The Chapters

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey at his rooms, and Art with us. I had half a mind to cry off at the last moment, and had actually written a note pleading an urgent case, but I tore it up. A man who has been beaten had best take his beating in company, and there is no better company than friends who were beaten on the same field.

Quincey had made a feast of it. There were oysters, and a saddle of mutton, and a champagne he said he had been keeping "for a wedding or a wake, whichever came along first." Afterwards there was a punch of his own brewing, which he called the drink of the Texas cattlemen. I doubt any cattleman ever tasted it. Art came late and flushed, like a schoolboy who has been running. He would not sit down until he had given us his messages, and he gave them standing, with his hand on the back of his chair, as if he were in the House. First, his father had written to give the match his full blessing. Second, Mrs. Westenra wished for no long engagement, and it was hoped that the thing might be done before the autumn was out. And third--here he stopped, and looked first at Quincey and then at me, and his voice was not quite steady:--

"She told me to tell you both, and I tell it you in her own words, that she has two friends in the world whom she would not change for any others living, and that she will not be happy on her wedding-day unless they are there to see it."

For a moment none of us spoke. Then Quincey got up, filled all three glasses to the brim, and raised his own.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I've drunk healths on a good many shores, and some of them in water I wouldn't give to a mule. But I never drank one that I meant more than this. Here's to the man that won, and to the lady that was worth the losing, and to the two old hosses that are going to stand by the pair of them as long as there's grass on the prairie."

We drank it standing, and Art wrung our hands and could say nothing at all, which was the best thing he could have said. I noticed, for the habit of the case-book is strong even in my cups, that there was no triumph in his happiness. There was a kind of shyness, as if he felt he had been given more than he had earned and was half afraid of being found out. I think Lucy has chosen well. I am glad I can say so into this machine, where no one will hear me say it but myself.

We sat late. Quincey told stories of the Pampas and of a certain night on the Marquesas which Art and I had heard before, and which we should have been sorry to miss. At one o'clock Art went home, and Quincey walked with me as far as the corner of the square. He did not speak till we parted, and then he put his hand on my shoulder.

"Jack," he said, "we're both of us hit, but we ain't down; and I reckon the lady knew what she was about when she picked her man."

I went home and to bed and slept soundly, which I have not done these two nights. The cure, as I said, is work. I shall take it up again to-morrow.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

"*2 June.*

"My dearest Lucy,--

"I have read your letter four times, and cried over it twice: once for poor Dr. Seward, once for Mr. Morris. I only did not cry for the third, because nobody could cry over number Three. Oh, my dear, I am so glad! I always knew you would find someone worthy of you, and from all I hear, Mr. Holmwood is worthy even of *you*, which is saying a great deal. You must tell me everything as it happens: the day, the dress, the church, all of it. You know I am a sober old thing now, and must live my romances second-hand.

"I wish I had better news of my own to send back. I have heard nothing from Jonathan since the few hurried lines I told you of. He wrote then that he would be home in about a week, and that is nearly a month ago. I know that posts are slow and uncertain in those wild countries, and that a lawyer's business can never be hurried when the client wishes it otherwise. I tell myself all this every morning when the postman passes the door. Mr. Hawkins, to whom I wrote, very kindly answered at once. He has had only one letter from him, written soon after he arrived, and has heard nothing since. He says there is no cause for alarm, and I am sure he is right; but he did not say it quite as heartily as I could have wished.

"So I have done a bold thing. Jonathan told me he was to stay at an hotel in Bistritz called the Golden Krone, and I have written to the landlord there, in my very best German (which Jonathan says is very bad), to ask whether he has any news of him. I daresay they will think me a foolish, fussing English girl. I do not mind, if only they answer. Meanwhile I practise my typewriting in the evenings until my fingers ache, because while I am counting the keys I cannot count the days.

"Give my dear love to your mother, and tell Mr. Holmwood from me that he is the luckiest man in England.

"Your ever loving

"MINA."

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

*5 June.*--A curious thing with Renfield to-day. It is worth setting down exactly, because I cannot yet account for it to my own satisfaction.

He has been quiet for the last week and much taken up with a new hobby. He has made a sort of pet of the flies that come in at his window. He feeds them on sugar, keeps a note of their number in a little pocket-book, and talks to them, when he thinks himself unobserved, in a low and reasonable voice, as a man talks to his dog. I went in this afternoon to see him at it. He received me with great politeness, as he always does when the fit is not on him, and for some minutes we talked of the weather and of a pane of his window that is to be mended. Then, without the smallest change of tone, and looking at me straight with those eyes of his, he said:--

"Tell me, doctor, is Miss Westenra to be married soon?"

I confess the question took me so much off my guard that I stood staring at him like a fool. I have never spoken her name within these walls. I am as certain of that as a man can be of a negative. He saw my confusion and seemed pleased with it, for he smiled, and went on in the same gentle way:--

"You need not answer. I only asked because I wished you well. A man who has lost the thing he wanted should find another thing to want as quickly as he can. I have always found it so." And he turned back to his flies and would not say another word. I tried him three or four ways, but he was as shut as an oyster.

I made inquiry afterwards and found, I think, the key. Simmons tells me that on Saturday the patient begged for the *Morning Post*, which he is sometimes allowed. In Saturday's paper, as I have since seen for myself, there was a notice of the engagement of the Hon. Arthur Holmwood, only son of Lord Godalming, to Miss Lucy Westenra, of Chatham Street. So far, so simple. But what made him fasten that paragraph upon *me*? I can only suppose that he had marked the change in me since the 25th, when I questioned him with more heat than was wise, and that he set the date of my trouble against the date of the notice and drew his own conclusions. The lunatic has time for noticing coincidences that the sane man is too busy to see, and sometimes he hits the truth by it. This man's powers of observation are greater than I had reckoned. I must be more guarded before him in future, and I must keep my face, as well as my case-book, under lock and key.

*Mem.*, that he said "the thing he wanted," and not "the lady." Was that delicacy, or his habit of mind? I think the latter.

*Letter, Friedrich Lang, of Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

"*Hotel Golden Krone, Bistritz,*

"*12 June.*

"Honoured Miss,--

"The host of this hotel has your letter, and because he has not the English, and I am teacher of languages at the Gymnasium of this town, he asks me to write you this answer. You will forgive that my English is not so good as my German. I have learned it out of books, and not from the mouth of an Englishman.

"The young English gentleman, Mr. Harker, lodged in this hotel on the night of the 3rd of May, and on the day after, which was the 4th, he went on by the diligence which goes toward the Bukovina. At the Pass of Borgo he got down from the coach. There a carriage was waiting to take him to the house of the gentleman on whose business he is come. Since then he has not come back through Bistritz, for if he had, the host must have seen him, since all travellers who come down from that side come by this road.

"Since then there has been one small news. Some ten days ago a man from the country on the other side of the Pass was at the market here and told that the English gentleman is yet at the house where he went, and that his business is not yet finished. In those mountains the post goes very seldom and not with regularity, and a letter may lie for many days in one place and be forgotten. The host thinks, and I also think, that the gentleman is only delayed by his affairs, and that you will soon have a letter from his own hand, or will see him himself, which will be better.

"The wife of the host asks me to say that she remembers well the young English gentleman, and that she wishes him a good journey home.

"With the highest respect, honoured Miss, I am

"Your obedient servant,

"FRIEDRICH LANG,

"*For the host of the Golden Krone*."

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

"*23 June.*

"My darling Mina,--

"There now! Did I not tell you it would be nothing but posts and business and mountains? A letter from the Gymnasium, and all in English, and so polite! I should like to meet your Herr Lang and give him a kiss for it, only Arthur would object, and I do not suppose Herr Lang would know what to do with it. You must stop fretting *at once*, dear, and eat your dinners, and go to bed at proper hours. I know you. You sit up over that dreadful typewriter until the candles gutter, and then you lie awake making up disasters. Jonathan is only doing what all men do, which is forgetting that women sit at home and wait.

"We are all well here. Mamma is better than she has been all the spring, and I am growing so fat and rosy that Arthur says he shall have to have the ring made larger. Dr. Seward dined with us on Tuesday. He was very kind and very grave, and looked at me in that way of his, and pronounced me the picture of health, as if it were a diagnosis. Mr. Morris sent me a great bunch of roses with a card that said only 'From a faithful friend.' Oh, Mina, I am so lucky in my friends. Tell Jonathan, when he comes, that I mean to steal you from him for a whole month, and that he must make up his mind to it.

"Your loving

"LUCY."

*Letter, Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

"*Exeter, 4 July.*

"My dear Miss Murray,--

"I have the pleasure to tell you that I had this morning a letter from Jonathan, written from his client's house and dated the 29th of June. In it he says that the business is concluded and that he is to start for home the next day. It is a short letter, and in rather a formal style for him, but I put that down to haste and to the fatigue of a long and tedious negotiation. Your correspondent at Bistritz was quite right, you see: the boy was merely detained, as I always supposed. Allowing for the roads and the railways, we may expect him in England within ten days, or at the most a fortnight. I need not say that you will be the first he comes to, nor that I shall be very willing to spare him from the office for a little while when he arrives. Pray do not give yourself any further anxiety.

"With every kind wish, believe me,

"Yours very sincerely,

"PETER HAWKINS."

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

"*23 July.*

"Jonathan found. Hospital, Buda-Pesth, three weeks. Brain fever; knows no one. Can you go to him?--HAWKINS."

Lady Russell came up from the village on the appointed morning with her plan written out and folded in her reticule. Mr Shepherd drove over from the town with his plan only in his head, having long found that a proposal committed to paper is more easily refused. They were received in the library. Sir Walter had been standing at the glass over the chimney-piece, and Elizabeth had been sitting near the Baronetage without looking at it. Anne was there too, because nobody had thought of desiring her to be anywhere else.

Lady Russell had given the subject a fortnight's anxious thought, and she had not given it alone. Several of the articles in her paper owed their exactness to Anne. Anne had sat with her at the Lodge through two long evenings over the steward's accounts, and was the only one of the family to whom it had occurred that figures might be of use in the matter. The plan was a temperate one, and Lady Russell had meant it to be. She valued the consequence of the family as much as anyone could who was not born to it, and she would not ask for more sacrifice than honesty strictly required. The London journey was to be given up for one spring. Two of the carriage-horses and one of the men were to be spared. The table was to be kept a little less splendidly, the drawing-room was to remain as it was, and the gardens and hot-houses were to be looked after by fewer hands. The charities, however, were to be restored. She could not consent that the poor of Kellynch should be the first to feel the distresses of the Hall. With such measures faithfully kept to, she believed, and Anne's figures confirmed it, the whole debt might be cleared in seven years.

Sir Walter heard her with polite attention until she reached the horses, and after that with none at all.

"Seven years!" he cried, once she had quite done. "My dear Lady Russell, do you know what you are asking? In seven years I shall be one-and-sixty. Am I to spend seven years going to church behind a pair, when the whole parish has always seen me behind four? Am I never to be seen in town? I should be forgotten there, and I should very soon deserve to be. No, no. I am sensible of your kindness. Nobody could be more sensible of it. But these are not retrenchments a gentleman can make. He might as well give up his name."

Lady Russell coloured a little, but said only that she had wished to be of use, and put the paper back in her reticule. She did not argue, for she had known Sir Walter too long to suppose that arguing would help.

Mr Shepherd now took his turn. He was a civil, cautious man, and he began by admiring what Lady Russell had proposed, so that no one should be offended. His own opinion, he said with every proper hesitation, was that there was a shorter way, which would spare Sir Walter every one of those privations. Some part of the estate might lawfully be sold, and the Hollins farm in particular was of no great consequence to the whole. There was also a good deal of fine timber in the lower park which would fetch a very handsome price just now. Between the two, the more pressing creditors might be satisfied at once, and nobody need walk or ride one step differently.

"Sell!" said Sir Walter, and nothing could have been colder than the word. "Mr Shepherd, you have known me these twenty years. Have I ever given you reason to suppose I would sell one acre of Kellynch? The estate shall go down as it came to me. As for the timber, the lower park is the only view from the south windows worth looking at. Lord Clanmore admired it particularly when he dined here in the year four. I am not going to look out every morning on stumps."

Mr Shepherd bowed, as if he had expected nothing better, which was very nearly the case. Then followed one of those silences in which everyone knows the difficulty is exactly where it was and nobody likes to be the first to say so.

Anne broke it. She had not meant to speak, and she was more surprised than anyone to hear her own voice. But she had sat over the figures, she knew their whole weight, and the silence was too hopeless to be borne.

"If I may say so, sir," she said, "I think the difficulty is not that Lady Russell's plan asks too much, but that it asks too little. If it cannot be borne for seven years, it might perhaps be borne better if it were stricter and shorter. Suppose we gave up London altogether, not for one spring but for three, and did not take the house in town at all. Suppose we kept only one carriage and one pair, let the hot-houses go entirely, gave up the second footman, did not entertain beyond our own family, and reduced Elizabeth's allowance and mine as well as everything else. Then I believe the whole might be paid in less than five years, and not an acre sold, nor a tree felled. It would be hard for a time. But it would end, and in the meanwhile no one need think that Kellynch had been changed."

She stopped, and felt her cheeks grow warm. Sir Walter looked at her with the kind of astonishment one might feel if a portrait on the wall had given an opinion. Mr Shepherd looked at his boots. Lady Russell looked at Anne with an expression that said more than she would have allowed herself to say aloud.

It was Elizabeth who answered. "I think Anne is quite right."

If Anne's speaking had surprised them, this surprised them far more. Elizabeth had never in her life been known to think Anne right, and the three who knew her best stared at her together. Why she said it would not be easy to explain, and she could hardly have explained it herself. Perhaps the word *retrench* had been in her own mouth so long, with no effect, that she was glad of any plan that sounded decisive. Perhaps she was still smarting at the memory of the linen-draper in the market town, who had looked at her across his counter on the previous Tuesday in a way no Miss Elliot should be looked at by a linen-draper. Or perhaps she had understood only that the plan was strict and would be over soon, and had not yet counted what it would take from her. Whatever the cause, she said it, and she said it again when her father appealed to her.

"Elizabeth! You cannot have considered."

"I have considered, sir, that I would rather do without a great many things than be dunned in my own county. Everyone in the town knows how we stand. I am sure of it."

Sir Walter was more disconcerted by this than by anything else that had been said to him that morning. But he recovered, as vanity always does, by concluding that his daughter was out of spirits and that Anne had upset her. He would think of it, he said. With Sir Walter, those words had always meant that he would not. Meanwhile he could only observe that Anne had very little notion of what was due to the family, which was hardly to be wondered at, since she went nowhere and saw nobody.

Mr Shepherd had been watching all this with a lawyer's eye. He now saw that no retrenchment whatever, stricter or milder, was going to be admitted, and he judged that the time had come to name the only remedy left. He approached it by degrees, as one approaches a nervous horse.

"There is one other course, Sir Walter, which I mention only so that nothing may be left unconsidered. I would not press it for a moment. But many gentlemen of the first consequence have found it convenient, for a few years, to live elsewhere, where their establishment might be what they pleased and cost them less. Meanwhile a place like Kellynch, so handsome, so complete, and so well kept, would easily find a tenant of the most unexceptionable—"

"A tenant!"

Sir Walter stood up. Elizabeth had turned pale.

"A tenant at Kellynch! A stranger at my table, in my bedroom, walking about my grounds, and I somewhere in lodgings, hearing of it by the post! Mr Shepherd, I will say this once and I will not say it again. I will not have that word spoken in this house. I will never have it spoken in my presence, by you or anybody else. There is no such word, so far as Kellynch Hall is concerned."

Mr Shepherd, who had been ordered to be silent by better men than Sir Walter, bowed low and said that he had done. He had not meant to give pain, he said, and he would never mention the matter again unless Sir Walter himself should mention it first. Sir Walter heard only an apology in this, and did not notice the reservation at its end. Shortly afterwards Mr Shepherd took his leave, apparently no more discouraged than a man who has sown a field and must wait for the rain.

Lady Russell soon followed him. As Anne walked with her to the carriage, she pressed Anne's hand. "You did right, my dear," she said. "You did quite right, though it came to nothing. I have never heard you speak so well." Anne had heard little praise in her life, and this was dearer to her than she could say. But she also knew how completely it had come to nothing, and the praise could not make her forget it.

The afternoon post brought a letter from Uppercross. It was addressed to Anne, and was in Mary's usual style:

"My dear Anne,

"I am so very unwell that I can hardly hold my pen, and I dare say you will not be able to read half of this. I have had a sore throat since Sunday, and such a weakness and lowness as you cannot imagine. Charles is out from morning to night and cares nothing about it, and Mrs Musgrove has not been to see me since Friday, though she knows perfectly well how I am. The children are more noise than I can bear. Nobody could be more ill used than I am. I wish you would come to me directly. I am sure Kellynch can spare you, for Elizabeth never wants you, and I want you very much. Pray come as soon as you can, and do not let my father put you off.

"Your affectionate sister, "Mary Musgrove."

Anne read it aloud at tea, since there was nothing in it that could not be read aloud. It was received much as she had expected.

"Mary is always ill," said Elizabeth, "and always wanting somebody."

"Well, Anne may go," said Sir Walter. "I do not see what she is wanted for here." Then, having remembered the morning, he added with some severity, "It will do her good to be in a family where her advice is not required."

Elizabeth seemed to feel the reproach as much as Anne did, though for a different reason. She had been quiet all afternoon, and a little before the candles were lit she was heard to say that she had not understood Anne to mean the London house next spring as well. The next spring was a different thing, for she had particular reasons for being in town next spring. If Anne had meant to include it, she could not answer for having agreed to anything. Sir Walter was relieved to find that his eldest daughter was herself again, and the subject was dropped.

It was a long, still summer evening. When Anne was at last free to go to her own room, the light had not left the sky, and she sat for some time at the open window. Below her the lower park lay in grey shadow, every tree of it still standing. She had resolved to go to Mary. The resolution had cost her very little, because she was so evidently not wanted where she was, and it was something to be wanted anywhere, even by Mary, and even for a sore throat. She would write in the morning, and go as soon as the carriage could be spared. Before she was more than a mile from the house, she knew, her going would be forgotten.

Yet she could not think of leaving Kellynch without a heavy heart, and she could think with even less comfort of how things stood there. Two plans had been laid before her father that day and refused. A third had been offered, for one moment supported by the last person she would have expected to support it, and then quietly withdrawn. A fourth remedy had been named and forbidden, and there was now a word which must not be spoken. The linen-draper's bill had not been paid, and neither had any of the heavier bills behind it. The debt stood exactly where it had stood when Lady Russell walked up from the village that morning. The only difference Anne could find was that Sir Walter now had one more thing to refuse to think about.

She sat until the last of the light was gone from the park, and then she closed the window.

“You have been hunting us like a pack of hounds,” said Madame Ratignolle when they had left the beach behind them and entered upon the sandy path. “One cannot escape you for an hour.”

“One escaped me for two,” returned Robert. “I went first to your cottage, and then to Mrs. Pontellier’s, and then I searched the whole of the camomile. The children would have it that you had gone over to the Chênière in a boat.”

She leaned upon him heavily, and they went very slowly. Every little while she stopped to press a gloved hand to her side, or to bend and rub her knee through the ruffles. She declared that she was an old woman and a wreck, and that some day she would be carried home upon a shutter. Robert protested with all the gravity the occasion demanded. He was used to Madame Ratignolle’s afflictions. They came and went with the weather, and they had never yet kept her from dancing.

“What were you two talking of, there on the gallery?” he asked presently. “Mrs. Pontellier’s face was as red as a rose. I have never seen her so. For a moment I thought you had been scolding her.”

“I scold her! It was she who talked. I only listened. She was telling me about Kentucky, and a field of grass that she walked through when she was little.”

Robert looked back over his shoulder. The children’s tent was a small white patch far behind them against the glare of the water. Edna could not be told apart from it.

“She will never learn to swim, you know,” he said. “I have given up hoping. It is not that she lacks the strength. She has more than you would think. It is that she will not let the water hold her up. She keeps one hand on the rope or on my arm, always. I don’t believe she has ever in her life let anything hold her up: not the water, nor any of us.”

Madame Ratignolle laughed a little. Then she gave a small cry and stood still in the path. “Oh, my knee! You are a philosopher this morning, Robert. It must be the heat. Give me your arm again. No, the other one. I am all on one side to-day.”

That was all she said on the subject. The cramp in her limbs occupied her fully until they reached her own door, where the nurse came out to meet her with the baby.

At dinner a telegram was brought to Mrs. Pontellier. A boy had carried it up from the wharf, and he stood waiting at the end of the long table with his cap in his hand while she opened it. It said: “Detained by business. Cannot come out Saturday. Writing. Léonce.”

She read it twice and folded it into a small square. Madame Lebrun, from the head of the table, hoped that it was not bad news.

“Oh, no,” said Edna. “Mr. Pontellier will not come out this week, that is all.”

There was a little chorus of sympathy up and down the table. Some one said that the city was not fit to live in at this season, and some one else that the brokers were all alike and would work themselves into their graves. Edna answered pleasantly, and slipped the square of paper into the pocket of her muslin. She had not known until that moment that she had been waiting for Saturday. Now that Saturday had been taken away she felt nothing she could name. Then, a little later, while the others were talking of something else, she felt a curious lightness. It was as though a hand had been lifted from her shoulder, a hand she had not known was resting there. She was ashamed of the feeling and put it aside, but it stayed near her all through the meal.

In the afternoon the whole place slept. The quadroon nurse took the children into the cottage for their nap, and the long galleries of the main house were empty and shuttered against the heat. Edna could not sleep. She lay for a while on her bed, looking at the ceiling. Then she got up and took her key from the table, where she had flung it that morning, and went down to the beach alone.

The wind had dropped since morning. The water that had been whipped into froth lay almost still now, with a slow, lazy swell that lifted and let fall the fringe of weed along the shore. Nobody was bathing. The Creoles did not go into the water until the sun was low, and at this hour the beach belonged to the gulls. Only the lady in black was there, on the porch of the neighboring bath-house, with her book open on her knees. It might have been the same book and the same page, and she might not have stirred since morning.

Edna unlocked her compartment, put on her bathing suit, and went down into the water.

She walked out slowly until it came to her waist, and then to her breast. It was warm, much warmer than she had expected, and very clear. She could see her own feet, pale and far away on the rippled sand. There was no rope within reach, and no one's arm. She stood a long time with her hands resting on the surface of the water, as a person might rest them on a table.

Then, without any resolution that she was aware of, she leaned forward and let her feet go.

The water held her. She felt it gather beneath her body like something alive. She struck out once, and again, clumsily, with a great deal of splashing, and then a third and a fourth time with less. For the space of those few strokes she was going somewhere of her own accord, and nothing touched her but the sea. Then a sudden terror took her. She let her feet drop and found the sand, which was nearer than she had feared, and she stood up, gasping and streaming, and laughed aloud. She could not have said whether she laughed from fright or from delight. She did it again, and a third time, and each time the terror came a little later.

When she came up out of the water the lady in black had lifted her eyes from her book.

“You went out a long way, madame,” she said.

Edna had never heard her voice. It was low and rather pleasant, not the voice of an old woman at all. She had somehow supposed the lady in black to be old.

“Not so very far,” said Edna.

“It is always farther than it looks, from the shore.” The lady in black turned a page. “I come at this hour because nobody comes,” she added, as if in apology, or perhaps in reproach. Then she bent her head over her devotions again and did not look up any more.

Edna stood a moment, dripping upon the hot planks, uncertain whether anything more was expected of her. Nothing was. She went into her compartment and dressed. She could not tell how much the woman had seen, and she did not want to ask.

She told no one. At supper Robert proposed that they all bathe by moonlight, and she said that she was tired. When the others went down she went instead to the Ratignolle cottage, where Adèle was lying on a lounge in her white wrapper, with her hair unbound and a bottle of smelling-salts at her elbow, receiving visitors as a queen might.

“Sit here, close, where I can see you,” said Madame Ratignolle. “I have been thinking of you all day. Do you know what Robert said of you this morning, walking home? I nearly died laughing, but I was in too much pain. He said you would never learn to swim. He said you would not let the water hold you up; that you have never let anything hold you up in your life, not the water, nor any of them. Is it not droll? Robert, a philosopher! I told him it was the heat.”

Edna laughed too. The words were very near her lips: *But I have. This afternoon. Four strokes, and then four again.* She did not say them. It seemed to her that the thing would be made smaller by telling it, and would belong afterward to Adèle and to Robert and to all of them, and she could not bear that yet. She said instead that Robert was very clever at knowing what other people could not do. Madame Ratignolle said that all men were, and began to talk of her knee.

It was late when Edna came back to her own cottage. The children were asleep, the little one with his fist thrown up beside his face, and Raoul crosswise on the bed, as he always lay. The nurse had gone to her own quarters. Edna did not light the lamp. She sat alone on the gallery in the dark, with her hands lying in her lap.

The bathers had come up from the beach long ago. Now and then a voice sounded from the main house, a door closed, a piano played a few bars and stopped. Beyond it all she could hear the sea, very low, turning over and over upon the sand. The telegram was still in her pocket. She took it out once, looked at the pale square of it in the starlight, and put it back without unfolding it.

It was not the telegram she was thinking of. She was thinking of Robert's words as Adèle had given them to her, with Adèle's laughter still about them. *Not the water, nor any of us.* She went over them again and again. At one moment they seemed a reproach, and at the next the kindest thing that had ever been said of her. She wondered whether he had meant "us" or whether Adèle had changed it, and which of them she would have preferred. She remembered the water gathering beneath her body, and the sand nearer than she had feared. She sat on in the dark a long while after the piano had stopped for good, and she did not go in.

"Have you?" I said.

"Rotten. All week."

The taxi went up the hill and around the dark bulk of the Pantheon and started down the Rue Saint-Jacques. The street was narrow and the lights from the cafés came into the cab and went out again. Brett sat back in the corner with her eyes closed. I sat and watched her face when the lights came in.

"Don't let's go to the park," she said. "I can't bear parks at night. They make me feel I ought to be something."

"Where do you want to go?"

She opened her eyes. "Tell him the Lilas. Nobody we know ever goes to the Lilas."

"Your crowd's going to Montmartre."

"That's why, darling."

I leaned forward and told the driver. He nodded without turning his head, and at the bottom of the Rue Saint-Jacques he swung into the Boulevard de Port Royal and we went along under the trees. The trees had their new leaves and the leaves were very green where the street lamps shone up into them. Brett did not say anything and I did not say anything. The driver pulled up at the corner where the Boulevard Saint-Michel comes in, and I paid him and we got out.

The terrace of the Closerie des Lilas was nearly empty. There were two men playing chess at a table inside by the window, and a waiter asleep in a chair against the wall with his napkin over his knee. The statue of Marshal Ney stood out in front among the chestnut trees with his sword up, and nobody was looking at him. We sat down at a table behind the hedge. The waiter woke up and came out.

"Brandy and soda," Brett said.

"Two," I said.

The waiter went in. Brett took out a cigarette and I lit it for her. Her hand was not steady and she held my wrist to keep the match still.

"I'm not going to get tight," she said.

"You said that."

"I'll say it again. I'm not going to get tight and I'm not going to Montmartre and I'm not going to be miserable. There."

"Good."

"It isn't good. It's only what I'm saying."

The waiter brought the brandy and the siphon and two saucers, and Brett squirted in the soda herself, a long way, and we drank. It was cool under the trees and there was no wind. Out on the Boulevard a cab went by, and then nothing went by for a long time.

"Do you know a man called Mippipopolous?" Brett asked.

"No."

"A count. He's Greek. I met him last week at Zelli's." She drank some of the brandy and soda. "He's got money. Simply stacks of it."

"What does he do?"

"Nothing, now. He used to own things. Shops, I think, somewhere in America. Candy shops. He has a car about as long as this terrace and a chauffeur who never says anything at all. He sent me flowers three days running. Great masses of them. The woman at the hotel thinks I'm going to be married."

"Are you?"

"Don't be an ass." She looked at me. "He wants to take me to Biarritz."

"Are you going?"

"Don't know. He says he doesn't want anything. He says he only wants to be seen about with me. He says it's enough for a man of his age to be seen about with a lovely woman."

"That's what they all say."

"No. I rather think he means it. He's rather a dear, really. He never gets tight and he never gets cross and he always has the right sort of wine."

"He sounds fine."

"He is fine. He's absolutely fine, darling."

One of the chess players inside moved a piece and sat back and the other one leaned forward over the board. I watched them through the window.

"You ought to go to Biarritz," I said.

"Ought I?"

"It would do you good. There's the sea air."

"You'd not mind?"

"Why would I mind?"

"No reason, darling. None at all."

"It's a fine place in the spring. They've got a casino."

"I adore a casino."

"Well, then."

"Well, then," Brett said. She put her cigarette out in the saucer, turning it round and round until it was all out.

I minded like hell, and I did not want her to go anywhere with anybody, and I sat there and told her about the casino.

"Let's have another," Brett said.

"Right."

I called the waiter. He came out slowly, the way waiters do after one o'clock, and I ordered the two drinks and he went in and brought them. Brett drank hers faster than the first one.

"You're going to lose your fifty francs," she said. "I keep thinking about it. It's the only funny thing that's happened all night."

"I'm going back for it."

"Darling, you're not."

"It's fifty francs."

"It's a gesture, then. You made a gesture and now you want your gesture back."

"I want my fifty francs back."

Brett laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since we left the bal, and it was a good laugh. "All right," she said. "I'll come and sit in the cab. I won't go in. I couldn't face Frances. Not in that heat."

We paid and walked out to the corner and found a taxi coming down from the Gare Montparnasse. I told the driver the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. We went back down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, past the Luxembourg with its gates shut and the trees black behind the railings, and turned at the Rue Soufflot and went up to the Pantheon again and down the other side. The taxi stopped in front of the Bal. The light was still coming out of the door and I could hear the accordion.

"Don't be long," Brett said. "I'll get lonely and go off with the chauffeur."

"He's got a wife and six children."

"How do you know?"

"They all have."

I went in. The room was not so full now. The Braddocks party was gone from the long table and there were only a few couples dancing, working people from the quarter who had come in late. The proprietor was still up on his stool with the accordion and the bells on his ankle, and his face was wet and shining. The policeman was sitting at a table near the door and Georgette was sitting with him. They had a bottle of wine between them. She had her hat off and it lay on the bench beside her.

The patronne saw me and smiled and reached under the zinc bar and brought out the envelope.

"She did not go out with any of those gentlemen," she said. "They went away to Montmartre. Your friends, too. All of them."

"Thank you."

"She has been waiting a long time. The *agent* has been keeping her company."

I took the envelope and went over to the table. The policeman stood up and shook hands with me and sat down again. Georgette looked up.

"So," she said. "It's you."

"It's me."

"You're a fine type. You bring a girl to dinner and then you leave her with a lot of those."

"They danced with you."

"Danced. Yes, they danced with me. All night they danced with me. That is no way to make a living." She looked at the policeman. "He knows. He's been watching. Tell him."

"She danced very well," the policeman said. "Everybody said so."

I handed her the envelope. She opened it and took out the note and looked at it and smoothed it out on the table and folded it and put it in her bag.

"Fifty francs," she said. "And a dinner. It's not so bad."

"No."

"The one who took you away. The one with the hair like a boy. She's your girl?"

"No."

"She's English?"

"Yes."

"She looked at you like a girl. I saw." Georgette poured herself some more wine from the bottle and looked at it and did not drink it. "Is she sick too?"

"Everybody's sick," I said. "You said so."

"That's true. I said so." She drank the wine. "Well, go on. She's waiting for you. I have my friend here. He's going to see me home. He's very respectable."

"Very," the policeman said.

"Good night, Georgette."

"Good night, Jacob the American. It's a shame. We got on well."

I went out. The cab was at the curb with the engine running and Brett was sitting in the corner with her legs crossed, smoking.

"Did you get it?"

"I gave it to her."

"Then you didn't get it at all."

"No."

"Oh, Jake," Brett said. "You are a fool. You're a lovely fool." She moved over so I could get in. "Was she very angry?"

"No. She was sitting with the policeman."

"How perfectly right. Where shall we go?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"I don't want to go anywhere. I want to drive about."

I told the driver to go down to the river, and we went down the hill and along past the Place Maubert and out onto the quai. The river was black and there were lights on the bridges. We drove along the quais on the left bank, past Notre Dame, which was grey and very big, and past the Île Saint-Louis with the trees along the edge of it, and across and back along the other side. Brett held my hand. We did not talk much. Once she went to sleep for a little while with her head against the side of the cab, and I sat and watched the river go by and the lamps on the bridges, and the driver drove very slowly because he was being paid by the meter and it was all the same to him.

When she woke up it was getting grey. The sky was grey over the roofs to the east, and the river was grey, and the lamps on the bridges were yellow and weak and did not seem to be doing anything any more.

"What time is it?"

"About half-past four."

"God. What a night." She sat up and looked for her compact in her bag and looked at her face in it. "Don't look at me."

"You look fine."

"I look like the morning after the Armistice. Let's get out and walk. I want to walk."

"You wouldn't walk across the street."

"I want to walk now, darling. I've changed."

I stopped the driver at the Pont des Arts and paid him and we got out. It was cold and Brett put her hands in the pockets of her jersey. We walked along the quai under the trees. The bookstalls along the parapet were shut up and padlocked. Below us a barge was tied up against the stone, and a man was standing in the stern of it in his undershirt, looking at the sky. Smoke was coming out of the little chimney of the barge.

"I shan't go to Biarritz," Brett said.

"Go if you want to."

"I don't know what I want. That's the trouble. I never know what I want."

"You want to go to bed."

"No, I don't. That's the one thing I don't want." She stopped and leaned on the parapet and looked down at the barge. "Mippipopolous said he'd be at Zelli's till they closed. He never goes to bed at all. He says at his age sleep is a waste of the time that's left."

"It's closed by now."

"They never close. Not till six."

We stood and looked at the river. A taxi came along the quai, slowly, with the flag up. Brett watched it come.

"Get me that one, darling. Will you?"

I stepped out and waved and the driver pulled over. I opened the door and Brett got in and sat on the edge of the seat and looked at me.

"Where shall I tell him?"

"Tell him my hotel." Then, when I had turned to tell him, "No. Tell him the Rue Fontaine."

I told him the Rue Fontaine.

"Don't hate me, Jake."

"I don't hate you."

"You're the only one I don't want to hate me."

"Go on," I said. "He'll close."

"He won't close. He never closes." She put her hand out of the window and I held it, and then the taxi started and she took it back in. She did not look back. I watched the taxi go along the quai and up onto the Pont du Carrousel and across the river, and then I could not see it any more.

I walked along the quai toward the Pont Neuf. It was getting light fast now. The sky over the Île de la Cité had gone from grey to white and there was a little yellow in it, and the water was beginning to show green close in against the stones. A man was fishing off the lower quai by the bridge, sitting on a box with a long pole out over the water, and a boy was sitting beside him watching the float. A street-sweeper was hosing down the pavement at the corner and he stopped the water to let me by. I crossed the Rue Dauphine and kept on along the river. The first tram came along the quai, empty and lighted, and went on past. I was very tired. I thought about the fifty francs and about Georgette sitting with the policeman, and it seemed very funny, and then it did not seem funny. I kept on walking along the river. It was a fine morning and the chestnut trees along the quai were all out in leaf, and in a little while the sun would be up and it would be warm.

Then came the night of the first falling star. I had sat late over my papers that night. I remember I had argued myself into a difficulty about the relation of pity to foresight in the civilised man, and could not argue myself out again. A little before three in the morning I put down my pen and went out into the garden to cool my head. The air was still warm, and there was no moon. Mars, I recollect, had gone down some time before, and I looked for it with a faint sense of disappointment. As I stood there a light appeared high in the west, a greenish-white streak that drew itself out eastward across the sky. It was no brief scratch of fire such as one sees on any August night. It travelled, and it grew brighter as it went, until for a moment it threw the shadows of the apple trees across the grass. Then it passed down behind the elms in the direction of Chertsey and was gone. I thought I heard a hissing, but I have never been sure of it. After a space I heard a dull concussion, like distant blasting, which I put down at the time to the shunting of some heavy train.

I went in thinking only that I had seen a very fine meteor, and that I must tell Ogilvy of it, since he would certainly want to know its path. It did not occur to me then, and I suppose it occurred to no one else in England, that the thing I had watched had come from Mars. Very few people can have seen it at all at that hour. Those who did saw only a shooting star a little larger than common, and went back to sleep.

For all my late sitting I woke early, and was restless. I had been making a practice of taking my bicycle out before breakfast, when the roads were empty and there was no one to see my wobbling. So I wheeled it out a little after six and went along the lane towards Chertsey. I had not ridden half a mile when I saw, over the hedges to my left, a white vapour going up into the morning. It rose thick and billowing, like the steam from a laundry copper, and thinned out above the trees. It came, I judged, from the old gravel-pit beside the Bourne, which the winter floods had filled and which the summer had never quite emptied. I thought at once of the light I had seen. I got off my machine, left it against the hedge, and went across the field.

The pit was a sheet of water perhaps a hundred yards across. It lay among heaps of spoil, and gorse and broom grew thickly about its edges. At its nearer end the whole appearance of the place was changed. The sandy bank had been ploughed up and flung outward in a great fan, and the gorse along it was scorched brown and smouldering in patches. The water was turbid and yellow. It seethed and bubbled, and the steam went up from it continually. Out of the midst of the steam, when the air moved and thinned it, I saw a great rounded mass lying half-sunk in the water.

What showed of it was a curved surface, grey-brown in colour and crusted with a thick, scaly, dun substance like clinker. I could see eight or nine yards of that curve standing clear of the water. How much more lay below I could not tell. The water about it heaved and simmered, and a smell of hot iron and wet ashes came from it. Now and then some piece of the crust cracked away with a small sharp sound and fell hissing into the pool. I went as near as I dared, which was not very near, for even at twenty yards the heat struck upon my face like the heat of an open oven. I stood there a long while. What held me, I think, was the evenness of that curve. I had seen meteorites in museums, and they were lumpish, knotted, shapeless things. This was as smooth in its rounding as a boiler.

I was alone there. The only sounds were the hissing of the water and the ticking of the crust as it cooled. A lark was going up somewhere over the fields beyond, quite indifferent to the matter. At last I went back to my bicycle and rode home faster than I had ever ridden before, and fell off only once.

My wife was at the breakfast table. I told her the whole story, very disjointedly, over a cup of coffee I did not drink. She listened with a sort of amused patience at first, as she listened to most of my enthusiasms. But when I spoke of the steam and the burning gorse she put down her cup and said she would come and see it for herself. I was glad of it. We walked back together along the lane, she with her hand upon my arm and I pushing the bicycle with the other. It must then have been a little after eight o'clock.

We found that we were no longer the only visitors. Two men from the gravel-works stood upon the spoil heap with their hands in their pockets. A small boy was throwing sticks into the pit for a dog, and the dog would not fetch them. And on the scorched bank, hatless, with his coat off and his face very red, was Ogilvy. He had seen the flare from his observatory, it appeared, and had marked its bearing. He had been walking about the country since dawn looking for the place where it fell. He greeted me with extraordinary warmth, as a man greets a friend who arrives in time to share a piece of good fortune, and he bowed to my wife.

"The finest fall in England in a hundred years," he said, "and it has come down in a puddle! Did you ever know such luck?"

I asked him what he supposed it to be.

"Suppose it to be?" said he. "It's a meteorite, of course. An aerolite, a siderite, whatever you please. A lump of iron and nickel that has been going round the sun since before there were men to see it, and has chanced to cross our path at last."

"It is very regular in its shape for a lump," I said.

"They take all manner of shapes," he answered at once. "The air works on them as they come down. It melts the surface and wears it smooth, as the sea wears a pebble. You get fusion pits, you get a crust—that's what you see there, that scaly stuff. The water has cooled one side of it faster than the other, and that accounts for the cracking."

"And the size of it?"

"The size of it is magnificent. I grant you that. It will go to South Kensington, and they will have to build a room for it."

"If a mass of that size had come down at the speed of a meteor," I said, "I should have thought it would bury itself out of sight. It would make a crater, and not simply lie in a pond like a stranded boat. It does not look to me as though it had fallen so much as settled."

"The water broke its fall," said Ogilvy. "Besides, you don't know how much of it is under there, nor how deep it went. It may be sitting on the floor of the pit this minute with forty feet of it below the surface."

I did not press him on that. But while we talked, a great flake of the crust came away near the top of the curve and slid into the water. Where it had been, a band of metal showed through, pale and bright, almost white in the sunlight.

"There," I said. "No iron I ever saw was that colour."

"Nickel," said Ogilvy, a shade too quickly. "An alloy of nickel. They are very rich in nickel, some of them."

Then I said what had been in my mind since I first saw the steam. I said that the flames on Mars had been seen only a few weeks before, and that it seemed to me a strange coincidence that this should come now.

He laughed outright at that and clapped me on the shoulder. "Oh, you'd have it a letter from our neighbours!" he cried. "Posted on the planet and delivered by the morning post! My dear fellow, those were volcanoes, or a shower of meteors striking the planet, as I told you at the time. And if something were thrown off from Mars, what are the odds against its coming down in Surrey? No. I said the chances against anything manlike on Mars were a million to one, and I say so still. This is an iron stone. It is a very large one and a very hot one, and nothing more."

My wife had said nothing all this while. She stood a little behind me, looking at the thing through the drifting steam. Now she said quietly, to me rather than to him, "It looks as if it had been made."

Ogilvy heard her and turned with great gallantry to explain the matter again from the beginning: the ablation, the fusion crust, the nickel. She listened politely and did not argue. But I saw that she was not convinced, and I found that I was very glad she had said it, because I had not quite liked to say it myself.

Ogilvy was now full of plans. He tore a leaf from his pocket-book and wrote a telegram against his knee. He gave the elder of the two gravel-men a shilling to carry it to the office at Chertsey, and wrote another to Markham, who would certainly want a photograph for his paper. He was anxious above all that nobody should disturb the thing, or chip at it, before a proper examination could be made. Nobody, as it happened, was able to go near enough to disturb it.

Word of it went about the neighbourhood very quickly. The boy with the dog carried it one way and the gravel-man carried it the other. A milk-cart went by in the lane, and the milkman stood up on his seat and stared, and drove off to tell every house on his round. By half-past nine there were twenty people about the pit. By eleven there were a hundred or more. They came from Chertsey and Addlestone and Ottershaw, on foot and in traps and on bicycles: shopmen who should have been in their shops, labourers from the fields, girls in print dresses, a number of boys who had no business out of school. Most of them had heard that a star had fallen, and were a little disappointed to find it so dull a colour. They stood along the spoil heaps and on the scorched bank and stared at the steaming mass in the water, and talked. There was very little to see. The water had ceased to bubble, though a thin steam still went up from it, and the crust went on cracking and dropping away. Every time a flake fell a little stir went through the crowd, as though something more were expected.

It was a little before noon that a young fellow from the gravel-works was hurt. He was a big, loose-limbed lad of eighteen or so, and he had been boasting among his friends that he would lay his hand on the thing. At last someone took him at his word and wagered him a pot of beer. The water at the edge of the pit had cooled a good deal, and the steam was now very thin. Ogilvy shouted at him to come back, but before anyone could stop him he had waded out up to his thighs, laughing over his shoulder. He reached up and put his open palm flat against the crust.

I shall not soon forget the cry he gave. He snatched his hand back and went over backwards into the water, and came up floundering and choking. Two of his friends went in and dragged him out. He came up the bank holding his wrist and white to the lips, and when he opened his hand the skin of the palm was blistered and puckered. It was already turning a dreadful whitish colour. The laughter in the crowd stopped, and people drew back from the water's edge of their own accord. My wife went to him before I did. She soaked her handkerchief in the pit at a place well away from the thing, bound up his hand with it, and made him sit down in the shade of the gorse. Ogilvy found someone with a trap who would drive him to the doctor at Chertsey. He went off still shaking. He was not, I learned afterwards, much the worse for it in the end, but for a good hour he was a warning to everyone at the pit. No one else tried to touch the thing that day.

It was very hot by then. The sun stood nearly overhead, and the heat of the day was added to the heat that still came off the pit. The scorched gorse smelt strongly. More people were coming all the time along the lane. A man had set up a stall of ginger-beer and oranges by the gate of the field, and he was doing a very good trade. Presently the local constable arrived, perspiring heavily, and began to walk up and down in front of the crowd, telling everyone to stand back. There was no need, for everyone was standing back already.

My wife had come back to my side, and I saw that she was pale. It was the heat, she said, and the lad's hand. But I think it was something more than that: the thing lay there so large and silent in the water, and no one knew what it was. I told her she had better go home out of the sun. I said there was nothing more to see, and there would certainly be nothing more to see before the evening. I said I would stay only to hear what Ogilvy's friends said when they came, and would be home by tea-time. She was unwilling to go without me. For a little while she stood holding my sleeve and looking at the pit, and she did not answer. Then she made me promise that I would not go near the thing, and that I would not let Ogilvy persuade me to go near it. I promised readily enough. At last she went.

I watched her go along the edge of the field, a small figure against the hedge, through the people who were still coming in. At the stile she turned and lifted her hand, and I lifted mine. Then she was out of sight in the lane. I turned back to the pit, and to the grey curve lying in the water with the thin steam going up from it. Ogilvy was talking eagerly to a newcomer about nickel and fusion crusts, and the crowd was growing all the while.

When Mary awoke the train had stopped, and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the shoulder.

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

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 rain had grown thinner, but it still fell, and the lamps on the platform made yellow blurs in the wet. Mrs. Medlock stepped down briskly, holding her bonnet with one hand. Then she stopped so suddenly that Mary, who was coming down behind her, nearly walked into the black silk mantle.

A man was standing under the station lamp. He wore a long dark cloak with a cape to it, and he stood quite still with the rain dripping from the edge of his hat. Near him stood an old servant holding an umbrella, which he did not seem to care to have held over him. Mary saw at once that one of his shoulders was higher than the other, and she knew who he was before Mrs. Medlock said anything at all.

"Mr. Craven, sir!" said Mrs. Medlock, and her voice was not brisk and hard any more. It was flustered and rather breathless, and the purple velvet flowers in her bonnet trembled very much. "I never thought--I'd no notion, sir, that you'd--"

"No," said Mr. Craven.

That was all he said to her. He did not seem to hear the rest. He looked past her at Mary, and Mary, because she did not know what else to do, stood still and looked back at him. He had a thin face, and it would have been a handsome one if it had not been so full of trouble. His eyes were dark and his black hair had a little white in it. He looked at her for what seemed a long time, as if he were looking for something in her face and could not find it. Mary did not know whether it was her plainness he was looking at, or her sallow skin, or her black crêpe hat. She only knew that nobody had ever looked at her so, and she held her thin little body very stiff and pinched her lips together.

"This is the child," he said at last. It was not a question.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock. "Miss Mary Lennox, sir."

He did not say "How do you do?" as people did in India when they were introduced, and he did not hold out his hand. He turned his head to the old servant with the umbrella.

"Pitcher," he said, "I shall go on in the dog-cart. Medlock will bring her in the carriage."

And he turned and walked away down the platform, a little unevenly, with his cloak swinging about him, and Pitcher went after him with the umbrella. Mary heard wheels outside the station and the sound of a horse being driven away fast. Then there was only the rain.

Mrs. Medlock let out her breath as if she had been holding it.

"Well!" she said, half to herself. "Well, I never did! Five years and more, and never once--" She stopped herself, as she had done in the railway carriage, and looked sharply down at Mary. "Come along," she said. "Don't stand there staring. The horses won't wait all night."

"Why did he come?" asked Mary.

"How should I know why he came?" said Mrs. Medlock crossly. "It's not my place to know. Come along, I say."

A neat carriage stood outside the station, and a footman helped them into it. His long waterproof coat and the waterproof covering of his hat were shining and streaming with rain, as everything was. When he shut the door and mounted the box with the coachman, they drove off. Mary found herself seated in a comfortably cushioned corner, but she was not inclined to go to sleep again. She sat and looked out of the window, curious to see something of the road over which she was being driven to the queer place Mrs. Medlock had spoken of. She was thinking also of the man with the crooked shoulder who had looked at her so long and said nothing, and she found she did not like to think of it, so she stared harder out of the window.

At first there were a few lights in cottage windows, and a little church, and a shop with toys and sweets in it; then there were only hedges and trees, and then after a long time the carriage lamps showed a rough road running between low bushes and long grass, and beyond the bushes there was nothing at all but darkness. A wind began to rise and make a singular, wild, low, rushing sound.

"What is that?" Mary asked. "It isn't the sea, is it?"

"No, not the sea," answered Mrs. Medlock. "That's the moor. It's miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep."

The road went up and down, and several times the carriage passed over a little bridge beneath which water rushed very fast with a great deal of noise. Mary felt as if the drive would never come to an end.

Then, all at once, the horses were pulled up so sharply that Mary was thrown forward against Mrs. Medlock's knees, and the carriage stopped. They heard the coachman shouting something, and the footman jumped down from the box.

"Mercy me! what's the matter now?" cried Mrs. Medlock, and she let down the window and put her head out into the wind, holding her bonnet on with both hands.

"There's a beast i' th' road, Mrs. Medlock," the footman called back. "A yowe, laid right across it. She's gotten hersel' fast i' summat."

Mrs. Medlock said that she hoped they were not to sit there all night on account of a sheep, and while she was saying it the footman opened the door to fetch the carriage lamp from its socket. Mary did not stop to think. She had sat still for so many hours that her legs ached, and she wanted to see what a moor was. She slipped past Mrs. Medlock's purple skirts and got down into the road before anybody could catch her.

The wind met her as if it had been waiting for her. It blew her crêpe hat back and pulled at her black dress and filled her mouth, and it was cold and wet and smelled of something she had never smelled before, something sharp and earthy and sweet all together. She took three steps away from the carriage and the lamp-light, and then she stood still.

There was nothing. That was what she thought, standing there. In India there had always been something--servants, and lamps, and the noises of insects, and the hot heavy dark full of things. Here there was only the wind rushing over miles and miles of black nothing, and the rough stiff bushes brushing against her legs, and the sky, which was hardly lighter than the land. She could not see where the moor ended. It seemed to go on forever, like the rain in the railway carriage. She felt very small, and for a moment she was not sure whether she was frightened or not. She was a little frightened, and at the same time something in her wanted to walk straight on into the dark to see what was there.

Up the road, in the circle of the lamp, the footman was kneeling beside a dim, heaving, woolly shape, and there was a thin angry bleating.

"Miss Mary! Miss Mary, you come back here this minute!"

It was Mrs. Medlock, leaning out of the carriage, and her voice was very sharp indeed. Mary turned and went back, not because she was told, but because the wind was so cold. Mrs. Medlock pulled her in by the arm.

"Of all the contrary young ones!" she said. "Getting down on the moor in the pitch dark! You might have walked off into a bog and nobody the wiser till morning. Don't you ever do such a thing again."

Mary said nothing. She sat in her corner with her hat pushed crooked and her face wet, and she did not straighten the one or wipe the other. Presently the footman came back, and the lamp was put in its place, and the carriage went on, jolting and rushing through the dark. But Mary kept thinking of the smell of the wind.

"Eh! I shall be glad to see the lights," said Mrs. Medlock, a long time afterward.

They came at last to the house, which was long and low and seemed to ramble round a stone court, and Mary thought there was only one light in all of it, in a window high up in a corner. The entrance door was a huge one made of massive, curiously shaped panels of oak studded with great iron nails and bound with great iron bars. It opened into an enormous 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. As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked.

"You are to go to your room," said Mrs. Medlock, when a thin old man who opened the door for them had spoken to her in a low voice. "He's not going to see you again to-night. He's gone up to his own rooms."

Mary had not supposed that he would see her. She did not want him to.

Then Mary was led up a broad staircase and down a long corridor and up a short flight of steps and through another corridor and another, until a door opened in a wall and she found herself in a room with a fire in it. Mrs. Medlock took off Mary's wet hat and her mantle, and said that she must go and see to things, for she had been away and everything had gone at sixes and sevens, and that somebody would bring Mary's supper.

The somebody was not a maid, as Mary had expected. When the door opened again there came in a big young man in a striped waistcoat with his sleeves turned up, carrying a tray. He had a wide red face and hair that stood up at the back, and he set the tray down on the table by the fire with a great rattle of dishes.

"Theer," he said, and grinned at her. "Tha'll be t' little lass fro' furrin parts. Eh, but tha'rt nobbut a bit of a thing! Get that down thee, it'll warm thee reet through. Mrs. Medlock says th' maids is all abed, an' Martha's gone whoam to her mother's, so it's me or nowt. Tha'll no' mind that, I reckon?"

Mary stared at him. She had understood "Mrs. Medlock," and she thought she had understood "Martha," though she did not know who Martha was. The rest was like a strange language.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said in her most imperious little voice. "I can't understand you. You don't talk English properly."

The young man did not seem in the least offended. He only grinned more widely.

"Nay, happen I don't," he said. "It's Yorkshire I talk, an' it'll ha' to do thee. Tha'll get used to it." And he went out still grinning, and Mary heard him whistling as he went away down the corridor.

She ate her supper because she was hungry. When Mrs. Medlock came back, Mary stood and waited to be undressed, and Mrs. Medlock, after a sharp look at her, did it, but with such quick jerks that Mary knew she did not like it. Then Mary got into the great bed, which was so big she felt lost in it too, and Mrs. Medlock took up the candle.

It was just then that Mary heard the sound.

It was very far away. It seemed to come from somewhere deep in the house, through many walls and down many corridors. It was a low, slow sound, and then a pause, and then the low, slow sound again--as if something heavy were being moved a little way across a floor, or as if someone were walking up and down, up and down, in a room a long way off. It went on for a while and stopped, and then began again.

"What is that?" said Mary, sitting up.

Mrs. Medlock had turned toward the door. She did not turn back at once.

"What's what?" she said.

"That sound. There. Don't you hear it?"

"That's the wind," said Mrs. Medlock. "It's wuthering round the house, as it does on the moor. You'll hear plenty of it before you're done. Lie down and go to sleep."

She said it very quickly and she went out very quickly, and the door shut behind her and the candle-light went away down the corridor with her.

Mary lay down in the dark. The fire had burned low, and it made a dull red glow on the hearth and nothing more. Outside the window she could hear the wind rushing and moaning round the corners of the house, exactly as it had rushed over the moor when she stood in it. That was the wind. She knew the wind now. She had stood out in it with her hat blown back.

And under the wind, far off in the house, the low, slow sound went on--and stopped--and went on again.

The wind did not walk up and down. Mary was quite sure of that. The wind did not stop and wait and then begin again at the same slow pace. And Mrs. Medlock had not turned round when she answered, and she had gone away too fast.

Mary lay with her eyes open and stared into the dark. She had told Mrs. Medlock in the railway carriage that she should not want to go poking about, and she had meant it, because she had wished to be disagreeable. But she had not known then that there would be anything to poke about for. There was a hundred rooms in this house, and most of them were shut up and locked, and somewhere in one of them there was something that was not the wind.

"I shall find out," said Mary to herself, quite low. "I shall find out what it is myself."

And she lay very still in the great dark bed, listening, and did not go to sleep for a long time.

Eve had not gone twenty yards along Shaftesbury Avenue before she became aware that the umbrella was weighing on her conscience. The rain had stopped. A watery sun had come out and was beaming on the West End like a man who has been rude at dinner and wants to be forgiven. And here she was, walking through the streets of London with a furled umbrella that did not belong to her. It had been a kind act, and a strange one, but you could hardly go on letting it be kind for ever. Somewhere, she told herself, some anxious person was probably searching the hall of that gloomy building and asking the hall-porter bitter questions.

She turned back towards Piccadilly. It was out of her way, and she had a good deal of walking to do that day, but Eve had never been able to leave a debt unpaid when she had the money to pay it. The trouble was that she so seldom had the money.

The gloomy building turned out, on closer inspection, to be every bit as gloomy as it had seemed from under the awning. Its door was guarded by a large, grave man in a uniform, who looked as if he had been in the family for generations. He looked down at the hat with approval, and then at the umbrella with something that was almost recognition.

"I want to return this," said Eve, "to a gentleman who lent it to me this morning. I'm afraid I don't know his name. He was tall, and he wore an eyeglass, and he hadn't got a hat on."

A faint light came into the porter's face, the light of a man who knows exactly who is meant and considers it none of his business to say so.

"I know the gentleman, miss. I will see that he gets it."

"Thank you so much. Could I . . . have you a piece of paper? I should like to leave a note."

The porter produced a sheet of the club's paper and an envelope, and Eve, using the top of his little desk, wrote quickly:

*To the gentleman who lent me this umbrella outside the coal-shop this morning.--Thank you ever so much. You saved a hat which I could not in the least afford to buy and could still less afford to have spoiled, so you did more good than you probably meant to. I am bringing it back because I can't bear to think of you standing in the rain one day wondering where it went.*

She thought for a moment of signing it, and decided against it. There seemed something pleasantly unreal about the whole affair, and a name would have spoiled that. She put the note in the envelope, gave it to the porter together with the umbrella, and went out into the sunshine feeling that she had behaved well, which is always a comfortable feeling, especially for someone who so often could not.

* * * * *

Psmith came down the stairs of the Drones Club at a little after one, on his way to lunch, and found the hall-porter waiting for him with the air of a man guarding a sacred trust.

"A young lady left this for you, sir. And a note."

Psmith took the umbrella and the envelope, put up his monocle, and read the note twice. He was a young man who seldom showed emotion, but a close observer might have noticed that his face, as he folded the sheet of paper and put it in his breast-pocket, wore an expression of peculiar tenderness. He was still standing there, lost in thought, when a voice at his elbow uttered a cry like that of a mother bereft of her young.

"I say! Smith! That's my umbrella!"

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick was a pink young man who looked as if he had been designed to hold up a monocle and had never quite managed it. He was staring at Psmith with round, reproachful eyes.

"Dash it, I've been hunting for it all over the place. Robert says you took it out of the rack this morning. What on earth did you want with it? You never carry an umbrella."

Psmith regarded him with a long, grave look. He had a sound explanation to hand, but he found that he did not want to give it. There are things too sacred for the Drones smoking-room, and the note in his breast-pocket was one of them.

"Comrade Walderwick," he said, "what would you take for it?"

"Take for it?"

"I wish to buy this umbrella. Name your price."

The Hon. Hugo's jaw fell slightly.

"But I don't want to sell it. I mean, it's my umbrella. I use it when it rains."

"Very sensible. But consider. There are other umbrellas. The shops are full of them. You have only to go into any of the larger establishments in Oxford Street and say the word, and you can have as many umbrellas as you want, all sizes, all colours. Whereas this one"--he tapped it gently--"has for me a sentimental value which I would sooner not go into. Would five pounds strike you as reasonable?"

"Five pounds! It cost me eighteen and six at a place in the Strand."

"Then you have made a handsome profit, and I congratulate you. I shall always say that you have a head for business." Psmith produced his note-case, took out a five-pound note, and pressed it into the Hon. Hugo's unresisting palm. "It would be a pity to sell cheap what has become, to one of the parties at least, beyond price. The umbrella is now mine. Treat it, if you meet it, with respect."

He tucked his purchase under his arm and went on into the dining-room, leaving Mr. Walderwick staring at the note in his hand in the manner of one who is not sure whether he has been done down or showered with gold. After some thought he concluded that it was the latter and went off to have a drink on the strength of it. But for the rest of the day he looked like a man trying to remember something he had never known in the first place.

* * * * *

Psmith spent the early part of the afternoon at the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, where Enquiries received him with promptitude, courtesy and intelligence, and in the end with a certain wistful regret. It seemed there was not at the moment a great demand for young men of good appearance and unusual gifts who were willing to do anything except handle fish. He left his name and address, promised to look in again, and walked slowly down towards Trafalgar Square, swinging his umbrella in a way that showed he had grown fond of it.

He was crossing the square, in fact, when the sky, which had been making its mind up since three o'clock, suddenly clouded over and let fall a second instalment of the morning's rain. And there, at the top of Northumberland Avenue, glancing up at the heavens with an expression that Psmith already knew and cherished, stood the girl of the coal-shop.

She had no umbrella. This, Psmith reflected, was entirely his fault, and he felt it was up to him to put it right. He moved forward, opened the umbrella, and held it above the hat.

"Excuse me," he said. "It seemed to me that your hat was in danger."

Eve turned. She looked at the umbrella. She looked at Psmith. Then she looked at the umbrella again, for it had a handle of carved ivory in the shape of a duck's head, and it was not the kind of umbrella you forget after carrying it through the streets for half a morning.

"Why . . . it's you!"

"It is always a delicate question," said Psmith, "whether a man is himself or not. On the whole, I think I may say that I am."

"But you're the man who gave me this umbrella this morning. In Dover Street."

Psmith's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch.

"Gave you an umbrella? In Dover Street? I fear there must be some mistake. This umbrella has been my constant companion for years. We were boys together. I would not dream of giving it away to anybody."

"But I recognize the handle. There can't be two umbrellas with ducks like that."

"Ducks," said Psmith, "are commoner than you would suppose. There is a school of umbrella-makers, very strong in the Midlands, which does practically nothing else."

"And I recognize *you*."

"There, too, I think you may be deceived. London is full of tall men with eyeglasses. They go about in droves. I often see them in the Strand in the early morning, grazing. The one you mean was probably hatless, was he not?"

"Yes, he was."

"There you are, then," said Psmith, indicating his own hat, which was glossy and above reproach. "I never go out without mine. A man in my position has to be careful. Shall we walk? You were going down this way, I think, and it would be a pity to waste such an umbrella on a standing target."

Eve laughed. She did not believe a word of it, and she saw that he did not expect her to, and that seemed to make it all the pleasanter. They moved together down Northumberland Avenue, the rain drumming on the silk overhead.

"I took it back, you know," she said. "The umbrella. The one you didn't give me. I left it at the club with a note."

"Then I am sure the owner, whoever he was, will be very much touched. There are few pleasures like getting back an umbrella. It restores one's faith in human nature, which in the case of umbrellas is usually at a low ebb."

"I hope he read the note."

"I have no doubt," said Psmith gravely, "that he read it more than once."

She glanced up at him quickly, but his face was as solemn as a bishop's.

"I wish you'd tell me who you are," she said.

"I am a man who happens to have an umbrella at a moment when you have not. Could anyone want a finer title? This is where you were going, I think?"

They had stopped outside the imposing entrance of the Senior Conservative Club. Eve looked at it with the doubtful expression of a young woman about to be interviewed for a post she badly needs.

"How did you know?"

"You slowed down. I have a way of noticing these things. I hope that whatever lies inside is kind to you." He raised his hat, and the rain, which appeared to have been waiting for exactly this, fell on his head. "Good afternoon."

He bowed and strode off towards the Embankment. And Eve, watching him go, found that she was smiling in a way that had nothing to do with the Earl of Emsworth or the library at Blandings Castle.

* * * * *

The room into which she was shown was small and brown and smelt faintly of old leather and older statesmen. She had been in it barely two minutes when the door opened and a long, thin, stooping gentleman came in, peering about him through a pair of pince-nez with the air of one who has lost something and hopes it may turn up here. He was holding a slip of paper, at which he glanced from time to time.

"Ah!" said Lord Emsworth. "Ah, yes. How do you do? Miss--ah--" He consulted the slip. "Halliday. Yes. Half-past three. Catalogue." He beamed on her with sudden warmth. "Capital! I'm very glad you have come. I've been wanting to talk to somebody about it for weeks. Baxter's no use. Baxter doesn't care. Now, what I want to know is, why is there nothing in your catalogue about the Glory of Blandings?"

Eve, who had come prepared to discuss bibliography, first editions and the proper handling of calf bindings, blinked.

"The--?"

"My rose. My hybrid tea. I bred it myself. A deep crimson, very fragrant, and quite free from mildew. I wrote to your people about it in March. And they put in the Duchess of Somebody, a wretched washy pink thing, and nothing whatever about mine. Now, I ask you!"

It occurred to Eve that there had been a misunderstanding somewhere, and that it had been going on for some time. But Lord Emsworth was already in full flow, and there seemed no way of stopping him short of physical violence. And she did happen to know a little about roses. Her father had once written a long article on them, in forty-eight hours and in the middle of a heat wave, with Eve reading aloud from every book the public library would lend them, and a good deal of it had stuck.

So when his lordship moved on to green-fly she was able to say something intelligent about soft soap and quassia. When he went on to the evils of pruning too late, she agreed warmly and quoted an authority. And when he mentioned, in a voice shaking with emotion, that his head gardener was a Scotsman named McAllister who would not listen to reason, she was sympathetic in a way that went straight to his heart. It was a quarter past four before he paused for breath, and it was then, with some reluctance, that Eve felt obliged to speak.

"Lord Emsworth, I think . . . I'm afraid there's been a little mistake. I haven't come from the nurserymen at all. I've come about cataloguing your library."

Lord Emsworth stared at her. He took off his pince-nez, polished them, put them on again, and stared at her once more. Then he looked at the slip of paper.

"Library?" he said. "Library? God bless my soul! So you have. Baxter said something about it. The library, of course." He seemed a little dashed, as a man might be who had been counting on a rose and been handed a dictionary. Then his face cleared. "Well, well, it doesn't matter. You know a great deal about roses, Miss--ah--Halliday. A great deal more than Baxter. More than McAllister, if it comes to that, and I'd like to hear you tell him so. You must certainly come to Blandings. Certainly. Baxter will write to you about the--ah--the particulars."

He shook hands with her warmly, called her Miss Holliday, and wandered away, still talking to himself about quassia. Not a single question had been asked about books. And Eve, as she went out into Northumberland Avenue, where the rain had stopped once more, found that she did not greatly care.

* * * * *

It was nearly eight o'clock, and the smoking-room of the Drones Club was empty except for Psmith. He sat in the window, in the same chair from which he had looked out that morning, and the umbrella leaned against its arm. Now and then he looked at it thoughtfully, as a man looks at an old friend who has done him a good turn. Across the road the premises of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe had drawn in their awning for the night and returned to their normal dullness.

The door opened, and the Hon. Hugo Walderwick came in, brighter and rosier than at lunch.

"Oh, I say, Smith, there you are. I say, I saw you this afternoon. From a taxi. Walking down Northumberland Avenue under my umbrella--I mean your umbrella--with Eve Halliday."

Psmith turned his monocle slowly on him.

"With whom?"

"Eve Halliday. Girl with the hat. You know her, don't you? Thought you must, walking about with her like that. Freddie Threepwood's frightfully keen on her. Proposes about once a week, and she just laughs at him. Freddie told me he'd fixed up some job for her at his governor's place in Shropshire. Well, I'll push along. Got to dress." He hesitated at the door. "I say, Smith, about that fiver. You're quite sure . . . ?"

"Perfectly sure, Comrade Walderwick. It was the best bargain of my life."

The door closed. Psmith sat on in the growing dusk and laid a hand on the umbrella's ivory duck, as if it could be trusted with a secret.

"Eve Halliday," he said softly, trying out the sound of it. He seemed to find it satisfactory.

"Now do you know who I am?" said Mr. Franklin. I knew him well enough by then. The seven-and-sixpence told me, before his face did. I have to set this down, or you will think our young gentleman was a borrower of money from the servants, which he never was. When he was a boy of eleven or twelve, not long before they packed him off to foreign parts, he came to me in the stable-yard in great distress about a kite. It was the finest kite in the town, and it could be had for seven-and-sixpence, and his pocket-money was spent to the last farthing. I lent him the sum. He flew the kite into the sea the same afternoon, and left England the week after, and from that day to this I had never heard another word of my seven-and-sixpence. Thirteen years, and he remembered it! Say what you like about foreign education, it had not taught him to forget a debt.

"Help me up, Mr. Franklin," I said, "and we'll call it square. You have taken me unawares, sir. We didn't look for you until the afternoon train. The dog-cart is not even out of the coach-house yet."

He got me on my legs, and dusted the sand off my coat with his own gloves, which I thought very handsome of him. Then the smile went out of his face all of a sudden, and he looked round him at the sandhills in a way I did not like. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere, except the Shivering Sand, which had gone quiet again now that the turn of the tide was past.

"I'll tell you why I came early, Betteredge," says he, "and I'll tell you here, where nobody can hear us. It was a letter. Read it for yourself."

He took a pocket-book out of his breast-pocket, and a folded half-sheet of paper out of the pocket-book, and gave it into my hand. It was common paper, such as you buy by the quire at any stationer's. The writing was small and very upright, like the hand of a man who writes more in account-books than in letters. There was no date and no address, and there was no name at the end of it. I copy it here word for word, for Mr. Franklin let me take a copy of it afterwards, and I have it by me now.

"To Franklin Blake, Esquire.

"Sir,—You have lately had placed in your keeping a certain thing, which came to you from a gentleman who is known to you by the name of uncle. Other persons know this, besides yourself. It is also known that you travel into Yorkshire by the afternoon train of Thursday, and that you are expected at the end of your journey by the close of the day. Take the advice of one who wishes you no harm, and go by an earlier train. When you arrive, do not keep what you carry in your own bedchamber for the first night. Lock it up under a key that is not your own. Do not show this letter to any lady.

"A WELL-WISHER."

I read it twice, and gave it back to him. I will own that it made the skin creep a little at the back of my neck. That is a thing which happens to me very seldom, and never before dinner.

"When did you get this, sir?" I asked.

"Yesterday evening, at my father's house in London," says Mr. Franklin. "It was left by hand. The servant who took it in could only say that a man brought it, a respectable-looking man in black, who went away without waiting. I laughed at it, Betteredge. I put it in the fire, and then I took it out again before it had caught, which shows you how much I laughed. This morning, when I came out of the house, there was a man loitering on the other side of the street. I never saw his face. He was there when I got into the cab, and I fancied I saw him again at the station. It may have been nothing at all. But I changed my ticket and came on by the early train, and here I am, four hours before my time, with a letter in my pocket from somebody who knows my business better than I like."

He folded the letter and put it away, and then he gave a little laugh. It was the laugh of a man who would much rather not be taken seriously.

I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell him then and there about the three Indians on the terrace, and the ink in the boy's hand, and the English gentleman who "had got It about him." Penelope had made me promise, and here was the very gentleman in front of me. But something in his face stopped me. I was also, I own, a little ashamed of bringing up a parcel of conjuring-tricks against a written letter. I held my tongue for the present. I am a great one for the present. How and when I did tell him, and what he made of it, you shall hear in its proper place. It came to him out of my mouth that same day, and it did not sit easier on him than the letter had.

We went back together through the fir plantation. Half-way through, where the path is darkest, Mr. Franklin stopped, looked behind him, and put his hand into his breast-pocket again. This time it was not the pocket-book he brought out. It was a small packet done up in stout white paper and tied with tape, and sealed where the tape crossed with three seals of black wax. I could not have told you what arms or letters the seals bore, for he kept his thumb over them. It was about the size of a lady's pincushion. I set that down because it is all I know of it, and I will not pretend to know more.

"You have the keys of the plate-room, Betteredge?" says he.

"I have had them, sir, for more years than you have been alive," says I.

"Then put this in the plate-room for me, and lock it up," says he, "and keep the key on your own bunch tonight. Don't open it. Don't ask me what is in it. Don't say a word about it to anybody, not to my aunt, and least of all to my cousin. Will you do that for me, for old times' sake, and for the seven-and-sixpence?"

He was laughing again, but his hand was not laughing. I noticed that it held on to the packet a moment after mine had closed on it.

Now, I put it to you, good friend who reads this. Suppose you were a man past seventy, with a natural turn for knowing what goes on in the house you serve, and a young gentleman put a sealed packet into your hand and told you not to ask what was in it. You would be curious. I was curious. I will go further and confess that on the way to the plate-room I weighed it in my palm, and it weighed next to nothing. But there my sins stop. The seals were never broken by me, and I never pinched the paper between my finger and thumb to feel what lay inside, though my finger and thumb were ready enough. I thought of Robinson Crusoe on the wreck, and the money he found there. He said to it, "O drug! what art thou good for?" and then took it away with him all the same. I said nothing to my packet whatever. I carried it straight to the plate-room and put it in the iron safe, behind the great silver épergne that comes out on company days. I turned the key twice and tried the handle, and then I put the key on my own ring, where it was hanging, tight against my waistcoat, when I began this page.

Mr. Franklin was shown to his room, and went up two stairs at a time, as he used to at twelve years old. The house began to buzz as the news went round, the way a house does when a young gentleman arrives unexpectedly. The cook sent up to know if he would take anything. The housemaids found they had business on the best staircase. Nancy asked me if it was true he had been brought up among the French, and whether that was why he wore a rose.

In the middle of it all my daughter Penelope found me out in my pantry. She had her apron screwed up in both hands, which is a bad sign with Penelope.

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

"She'll be in presently," says I. "I left her on the sands not an hour ago. She went off in a hurry, with never a curtsey to Mr. Franklin, and I'm to speak to her about it."

"She's not coming in presently," says Penelope. "Young Tommy from the Hole came up with the fish just now. He says he passed Rosanna on the shore path going towards Cobb's Hole, walking as if she was walking for a wager. She never went near the house at all, father. She has gone straight on to the Yollands'. She'll sit there with Lucy, I suppose, the way she does. But it isn't her turn out, and she has had no dinner, and Nancy is telling everybody she has run away."

"Nancy," I said, "will do no such thing in my hearing. Let the girl bide at the Yollands' till tea, and if she isn't back by then I'll send for her."

Penelope did not go. She stood twisting her apron and looking at me with her mother's look. My late wife had that look, and it always meant that she knew a thing I didn't, or thought she did, which with women comes to the same.

"What did Rosanna do when she saw Mr. Franklin?" says she.

"Coloured up, and ran," I said. "Silly girl. She took him for a stranger, I suppose, and she's shy of strangers."

"Did she?" says Penelope. That was all she said. Then she asked me if I had told Mr. Franklin about the Indians yet. I told her to mind her own business and go and lay out Miss Rachel's things, and she went. Looking back on it now, I think my daughter was a good deal nearer the truth that afternoon than her father was. But there is no use crying over what you didn't see, as the saying is, or ought to be.

Towards four o'clock the carriage came back, with my lady in it and without Miss Rachel. The ladies at the house where they had lunched had kept Miss Rachel to drive out with them, and she was to be brought home before dinner. So she was, as it turned out, but not in time for any part of what I have to tell in this chapter. My lady heard on the door-step that her nephew had come. She looked, I thought, more startled than pleased, and then more pleased than startled. She went straight into the drawing-room and sent for him.

I brought in the tea myself. I always do when there is a thing going on in the drawing-room that I have a mind to see. Mr. Franklin had come down in a fresh coat and a fresh rose, and he kissed his aunt on both cheeks, foreign fashion, which she took very kindly. For some minutes they talked over his father, and his travels, and the German universities, and the Italian painters, and all the rest of what a young gentleman brings home in his trunks besides his shirts. I was busy with the cups and the kettle, and took no more notice than a good servant should, which is to say that I heard every word.

Then Mr. Franklin put down his cup and leaned forward, and his voice changed.

"Aunt," says he, "I ought to tell you that I have come down partly on business. It concerns my uncle Herncastle, and a..."

My lady put up her hand. She did not raise her voice. She never does. But she stopped him as surely as if she had shut a door in his face.

"Franklin," she said, "I am very glad to see you, and I hope you will stay with us as long as you like. But there is one thing I must ask of you before you have been an hour in the house. My brother John Herncastle's name is not spoken under this roof. It has not been spoken here for many years, and I cannot have it spoken now, not even by you, and whatever the business may be. If you have anything to settle that concerns him, settle it with my lawyer, or settle it with Rachel when the time comes. But not with me, and not here. Will you promise me that?"

Mr. Franklin looked at her for a moment. Then, without meaning to, I believe, he looked across at me, standing by the tea-tray. I looked at the kettle.

"I promise you, aunt," says he. "You shan't hear it from me."

"Thank you, my dear," says my lady, and she asked him in the same breath whether he still took sugar. Mr. Franklin said he did, and the subject was at an end.

It is not my business to tell you in this place why my lady would not hear her own brother named in her own house. Some of it I know, and some of it I have guessed, and the rest is the family's own affair. I will only say that the Honourable John Herncastle had not been received at our house within my memory. When the family spoke of him at all, which was seldom, they spoke of him the way people speak of a dead man they did not like. What his nephew had to do with him, and what "business" could concern him in the year 'forty-eight, I did not know that afternoon. I will only ask you to remember, as I did not, a certain small packet with black seals lying in a certain iron safe behind a silver épergne.

The rest of that day went by as days do when there is company in the house. There were extra covers laid and extra candles lit, and the second-best claret came up from the cellar, because I would not trust the best to a gentleman whose palate had been spoiled among the Germans. Mr. Franklin was the life of the table. My lady laughed more than I had heard her laugh since Sir John died. As for what passed between Mr. Franklin and his cousin that evening, it belongs to another page, and to my daughter, who saw more of it than I did.

Tea came and went in the servants' hall, and Rosanna Spearman did not come in to it. Supper came and went, and Rosanna did not come in to that either. Nancy had a good deal to say, and I told her to say it to her bread-and-butter. At nine o'clock I sent the stable-lad down the shore path with a lantern as far as the Yollands' door. He came back to say that Rosanna was there. She was sitting with Lucy by the kitchen fire, and she sent word, very civil, that she begged Mr. Betteredge's pardon, and she would be in before the house was shut up. I did not tell my lady. My lady had her nephew back after thirteen years, and she was entitled to one evening without a housemaid in it.

And so, at last, I come round to my beehive chair again, where I began. The evenings are long in our parts at the end of May, and the light holds late over the back court. I took my pipe and my Robinson Crusoe out there when the gentry's dinner was cleared away, as I have done these twenty years. I felt my keys against my waistcoat, and the plate-room key among them. I opened my book at random, which is my custom when my mind wants settling. I dropped, as luck would have it, on the place where Robinson Crusoe comes upon the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, and stands like one thunderstruck, and runs home to his fortification, and looks behind him at every two or three steps. I did not find that as comforting as I could have wished. I read it through all the same, and then I read it again. It was getting too dark to see the page.

The house was quiet behind me. The sea was quiet beyond the firs. The packet was locked in the safe, and the key was in my pocket, and Mr. Franklin's letter was in his. And the back door, which I had left on the latch for her, had not yet opened to let in Rosanna Spearman.

I found Poirot's lodging without difficulty. It was a small cottage at the far end of the village, which the Belgians shared among them, and I was surprised to see a thin curl of smoke already rising from its chimney. It was still very early. The storm had never broken after all. The heavy, oppressive air of the evening before lay over everything, and the sky was a dull white, as though the thunder were still waiting somewhere behind it.

I knocked, and after a moment the door was opened by Poirot himself. To my astonishment he was fully dressed. His moustaches had been carefully brushed and every hair was in place, and he did not seem at all surprised to see me.

"Ah, it is you, my friend," he said gravely. "Enter, enter. I have been expecting you, or someone from Styles, this half-hour."

"Expecting me?" I stammered. "Then you know——?"

"That Madame Inglethorp is dead? Yes, I know it." He shook his head sadly. "The poor lady. She was very good to us, Hastings. We others, we do not forget it."

"But how on earth did you hear? It is barely six o'clock!"

"It is very simple. I sleep little, and I rise early. I walk in the road before the village is awake, because it is then that one may think. At a quarter before six the automobile from Styles comes down the hill, and stops at the house of the doctor, Wilkins, and the doctor gets out. The chauffeur, your Baily, knows me. He has driven the car many times with baskets for us from Madame. When he turns the car I lift my hat to him, and he stops and tells me. He was much moved, that young man. He said, 'The mistress has gone, sir, all of a sudden, in a fit.'" Poirot paused. "And then he said something more. He said that the doctor from London had been with her at the end. That interested me, Hastings. It interested me very much. So I dressed with care, and I waited."

I told him everything as quickly as I could: how Lawrence had roused me, how the doors had been bolted, the terrible convulsions, Mrs. Inglethorp's dying cry, Dr. Bauerstein's peculiar manner, the post-mortem, and Alfred Inglethorp's unexplained absence. I added, with some pride, that I had looked up the symptoms of strychnine poisoning before setting out, and that in my opinion they corresponded exactly.

Poirot listened with the closest attention and did not interrupt me once, except to ask me to repeat the dying words.

"'Alfred—Alfred——'" he murmured. "And her eyes were upon the doctor. Good. Now listen, my friend. You will go back at once. I follow you in a quarter of an hour, no more. I have one or two small matters to arrange. On no account let anyone enter that room."

"The doors are locked, and John has the keys."

"*Bien.* Then go."

I went, a little disappointed, I confess, that he had not come with me at once. I walked quickly, and I was just turning in at the lodge gates when I saw a figure in front of me on the drive, going towards the house. It was Alfred Inglethorp.

He heard my step and turned. His face was pale, but that was usual with him, and I could read nothing in it. He was carrying his hat, and his clothes looked neat enough.

"Good morning, Mr. Hastings. You are abroad early." He looked at me more closely. "Is anything the matter?"

I hardly knew how to tell him. In the end I said it bluntly.

"Mrs. Inglethorp was taken very ill in the night. I am sorry—she is dead."

He stood quite still. Then he put out a hand to the gatepost beside the drive, and I saw that the hand was trembling.

"Dead? Emily? But it is impossible. She was perfectly well when I left her. Perfectly well!"

"It was very sudden," I said. "Some kind of fit."

"My God!" He passed his hand over his eyes. "And I was not here. I was not here!"

We went on up to the house together. John came out into the hall as the door was opened, and stopped dead at the sight of his stepfather. For a moment neither spoke. Then Inglethorp went towards him with outstretched hands.

"John, my dear fellow, I have just heard. I can't believe it. Hastings tells me——"

John did not take the hands. He said very quietly:

"Where have you been all night?"

It seemed to me that the question was put with a kind of deadly politeness. Inglethorp, however, answered readily enough.

"At Denby's. I walked down with Bauerstein, as you know, and left him at the corner by the post office. Then I remembered that Denby had been wanting to see me about the farm accounts. It was only a step, so I looked in. He kept me talking, and we went into the figures. It was past one before I noticed the time, and then I found I had come out without my latch-key. I didn't care to knock up the whole household at that hour, so Denby very kindly gave me a bed." He spread out his hands. "If I had had the least idea—the least idea——"

His voice broke. Whether the emotion was genuine or not I could not tell. John said nothing at all. He turned on his heel and went into the dining-room, and after a moment's hesitation Inglethorp went slowly up the stairs. I heard him try the handle of his own room, and then the handle of his wife's, and then come down again and ask in a low voice where the keys were.

I did not wait to hear the answer. Dorcas had come out from the back of the hall, her eyes red with crying, and she beckoned me aside with a sort of desperate eagerness.

"Excuse me, sir, but did I hear the master say he forgot the latch-key?"

"Yes, Dorcas. That was why he stayed in the village."

The old servant's lips tightened.

"Well, sir, it's not my place to say it, but he never forgot it. I was in the hall last night when he went out with the doctor, and I saw him take the key off the table and put it in his pocket. With my own eyes I saw it, sir. And this morning he rang the bell, same as if he'd never had it at all."

"You are quite sure?"

"As sure as I'm standing here, sir."

I told her to say nothing of it to anyone else for the present, and she promised. My mind was in a whirl. I went into the dining-room, where Lawrence was standing at the window staring out at nothing, and John was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. Neither of them spoke to me, and I was relieved when, some ten minutes later, I saw Poirot's small upright figure coming up the drive.

He was very correct with John. He expressed his condolences with a formal little bow, thanked him for the honour of his confidence, and assured him that he would do nothing to add to the family's distress. John, I think, was a little reassured by his manner, and handed over the keys at once.

As we crossed the hall to the stairs, Mary Cavendish and Cynthia came down. Mary was quite composed now. She was pale, but she held her head high and greeted Poirot with grave courtesy. Cynthia looked dreadful. Her eyes were heavy, and she seemed only half awake. She stopped on the bottom stair with one hand on the bannister and stared at Poirot as though she hardly knew who he was.

Poirot bowed to both ladies. Then he looked at Cynthia for a long moment with a curious gentleness.

"Mademoiselle," he said, "forgive me. You slept very soundly last night, I think?"

"Soundly?" Cynthia put her hand to her forehead. "I don't know how I slept. I went to bed quite early. I remember putting out the light, and then there was nothing, nothing at all, until Mary was shaking me and saying my name over and over. She says she had been at it for ages. I've never slept like it in my life. It was like being at the bottom of a well. And my head aches horribly still."

Poirot thanked her with another bow, and asked her nothing more. I was surprised, for I had expected him to question her closely. He simply stood aside to let the two ladies pass, and then went up the stairs, and I followed him.

He unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp's room, and we went in. He shut it behind us and turned the key.

The room had been left exactly as we had seen it at dawn. The gas was out now, but the curtains had been partly drawn back, and in the dull white light everything looked grey and very still. The figure on the bed had been decently covered with a sheet. Poirot stood beside it for a moment with bowed head. Then he became brisk.

"Now, Hastings. We will begin. You will stand there by the door and touch nothing, and you will tell me again, very slowly, how everything was when you came in."

I did so. I showed him the door we had broken in, its lock torn from the frame, and the door into the corridor, which I had unbolted myself. I pointed out the door which communicated with Cynthia's room, and he went across and examined the bolt with great care. It was still shot home. He looked at it a long time without touching it.

"Bolted on this side," he murmured. "Then, as you say, all three doors bolted. *C'est curieux.*"

The little table beside the bed lay on its side, as it had fallen. Round it on the carpet was a litter of objects: a reading-lamp, two or three books, a box of matches, a bunch of keys, and the fragments of a cup which had been broken, and, as it seemed, trodden on, for part of it was crushed almost to powder. Poirot went down on his knees and examined all these things one by one, without moving any of them, and making little clucking noises to himself the while.

Then he rose, dusted his knees with great care, and went to the fireplace. The ashes were cold now. He stirred them delicately with a pencil, and I heard him mutter something about a fire in July. After that he looked at the ornaments on the mantelpiece. It was the very place at which Lawrence had stared in such horror, and I told him so. He turned and looked at me very keenly.

"So? Monsieur Lawrence looked at the mantelpiece? You are sure of it?"

"Quite sure. He looked as though he had seen a ghost."

Poirot considered the row of ornaments. There was a pair of china spill-vases, a small clock, a photograph in a silver frame and one or two other trifles. One of the vases stood very slightly askew. With a look almost of pain, he set it straight.

"You see nothing?" I asked eagerly.

"I see a mantelpiece, my friend. Nothing more. Not yet."

He passed on. He examined the despatch-case, which stood on a chair near the window, and found it locked. He looked at the wash-stand, the bureau and the window-fastenings. He opened the door into Inglethorp's room and went through it, and I heard him moving about in there for several minutes. When he came back his face told me nothing. It must have been nearly an hour that he spent going over that room inch by inch. I grew very tired of standing by the door, and I confess that my thoughts wandered more than once to breakfast, which I had not had.

At last, when he was on his hands and knees by the wash-stand, peering at the strip of floor between it and the wall, he gave a little exclamation. He put in a hand and drew out something very small, and sat back on his heels looking at it in his palm.

"What is it?" I cried, forgetting my orders and coming forward.

He held out his hand without a word. On his palm lay a collar-stud, a plain one of white bone, such as any man might wear, and of the commonest pattern.

"A collar-stud!" I said, and I must admit that I was disappointed. "Well, there's nothing very remarkable in that. It is Inglethorp's, I suppose. The rooms communicate. He must have dropped it some time or other."

"You think so?"

"Why not?"

Poirot did not answer. He took an envelope from his pocket, put the stud into it, and fastened the flap with great care. Then he wrote something on the envelope, which I could not see.

"Poirot," I said, "what does it mean? You surely don't think that a collar-stud——"

"I think nothing, my friend. Not yet. The little grey cells, they are not to be hurried." He tapped his forehead. "Tell me instead: who sweeps this room, and when?"

"How should I know? One of the housemaids, I suppose. Every morning, I should think."

"We will ask," he said placidly. He unlocked the door, went out into the passage, and presently came back with Annie, who looked very frightened. In answer to his questions she said that she had done out the mistress's room thoroughly the morning before, as she did every day, and had swept right round the wash-stand and under it, because the mistress was very particular. She was quite certain there had been nothing on the floor. Poirot thanked her kindly and let her go, and once more locked the door behind her.

Then he came back to the table by the window, where he had laid the envelope, and sat down, and I sat down opposite him. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to a quarter past eleven. Somewhere below us a door closed, and I heard John's voice in the hall and then silence again. The envelope lay between us. Poirot looked at it for a long time with his head a little on one side, like a bird's.

"So," I said at last, "it came into the room some time between yesterday morning and five o'clock to-day. That narrows it down, at any rate."

"Yes," said Poirot absently. "Yes, that is quite true. But it is not the most interesting thing, Hastings."

"Then what is?"

He looked up at me, and his eyes were as green as a cat's.

"That it has never been worn, my friend. Not once. And for that reason, you understand, it is the one thing in this room that is exactly where it should be."

I stared at him. I did not understand him in the least.

The First National Bank was a gray stone building on Broadway, three blocks from the Herald, with brass on its doors and a clock over them. The clock gave me half an hour before closing.

I didn't want an answer through a teller's window. A guard with a gray mustache passed me through a gate in a mahogany railing to a desk where a plump pink man of thirty-five was initialing papers. His hair was parted in the middle and slicked down so hard it looked painted on. He had rimless glasses. His name was Muir, he said, Elmer Muir, and he was an assistant cashier.

I gave him a card, my own this time, and told him who had brought me to Personville and what had happened to the man who brought me.

"A dreadful thing." He took off his glasses to say it. "Dreadful. Mr. Willsson was in here only⁠—" He stopped and put the glasses back on.

"Only yesterday afternoon?"

"I was going to say only last week."

"Yesterday afternoon, a little before three, he wrote a check on his account here for five thousand dollars. I want to know what became of it."

Muir looked at my card again, as if something might have been added to it while he wasn't watching.

"You understand," he said, "that the affairs of our depositors are not⁠—"

"Your depositor's dead. Somebody put four bullets in him last night. That check was the last thing he did with his money that anybody knows about. If it turns out to mean something, you'll want to have told me before you read about it in the Herald."

"I'm sure I don't know that it would⁠—"

"Who owns this bank?"

He moistened his lips. "Mr. Elihu Willsson is president of the board."

"I was talking to him this morning," I said. That was true, as far as it went.

Muir sat there for a while looking at the papers he had been initialing. Then he said, "Will you excuse me?" and went through a door at the back of the cage.

He was gone ten minutes. When he came back he sat down carefully, squared the papers with both hands, and gave me what he had brought the way a man reads a statement into the record:

"No check drawn by Mr. Donald Willsson for five thousand dollars has been presented at this bank, either for payment or for deposit. None came through this morning's clearings. None was certified. I have spoken to both certification clerks and to each of the paying tellers. So far as anyone here remembers, Mr. Willsson did not come into the bank at all yesterday."

"If it had been deposited at another bank yesterday afternoon, when would you have seen it?"

"This morning, ordinarily. If it had gone out of town, some days later."

"And if it shows up tomorrow?"

"It won't be paid." He seemed glad to have something definite to say. "When we learn of a depositor's death the account is stopped until the estate is settled. We learned of it at eight this morning. Anyone holding one of Mr. Willsson's checks today holds a piece of paper."

"Then whoever got it had between three o'clock yesterday and closing time to cash it, and didn't."

"Between the time it was written and three o'clock. We close at three."

"There was money enough in the account to cover it?"

He hesitated, decided that it wouldn't hurt anything, and said: "There was."

"If it comes in, from anywhere, I'd like to know who brings it."

"I should have to have the cashier's authority for that."

"Get it," I said, and put the Great Western's name on the back of my card and left it on his desk.

Outside, the clock over the door said it was nine minutes to three. I stood under it and lit a cigarette. Donald Willsson had been out of his office twenty minutes with a five-thousand-dollar check. He hadn't spent them at his bank. Whoever he gave the check to had had the rest of the banking day to turn it into money and hadn't. That could mean they didn't need money in a hurry, or that they had meant to cash it this morning and learned from the Herald that they couldn't. It could mean the check had never been meant to be cashed at all. And it could mean Willsson still had it on him when he was shot, and that it was now lying in a drawer at the City Hall with his watch and his keys, which was something Noonan wouldn't be telling me for nothing.

I finished the cigarette without deciding anything and walked back to the hotel.

I ate a late lunch in the grill, went up to my room, took off my coat and shoes, and was working on the second page of a report to the agency when somebody knocked on the door.

It was Donald Willsson's widow.

She was in black: a close black hat, a black coat with a fur collar, black gloves. Her face had had a night and a morning to get over being white and hadn't quite managed it. She stood in the doorway looking at my stockinged feet and then at my face.

"You are the man who waited at my house last night," she said.

"Yeah. Come in."

I hadn't told her where I was stopping. I put that away to think about later and moved my coat off the only armchair. She sat in it with her back straight and her gloved hands together on her bag, and didn't unbutton her coat. I sat on the edge of the bed.

"You are a detective," she said. "Donald sent for you."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

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

She looked at me as if she thought I might be lying and wanted to decide how much. Then she said:

"The police have not come to me about you. Have you told them about me?"

"Not yet."

"What will you tell them?"

"That depends."

"On money?" There was nothing in her voice. She might have been asking the price of something in a shop.

"On you."

"I do not understand."

"You went out of your house at ten-twenty last night after a phone call," I said. "You came back at five minutes past eleven. Your husband was shot in Hurricane Street at ten-forty. When you came back there was something on the toe of your left slipper that looked like blood."

She looked down at her feet. She had on black shoes with straps.

"I have not those slippers any more," she said.

"Burned?"

"Thrown away."

"That's too bad. They were nice slippers."

Some color came up into her face then, not much, a little along the cheekbones.

"I did not kill my husband."

"Nobody's said you did, except his father."

"That old man." She said it softly, the way some people swear. "He has told you this?"

"He told me that and a lot of other things. He's got a big vocabulary for a sick man."

"He has always hated me. He hated that Donald married me. He hated that we lived in Paris. He is glad now, I think, that he has something to say."

"Where did you go last night?"

"To meet my husband."

"Where?"

"It does not matter where."

"Hurricane Street?"

She didn't answer that. She moved the bag an inch on her knees and moved it back.

"Someone telephoned," she said, "to tell me where he could be found. I went there. I waited. He did not come. I came home."

"Who telephoned?"

"I do not know."

"Man or woman?"

She looked at me for a moment and said: "I do not know."

"That's a pretty thin story."

"It is the story."

"All right. What did Max Thaler want this morning?"

Her gloved hands closed on the bag. "You watch my house."

"I happened to be going by."

"Mr. Thaler came to say he is sorry for my husband's death."

"That was nice of him. Your husband had been calling him a crook in the Herald every morning."

"Then it was very nice of him," she said.

I laughed. She didn't. I asked:

"Did your husband give you any money yesterday?"

"Money? No." Her eyes came up sharply. "Why?"

"He wrote a check for five thousand dollars in the afternoon and took it out of the office with him. Nobody has cashed it."

She sat very still. Something moved behind her eyes and went away before I could see what it was.

"Five thousand," she said. She said it slowly, like a woman pricing a hat she means to go without. "To whom?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"I do not know. Donald did not tell me about his money. He did not tell me about anything." She stood up. "If you tell the police what you have told me, they will believe it. Mr. Noonan would be very glad to believe it."

"I know he would."

"And you will tell them?"

"When I'm ready."

"And what will make you ready?"

"Knowing whether it's true."

She went to the door and turned there with her hand on the knob.

"Donald paid you," she said. "What was Donald's is mine now."

"Some of it, maybe. I was working for him, not for his money."

"He is dead."

"Yeah," I said. "That's what I'm working on."

She went out. I listened to her heels go down the hall toward the elevator. Then I put on my shoes and finished the second page of the report and tore it up, because nothing I had put on it meant anything.

At a little after seven I went down to get something to eat. The clerk called me over to the desk and handed me an envelope.

"Left for you, sir, about half an hour ago."

"Who left it?"

"A taxi driver brought it in. He didn't say who from."

My name and room number were printed on the envelope in pencil, in small careful letters. Inside there was a railroad ticket to San Francisco and a Pullman check for lower six on the nine-forty that night. There was also a card, engraved with the name Max Thaler and nothing else. On the back, in the same small careful pencil, somebody had written: *Lower six is the best berth on the car.*

I put everything back in the envelope and the envelope in my pocket and went in to dinner. It was a friendly gesture. A lower berth to San Francisco runs into money. I thought about how Thaler knew what room I was in, and about how Donald Willsson's widow had known what hotel I was in, and about his Stutz parked outside this hotel at a time of night when I had been coming back to it. None of the thinking got me anywhere, but the steak was good.

After dinner I walked to the Western Union office on Broadway and wrote a wire to the Old Man:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD LAST NIGHT BEFORE I SAW HIM. NO WORD OF WHAT HE WANTED US FOR. FATHER ELIHU OWNS CITY AND BANK AND NEWSPAPERS AND SAYS WIDOW KILLED HIM. WIDOW WAS OUT OF HOUSE AT TIME OF SHOOTING AND ADMITS NOTHING. DECEASED WROTE CHECK FOR FIVE THOUSAND AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH AND TOOK IT OUT OF OFFICE. CHECK NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED AND NOW STOPPED. LOCAL GAMBLER MAX THALER HAS SENT ME TICKET HOME TONIGHT WITH HIS COMPLIMENTS. AM NOT USING IT. RETAINER COVERS SOME DAYS. INTEND STAYING UNLESS YOU OBJECT.

The girl behind the counter counted the words twice, looked at me once, and took my money.

I went back to the Great Western, up to my room, and locked the door. I didn't turn on the light. I took off my coat and shoes again, pulled the armchair over to the window, and sat there with a cigarette looking down at Broadway. The street had the kind of traffic a mining town has on a weeknight: miners in twos and threes, a few cars, a policeman on the corner who wasn't looking at anything much, and now and then somebody going into a doorway that had no sign over it.

At nine-forty I heard the San Francisco train whistle for the crossing east of town. I took Thaler's envelope out of my pocket and put it on the window sill, and heard the train go out without me.

Then I thought about the check again, because there wasn't anything else to think about that I hadn't already worn thin. Five thousand dollars. It had gone out of the Herald building a little before three in Donald Willsson's pocket, and it had not gone into the First National Bank. A woman on the telephone had said something to him that made him answer, "Very well, at ten." Somebody had got the check, or nobody had. Whoever had it hadn't hurried to the bank, and now it was worth as much as the paper Thaler had written his joke on. Either whoever had it had never meant to cash it, or they hadn't been able to, or it had been in Willsson's pocket on the sidewalk in Hurricane Street when the man and woman nobody could describe bent over him.

I smoked the cigarette down and lit another from it. Down on the corner the policeman yawned, looked up and down the street, and went away around the corner. The room was dark and the city was noisy, and somewhere in Poisonville a signed piece of paper was in somebody's pocket or somebody's stove. I didn't know which, and nobody I'd talked to was going to tell me.