned written out on a piece of paper, had walked four blocks to make sure the piece of paper was good, had refused to let the bank put its name behind it, and had gone back to work. Seven hours later he was dead in Hurricane Street with four bullets in him, and the piece of paper was somewhere in Personville, not being spent.

I thanked young Albury. He came out through the gate in the railing with me and walked as far as the door, and there he stood turning his hat over.

"He was a decent man," he said, not looking at me. "I don't suppose that's evidence."

"It's more than I've been given by anybody else today," I said.

I ate lunch, spent an hour and a half in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street looking at a narrow alley, a dark street, four holes in a house front where two bullets and a couple of amateur souvenir hunters had been at work, and got nothing out of any of it that the newspaper hadn't already given me. Nobody in the block wanted to talk to a stranger. One woman shut a door in my face while I was still holding my hat in the air.

It was after six when I got back to the Great Western. The clerk handed me my key and with it a folded sheet of the hotel's own paper.

"A boy left it for you, sir. About four o'clock."

"What boy?"

"Just a boy. Not one of ours."

The note was written in pencil in a round hand that had never learned anything but printing:

WHISPER SAYS YOU ARE A LONG WAY FROM HOME AND THE TRAINS RUN BOTH WAYS.

That was all of it. No date, no signature, nothing on the other side. I asked the clerk if the boy had said anything. The clerk said the boy had said, "For the fat man in 537," and had gone out again, and that he had been about fourteen and had a bad eye. I put the note in my pocket, went up to my room, washed, and was rubbing my face with a towel when the telephone rang.

The clerk said Mrs. Willsson was downstairs and would like to see me.

I said I'd come down, and the clerk said she preferred not to sit in the lobby.

I said all right, and went on drying my face, and in three minutes there was a knock.

She had on black today, a black hat with a brim that shaded her eyes, black gloves, and black shoes. I looked at the shoes. She saw me look at them, and her mouth got thin. She came in past me and stood in the middle of the room until I moved the one comfortable chair around for her.

"You went to my husband's father this morning," she said. She kept the accent under a tight rein, but it got away from her here and there. "You told him things about me."

"I told him what happened here last night, and what I saw."

"You told him I killed my husband."

"No. He told me that. Twice. He'd have told it to a lamp post."

She pulled off one glove, finger by finger, and looked at her hand.

"You are a detective. My husband hired you. What did he hire you for?"

"He didn't live long enough to tell me."

"That is not true." She looked up quickly. "Men do not send to San Francisco and pay money and say nothing at all."

"He wrote the agency a letter saying he wanted a man sent, and the letter said nothing else. That's the whole of it. You can see the letter when it catches up with me, if you like. It won't tell you any more than I have."

She thought about that with her lower lip between her teeth, the way the Lewis girl had thought about a different thing that morning. Blondes were doing a lot of thinking at me that day.

"Then you know nothing," she said.

"I know you went out at twenty minutes past ten because somebody telephoned you, and came back at five minutes past eleven with something on your left slipper. I know your husband went out of his office yesterday afternoon and wrote a check for five thousand dollars, and I know that check hasn't been cashed. That's not nothing. It's not much."

The check did something to her. She had been holding herself very straight and she went on holding herself very straight, but she had to work at it.

"Five thousand dollars," she said.

"Who'd he owe it to?"

"He owed nothing. My husband owed nobody anything."

"Then who was he giving it to?"

"I do not know." She stood up. "I came here to tell you that I did not kill my husband, and to tell you to stop making his father say that I did. That is all. His father hates me. He hated me before he saw me. It is a thing that amuses him, to hate."

"Then help me. Where were you between twenty past ten and five past eleven?"

"I was driving."

"Where?"

"About. In the streets. Anywhere."

"Who telephoned you?"

"A voice. A man. He did not give a name."

"And said what?"

"That my husband was hurt, and where."

"So you went there. And found him. And you and a man were bending over him when the neighbors put their heads out of the windows, and then you both got away from there in a hurry. Who was the man?"

She had her glove back on now and she was pulling at the wrist of it.

"There was no man," she said. "I did not go there at all."

"Mrs. Willsson," I said, "you're a bad liar, and I'm not the one you have to lie to. There'll be a coroner's inquest, and there's a chief of police in this town who has plenty of reasons for wanting an easy answer to this killing and no reasons at all for being tender with you. A pretty foreign wife who came home at five past eleven with blood on her shoe will do him nicely. If you've got a story that isn't the one he's going to want, you'd better be telling it to somebody who'll listen while there's still time."

For a second I thought she was going to give me something. Her eyes came up and stayed on mine and got wet, and she made a little movement toward the chair as if she were going to sit down again and be sensible. Then whatever it was went out of her.

"You are like the old man," she said. "You have already decided. Good evening."

I opened the door for her. Going out she stopped and said, without turning her head:

"Was it money he wanted to buy with that check, or was it a person?"

Then she was gone down the hall, and I didn't get anything else out of her, that night or for a while afterward.

I sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes with the note in my hand, reading it again and not learning anything more from it than I had the first time. Whisper had gone into the dead man's house in the morning. In the afternoon Whisper had sent word to me that the trains ran both ways. He had done it without showing me his pretty dark profile, which was the part I liked least about it. A man who comes and tells you himself is generally a man who wants something. A man who sends word is a man who has already decided what he's going to do and is being polite about it.

At nine o'clock I went out to the telegraph office in the next block and put a wire on the counter for the Old Man in San Francisco. The clerk counted the words twice and looked at me with what he probably thought was no expression at all.

OUR CLIENT DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD LAST NIGHT TEN FORTY IN HURRICANE STREET HERE BEFORE KEEPING TEN OCLOCK APPOINTMENT WITH ME STOP FOUR BULLETS THIRTY TWO CALIBRE FROM ALLEY OPPOSITE NO WITNESSES STOP HE DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK YESTERDAY AFTERNOON PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NEITHER PRESENTED NOR CERTIFIED AND HAS NOT COME THROUGH FIRST NATIONAL STOP WIDOW WAS OUT OF HOUSE FROM TWENTY PAST TEN TO FIVE PAST ELEVEN AND CAME BACK MARKED STOP SHE CALLED ON ME TONIGHT AND TOLD ME NOTHING AT SOME LENGTH STOP HIS FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON WHO OWNS THIS TOWN WANTS HER HANGED AND WANTS ME OUT OF IT STOP LOCAL GAMBLER THALER KNOWN AS WHISPER VISITED WIDOW THIS MORNING AND SENT ME WORD THIS AFTERNOON THAT TRAINS RUN BOTH WAYS STOP JOB WE WERE HIRED FOR NEVER STATED BUT RETAINER PAID AND ESTATE WILL WANT VALUE STOP INTEND STAYING UNTIL ORDERED OFF WIRE INSTRUCTIONS GREAT WESTERN HOTEL PERSONVILLE

I paid for it, watched the clerk pin it on his hook, and walked back to the hotel through streets that smelled of the smelter. The night was thick and yellow overhead where the smoke lay under the hills.

Up in 537 I took off my coat and shoes, propped the pillows against the head of the bed, and smoked cigarettes in the dark with the window open. Below in the street a car would come along every few minutes, and once one of them slowed in front of the hotel and then went on again, and I didn't get up to look at it.

Five thousand dollars had gone out of that office at three o'clock in the afternoon in a dead man's pocket. Nobody had put it in a bank. Nobody had asked the bank if it was good. Nobody in this town had said one word about it to me except a young teller who thought Donald Willsson had been a decent man, and a French widow who had wanted to know whether it was meant to buy money or a person.

Somebody was holding a piece of paper worth five thousand dollars that they didn't dare cash and couldn't bring themselves to burn.

I put out my last cigarette and went to sleep on top of the covers with the light off and the door locked.

They came, accordingly; and they came on the same morning, which was more than either had intended, and more than Sir Walter had any pleasure in. Mr Shepherd had been summoned for eleven o’clock, and Lady Russell, who had promised only to walk over from the Lodge, had walked over rather earlier than she promised, in the hope of a quarter of an hour’s private conversation with Anne before the business began; but the morning was against her. Elizabeth was in the breakfast-room, and Sir Walter was there, and the papers were there; and there was nothing for it but to sit down among them, and be looked at as one who was expected to produce a remedy out of her reticule.

Lady Russell had, in fact, brought her remedy; not in her reticule, but in a small folded sheet of paper, which she had drawn up with a care and a pain of which nobody in that room would ever know any thing. She loved Kellynch Hall; she had a value for it which was not much short of Sir Walter’s own, though it rested upon better grounds; and she had passed a fortnight of very serious calculation before she could bring herself to set down in figures how much of its establishment must be surrendered. She had considered every claim upon Sir Walter—the claims of his rank, of his neighbourhood, of his own habits, of his daughters—and had made every allowance which a woman of principle and a woman of the world could unite in making. The scheme, when it was laid before him, was in truth a very moderate one, and she had every hope of it. It proposed the reduction of the household by a certain number of servants; the giving up of the second carriage and of two of the horses; the discontinuance of the annual journey to London for a term of three years; a strict retrenchment in the article of the table, and in the still greater article of the cellar; and some other particulars, which need not be enumerated, because Sir Walter did not permit her to enumerate them.

He heard the first three with a rising colour, and the fourth with a laugh which was not meant to be uncivil, and was only the more offensive for it.

“My dear Lady Russell,” said he, when she had done, “I am sure I am very much obliged to you. You have taken a great deal of trouble. But you must allow me to observe that you have been drawing up a plan for a gentleman of eight hundred a year, and not for Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall. Give up the second carriage! And how is Elizabeth to go to Crewkherne when I am at Taunton? Cut down the table! It would be known in the parish before the week was out. There is no such thing as a private economy in a country neighbourhood, ma’am; a man is watched at his own gate. And to be shut out of town for three years—to be told, at my time of life, that I must not shew myself in the only place where a man of any consequence is understood! No, no. I would sooner quit the house altogether than remain in it upon such terms as those. There is a limit beyond which retrenchment is not economy, but degradation; and I will not pass it.”

Lady Russell, who had been prepared for objection, but not for this, folded her paper again and said nothing. She had known Sir Walter for thirty years, and it had never yet answered to argue with him upon the subject of himself.

Mr Shepherd’s plan came next, and Mr Shepherd, being a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his opinion of his employer, was determined that the disagreeable part of the business should be Lady Russell’s and not his own, had made his very much shorter, and had wrapped it in a great deal more civility. He submitted, with the utmost deference, that a considerable sum must be raised, and raised soon; that the interest was accumulating; that the tradespeople of Crewkherne and of Taunton, however sensible of the honour of Sir Walter’s custom, were beginning to make applications of a nature which it was not agreeable to receive; and that in his humble judgment, no arrangement within the walls of Kellynch, however spirited, would meet the case. He would therefore beg leave to suggest that a part of the establishment might be broken up for a season; that Sir Walter and Miss Elliot might find it not disagreeable to pass some months in a smaller way, in some place where a smaller way was usual and unremarked; and that the Hall, in the mean while, might be——

Here Mr Shepherd, who had been getting on very smoothly, arrived at his difficulty, and paused; and Sir Walter, who had been getting angrier by the sentence, did not require him to go on.

“I understand you perfectly, Mr Shepherd. You would have me shut up my house and hide myself in a lodging, because I owe money to a wine merchant. You are a very good sort of man, and you understand a lease as well as any body in the county; but you do not understand what is due to a family of standing. It is not the fashion of the Elliots to run away. My father lived here, and his father before him, and neither of them was ever advised to lodgings. I am obliged to you, but I must be allowed to be the judge of my own dignity.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and observed that the interest, unhappily, was not to be silenced by a bow; and there followed a silence in which Elizabeth looked at the fire, and Lady Russell at Anne, and Anne, who had been sitting a little apart at the window, and who had been the only person present that morning who had listened to both plans with an equal wish that either of them might do, spoke.

It was so unusual an event, that even the manner of it was remarked. She did not colour, and she did not apologise; she only said, in her quiet way, that if the case were really so bad as Mr Shepherd had stated, she could not think either scheme went far enough.

“Since we must retrench,” said she, “I would rather we retrenched a great deal at once, than a little for a great while. Half measures will only make us uncomfortable without making us safe. I would have every debt paid, if it can be done, before the year is out; and to do it, I would give up the carriages altogether, and not merely the second; I would keep no more servants than are wanted for two ladies and a gentleman living quietly; I would have no company but our own neighbours, and no journeys at all, not to London nor to Taunton, until the whole is cleared. It would be a very great change, and I know how much it would cost my father. But it would be over. And there is nothing dishonourable in living within an income; there is a great deal that is dishonourable in the other thing.”

She said it without any expectation of being attended to; she had spoken chiefly because she could not bear to sit silent while her father was persuaded that a bottle less of claret was ruin. She was therefore as much astonished as any body in the room by what followed. Elizabeth turned round from the fire.

“Anne is right,” said she.

It was not that Elizabeth had been converted to justice; it was that she had been sitting for a quarter of an hour with two very disagreeable ideas contending in her mind—the idea of Lady Russell’s three years, and the idea of Mr Shepherd’s lodgings—and had perceived, with a quickness which did her understanding more credit than her heart, that of all forms of humiliation the shortest was the least. To be poor for one year at Kellynch, in her own drawing-room, with her own name upon her own gate, was a thing she found she could support; to be seen for three years going about the country in a hired chaise, or to be met with in some watering-place among people who did not know who she was, was not. “If it must be done,” she added, “let it be done handsomely, and let it be done quickly. I am sure I have no wish to be spending five years in creeping.”

Lady Russell, who had come prepared to be opposed by Elizabeth in every thing, and to be supported by Anne in nothing that would signify, looked from one sister to the other with a very serious pleasure, and said that she believed Miss Anne had more of her mother’s judgment in her than any of them; and Mr Shepherd said that the plan did the young ladies infinite credit. But Sir Walter said no such thing. He had heard his daughters propose that he should live like a private gentleman in his own house, and be seen by his own tenantry walking where he had used to drive; and it was some moments before he could command himself to answer at all.

“You are all excessively kind,” he said at last, “and I dare say it is very fine to talk of paying every body by Christmas; but I hope I may be permitted to remark that a baronet who goes on foot is a spectacle, and that I have no ambition to be one. Anne has always had an odd taste for whatever is plain. It is a great pity, but it is not to be argued with. I shall be in the shrubbery.”

He did not, however, go to the shrubbery; and Mr Shepherd, who saw that nothing was concluded, and knew that his own interest, as well as his employer’s, required that something should be, made one more attempt, and made it in the most guarded terms which the English language afforded him. He would only just hint—he threw it out as the merest possibility, to be considered at leisure, and rejected at once if it were disagreeable—that a house of the beauty and size of Kellynch, so complete in all its offices, and so unexceptionable in its situation, would be sought after by many a gentleman of large fortune who had no seat of his own; that such gentlemen were, at this season, very numerous, and very liberal in their terms; and that if Sir Walter should ever be inclined to consider of it, there would be no difficulty whatever in finding a most respectable tenant——

“A tenant!”

Sir Walter had risen from his chair.

“A tenant at Kellynch Hall! In my father’s house! Mr Shepherd, you have been my agent these twenty years, and I must suppose you meant no impertinence; but I desire that I may never hear that word again. I will not have it spoken in this room. Let a stranger into my hall, to sleep in my rooms, to walk in my grounds, to be called master of Kellynch by every labourer in the parish—and for money! I would rather the house stood empty and the roof fell in. I would rather sell my plate, my pictures, my horses—I would rather do any thing than that. The word is not to be mentioned again in my hearing, if you please, nor in Elizabeth’s. And now, if there is nothing further, I believe we have all done a great deal of business for one morning.”

Nothing further was said. Mr Shepherd gathered up his papers with the composure of a man who has been in the room before, and who has observed that what is impossible in July is frequently very natural in September; Lady Russell rose to take her leave, with her own paper still folded in her hand; and the debts of Sir Walter Elliot stood precisely where they had stood at breakfast, with the addition of the morning’s interest.

It was while Lady Russell was in the hall, and Anne with her, that the letters were brought in from Crewkherne; and among them was one for Anne, in Mary’s large, hurried hand.

Anne read it standing. Mary was very unwell; she had been very unwell ever since Tuesday; nobody at Uppercross had the least idea what she suffered, and Charles was gone out shooting and had said she looked very well, which was exactly like him. She could not be left alone; the children were very unmanageable; the Great House people were very kind, but the Miss Musgroves never came unless they were sent for, and then they came together and talked of nothing but their own concerns. She was sure she should be seriously ill if she were left much longer to herself, and she could not think it was too much to ask that one of her own family should be with her, since she had nobody. She hoped Anne would come directly; but of course, if Anne was wanted at Kellynch, or had any engagement, she would say no more about it, and would try to bear it as well as she could, though she must observe that she was always the last to be considered.

Lady Russell, hearing the substance of it, could not forbear an expression of impatience; but Anne only folded the letter.

Nothing more was said upon the subject that day. Sir Walter dined in a state of injured dignity, and talked of the poor figure Lady Russell’s scheme would have made in the county; Elizabeth agreed with him in every thing she had not herself proposed in the morning, and appeared to have forgotten that she had proposed any thing; and the evening closed as their evenings closed, with no measure taken, no sum named, and no day fixed for naming one.

When the candles were brought, Anne carried hers away early, and sat down alone. She thought of the morning without any bitterness; she had said what she believed to be right, and it had been heard, and it had come to nothing; that was all. Nothing would be settled at Kellynch this month, perhaps not this year, and she had no power to settle it. But at Uppercross there was somebody who wanted her, and wanted her for two months at least, and would say so every day; and to be wanted, even by Mary, and even in that manner, was not what Anne Elliot could afford to undervalue. She would go. It could be arranged for the beginning of the next week, and she would write in the morning to say so.

And so, with the whole question of her father’s debts as unsettled as it had been when Mr Shepherd first rode up to the door, Anne put out her candle, and went to bed to think of Uppercross.

The symptoms it described tallied so closely with what I had witnessed that I closed the book with a queer cold feeling at the pit of my stomach, and went out through the front door into the morning.

The storm that had hung over us all the evening had broken in the night, though I had slept through it, and the drive was strewn with small branches and beaten leaves. The air had that curious washed sweetness which comes after heavy rain, and the sun, already hot, was drawing up a thin steam from the gravel. It seemed a monstrous thing that the world should look so fresh.

Leastways Cottages, where the Belgians were housed, stood at the far end of the village, and I walked there rapidly, rehearsing to myself what I should say. It is not an easy matter to tell a man that a woman who has been kind to him is dead, and dead in circumstances that would not bear the light.

I need not have troubled. The door was opened to me by an elderly Belgian lady with a shawl over her head, and behind her, in the little passage, already dressed with that incredible neatness which never deserted him, stood Poirot.

“Ah!” he said. “It is you. I have expected you this half-hour.”

I stared at him.

“You know, then?”

“But certainly I know. Madame Inglethorp is dead. She died at a little before five o’clock this morning.”

“Who told you?”

“Baily.” He gave the name its full weight, and cocked his egg-shaped head at me. “The good Baily, who was sent for the car to fetch Dr. Wilkins. He is a man who cannot drive and hold his tongue at the same time. He stopped at the corner by the forge, where they were already up with the milk, and he told them that the mistress was taken bad and that Dr. Bauerstein had run up to the house across the park. And Madame Bertrand, who keeps this house, she was at her door for the milk, and she came in to me with her eyes as round as saucers. That was at half-past five. Since then I have shaved myself, and I have waited.”

“Waited for what?”

“For you, my friend. If it were an affair of nature, you would sleep. Since you do not sleep, since you come to me at half-past six in the morning with your collar crooked, it is not an affair of nature.” He put out a hand and straightened the collar for me. “Now tell me. Tell me everything, and in the order in which it happened, and do not, I implore you, tell me what you think. Only what you saw.”

I told him, as we walked, and he listened without one interruption, his hands behind his back, his little steps rapid on the wet road. When I came to Dr. Bauerstein’s word “tetanic,” he made a small sound in his throat, but he did not stop me. When I had finished he was silent for some fifty yards.

“The doors,” he said at last. “Let us be exact about the doors. The door to the passage—locked or bolted?”

“We could not tell. It would not give.”

“The door to Mr. Inglethorp’s room?”

“The same. That was the one we broke down.”

“And the door to Mademoiselle Cynthia’s room was bolted, and Dorcas says it is always bolted. So. Madame was shut in on all three sides.” He shook his head slowly. “It is not usual, that. It is not usual at all that a lady should barricade herself into her own bedroom in her own house.”

“She said herself it was stupid of her to have locked herself in.”

“She said that, did she?” said Poirot, and said nothing more until we came within sight of the lodge gates.

It was there, at the gates, that we met Alfred Inglethorp.

He came round the bend of the road from the direction of the village, walking easily, his black beard very black against the morning, swinging a stick, and he raised his hat to us with that manner of his which had always set my teeth on edge.

“Good morning, Hastings. A wild night of it. Did the storm wake you?”

I could find nothing to say. It was Poirot who answered him, quietly and with great gentleness, and told him. I watched the man’s face, and I will confess that what I saw there confounded me. He went the colour of clay. The stick dropped out of his hand into the wet grass, and he did not stoop for it.

“Emily,” he said. “Emily—dead?”

Then he began to walk very fast towards the house, and we followed him.

The others were in the morning-room. John came forward and shook Inglethorp’s hand, briefly, and looked away. Nobody spoke to him of the doctors. Nobody, I think, could have spoken at all. It was Inglethorp himself who broke out, standing in the middle of the room with his hands hanging.

“If I had been here! If I had only been here!”

“Where were you?” said John. He said it very levelly, but there was a something in it that made Mary Cavendish look up sharply from the window-seat.

“At Denby’s,” said Inglethorp. “You know I walked down with Dr. Bauerstein. I left him at his gate at a quarter past eight, or thereabouts, and went on to Denby’s about the estimates for the hospital fête. We got talking, and the papers were in a shocking muddle, and it was after eleven before we had done. Then the storm came on—it was coming down in sheets, you could not have put a dog out in it—and Denby would have me stay, and they made me up a bed. I have walked up this morning. I have not been near the house since eight o’clock last night. Good God, and all the time——”

He put his hand over his eyes.

“You had the latch-key,” said Lawrence suddenly from the hearth-rug. It was the first word he had spoken.

“I had it in my pocket, and much good it did anybody,” said Inglethorp. “I said I should be late and that nobody was to sit up.”

At that moment Dorcas came in with the coffee. She had been crying, and her hands shook so that the cups rattled, but she was one of those women whom trouble makes only the more upright. She set down the tray, and then she stood still, looking at Mr. Inglethorp with a curious fixed look.

“Beg pardon, sir,” she said. “But you did come back.”

There was a silence you could have cut.

“What do you mean, Dorcas?”

“I saw you, sir. I was in the passage window on the stairs, the little one that looks on the side path, drawing the blind down, because it had banged in the wind. And I saw you come up the side path from the shrubbery and go in at the side door. I couldn’t mistake you, sir, not with your beard, and you had no umbrella, and I remember thinking you’d be wet through. And it was a quarter past eleven, because the hall clock had struck the quarter not a minute before, and I said to myself the master’s later than he said he would be.”

“You are mistaken,” said Inglethorp.

“No, sir,” said Dorcas.

“You are mistaken, my good girl,” he repeated, quite quietly, and turned away to the window. “I was at Denby’s at a quarter past eleven, and Denby and his wife and their girl will tell you so. It was some trick of the light, or some tramp out of the rain. There have been tramps enough on the road this summer.”

Dorcas said nothing at all. She went out, and shut the door with great care behind her, as though the shutting of it mattered. I looked at Poirot. He was studying the pattern of the carpet with an air of the most profound melancholy, and he did not raise his eyes.

“Poirot,” I said, when I had got him to myself in the hall, “did you hear that?”

“I have not yet had the misfortune to lose my hearing, Hastings.”

“But it is monstrous! He denies it flatly, and she saw him.”

“She saw a man with a black beard, in the dark, in the rain, at a quarter past eleven at night,” said Poirot. “It is not the same thing. But it is very interesting, all the same, that the hall clock had struck. Dorcas is a witness of the first quality. She does not tell you what she thinks. She tells you the quarter.” He took my arm. “Now, my friend, I would like to speak to the ladies, and then I would like the keys.”

He saw Mary Cavendish first, for perhaps five minutes, in the boudoir, and what passed between them I do not know, for he sent me on my errand to John. When I came back with the two keys he was in the hall with Cynthia.

She was standing by the table in her hospital coat, ready to go down to Tadminster, for she had said, with a sort of desperate obstinacy, that they were short-handed and that she must go; and she looked, I thought, dreadfully ill. Her face was still flushed, and there were violet shadows under her eyes.

Poirot took her hand and bowed over it.

“Mademoiselle, I will ask you one question only, and then I will not trouble you.”

“Yes?” said Cynthia.

“Last night—did you sleep well?”

She gave a little laugh which was not far from tears.

“That’s the horrible part of it. I slept like the dead. I never heard a thing—not the doors, not the crash when they broke it in, not anything. Mary shook me and shook me, and I heard her a long way off, like somebody calling down a well, and I could not get my eyes open. And I’m not a sound sleeper, ever. I wake if a door creaks. Aunt Emily used to say I was the lightest sleeper in the house.” Her lip trembled. “And last night of all nights——”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “That is all.”

She went out to the waiting trap, and Poirot stood watching her from the doorway until she was out of sight down the drive, and his face wore an expression I could not read.

“Well?” I said. “The poor child was frightened out of her wits, that is all.”

“Assuredly,” said Poirot. “Let us go upstairs.”

It was a little after eleven when we unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room and went in.

I had not been in it since the morning. The blinds were drawn, and Poirot pulled them up one after another, letting in the strong sunlight, and stood for a moment in the middle of the floor, turning himself slowly round like a man on a pivot. Then he began.

I had seen him work once before, in Belgium, but I had forgotten what it was like. He went over that room as a terrier goes over a rat-hole. He knelt on the carpet by the overturned table, and gathered up in his neat fingers the fragments of the coffee-cup that lay smashed there, and set them in a little row on the tray; he looked long at a great splash of candle grease on the floor by the writing-table and asked me twice whether Lawrence had stood there with his candle; he opened the doors of the wardrobe, he examined the lock of the despatch-case that stood on the table by the bed, and made a little clicking noise with his tongue at it; he raked the cold ashes of the grate over with the poker, and remarked, without turning his head, that it was a strange thing to light a fire in a bedroom on the seventeenth of July. Once he went to the mantelpiece and stood before it a long while, and the prim ornaments were undisturbed, and I remembered Lawrence’s face, and said nothing.

Last of all he came to the door of Mr. Inglethorp’s room, the one we had broken in, hanging now on its wrenched hinges, and there he stooped over the bolt.

He was down a long time. When he straightened himself I saw that he had in his hand a small pair of tweezers, and gripped between them something so small that at first I could not see it at all.

“What is it?”

“Come and see.”

I went over. Held up against the light, the thing was a shred of stuff, no bigger than my little finger-nail—a wisp of dark green fabric, the merest thread or two, frayed at the edges as though it had been torn away in a hurry.

Poirot took an envelope from his pocket, and dropped the shred into it, and wrote something on the outside, and put it away in his breast pocket, and buttoned his coat over it, and all this he did with an extraordinary satisfaction, as a man puts away money.

“There is no one in this house who wears dark green,” I said. “I am certain of it. I should have noticed.”

“Would you?” said Poirot. “Yes, my friend, I think perhaps you would.”

“Then what does it mean?”

“It means that it is there.”

“Poirot——”

“Presently. Presently, Hastings.” He sat down, quite suddenly, on the edge of a chair, and put the tips of his fingers together, and looked at the wrecked door and the smashed cup and the cold grate and the little row of prim harmless ornaments on the mantelpiece.

“Consider,” he said. “Everything here is wrong, and everything here is tidy. There is a bolt drawn against a husband, and a fire lit in the heat of July, and a young girl who cannot be waked, and a lady who says it was stupid of her to lock herself in. That is a great deal for one small room. And yet it is not what is in this room that concerns me the most.”

“What, then?”

“It is that the person we look for was not in the least concerned to leave this room,” said Poirot dreamily. “It is that the person was concerned to have been in it—and to have been in it before the thing was done, and not after.”

I looked at him blankly.

“I don’t understand you in the least.”

“No,” said Poirot. “That is very fortunate.”

I had got on my legs by this time, and had recovered breath enough to look my young gentleman over from head to foot. Four good hours before his time, and coming at us from the wrong quarter of the compass altogether—out of the sandhills, when he ought to have been rolling up the drive from the station in a fly, with the boxes on the roof of it. There he sat on the sand at his ease, brushing the grains off his beautiful fawn-coloured trousers, as if a gentleman's arriving four hours early by way of the Shivering Sand was the commonest thing in the world.

"Mr. Franklin," I said, "I'm heartily glad to see you, and so will my lady be. But how, in the name of wonder, do you come to be here at all? We looked for you at the seven o'clock train."

"I came by the early one," says he, "and got out at the junction, and walked over the moor and down through the plantation. My luggage is following me like a Christian, and will be at the house by seven, when I ought to have been. Do you want to know why, Betteredge?"

"If it's not making too bold, sir."

He put his hand into his breast-pocket, and pulled out a letter, and slapped it on his knee, and looked at it in a way I didn't quite like—the way a man looks at a dog that has bitten him once already, and may bite him again.

"Because of that," he says.

Now I have my failings, like other men, and one of them is that I can't abide a mystery in a paper form. Give me a thing in words, and I will take it as it comes. Put it in an envelope, and it sits on my mind like a stone in my boot. I stood there, saying nothing, and looking at the letter as hard as I could look at it; and Mr. Franklin (who was always quicker than his neighbours) burst out laughing at me.

"Read it," says he. "You will have to know all about it before the week is out—you may as well begin at the beginning."

Here it is, copied out fair. It was written on a poor thin sort of paper, in a small cramped hand, and there was neither date, nor address, nor signature to it, from first to last:

"SIR,—You are advertised in your friends' mouths as travelling into Yorkshire on Thursday next, by the seven o'clock train from London, to your aunt's house on the coast. Do not go by that train, and do not tell any person by what train you go. You have been followed in London for a fortnight past, and you are followed still. If you carry any valuable thing with you, keep it about your own person night and day, and put it into no strong-box, and give it into no hands but such as you would trust with your life. It is not money that is wanted. This is written by one who wishes you well, and who dare not say more.—Burn this."

I read it twice over, standing on the beach there, with the sea coming in behind me as quiet as a cat. Then I gave it him back.

"You haven't burnt it, sir," I said.

"No," says he, "and for the best of reasons. When a stranger tells me to burn a thing, my first impulse is to keep it. I have carried it in my pocket for three days, and I don't mind confessing to you, Betteredge, that it has kept me better company than most of my acquaintance."

"And you believe it, sir?"

He got up and shook himself, and looked out over the quicksand, and the smile went off his face for the first time since I had set eyes on him.

"I believe this much of it," he says. "I did not go by the seven o'clock train, and I told nobody by what train I went; and I saw a man on the platform at London Bridge, on Tuesday morning, whom I had seen twice before in Frizinghall—which is a curious thing for a man to be doing, unless he is in the railway line, and this man was not. There! that's the whole of it, and it has brought me to your beach at the wrong hour, and given me the pleasure of finding you asleep in the sun instead of upright and terrible in your own hall. Are you satisfied?"

I was not satisfied—but it is not the business of a servant to say so to his master's nephew. I asked, in a roundabout way, whether the letter might not be a hoax, got up by some idle person to make sport of a gentleman just home from foreign parts.

"It might," says Mr. Franklin. "It is exactly the sort of thing an idle person would write. Only, an idle person doesn't generally know the hour of my train and the name of my aunt, and take the trouble to be right about both." And with that he put the letter back in his pocket, and buttoned his coat over it, and said no more.

Now, before I take you a step farther, allow me one word to yourself, sitting comfortable in your chair with the whole of this business between two covers, and the end of it, if you are impatient, at the back of your thumb. You know already, or you very soon will, what was at the bottom of that letter. I knew nothing. I stood on the sand at Rosanna's side an hour ago, hearing a girl talk about her grave; and I stood on it now, hearing a young gentleman talk about being followed in London; and I set both down in my mind as the same kind of thing—namely, the fancies of persons who have too little to do. A man who has had a comfortable life, and a good digestion, and one book to read, is the last man in England to see a mischief coming. I say that against myself, and I leave it standing.

We turned to walk home together, up through the sandhills. Mr. Franklin took my arm at the top of the slope, in his free foreign way, and then, as if he had thought of it that instant, he stopped, and put his hand into his breast-pocket again—not the pocket the letter was in, but the other one—and pulled out a small packet, done up in white paper, and sealed at both ends with a plain seal, no bigger, in the way of size, than a cake of soap you might carry in a travelling-bag.

"Betteredge," he says, "you have got a plate-room at the house, and a lock to it that I remember of old, and a key to it that never leaves you."

"There's the plate-room, sir, and there's the key," I said, and rattled it in my pocket to prove it.

"Put that in, please, along with my aunt's spoons, and lock the door on it, and say nothing to anybody about it till I ask you for it again."

I took it, and turned it over. It was light—light enough to be nothing at all—and hard in the middle, and there was no writing on it of any sort.

"Am I to know what's inside it, sir?" I asked, being, as I have owned, a man who likes his mysteries in words.

"You are not," says Mr. Franklin, and laughed, and put his arm through mine again. "You are to know to-morrow morning, when I have said what I have got to say to my aunt, and you are to tell me then whether you think I have been a fool for the last three days, or something worse than a fool. There is only one thing I ask of you between this and then. Don't lose it, and don't tell my aunt you have got it, and don't put it into your own pocket and go to sleep in the sun with it. Is that a bargain?"

"That's a bargain, sir," I said. And a poor bargain it turned out to be for all of us—but that is neither here nor there just now.

We walked on, and I bethought myself of the three jugglers on the terrace, and Penelope's tale of the boy and the ink, and my promise to tell it. I told it accordingly, making light of it as I went, and expecting to be laughed at for a superstitious old fool for my pains. But there is no reckoning beforehand what a gentleman with a foreign education will do. Mr. Franklin let go of my arm, and stood stock-still in the middle of the plantation, and made me go over it all a second time, slowly; and when I came to the part where the boy said that the English gentleman had got It about him, he asked me, very quietly, what word the boy had used, and whether Penelope was sure of it.

"She's as sure of it, sir," I said, "as she is of her own name. But what is 'It'?"

He didn't answer that. He looked at the firs, and then he looked at his boots, and then he said something in a foreign tongue which I took to be French, and which I am satisfied, on reflection, was swearing. Then he came back to me, and gave my arm a pull to start me walking again.

"To-morrow morning, Betteredge," says he. "You are a wonderful old man, and you have told me more in five minutes than my own eyes have told me in three days. To-morrow morning—when the packet comes out of the plate-room."

That is all that passed between us on the way home; and I ask you to observe that, if I had had one grain of the wit I have always given myself credit for, I might have joined the boy's "It" and the letter's "valuable thing" and the sealed packet in my hand into one, and had the whole truth out of him then and there. I did nothing of the sort. I thought of my key, and of the housekeeper's room, and of the fact that a young gentleman who has been abroad since he was a boy comes back with a taste for making mountains out of molehills, and there I let it rest.

We came out on the terrace, and I gave the packet the honour of my own two hands as far as the plate-room door, and locked it in among the spoons, as directed, and put the key back in my pocket, and heard the whole business click behind me with a comfortable sort of a sound. There it lay all that night, and I am bound to say I never gave it another thought till the candles were lit.

In the passage outside, whom should I meet but my daughter Penelope, with her face full of news, as usual, and her tongue ready loaded and primed.

"Father," she says, "Rosanna hasn't come in."

"Not come in!" I said. "I left her on the beach an hour ago, and told her the mutton was waiting."

"She hasn't been near the house," says Penelope. "Nancy went to the plantation gate to look for her, and one of the Yolland boys was coming up with the fish, and he met her on the shore road, going the other way, walking as fast as she could walk, with her cloak over her head. She has gone on to Cobb's Hole."

"To Cobb's Hole? At this hour? What's taking her to Cobb's Hole?"

"To Lucy Yolland, of course," says my daughter. "She goes nowhere else. Father"—and here she dropped her voice, which is a thing Penelope only does when she means to be believed—"there's something wrong with Rosanna to-day. She was crying this morning, before ever she went out; and when I passed her the salt at breakfast she never so much as saw my hand."

"There's nothing wrong with her but an empty stomach and too much of her own company," I said. "And when she does come in, she may come to me, and I'll tell her so."

Penelope gave me one of those looks which women keep for men who they know are talking nonsense, and which they are too well brought up to answer; and off she went to my lady's room. And you are to understand that I said what I said with a perfectly easy mind, and went in to my own supper directly afterwards, and ate it.

My lady came back from the lunch at Frizinghall towards six; and Mr. Franklin, hearing the wheels, went out to the porch bareheaded to hand her down, in the way he had. She knew him again in an instant, though she had not set eyes on him since he was a boy of thirteen, and she took him by both hands and kissed him on the forehead, and called him by his mother's name before she called him by his own. There was not a dry eye in the hall, mine being (I am not ashamed to say it) among the number.

They went into the drawing-room together, and I followed with the tea-tray in due course, and so came in for the end of the only piece of that day's talk which I am at liberty to set down exactly as I heard it. Mr. Franklin was standing on the hearthrug with his hands behind him, and my lady was in her chair, and neither of them so much as saw me come in.

"—and one thing more, Franklin, before we say another word," says my lady. "You are your mother's son, and you may take a liberty with me that nobody else in this house may take. I ask you not to take that one. Your uncle Herncastle's name is not to be mentioned under this roof. Not by you, not by me, not before Rachel, and least of all before Rachel. I have my reasons; they are old reasons, and they are good ones; and I don't propose to give them, even to you."

Mr. Franklin was a long time answering—longer than I have ever known him take over anything, before or since. He looked at the fireplace, and then he looked at my lady.

"May I ask one question, aunt, and never open my lips on the subject again?"

"You may ask it."

"If circumstances should arise—not of my making—which brought that name into this house whether we would or no, would you still forbid it?"

My lady sat up in her chair, and I saw the Herncastle look come into her face, which I had not seen there since Sir John's time.

"I would," she says. "In that case most of all."

"Then it is a promise," says Mr. Franklin, "and I shall keep it. And I hope, with all my heart, that you may never have cause to release me from it."

He said it as pleasantly as he said everything; but there was a something under it, and my lady heard the something as plainly as I did, for she gave him a quick look, and then let it go. And upon that I made a noise with the tea-tray, and came forward, and the subject was dead and buried, and they talked of Mr. Franklin's father, and of the great lawsuit, and of the state of the roads in Italy, till the dressing-bell rang.

The rest of the evening went as pleasantly as any evening we had had in that house for years. There was music in the drawing-room after dinner, and laughing, and the sound of a young gentleman's voice in it, which is a sound a house wants and doesn't know that it wants till it hears it. I did my rounds at half-past ten, and tried the plate-room door with my own hand—and it was fast, as it had no business not to be—and went into my sitting-room, and sat me down in my beehive chair with my pipe and my ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I opened the book at the place where I had left off, which was where he finds the print of a man's naked foot in the sand. I had read that passage a matter of a hundred times, and it had never once failed to comfort me. It failed me now. Every time I got to the foot in the sand, I thought of Rosanna Spearman making images with her finger on the beach, and of a letter without a name to it, and of a sealed packet lying in the dark among my lady's spoons. I filled my pipe again, and read on to the end of the chapter, and then I got up and went out into the back court and listened.

There was nothing to hear but the sea on the bank, half a mile out, rolling its waters in smoothly with a heave, in the way I have told you of. The house was dark on the servants' side; the girls had gone up an hour ago. Rosanna Spearman had not come in.

I saw the first of them fall a little before midnight, on the night of the twelfth. I had been sitting late over my paper upon the probable developments of moral ideas, and, my head being heavy with the lamp and the tobacco, I went out into the garden for the air. The night was clear and windless, with a slight ground mist lying in the hollow towards the Bourne, and the stars very sharp. I remember standing by the pear tree and looking up, and thinking, with that faintly patronising affection one has for a thing one has just been explaining to somebody else, of the Signs of the Zodiac I had shown my wife. Mars was already low in the west.

Then, out of the eastern sky, a streak of green fire cut down towards the north-west, and after it, as it seemed to me a very long time after, came a sound.

I have read since a good deal of what people saw that night, and it is curious how few of them agree. To me it seemed a livid green, and it went too slowly for the ordinary shooting star—slowly and with a sort of deliberation, as though it were being lowered rather than falling. It did not vanish in the upper air as they commonly do. It went down behind the black line of the elms towards the Chertsey meadows, and for a moment the undersides of the leaves were lit as though by a flash of summer lightning. Afterwards there was a dull concussion, not loud, that I felt in the soles of my feet as much as heard, and then a sound of water, or what I took for water, a hissing and a rushing that lasted perhaps half a minute and then was gone. The dogs began in Ottershaw, and were answered from Row Town, and a horse was kicking somewhere in a stable. Then the silence came back and the mist lay quiet, and I went in and told my wife that I had seen a very fine meteor, and went to bed.

That is the whole of my part in the greatest event in the history of our species. I saw the Thing come, and I said it was a very fine meteor, and I slept until eight.

It was the milkman who told our servant, and the servant who told my wife, that a star had fallen in the night into Cobbett's sand-pit in the meadows below Ottershaw, and that the water in the pit was boiling. I laughed at the boiling. But I had my breakfast in a hurry for all that, and I took the field path down past the withy beds with the dew still on the grass, and I was there, I suppose, by a quarter to nine.

The sand-pit had been worked out and abandoned before I came into the neighbourhood, and the Bourne, which runs sluggishly along that flat and is apt to come out of its banks in a wet season, had filled the bottom of it, so that it was a shallow pond of perhaps an acre, brown, reeded at the margins, with a shelf of yellow sand going down at the western end and a bank of gravel and thorn scrub standing up ten or twelve feet upon the east. I came upon it from the east, and I looked down.

The reeds along the near side were laid flat and blackened as though a wagon of hot cinders had been dragged through them. The water was gone from the eastern half of the pit altogether; the mud there was scored and glazed, and cracked into a pattern like the shell of an old picture, and out of the shrunken pool at the further end there rose a steam that went up in a slow white column for perhaps twenty feet before the morning air took it and drew it away flat over the meadows towards Chertsey. And in the middle of the emptied part, lying at an angle in the mud and half in what remained of the water, was the Thing.

It was a cylinder. I saw that at once, and it is odd to remember with what perfect calm I saw it. It was about thirty yards in diameter, so far as one could judge of a thing so sunk, and its exposed upper surface was a dull grey, encrusted with a scaly dun-coloured incrustation. It lay tilted, its nearer end deep in the mud, its further end lifted out of the water with the pool steaming and bubbling round it, and it was so plainly artificial, so plainly a made thing, that I remember I looked round the rim of the pit for the men who had put it there. The incrustation flaked off it as I watched. There was a continual slight noise coming up out of the pit, a hissing and a ticking, and now and then a sound as of a great cauldron very far off.

Ogilvy was down in the pit already, in the mud to his ankles, with his coat off and folded on a tussock and his hat on the coat, walking round the thing at a distance of some twenty feet with his hands behind him, as a man walks round a horse he is thinking of buying. When he saw me on the bank he waved his arm and shouted to me to come down, and I went down the sand slope with my heels driving into it, and the air came at me hot and dry and with a smell in it—a smell of scorched clay and wet ash and something metallic, like the taste of a cut finger.

"You'll not have seen its like," he said, "and no more shall you again. Twenty tons if it's a pound, and it came down whole. Whole, do you understand? They break up. That's the rule, they break up in the air. And this has come down whole and lit in mud and water, which is the one thing that could have saved it, and I would not have missed it for a knighthood."

"It is a cylinder," I said.

"It's a meteorite," said Ogilvy.

"Ogilvy," I said, "the thing has been turned in a lathe."

He was very good about it. He took my arm and walked me a little way along the mud and pointed with his stick, and explained to me, in the voice of a man explaining a simple matter to a friend of whom he is fond, that a mass falling through our atmosphere at twenty or thirty miles a second is worked upon by that atmosphere as by a graving tool; that the fusion of the surface and the streaming away of it produce forms of the most remarkable regularity; that there were specimens at Vienna, or at Kew, or somewhere, which the ignorant had taken for cannon-shot and for statuary; and that the appearance of a joint or seam near the further end—for there was such an appearance, a fine circular line running round the raised part of it—was nothing in the world but a plane of cleavage in the mass, along which it would very likely split when it had cooled.

"And the ticking?" I said.

"Contraction," said Ogilvy. "It is losing about a thousand degrees an hour into that water, and it will go on talking to us for a week."

"And the roundness of it? And that line, which is as true as a wedding ring?"

"My dear fellow," he said, "you have been writing about the moral ideas of the future until you cannot see a stone without suspecting it of a purpose." And then he laughed and said, "You have been reading the papers about the volcanoes on Mars."

I said that I had not thought of Mars at all until he said the word, which was true, and is one of the things I am least willing to remember. But I said also—and I said it two or three times that morning, and I set it down here not out of vanity, for a man may guess right for no better reason than that he is fanciful, and that was my case—that no natural falling body known to me had ever come to earth with a seam in it, and that the thing was hollow.

"Hollow!" said Ogilvy. "And why hollow?"

"Because of the way it came down," I said. "I saw it come down. It came down slowly."

He said that everybody who sees a fireball says that, and that the eye is a very poor witness in the dark, and there for the time it rested. I do not want it thought that he was a stupid man. He was very much the reverse; but he had been waiting twenty years for a meteorite of his own, and here at last, within three miles of his own observatory, was a meteorite, and no man is at his most sceptical about the thing he has prayed for.

He would not let me go near it. There he was perfectly right, and he was very peremptory about it, and set a sort of boundary of walking-sticks and stones in the mud, and abused two boys from Ottershaw who came scrambling down the bank, until they went up again. By ten he had sent one of them off to Henderson, the London journalist, who lodged that summer at Ottershaw, and Henderson came down with a note-book and asked me how to spell my name, and went off again to telegraph to his paper. And I—I am ashamed of this too—I walked home to my breakfast, which I had left half eaten, because I could think of nothing whatever to do.

It seems to me now scarcely credible, but I did no more that day. I went back once in the afternoon and found perhaps thirty people about the pit and a policeman from Chertsey, and Ogilvy still there, sunburnt now and hoarse, and the steam still going up, though thinner. That night I slept badly and dreamed of nothing in particular, and in the morning my wife, who had heard the milkman's account and Henderson's and mine and thought little of any of them, said that she would come and see the star that had fallen in Cobbett's pit.

We went down together after ten, by the field path, and she carried her parasol, and we talked about her sister's letter. It was a bright, still, hot morning, the second fine morning of that week, and the meadows were full of that faint smell of hay and stagnant water that belongs to the Bourne in August. Long before we came to the pit we could hear the crowd; and coming over the rise we saw perhaps a hundred and fifty people strung out along the eastern bank, with the dog-carts and two or three bicycles on the track behind them, and a man selling ginger-beer already, which I thought at the time the most extraordinary thing I had yet seen.

My wife looked down into the pit for a long while and said nothing. Then she said, "It is like a boiler."

"That is what I have been telling Ogilvy," I said.

"Poor Mr. Ogilvy," said she, "he has been up all night," which was the truth, and more to the purpose than anything I had said.

The steam was much less. The pool at the far end had shrunk to a black slime, and the cylinder—for I will call it what it is, and what I believed it to be from the first hour—lay clear of it now, dull grey where the crust had scaled away, and the scaled patches were smooth and did not look like any stone or iron I knew. The ticking had grown slower. Twice while we stood there it made a sound like a great sigh, and a little dust rolled down the mud beside it, and the crowd along the bank made that low murmur which a crowd makes and does not know it is making.

It was a little after eleven that the man was burnt. He was a young fellow from Addlestone, a bricklayer's labourer I was told afterwards, and he had got down into the pit on the far side where nobody was watching, on a wager of a shilling. He went across the mud in a stooping run, with his cap in his hand and his shoulders up like a man going through rain. Ogilvy roared at him from our side, and everybody along the bank began to shout, and the shouting was what did it, I think, for he lost his head and put out his hand against the flank of the thing to steady himself as he turned.

He was down in the mud before the sound of it reached us. It was a small, flat sound, and there was a puff of steam off his palm, and then he was up again and running back, and holding the hand out from him in the way a man holds a thing that is not his. They got him up the sand slope, and he sat there on the gravel and would not let anybody touch it, and was sick, and then began to laugh, and there was more of the crowd about him than about the cylinder. A woman bound it up with a handkerchief soaked in the Bourne. The palm and the inside of the fingers were burnt white to the flesh, and the whole hand was already swelling, and he kept saying that it had not been hot to look at, that there had been no more heat off it than off a wall, and that it had taken him.

That silenced my wife. It did not silence Ogilvy; he said, with perfect justice, that a mass of that size might hold heat for a fortnight, and that he had said so all along, and that he wanted a rope run round the pit and would go into Chertsey for one himself if the policeman would not. But it silenced my wife, and when I looked at her she was looking, not at the man's hand, but down at the grey thing lying in the mud with the sun on it and the little dust running.

"Come home," she said.

I told her I would stay. I told her that Stent was expected, and that Ogilvy would want somebody, and that it was the most remarkable thing that had ever happened within twenty miles of London, and I daresay I said other things of the same sort. She did not argue with me at all, which was not her way when she thought me wrong; and that too I remember. She said I was to come home for my dinner, and that I was not to go down into the pit, and I promised both, and kept the second.

Then she went up over the meadow with her parasol, past the dog-carts and the ginger-beer man, and she turned once at the stile and I waved to her, and she went on to Ottershaw and was out of sight; and I turned back to the crowd upon the bank, which was growing every minute, and to the cylinder lying in the mud with the noon sun upon it, ticking.

“I know,” I said.

The taxi went up the hill and out into the lighted square and then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, past the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late shops open on both sides of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett’s hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the light from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue des Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett’s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I put my hand on hers and she took her hand away.

“Don’t,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t stand it.”

“Then don’t.”

“Darling, don’t be that way. You know I can’t stand it.”

“Do you want to go on riding?”

“No. I don’t want to ride. Take me to Zelli’s.”

“I thought you had a date at Zelli’s.”

“I had a date with all of them. I don’t want any of them.”

“Zelli’s, then.”

I tapped on the glass and told the driver Montmartre. He turned and went back up the avenue and we came around into the Boulevard Arago and then the taxi went up the long way through the dark streets with the trees in them and Brett sat looking out of the window with her chin up. She looked as though she had been crying, but she had not been crying.

“I was in the country last week,” she said.

“Where?”

“Down near Fontainebleau. There was a house party. Ghastly. Everyone was drunk on champagne at eleven in the morning and there was a man there with a monocle who wanted to show me his horses.”

“Did you look at them?”

“Rather. They were lovely horses. I was very bored.”

“Poor Brett.”

“Don’t be poor Bretting me. I had rather a good time in a way. I met Count Mippipopolous.”

“Who?”

“Mippipopolous. He’s a count. He’s got the most extraordinary money.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Nobody’s ever heard of him. That’s the charm of the thing. He came in on Tuesday with nine dozen roses and a chauffeur to carry them.”

“What’s he count of?”

“Somewhere in Greece, I believe. He says it’s all quite genuine but he doesn’t use it. He’s been in seven wars and four revolutions and he’s got arrow-wounds. He showed them to me.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to go to Biarritz with him for ten thousand francs. Then he wanted me to go to Cannes. Then Monte Carlo.”

“Did you go?”

“No. I told him I knew too many people in all those towns.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he’d take me somewhere where I didn’t know anybody. He’s a very sound chap in his way. He knows a great deal about wine.”

“He sounds fine.”

“He is fine. I’m rather fond of him.”

The taxi came up the hill and past the lighted windows and the closed shutters and stopped where the street was too full to go on. There were people standing in the street and the doorman of one of the places was calling out and swinging his cape. It smelled of dust and of the rain that had not come. We got out and I paid the driver and we went down the steps into Zelli’s. It was crowded and smoky and hot and the music hit you as you came down. Zelli himself came over and shook hands with Brett and shook hands with me and got us a table close to the floor.

“Everyone here,” Brett said.

“It’s a fine crowd.”

“Isn’t it lovely?”

The negro drummer was playing and grinning at Brett and she waved her hand at him and he waved a stick. The band was very loud in the small room. We had brandy and soda. Brett drank hers and looked at the dancers.

“Do you want to dance?”

“Rather.”

We danced. It was very crowded and you could hardly move. Brett danced close and easily and did not talk. The drummer sang something into the noise and the people at the tables laughed. Brett held on to my arm when we came off the floor.

“I say, this is better,” she said.

“It’s better than the Bal.”

“Anything’s better than the Bal.”

We sat down and had another brandy and soda. A man Brett knew came over from the bar, a big Englishman with a red face, and stood by the table with his glass and said he had not seen her since Ascot and that everybody was in Paris and it was a scandal. Brett said it was, and he went away again.

“Who was that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Ascot, though. Isn’t it wonderful.”

“You know everybody.”

“I know a great many chaps. It comes to the same thing.”

The music started again and we did not dance. Brett sat with her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand and looked at me.

“You look very well, Jake.”

“I feel very well.”

“Do you?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good, then,” Brett said. “I’m glad one of us is well.”

“Have another brandy.”

“I said I’d never get tight any more.”

“So you did.”

“Get me one, will you, darling.”

I got them and we drank them and the room got hotter and the smoke came down under the lights and the drummer sang and grinned and beat on his drum. I looked at Brett and she was looking at the floor where the people were dancing, and she was a long way off. She turned around.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“How?”

“You know how.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You do. Order another drink.”

“You’ve had four.”

“Six, my dear.”

We sat there and did not talk and after a while the band stopped and there was that noise that comes when the music stops and people begin to be loud. Brett put her hand on my arm.

“Jake.”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. I only wanted to say it.”

I was happier just then than I had been all evening, and that is a bad thing to be happy about.

At three o’clock the place was still going. Brett wanted to go. We came up the steps into the street and the air was cold after the room and it was very quiet in the street with the taxi-drivers standing in a row by the curb.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ve got to go back to the Bal.”

“Whatever for?”

“I left fifty francs there for that girl.”

“You are a fool,” Brett said. “She’s gone off with one of those beauties long ago.”

“Then I get the fifty francs back.”

“You’re the most extraordinary chap. Come on, then. I’ll ride down with you.”

We got a taxi and went down the hill and across the town. It was cold in the taxi and Brett put her coat around her shoulders and sat back in the corner and did not say anything. The streets were empty and washed-looking and at the markets they were unloading vegetables from the carts and the horses stood with their heads down. We crossed the river and went up the hill on the other side and the taxi stopped in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The accordion was still going inside.

“Wait here,” I said.

“Don’t be long. I shall die of cold.”

I went in. It was late and the crowd was thinned out but there were still people dancing, and the working people who had come in after the others had gone. The proprietor was still on his high stool with the bells on his ankle. The policeman was gone from the door. Georgette was sitting at a table against the wall with two men I did not know, and she had her hat on the table beside her and she was drinking coffee. The men were talking to each other and not to her.

“Hello,” I said.

She looked up. It took a moment.

“So you came back.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“No.”

“Sit down, then.”

I sat down. The patronne came over and I asked her for the envelope and she went and got it from behind the bar and gave it to me.

“The lady did not ask for me?” I said.

“No, Monsieur.”

“Give her this, then,” I said, and put it on the table in front of Georgette.

“What is it?”

“Open it.”

She opened it and looked at the fifty francs and put it in her bag and shut the bag.

“You’re not a bad type,” she said. “You went away with the one with the hair.”

“Yes.”

“She’s very chic. She’s no *poule*, that one.”

“No.”

“It’s the same thing,” Georgette said. “Only one is dear and the other is cheap.” She looked at the two men, who were not listening. “These are friends of mine. They are from Lille.”

“Enchanted,” I said. The men nodded.

“Did you dance with all those gentlemen?”

“All of them. They dance very well. They are like women, but they dance well.” She looked at her coffee. “They did not want anything.”

“No.”

“Nobody wanted anything tonight,” Georgette said. “It has been a night for nothing.” She grinned then and shut her mouth quickly. “Have a coffee.”

“I have a taxi waiting.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well. It’s all one.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

“Good night, Jacob. You are sick and I am sick and it is a dirty life.”

“Yes,” I said. “Good night.”

I went out. The accordion went on behind me and the door shut on it. Brett was in the taxi with her collar up.

“Well?”

“She was there.”

“And your fifty francs?”

“She’s got it.”

“You gave it to her.”

“She earned it. She danced all night with your friends.”

Brett laughed. “They can dance,” she said. “That’s about all they can do.” Then she stopped laughing. “Was she nice about it?”

“She was fine.”

“I’m sorry about tonight, Jake.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

We drove down through the sleeping streets to the quais and the taxi went along by the river. It was getting light. The sky over toward the east above the river was grey and there was that colour on the water where it was not black under the bridges. The book-stalls were shut and locked along the parapet and a man went by on a bicycle with bread under his arm.

“Where do you want to go?” I said.

“Home, I suppose. God, what a dreadful word.”

“The hotel?”

“The hotel.”

The taxi stopped where I told it, back by the bridge, and we sat there a moment. The motor ran. Brett looked out at the river.

“I’m going away, Jake.”

“Where?”

“San Sebastian. I don’t know. Somewhere out of this.”

“When are you coming back?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On a good many things,” Brett said. “Don’t ask me things, darling. I’m a fool tonight.”

“When shall I see you?”

“I don’t know. Soon. Not soon. I shouldn’t see you at all, you know. It’s bad for both of us.”

“It’s fine for me.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s a lie.”

She turned and looked at me and her face was very tired in the grey light and older than it was, and I thought that she was the loveliest thing I had ever seen and that I would do anything she asked me, and that she knew it.

“Don’t come in with me,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. Well.” She put out her hand and I took it and she pressed hard, the way she had in the bar, and then let go. “Good night, my dear.”

“Good night, Brett.”

I got out and shut the door and told the driver the hotel in the Rue Cambon and gave him the money through the window. Brett was leaning back with her eyes shut. The taxi went off up the quai and I watched it until it turned, and then it was gone and there was only the empty street and the river.

It was nearly full light now. I started walking home along the river. The water was grey and moved fast under the bridges and there was a barge going down with smoke coming out of the stove-pipe and washing hung out on a line. A man came along leading two horses to the market and their hoofs sounded loud on the stones. The trees along the quai were fresh with new leaves. I walked and did not think about anything much, and then I would think about it and it did not do any good. That was the worst thing about it: you could not use your head on it at all. In the daytime it was easy to be hard-boiled about everything, but at night it was another thing, and now it was neither night nor day and it was worse than either. Ahead of me the towers of the cathedral were grey against the light and pigeons were going up off the parapet. I walked on past the shut book-stalls and the fishermen who were already there with their long poles, and it was going to be a fine warm day.

The rain, which had been coming down with the single-minded devotion of a thing that means to make a day of it, had thinned by half-past eleven to a sort of luminous drizzle, and by noon had given the matter up altogether; so that when Eve came out of the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau there was actually a spot of blue in the sky over Shaftesbury Avenue, of the size which sailors are popularly supposed to consider sufficient for the manufacture of a pair of trousers. She looked at the umbrella under her arm, and the umbrella, so to speak, looked back at her.

It was, she perceived now that she had leisure to examine it, an extremely opulent umbrella. It had a handle of some pale wood, banded with a broad ring of gold, and upon this ring there had been engraved a monogram which, after prolonged study, she decided might be anything at all. Property of this magnificence could not simply be carried off to Bayswater and kept in a hall-stand. Besides—and this was the point which really weighed with her—one does not accept gifts from young men who materialise beside one out of the rain, present one with expensive umbrellas, and then dash away across the road without a word, like Alice's White Rabbit. It had been a handsome action, and she had laughed about it three times since; but there was only one thing to be done with it.

She got into an omnibus—her financial position being what it was, this was rather an event—and was borne back to Dover Street. The gloomy building opposite Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe's had, she now saw, the word "Drones" carved with a certain diffidence over the door, as though the architect had had his doubts about it. In the hall a large man in a braided uniform was arranging letters in a rack, and he turned and regarded her with the massive courtesy of his order.

"I want to leave this umbrella," said Eve.

"Yes, madam."

"It belongs to a gentleman here. At least, I think it does. He gave it to me this morning in the rain, and he didn't tell me his name, and he ran away before I could stop him. He was very tall and thin and he wore an eyeglass."

The porter's face expressed nothing whatever. It was a face which had been trained through long years to express nothing whatever, and it did its work well.

"Very good, madam. I will make enquiries."

"And would you give him this, please?"

She had written the note in the omnibus, steadying the paper against her handbag while the vehicle bounded over the wood-paving, and the handwriting had suffered for it. It ran:

"*Thank you a thousand times. It was the kindest thing that has been done to me for years, and I am quite certain you will get pneumonia and it will be my fault. If you had waited one moment I should have said all this properly instead of standing under an awning with my mouth open. The umbrella is a beauty and has been taken great care of.*"

She had thought for some time about the signature, and had ended by putting no signature at all, which she felt was probably the correct procedure in these matters, there being no book of etiquette dealing with the case.

"The gentleman with the eyeglass," she said, at the door. "You won't forget?"

"No, madam," said the porter, who had already forgotten a good deal in his time but was not going to say so.

* * * * *

Psmith, at that moment, was seated in the window of the smoking-room in a condition of dreamy peace, having lunched simply but well. It was thus that the Hon. Hugo Walderwick found him: and the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, a solid young man with a face like a discontented codfish, was not dreamy and was not at peace.

"Smith," said Hugo, "have you seen my umbrella?"

Psmith looked up with the air of a bishop about to confer a benefice.

"Your umbrella, Comrade Walderwick? Describe it."

"It's got a gold band round the handle and my monogram on the band."

"That," said Psmith, "would identify it anywhere."

"Well, it's gone. Some blighter has pinched it out of the rack. I've asked the cloak-room man, and he says a tall chap with an eyeglass took it away at about half-past ten this morning."

"A sinister figure."

"Well, dash it, that's *you*."

"There is a superficial resemblance," Psmith admitted, "which has misled better men than Comrade Jevons in the cloak-room. Sit down, Comrade Walderwick, and let us go into this."

"I don't want to go into it. I want my umbrella. There's a fellow I've got to meet at three o'clock at the Bath Club, and it's coming on to rain again."

"Then let us waste no time. Comrade Walderwick, I will be frank with you. Your umbrella has passed out of your life."

Hugo's jaw fell some inches.

"You mean you've lost it?"

"I mean," said Psmith, "that it has gone to a better place. It is fulfilling a higher destiny. Do not ask me for details, for I shall not give them. There are chapters in a man's life which he does not open to the general public, and this is one of them. What I will do is this. I will buy the umbrella from you."

"But you can't buy it if you haven't got it."

"That objection," said Psmith, "is one which would have appealed with great force to my late uncle, a man who never in his life bought anything he had not first prodded with his thumb. Nevertheless, I persist. Name your figure."

"But dash it--"

"Name your figure, Comrade Walderwick. Time presses, and there is a fellow you have got to meet at three o'clock at the Bath Club."

Hugo Walderwick took hold of the back of a chair, as men do when the foundations of things become insecure.

"It cost me thirty bob," he said at last, in the voice of one who feels he is being drawn into something.

"You have been swindled," said Psmith gravely. "It was worth infinitely more. I shall give you ten pounds."

"Ten quid! For an umbrella?"

"For *that* umbrella. There are umbrellas and umbrellas. It is a distinction which the careless thinker frequently fails to draw." He had produced a cheque-book and was writing in it with a fountain-pen, using the arm of his chair as a desk. "You will observe that I do not haggle. Haggling over the great moments of life is a vice of the age. There you are. Present that at the Piccadilly branch of the London and Provincial and they will give you the money, though I fancy they will look at you a bit oddly, for it is the largest cheque I have drawn this year and the last one was to my tailor and bounced."

Hugo looked at the cheque. Then he looked at Psmith. Then he looked at the cheque again.

"But look here," he said, "I mean to say--why?"

"Ah," said Psmith.

"But, dash it--"

"There," said Psmith, "you have put your finger on the very heart of the matter. Do not brood on it, Comrade Walderwick. Take the money and buy yourself another umbrella, a stouter and a nobler umbrella, one better fitted to face the rough weather of life. And now, if you will forgive me, I have a good deal of heavy thinking to get through before tea."

Hugo Walderwick went out slowly, pausing twice on the way to the door to look at the cheque; and Psmith, having lit a cigarette, resumed his contemplation of the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, beneath which there was now nothing whatever except a coalman's boy scratching his leg.

* * * * *

It was at ten minutes past three that afternoon, in Bond Street, outside the window of a picture-dealer's, that Eve Halliday, standing on the kerb and looking with disfavour at the sky, which had begun to think seriously about rain again, became aware that a young man had stopped beside her.

"Excuse me," said the young man, "but are you not the young lady who was standing under the awning in Dover Street this morning?"

Eve turned, and found herself looking up at a monocle. Behind the monocle was an expression of grave and courteous enquiry, such as a curator might wear when identifying a fossil.

"Why," she said, "yes. I was."

"I thought so. One of those trifles that stick in the memory. I chanced to be passing at the time. And, if I may say so without offence, you were being rained upon."

"I was. And then somebody gave me an umbrella."

"Indeed?" said the young man. "London is full of these romances. It is a city of hidden kindnesses. Only last week a total stranger told me the time in Sloane Square."

"He didn't tell me his name. He didn't say anything at all. He simply put the umbrella into my hands and ran."

"Some nervous disorder, no doubt," said the young man sympathetically. "Or possibly he was late for an appointment. In these strenuous days--"

"He went into a club opposite."

"Ah, then he was a member of it. That narrows the search to some six hundred men, of whom, I am told, four hundred and eighty are called Reggie. I should let the matter drop, if I were you. Anonymity is the flower of benevolence." He glanced at the sky with the air of one who reads unpleasant news in a paper. "It is going to rain again. I regret that I have no umbrella to offer you; my personal supply has run dry. But there is a cab, and I propose to secure it for you before that man in the bowler hat, who has been edging towards it for the last minute like a stoat, can get his hands on it."

He was in the road before Eve could speak, and the cab was at the kerb.

"Where," he enquired, holding the door, "may I tell him to go?"

"The Senior Conservative Club, in Northumberland Avenue," said Eve. "I'm being interviewed."

"Then may Fortune attend you. It is a solemn thing, being interviewed. I am shortly to undergo the experience myself, in circumstances of some peril." He raised his hat. "You will forgive me for saying that whoever it is will engage you inside three minutes."

The cab drove off. Eve, looking back through the little window, saw him standing on the pavement gazing after her with a look of quiet approval, exactly as though she had been a picture in the dealer's window which he was thinking of buying: and it was not until Trafalgar Square that it occurred to her, with a good deal of force, that in the whole of this conversation he had not once asked her her name, nor she his.

* * * * *

Whatever Eve had expected of the interview, she had not expected the Earl of Emsworth. She was shown into a small room off the hall, where a long, thin old gentleman in a suit which appeared to have been slept in by somebody of a different shape rose from a chair and beamed at her mildly through rimless pince-nez.

"Miss--ah--yes, exactly," said Lord Emsworth. "Yes, yes. Do sit down. Charming weather. Or, rather, no. It has been raining, has it not? Yes."

"I'm Eve Halliday," said Eve. "About the library."

"The library. Precisely. My sister Constance is very keen on the library. A great many books, you know. My father collected them. Very fond of books, my father. I have never been able to see the point of them myself, but there they are." He removed the pince-nez, polished them on his sleeve, and put them on again, and Eve saw that he was now looking not at her but at a bowl of flowers on the table by the window. "Tell me," he said, with animation coming into his voice for the first time, "does that strike you as a healthy specimen?"

Eve, who was a resourceful girl, said that it did.

"It does not strike me so," said Lord Emsworth. "It is a poor thing. My man Thorne would blush for it. Thorne is my head gardener. A remarkable fellow, though obstinate about hollyhocks--extraordinarily obstinate about hollyhocks. Do you care for gardening, Miss--er?"

"I love it," said Eve, who had once had a window-box.

"Ah!" said his lordship, and from that moment Eve was in. For some twenty minutes she heard about Thorne, about Angus McAllister, who came later and was a worse case, about the perverse behaviour of a certain Achillea in the lower border, and about the shameful conduct of a neighbouring landowner named Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe in the matter of a pumpkin. Not one syllable was uttered concerning cataloguing, the Blandings library, her qualifications, her salary, or the terms of her employment. Twice Eve got as far as "About the books--" and twice was swept gently away on the flood.

At last Lord Emsworth rose, took off his pince-nez, and looked round the room with the vague air of a man who suspects he has mislaid something and is not sure what.

"Well, well," he said, "this has been most delightful. Most. You will come down to us on Friday, then. Excellent. Blandings Castle, Shropshire. Anybody will direct you at the station. And I shall be very glad indeed, my dear young lady, if you will look at that Achillea and give me your candid opinion, for Thorne, as I say, is obstinate."

"Then you'll want me to do the library?" said Eve, feeling that this ought to be got on to a firm basis.

"The library, yes. Yes, indeed. My sister Constance is very keen on it." He drifted to the door, and paused there with the expression of one to whom light has been vouchsafed. "Do you know," he said, "I have an idea that I have forgotten to ask you something. Something rather important. Well, well, no doubt it will come back to me."

And he wandered out into the hall, and Eve, following a moment later, saw him going up the staircase, reading a seed catalogue as he went; and she stood alone in the doorway of the Senior Conservative Club and laughed until a hall porter came and asked her if she wanted a cab.

* * * * *

Evening had come, and with it a fine wet dusk over Dover Street, when Mike Jackson, ushered into the smoking-room of the Drones, found his old friend seated in a deep chair with an umbrella across his knees.

"So you did resign?" said Mike.

"At nine-fifteen this morning," said Psmith, "I placed my resignation in my Uncle Joseph's hands. He took it well. He had been expecting it since the day I asked him whether he had ever considered the finer feelings of the herring."

Mike lowered himself into a chair. "Phyllis wants to know if you'll come to supper on Sunday."

"With profound pleasure." Psmith turned the umbrella thoughtfully in his hands. "Comrade Jackson, a small point of information. Tall girl, extremely well dressed, with a hat--I use the word loosely--a hat with a black bird of Paradise feather down over the left shoulder. Blue eyes. Laughs easily and, one gathers, often."

"That sounds like Eve Halliday," said Mike. "She was at our place yesterday, having tea with Phyllis. They were at school together. Why?"

"Nothing," said Psmith. "Nothing whatever. A stray thought, idly pursued."

And when Mike had gone, he sat on alone in the deepening dusk with the Hon. Hugo Walderwick's umbrella laid across his knees, and it was observed by the club waiter, coming in to draw the curtains, that the gentleman by the window was smiling faintly at nothing at all.