The Chapters

*Letter, Arthur Holmwood to Miss Lucy Westenra.*

“*Windham Club*,

“*27 May*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I said that I would give you a full and true account of Quincey’s dinner, and here it is; though I warn you that a man is a poor hand at describing an evening in which he was himself the person made much of.

“We met in his rooms, which are like nothing so much as a corner of a museum that has run away to town: a Mexican saddle on a chair that ought to know better, a bearskin from the Rockies on the floor, a Winchester over the chimney-piece, and photographs of every sort of unlikely person pinned up with drawing-pins. Quincey gave us a dinner that was cooked, I believe, by his own landlady under threats, and he sat at the head of the table looking as happy as a boy, and never once let the talk stand still. We had the old yarns over again--the night at the Marquesas when Jack sewed up his arm by the light of a ship’s lantern, and the health we drank on the shore of Titicaca out of a tin mug--and I laughed till I was ashamed of myself.

“And then, my dear, they drank my health, and I knew, as they stood up, what it must be costing them; for you had told me all, and I had known before you told me that a man does not go about with a face like Jack Seward’s for nothing. Quincey made the speech. He said--I shall try to give it as he said it, for I would not lose a word of it--‘Boys, we drink to the happiest man in all the wide world, and if any one of us is fool enough to grudge him his luck, let him say so now and I’ll take him outside and argue it with him in the passage.’ Nobody said so. Then he turned to me and said quite quietly, in his own voice and not his campfire one: ‘Art, she is worth more than you know yet. Be good to her.’ Jack said nothing at all, but he shook my hand with a grip that I felt for an hour afterwards, and looked me straight in the face in that way he has, as though he were reading something written behind my eyes; and then he smiled and said that if ever he had a patient who could not be made happy he should send him down to us to be cured. I never in my life felt so small and so rich at the same moment.

“There is one thing more, and it is my father’s doing rather than mine. He wishes the engagement to be put in the papers at once, and would take no denial; so the notice goes to the *Morning Post* and to the other papers this week. Forgive me, dearest, if you would have kept it a little longer to ourselves. I am not sorry, for I find that I want the whole world to be told, and told immediately, and I would stop men in the street to tell them if I dared.

“Give my most respectful remembrances to your mother.

“Yours, ever and only,

“ARTHUR.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*30 May.*--Appetite better. Work is the one honest anodyne, and I have had plenty of it. The notice of the engagement was in the paper this morning. I read it at breakfast, and then read it again, and then went out and walked twice round the whole boundary wall of the grounds before I trusted myself amongst the patients. That is all that need be said of it, and more than I meant to say.

Renfield again. His condition has developed a new phase, and one which is at least orderly. He has taken to collecting flies, and has so many that I was obliged to speak to him about it. To my surprise he did not break out, but took the matter gravely, as a man of business receiving a complaint, and asked me for three days’ grace, at the end of which he would clear them all away. I gave it him. He keeps a little pocket-book in which he is always jotting down figures, and he adds them up in columns, as though he were balancing an account. He calls it his ledger.

Then came the thing which I set down here because I do not know what to make of it. I was leaving him, and had my hand on the door, when he said, in the most ordinary manner in the world, as one gentleman speaking to another of a matter of common interest:--

“Doctor, is Miss Lucy Westenra to be married soon?”

I own that I stood still. I asked him, as steadily as I could, what he knew of Miss Westenra. He answered that the attendant had left the newspaper on the bench in the passage, and that he had read it, and that he never forgot a name once he had seen it. Then he said: “She is to marry the Honourable Arthur Holmwood. It is a great match for her. Will she come here?”

I told him that ladies did not visit the wards, and he nodded as though I had confirmed something, and said, “No. It would not be wholesome for her.” After that he would say nothing more, but went back to his window and his flies, and to his figures.

Now, upon what does the man’s mind fasten? He has read a name in a newspaper; he has never seen the lady, nor could he; there is nothing in the paragraph but the bare announcement. Yet out of the whole sheet--murders, dividends, wars--he has taken up that one line and carried it about with him. I confess that when he spoke her name in that flat, patient voice of his I felt something go through me which was not scientific interest, and which I do not intend to record further.

(*Mem.*, is it that he takes his cue from me? I have never spoken of her here--but a madman’s ears are longer than his keeper’s tongue, and I dictate these notes with the door shut, but not always locked.)

*Letter, Andreas Vollmer, of the Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*Bistritz*, *30 May*.

“Honoured and gracious Miss,--

“You will pardon that a stranger writes to you, and pardon also my English, which I have learned in Vienna and have not used for some years, so that it walks with a limp.

“The English Herr, Mr. Jonathan Harker, who was lodged in my house upon the third and fourth days of May, did leave with me a small trunk of English make, to be kept until his returning, and did write in my book your name and your address, and did say to me these words: ‘If I am kept beyond my time, be so good as to write to this lady, that she be not anxious.’ I have therefore waited, as was proper, and now I write.

“Yesterday there came down by the carrier from the direction of the Borgo Pass a message for me, that the Herr’s business is not finished, and that it will hold him some weeks yet; also that he is well, and wants for nothing, and is very handsomely lodged. It is a great affair, as I understand, of purchases and of papers, and such things go slowly in this country, where a signature must travel far before it comes home again. Let not the gracious Miss disquiet herself. Our roads are bad, and our posts are worse, and a letter may lie a month in a bag at a mountain station and no man be blamed for it; and it is nothing here that a man should be silent for four weeks, when in England, as I have observed, a silence of four days is thought a calamity.

“The trunk is dry and safe in my own room, and I have put my wife’s shawl over it. When the Herr comes he shall have it, and my best wine also, for he was a very civil young gentleman and praised my paprika hendl to my wife, which is more than my own countrymen do.

“With respectful hand-kissing, and my wife’s good wishes,

“Your obedient servant,

“ANDREAS VOLLMER.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*3 June*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have copied out for you, word for word, the letter which came to me on Tuesday from Bistritz, because I know that if I only told you the sense of it you would suspect me of keeping back the worst, and because, my dear, I have read it so many times that I could say it in my sleep, and I want somebody else to read it and tell me that it says what I think it says.

“It says that Jonathan is well. I have written that down three times to-day at the top of a sheet of paper, and each time I have gone on and worried at it, and each time I have come back to it: *he is well*. The good landlord means to be kind, and is kind; but oh, Lucy, it is a strange thing to be told about the man you are to marry by a person you have never seen, in a language he apologises for, at second hand from a carrier who came down out of a mountain pass. It is like hearing a voice call to you across a valley, and knowing that it is a friend, and not being able to make out one word in three.

“Since the twelfth of May I have had nothing from Jonathan himself but the few hurried lines I told you of, and they were written in such a hand--not his own free hand, but small and cramped, as if he wrote on his knee with somebody waiting for the pen. I told myself then that he was hurried. I tell myself now that he is busy, and that great gentlemen abroad keep their men of business at their elbow till the last paper is signed, and that Jonathan is too honourable to leave a thing half done, and too poor a hand at self-indulgence to plead his own convenience. All that is true, and I believe it, and I go on believing it from breakfast to bed-time, and it is only between the striking of the hours in the night that I do not.

“So I am doing the sensible things. I have written to Mr. Hawkins at Exeter, who is Jonathan’s master and his good friend, and who is a shrewd old gentleman and will know what a delay in such a business really means; and I have asked him to tell me the truth and not the comfortable part of it. I have written also to the landlord, to thank him--I think he will be pleased to have an English letter to show--and I have asked him, if any further word comes down from the Pass, to send it to me at once, and I have enclosed money for the telegraph. And in between I have corrected forty-one exercise books and heard the second class through their French verbs, which is, I assure you, a specific against imagination.

“Do not think me low-spirited, dearest. I have practised my shorthand every evening, and my typewriting too, and I mean that when he comes home there shall be somebody waiting for him who has not been idle and has not been foolish. I read your letter, and Arthur’s message in it, over my tea, and was so glad and so proud for you that I forgot myself for a whole half-hour, which is the best gift you could have sent me.

“Write soon, and tell me everything, and do not be afraid of writing of your own happiness to me. It does not hurt me. It is the only thing just now that certainly does me good.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street*,

“*6 June*.

“My dearest Mina,--

“Of course it says what you think it says. He is well, and he is kept, and the roads are bad; and I have read the good man’s letter aloud to mamma, who says that any one who puts a shawl over a young man’s trunk is to be trusted with the young man, and that when he comes back you are to bring him here and we shall all be as merry as possible.

“Mina, you shall not sit up at night listening to clocks. I know you; you will call it thinking things over. You have that head of yours which will go round and round like a squirrel in a cage sooner than be still. So I have made a plan. When your term ends you shall come to us, and we shall walk, and be idle, and I shall talk to you about Arthur until you beg for mercy, and Mr. Hawkins may send his letters after you.

“Arthur is here every day, and mamma has quite given him up her chair by the fire, which in our house is a sort of coronation. Dr. Seward came on Wednesday--he looked, I thought, rather worn, and mamma said afterwards that he works too hard--and he was so pleasant and so brave about everything that I could have cried; only I did not, because I have quite done with that. Mr. Morris has gone north to shoot something, and writes to Arthur on a sheet torn out of a note-book.

“Bless you, dear, and go to sleep.

“LUCY.”

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

“*14 June*.

“Harker’s letter reached me to-day, dated twelfth June, postmarked Bistritz nineteenth May. Come to Exeter at once.”

Then came the night of the first falling star.

It was seen a few minutes before midnight, and I saw it myself, being still up and at my desk; for I had been working late upon the third of my papers on the probable development of moral ideas, and had come to a stand upon a paragraph that would not shape itself. I put down my pen and went out through the French window into the garden to cool my head. The night was clear and very still. Northward, over the black line of the fir plantation, the sky had that faint milkiness that comes of the whole quiet earth breathing; and as I stood there with my hands behind me, looking up as a man does when he is thinking of nothing at all, a greenish streak drew itself swiftly across the constellation of Aries and was gone. It left a line of dull fire hanging for a moment upon the darkness, and then that too faded. I remember I said aloud, "A meteor," in the tone in which one remarks upon a piece of weather; and I stood a while longer waiting, in the idle hope of another, and thinking of my paragraph.

Perhaps a minute afterwards there came a sound. It was not loud. It was a heavy, muffled concussion, such as a distant blasting makes, or a door slammed in an empty house at the end of a long passage, and after it a low rumour that died away into the hedges. The dogs of the neighbourhood took it up and barked for a quarter of an hour. I supposed it was some accident upon the line beyond Chertsey, and I went in and shut the window and finished my paragraph, and so to bed. I have thought since of the extraordinary insignificance of that noise; it was the arrival upon this planet of the first of the things that came from Mars, and it disturbed nobody but the dogs.

In the morning I was roused by our servant with the news that there had been a thunderbolt in the night, and that it had fallen into the flooded gravel pits in the meadows between us and the Bourne, and that half the parish was going to look at it. She had it from the milkman, and the milkman had it from a carter, and both of them, she said, had been made ill by it, which was her own embroidery. It was a bright still morning, with a white mist lying breast-high over the flat ground by the river, and the sun already burning it away in patches. I dressed with more haste than I should like to confess and went out without breakfast, walking down the lane and across the stile and over the sodden meadow, where my boots went in to the ankle at every second step.

The gravel pits there had stood open and neglected for a dozen years, and the winter rains had filled them until they were little lakes, fringed with reed and gorse and heaps of yellow ballast grown over with grass. I saw the steam before I saw anything else. It hung above the largest pit in a great slow column that leaned a little with the air and spread out at the top and drifted away eastward, and it was rosy where the low sun struck it. The sight of it stopped me in the field. I had seen a rick burn once, and it had looked like that; but there was no smell of burning, only the flat mineral smell of hot water, and a hissing that came and went.

And in the pit, black against the white steam, tilted like a great ship's boiler flung there and abandoned, lay the Thing.

It was a cylinder, and I saw at once that it was enormous. Perhaps thirty yards of it showed; it had ploughed a monstrous trench through the ballast heap at the further edge and had gone down nose foremost into the water, so that it lay slanting, more than half sunk, with the water lapping and steaming and boiling in little furious patches all along its flank. Its upper end stood clear, a huge blunt circle of dun-coloured crust, seamed and scaled like the bark of an old tree; and even while I looked a great flake of that crust cracked with a snap and slid off and fell into the water, and the water leapt up in a white puff of vapour, and where the flake had come away there showed a surface of dull metal, greyish, curiously smooth, not shining but reflecting the sky as a piece of lead does when you have breathed upon it. Round the whole of that upper end, faintly, under the incrustation, there ran a ridge, or a raised band; and I remember that I noticed it in the first minute and thought it strange, without knowing at all why.

There were perhaps a dozen people on the bank. Two labourers who had been at the pit before daylight, a boy with a fishing basket, the landlord of the Bell in his shirt sleeves, an old woman with a shawl over her head who kept saying that it was a judgment; and Ogilvy.

He had a hazel stick in his hand and his coat over his arm, and he was walking round the rim of the pit as a man walks round a horse he means to buy. He had been up all night at the observatory, he told me, and had heard the fall, and had been down here since five. He was in a state of high delight. He shook my hand and pointed with his stick, and began to talk before I could get a word in—about the mass of it, and the angle of impact, and how it must have come in at a very flat trajectory to have driven so far and yet lie so nearly whole; and how the crust was fused silica and iron, and how we should have the finest siderite in Europe when they got it out, and how he had already sent a wire to Chertsey and another to a friend of his at the Museum.

"A meteorite," he said, "and by every appearance a mass of native iron. And it fell into water, which is our great good fortune, for the water is cooling it and we shall have the crust intact."

I said that I did not think it was a meteorite.

He looked at me over his shoulder with the tolerant amusement of a man who has spent his life among instruments, and asked me what else I supposed it might be.

I said that meteorites, so far as my very small reading went, were lumps, and that this thing was not a lump. I said that it was a cylinder; that it had two ends and a length; that there was a band running round it; and that the end which stood out of the water was as true a circle as though it had been turned in a lathe. And then, feeling that I had gone too far to draw back, I said the other thing that had been in my mind since I came over the stile: that for ten nights running, not eight months before, jets of flame had been squirted out of the planet Mars, and that here was a cylinder lying in a Surrey gravel pit and steaming.

I have set down what I said because it is the only occasion in this whole history upon which I was in advance of the event, and I would not have the reader think me wiser afterwards than I was at the time. It was not reason but a kind of unreasoned discomfort that spoke; and Ogilvy, who was a far better man of science than I shall ever be, answered me with reason, and was wrong.

He laughed out loud. He said that the shape of a meteorite was the shape the air had left it, and that a body entering our atmosphere at twenty miles a second was moulded like a bullet by the pressure in front of it, and would come down blunt at the head and drawn out behind, which was precisely what this thing had done; the ridge I made so much of was a lip of fused stuff turned back by the blast, and he had seen the like in miniature in a glass case, and would show it to me. And as for Mars, he said, that was a very pretty piece of arithmetic, but I might as well argue that because a gun had gone off at Aldershot in the spring my hat had blown off in the autumn. Volcanic disturbance upon Mars, he said, and a meteorite in Surrey, and one had no more to do with the other than the moon with a man's dinner.

"You remember what I told you at the observatory," he said. "The chances against anything manlike upon Mars are a million to one. And the chances against anything manlike putting itself into a bottle and throwing itself across forty millions of miles of vacuum, my dear fellow, are a million to one upon that."

He said it very good-humouredly, and he was quite unshaken, and I could make no answer to it. He turned back to his crust and his angles, and I stood looking at the great dun thing in the steam and felt foolish, and could not for the life of me get rid of my discomfort.

I went home about eight for my breakfast, and I talked of nothing else, and the end of it was that my wife put on her hat and came back with me. She was curious, as everyone in the parish was curious that morning; and I remember she took my arm going over the meadow and said that she had never seen me so excited about anything since I had learned to ride the bicycle. The mist was gone by then. The steam was less than it had been, but it still went up in a leaning plume that could be seen from the road, and it was the plume that brought the people. They came all the morning. They came from Ottershaw and from Chertsey and from the cottages along the Bourne, and by ten o'clock there were cyclists in the lane, laying their machines in the hedge; and a dog-cart; and two boys with a barrow of nuts and ginger beer, which seemed to me at the time the most remarkable circumstance of the whole day. Somebody said that the ground had been shaken as far as the Abbey. Henderson, the journalist, came down about eleven with a note-book and was very busy with Ogilvy, and afterwards went off to telegraph, and I heard him say that the London people would not print a line of it.

My wife would not go near the edge. She stood up on the ballast heap with her hands folded in front of her, looking down at it, and after a while she said, in quite an ordinary voice, that she wished it had fallen somewhere else. I asked her why, and she said she did not know why, and that it was a foolish thing to say. Then she said it was like a great grey egg, and asked me whether the water would ever cool it. I said that Ogilvy gave it two days.

It was towards noon that the accident happened which I have to set down, and which was the first hurt that any of that company took. There was a lad of eighteen or nineteen there, a labourer's son named Coombes, one of a knot of young men who had been amusing themselves for an hour by pitching stones down upon the crust and hearing them ring; and being dared by the others he went down the slope of ballast to the water's edge, where a fallen flake of the crust lay half in and half out, and put his hand upon the thing itself.

He was up the bank again in a moment, without any outcry at all, holding his right hand in his left and looking at it in a puzzled way. Then he began to make a noise. Ogilvy had him by the wrist directly and had the hand into the water at the far end of the pit, where it was cold, and afterwards it was tied up in a handkerchief and he was sent off between two of his friends to the doctor at Chertsey. The palm and the inside of the fingers were burned white and were beginning to blister, and I saw a shred of skin hanging from the ball of the thumb. It was the kind of burn a man gets from an iron fresh out of the fire.

That sobered them for perhaps ten minutes. Ogilvy went round the rim calling out that no one was to touch it, that it was above the temperature of boiling water and would be so all day, and that they were to keep back for their own sakes; and the crowd fell back three yards and closed in again by inches, as crowds do. My wife had gone very white. She said the boy's noise had upset her, and that she was doing no good there, and I said that I would stay a little and see what the Chertsey people did when they came, and that I would be back for dinner.

So a little before noon I took her as far as the stile, and she went away up the lane towards home with her sunshade up, between the hedges; and she turned once and looked back at me, and I waved my hand and went down again over the meadow to the pit.

They walked slowly, and Madame Ratignolle stopped twice in the sandy path to shift her weight from the foot that troubled her, holding all the while to Robert's arm and to the handle of the great white sunshade, which he had taken from her and now carried tilted absurdly over both their heads. The children had run on ahead with the nurses. The camomile stood yellow and motionless in the glare between the gusts.

"You are not listening to me," said Madame Ratignolle. "I have asked you twice whether your mother means to have the *soirée musicale* on Saturday or the Saturday following, and you answer me about the wind."

"I beg your pardon a thousand times. I was thinking of Mrs. Pontellier."

"Naturally."

"No, but seriously." He shifted the sunshade and looked out toward the water, where the sails hung in the far distance as though they had been pinned there. "Have you noticed how she looks at things? At the water, at a bird going over, at the coffee in her cup—as if she had never seen any of them before in her life and did not expect ever to see them again. It is like walking about with some one who has only just arrived in the world. It makes a man feel that he has been asleep for twenty-six years and that somebody ought to wake him."

Madame Ratignolle laughed comfortably behind her veil. "That is very pretty. You should write it in a letter to your brother Victor; he would read it aloud at table."

"I shall not write it to anybody," said Robert; and he began at once to talk of the *soirée musicale*, and of the Farival twins, and of whether the piano could be got in tune before Saturday.

The telegram came out from the city a little before noon, brought up from the wharf by the boy along with the mail and a crate of poultry. Madame Lebrun herself carried it across to the cottage, holding it at arm's length as though its contents might be read through the envelope, and lamenting in advance the misfortune which it must certainly announce. It announced that Mr. Pontellier would not be able to come out for the Sunday; that business detained him; that he would write.

"There!" said Madame Lebrun. "It is always so. They put us out here on an island like a hamper of provisions and remember us when they are hungry. My poor child, you are quite alone."

"But I am not alone at all," said Edna, folding the paper into a small square. "I have the children, and everybody, and there is nothing whatever the matter."

She was surprised at herself. She had expected—she supposed she had expected—to be disappointed; and she waited a little while inwardly for the disappointment, as one waits for a familiar pain, and it did not come. What came instead was a curious lightness, not unlike the sensation she had felt that morning with her head upon Madame Ratignolle's shoulder; and being unable to give it any name that she was willing to use, she went in and read the telegram again, and put it into the drawer with her husband's letters, and said nothing more about it.

At two o'clock the island lay under the sun without a sign of life. The Farival twins had been silenced; Madame Ratignolle was lying down; the lovers had disappeared; even the children slept, sprawled and damp, with the quadroon nodding over them and the pack of cards in her lap. Robert came to the door of the cottage in the drowsy stillness and asked whether Mrs. Pontellier would care to go down to the water.

"Not this afternoon," said Edna.

"There will be no one there. The tide is coming in beautifully."

"Not this afternoon," she repeated. She could not have told him why she said it, nor why, when he had gone off whistling toward the house with his hands in his pockets, she stood a long while at the window watching the place in the path where he had disappeared. Then she got her bathing suit and went down alone.

The beach was empty except for the lady in black, who sat as usual on the gallery of a neighboring bath-house with her beads and her book of devotions, and who did not look up. Edna went into the water without stopping to consider it, which was not her habit; her habit was to venture in timorously, with a hand always reaching for something—for Robert's hand, or Madame Ratignolle's, or the rope. All summer they had been teaching her to swim, and she had learned nothing, and had laughed at herself, and had been ashamed.

The water was warm at the top and cool beneath, and the small choppy waves that had run all morning had gone down into a long, oily swell. She waded out until it took her under the arms. Then, without knowing that she meant to do it, she lifted her feet from the bottom.

For a moment there was nothing at all beneath her; and the old terror came, the terror that had always turned her back at just that point, that made her clutch and gasp and set her feet down again upon the sand. But this time the terror went by her like something passing in the dark, and she stayed where she was, and struck out. She made four strokes, or five. The water carried her; she felt it hold her up as though it had been waiting all summer with a great deal of patience to do it. Then she put her feet down and found the sand, and stood breathing quickly, with her heart going in her throat and her hair loosened and streaming, and looked back at the little space of water she had crossed, which was hardly wider than the gallery of her cottage, and which seemed to her at that moment as considerable as the ocean of grass she had walked through as a child.

She did it again, further out, and a third time. She would have liked to shout. She would have liked, she thought, to swim out to where the sails were; and the thought did not frighten her; it made her laugh aloud in the empty water. There was no one to hear her. Some new power seemed to have been given her, and it appeared to her a very strange and important thing that it should have been given her when there was nobody by; as though a gift had been left at her door in the night, with no name.

She came out and dressed slowly in the bath-house, and when she stepped down to the sand the sun was already reddening and the lady in black had risen and stood at the head of the little wooden stair, drawing on her black cotton gloves.

"The tide turns at this hour," said the lady in black.

Edna started. In all the weeks of that summer she had never heard the woman's voice, and had come to think of her, without ever putting it into words, as belonging to the beach in the way the bath-houses and the tent belonged to it, and as being no more likely to speak than they.

"Yes," said Edna. "Yes—I suppose it does."

"When it turns it goes out very fast, and it takes whatever is in it." She said it without any expression whatever, gazing past Edna at the water. "The Chênière boat is late. Good evening, madame."

"Good evening," said Edna. She had it on her lips to say, "I have been swimming; I swam by myself, out beyond the second bar"—and she did not say it. The lady in black went up the path with her beads swinging, and Edna followed slowly, some distance behind, keeping the secret pressed against her as one presses a hand over a bird.

She told no one. She sat through dinner in the great hall and heard Monsieur Farival deliver himself upon the iniquity of the Louisiana Lottery, and answered Madame Lebrun about her husband's telegram, and passed the *pain perdu*; and all the time it lay under her hands like something warm.

Madame Ratignolle came across after dinner with her sewing, in the blue hour when the mosquitoes were not yet unbearable, and sat fanning herself on the step while Edna put the children to bed. She spoke of her cramp, which was better; of the *soirée musicale*; of the Farival twins.

"And I must tell you what Robert said of you this morning, coming up from the beach," she said, biting off her thread, "for it was really charming, and it is a pity to let such things be wasted. He said that you look at things—at the water, at a bird, at your coffee—as if you had never seen them before and never expected to see them again; and that being with you is like being with some one who has only just arrived in the world; and that it made him feel he had been asleep for twenty-six years and that somebody ought to wake him."

Edna laughed and said that Robert talked a great deal of nonsense, and that his mother had spoiled him; and Madame Ratignolle agreed that all sons were spoiled, and gathered up her work, and went home to Monsieur Ratignolle, who did not like to be left alone in the evening.

The children were asleep by nine. Edna came out and sat on the gallery of the cottage with her feet on the rail. There was no lamp behind her; the moon had not yet risen; a mosquito hummed and stung her arm and she did not move. The sea sounded from beyond the yellow camomile with that dull, incessant beating which one hears all night at Grand Isle and never hears at all. She thought of the water lifting her, and of the lady in black's flat voice saying that the tide took whatever was in it, and of her husband's telegram lying in the drawer among his letters. But what stayed with her, and came back, and would not be put down, was the other thing—that she had only just arrived in the world; and it seemed to her, sitting there in the dark with her hands lying open in her lap, that this was perfectly true, and that no one had ever told her so before.

The First National Bank was a block and a half from the Herald building, in a gray stone box with too many pillars across its front. I asked a man at a desk near the door for somebody who could tell me about Donald Willsson's account, and after I had been passed along from him to a second man and from the second man to a third, I found myself at a mahogany railing talking to a nice-looking blond youngster of twenty-five or six named Robert Albury.

I gave him one of my cards and told him I was working on the killing.

"Anything I can tell you," he said, and meant it. His face was young enough to show what was going on behind it, and what was going on was the excitement of a boy who has had a murder brought within reach of his hands.

"He drew a check for five thousand dollars yesterday afternoon, a little before three. I want to know who got it."

"Yesterday afternoon?" He looked at the clock on the wall as if it could tell him something about yesterday. "It wouldn't have cleared yet unless it was cashed over the counter or certified. Wait a minute."

He was gone six or seven minutes. When he came back he had a strip of paper in his hand and a puzzled pucker between his eyebrows.

"Nothing," he said. "There's no five-thousand-dollar item against his personal account, yesterday or this morning. Nothing certified. He hasn't been in the bank—that is, nobody at the windows remembers seeing him, and they'd remember. He wasn't in here so much that we'd forget him. Whoever's got that check hasn't done anything with it yet."

"Sure the paying teller didn't take it?"

"There's no five-thousand-dollar cash item at all for the day. There's the record." He turned the strip of paper around so I could look at it, which was decent of him and no good to me. "If it comes in it will have to come to me or across one of those windows, and it will be talked about. A check that size on a dead man's account is going to be talked about anyway. His account's stopped, of course. It stopped when he did."

"Meaning whoever brings it in doesn't get any money."

"Meaning he doesn't get any money over this counter. He'd have to file it as a claim against the estate, and then he'd have to say what it was for."

"And if he doesn't want to say what it was for?"

"Then he tears it up," Albury said, "and is out five thousand dollars."

I chewed that. It made a nice tidy piece of nothing.

"How long would it have taken him to walk here from the Herald?" I asked.

"Four minutes. Five."

"He was out of his office twenty minutes with that check in his pocket. He didn't come here. Where else could he take a check?"

The boy turned his hands palms up.

"Anywhere. To whoever it was made out to. You don't have to bring a check to a bank to give it away."

"Did he have a box here?"

"A safe deposit box, yes. It can't be opened without an order and somebody from the state to sit in on it. That'll be a week, likely."

"Who was on the account besides him? His wife?"

"No. That account was his own. There's a household account she draws on. Nothing has come through on that in three days but a hundred and forty to a Broadway shop."

"Anybody been in here asking about his money?"

Albury flushed a little and looked past my shoulder at the pillars.

"Two men from the chief's office were in this morning," he said. "They asked what his balance was and went away with it. They didn't ask about any check."

"They wouldn't," I said. "If that five-thousand-dollar check comes in, I'd like to know it."

"I'd have to tell the bank," he said. "And the police."

"Tell them first. Then tell me. I'm at the Great Western."

"That's fair enough," he said, and wrote it on the strip of paper, and then, because he couldn't hold it in any longer: "Do you know who killed him?"

"Not yet," I said. "Did you?"

He laughed at that, the way a youngster laughs when he isn't quite sure a thing is funny, and I went out into the sunlight.

Hurricane Street in the daytime was three blocks of frame houses with their paint gone and their front yards worn down to hard clay. The eleven-hundred block ran downhill toward the smelter smoke. The alley the police had figured the shots from was on the north side, a crooked slot four feet wide between a boarding house and a store that had gone out of business, running back a hundred feet and turning to come out on the next street. A man could stand in the mouth of it with his shoulders touching brick on both sides and see everything on the sidewalk opposite and be seen by nobody.

I found the two bullet holes in the wall of the house across the way, patched with white where somebody had already dug the lead out. There was nothing else to find. The nearest street light was at the corner, better than a hundred feet up the hill, and there was a tree in front of it. Whoever had picked that spot had picked it in daylight, with his mind on his work.

I rang doorbells for an hour up and down that block. A woman with a baby on her arm had heard the shots and thought they were a car; her husband had thought they were shots and had told her to keep away from the window. An old man three doors up had got to his porch in time to see two people stooping over something on the sidewalk, and had gone back in for his glasses, and when he came out with them there was nobody there but the dead man. He couldn't tell me whether the two had been tall or short, fat or thin, young or old. He was sure one of them had been a man and the other a woman, and he was sure of it because he had said so to the police that night and hadn't been contradicted since.

I ate a late lunch and walked back to the Great Western.

The clerk was holding an envelope out to me before I was across the lobby. It was a cheap white envelope with my name on it in pencil, printed in block capitals, no stamp and no address.

"Who left it?"

"A boy. About ten, twelve years old. He wouldn't wait."

The paper inside was the same cheap grade, folded twice. The printing on it was the same:

MAX THALER WANTS YOU TO KNOW HE DIDNT KILL DONALD WILLSSON AND DONT KNOW WHO DID. HE DONT WANT TO SEE YOU AND DONT WANT YOU LOOKING FOR HIM. IF YOU ARE HERE TO FIND WHO KILLED WILLSSON THAT IS ALL RIGHT WITH HIM. IF YOU ARE HERE FOR ANYTHING ELSE PERSONVILLE IS A BAD TOWN TO BE IN.

There was no signature. I turned it over. The back was blank.

"Is Mr. Thaler a guest here?" I asked the clerk.

The clerk had trouble with his necktie for a moment. "No, sir," he said. "Mr. Thaler is not a guest here."

I put the note in my pocket and went up to my room and sat on the bed with it spread out on my knee. It told me two things, if it told me anything. Whisper had known within four hours that a San Francisco op was in town, which was no news, since everybody from Bill Quint to the bell captain seemed to know it. And Whisper wanted something out of Donald Willsson's death, or wanted something kept out of it, badly enough to spend a boy and a sheet of paper on me. Men who are simply innocent don't usually go to the trouble.

The telephone rang at half-past four. The clerk said there was a lady downstairs to see me. I asked who she was. He said she had said I would know.

I did. She was standing by the cigar case in a black coat with a gray fur collar, and she was the only thing in that lobby worth looking at. The blondeness of her hair under a small black hat was the only bright thing in the place. Her face was as white as it had been at five past eleven the night before.

"Is there somewhere we can talk?" she asked.

There were four men in the lobby and every one of them had stopped doing whatever he had been doing. I took her into the writing room off the far end, which had two desks, a dead fireplace, and nobody in it. She sat down in the chair I turned around for her, but she didn't lean back in it.

"You went to see my husband's father this morning," she said.

"Yeah."

"What did you tell him?"

"What I saw and what I heard. He asked me. He's the kind of man people tell things to, when they're through being yelled at."

Her hands were quiet in her lap. That took some doing. Her accent got a little thicker.

"You told him I went out at twenty minutes past ten and came back at five minutes past eleven."

"I did."

"And that I had blood on my shoe."

"I told him it looked like blood. It was on the left slipper, the green ones, at the toe and along the edge of the sole. If it wasn't blood you can have it looked at and be a lot better off than you are now."

"I stepped in the street," she said. "It was dark. There are dogs in Personville, and men who—" She stopped that and started again, and her voice came out very level. "You are a detective. My husband sent for you. Then you are working for my husband, and my husband is dead, so you are working for nobody. Who is paying you now?"

"Nobody. That's what makes me expensive."

"I will pay you," she said. "I want to know who killed Donald. I have money of my own—not his, my own. Name the amount."

"You're the second Willsson today who's tried to buy me for a purpose of his own," I told her. "The old man wanted me to put you in jail before lunch. You want me to take your money so that whatever I turn up afterwards has your name on the bill for it. I'll find out who killed him without either of you."

She looked at me for a while without saying anything. There was nothing helpless in that look. Old Elihu had called her a lot of things, and one or two of them may have fitted.

"You are not a very polite man," she said at last.

"No."

"Max Thaler came to my house this morning."

"I know. I watched him go in. That's why I didn't."

That jarred her a little, but not much. She stood up and put her gloves on, taking her time about it.

"He came because he was a friend of my husband's," she said. "Of both of us. You will believe what you like."

"Where was your husband going in Hurricane Street at half-past ten last night, when he had a date with me at his house at ten?"

"I don't know."

"Who telephoned you at twenty past ten?"

"A friend."

"That's a fine, wide word. Did he give your husband a check for five thousand dollars yesterday afternoon?"

Her chin came up. Whatever was in her face then went out of it before I could read it, and it was as white and still as it had been in the lobby.

"I know nothing about my husband's money," she said. "I never did. Good afternoon."

I let her go. She walked out through the lobby with the four men watching her again, and got into the Buick coupé that was standing in front of the hotel, and drove off up Broadway with the traffic.

I had dinner in the hotel dining room, and afterwards I walked over to the telegraph office on Broadway and wrote out a wire to the Old Man in San Francisco:

CLIENT DONALD WILLSSON MURDERED HERE TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT BEFORE KEEPING APPOINTMENT WITH ME SHOT FOUR TIMES FROM ALLEY HURRICANE STREET BY PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN STOP HE LEFT NO INSTRUCTIONS AND I HAVE NOTHING TO SHOW WHAT JOB HE WANTED DONE STOP HIS FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON WHO CONTROLS THIS TOWN REFUSES TO EMPLOY US OR TO TALK AND WANTS ME OUT OF PERSONVILLE STOP LOCAL POLITICAL SITUATION ROTTEN AND MAY BE BEHIND KILLING STOP DECEASED DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK THREE HOURS BEFORE DEATH PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NEVER PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED STOP WIDOW UNDER SUSPICION AND LYING BUT NOT NECESSARILY GUILTY STOP HAVE BEEN WARNED OFF BY GAMBLER MAX THALER STOP CONSIDER AGENCY ENTITLED TO CLEAR UP MURDER OF CLIENT AND AM STAYING ON UNLESS ORDERED OFF STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS GREAT WESTERN HOTEL

The girl behind the counter counted the words twice and charged me for all of them.

Broadway had its lights on when I came out. Personville at night was better looking than Personville at noon; the smoke hid the sky instead of the sun, and the yellow signs hid the smoke. A newsboy was crying an extra that had nothing in it but the same story turned over. I bought one anyway, and read it going up in the elevator, and it hadn't got any warmer by the time I reached my floor.

In my room I took off my coat and shoes, propped myself up on the bed with the pillows behind me, and put the whole day out on the counterpane where I could look at it: a girl of nineteen who told me things she should have kept, an old man who wanted a hanging instead of a murderer, a widow with a spot on her slipper and money she wanted to spend on me, a note in block capitals from a man who wouldn't show his face, and an alley with two patched bullet holes across the street from it.

And a check for five thousand dollars, written out at a quarter to three in the afternoon and carried out of the Herald building in a dead man's pocket, that no bank had seen and nobody had claimed.

Whoever had it either didn't dare cash it or didn't need to. I turned the light off and lay there in the dark a long while, trying to decide which of those was worse, and getting nowhere with it.

The conference was fixed for a morning in the middle of the week, and Lady Russell came to it with her papers in her hand. She had been employed upon them many evenings; she had gone over the receipts and the disbursements of the last seven years with a patience which nothing but affection for the memory of Lady Elliot could have supported; and she came prepared to be firm, having satisfied herself that firmness was a duty, and being aware that it was not likely to be pleasant. Lady Russell had a value for rank and consequence which sometimes blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them; but she had also a very sincere horror of debt, and she knew that credit unpaid was a stain of another kind, which the Baronetage could not wipe out.

Mr Shepherd was sent for from the market town, and arrived with the punctuality of a man whose living depends on being wanted. Elizabeth was of the party, as of right; and Anne, whom nobody had thought of, was desired by Lady Russell to remain, which she did, taking her seat a little apart, near the window, where she might be forgotten as usual, and hear every thing.

Lady Russell spoke first, and spoke well. Her plan was regular, moderate, and complete. The annual excursion to London must be given up—not for ever, but for a period; two carriage horses, and the third saddle horse, must be parted with; the number of servants within doors must be reduced by three; the table must be reduced from its present style of hospitality to that of a quiet gentleman's family; and the entertaining of the neighbourhood must be confined to what could be done without cost. By these means, she calculated, a sum might annually be laid aside towards the discharge of the debt, and in seven years Sir Walter would be a free man, holding his estate whole and entire, and holding it moreover in honour.

Sir Walter heard her out, because she was Lady Russell; but he heard her with a rising colour, and he answered her with warmth.

“And this is what is recommended to me! To sink at once, in my own county, in the sight of every creature who has known me from my cradle, into a man who cannot keep his horses! To give up London, where the Elliots have appeared every spring for a century! To be seen with a table which the Musgroves might pity! My dear Lady Russell, I am willing to be advised, nobody is more willing; but you must be sensible that what you propose is not retrenchment—it is degradation. Kellynch Hall would be a byword. The very servants we dismissed would carry the story into every kitchen in Somersetshire. No, no; there must be some other way. A gentleman may be poor; there is no disgrace in that, if it is not talked of; but he cannot be shabby.”

Lady Russell coloured a little herself, and was silent. She had expected opposition, but not that her seven years of patient arithmetic should be answered by the word shabby.

Mr Shepherd, thus left the field, came forward with the caution of a man who had no wish to be the person to say the disagreeable thing, and who preferred that his client should appear to have thought of every thing himself. His plan was gentler. Let the debts be classed; let the more pressing be met by such a sum as could be raised without difficulty; let the tradespeople be spoken to—he would undertake to speak to them—and be brought to consent to receive their money by degrees; a little reduction here, a little forbearance there, and, above all, time. Time did a great deal. Nothing need be given up which the eye of the world could observe. The London journey might even be continued, though perhaps for a shorter period, and with one carriage only.

“And who is to speak to them?” said Sir Walter. “You, Mr Shepherd? You would go from shop to shop in Crewkherne, and beg my creditors to be patient with Sir Walter Elliot? Upon my word, sir, I had rather owe the money for ever. Do you suppose that would be a secret four-and-twenty hours? It would be at Uppercross by Sunday, and at Taunton by the week's end. There is not a scheme before me this morning which is not worse than the evil. I am to be either a poor man in appearance, or a poor man in fact, and known to be so. I decline both.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said that Sir Walter's feelings did him honour; and there was a pause of some length, in which Elizabeth looked at the fire, and Lady Russell looked at her papers, and Sir Walter looked at the picture of himself over the chimney-piece; and it was in this pause that Anne spoke.

“I think,” said she, in a voice which was low, but perfectly steady, “that all these plans are too gentle. If we are to retrench at all, would it not be better to retrench so far that the thing may be done quickly, and done once? Half-measures will keep us seven years in the very difficulty which makes us unhappy, and we shall have all the mortification of economy without the credit of having conquered any thing. I would give up London entirely, and the horses, and half the servants; I would have no dinner-company for a year, and no new furniture, and no journeys; and I would pay the debts as fast as the money could be found, and not by degrees, and not by favour asked of any body. Honesty may be practised at a great expense of comfort, but I do not think it can be practised at any expense of dignity. Nobody can be lowered by paying what he owes. We should be doing what is right, and I believe we should very soon be doing it without pain.”

There was an astonishment in the room which no words of Anne's had produced there for many years. Lady Russell's eyes filled; she had heard her friend speak. Mr Shepherd, who had a professional respect for whatever was practicable, said within himself that Miss Anne had more of a head for business than the whole family besides. And Elizabeth, after a moment, said,

“Anne is right.”

She said it so decidedly that her father turned to look at her. Elizabeth had her own reasons, and they were not Anne's. She had listened to Mr Shepherd's proposal of applications to tradesmen with a sensation of positive sickness; the notion of Sir Walter Elliot's daughter being an object of forbearance to the people who supplied her gloves was not to be endured. Between being pitied for seven years and being wondered at for one, her pride made its choice without hesitation. There was even something in the largeness of Anne's scheme that pleased her; it had an air of doing a great thing; it might be talked of as a proof of spirit rather than of necessity, and she already saw herself saying, with composure, to Lady Russell's cousins, that they had thought it best to lay aside the London house for a season, and that she found the country very tolerable.

“Anne is right,” she repeated. “If it must be done, let it be done thoroughly. I shall not go to London. I would rather do without every thing for one year than be spoken of for seven.”

Sir Walter looked from one daughter to the other, and could scarcely believe that he was to be attacked from that quarter.

“Upon my honour,” he cried, “this is very extraordinary. Anne, my dear, you have no idea what you are talking of; you never had. You would have me sit down at Kellynch Hall with four servants and a pair of horses, and call it doing right. And Elizabeth—Elizabeth, whom I would not have believed capable of it—joins with you. And to what end? That in one year or two years, the money being paid, I may have the satisfaction of remembering that Sir Walter Elliot lived like nobody, and was talked of by every body. My dear girls, the world does not enquire whether a man's debts are paid; it enquires whether he keeps a good table and a decent equipage. Whatever is given up is given up in public; whatever is owed is owed in private. That is the whole of the matter, and I am surprised that a woman of Lady Russell's understanding should not have seen it.”

He rose, and walked to the window, and came back; and Mr Shepherd, perceiving that the moment of the gentlemanly and the moment of the possible had both gone by together, and being a man who had been all the morning working towards one point, made his push.

“There is one measure, Sir Walter,” he said, in his softest manner, “which I should not have ventured to name, but that the times are so peculiarly favourable to it, and it is a measure to which many families of the first respectability have had recourse, without the smallest diminution of their consequence. Where an estate is embarrassed and the house is large, it has been found that the house itself may be made to assist the estate. If Kellynch Hall were to be offered—for a term of years only—to some suitable person, some family of fortune and character, who would be sensible of the honour of such a situation—a tenant, in short—”

“Mr Shepherd.”

The word had been reached, and it was enough. Sir Walter was on his feet, and his face was a fine study for any body who had leisure to observe it.

“Mr Shepherd, you will oblige me by never using that expression again. A tenant! at Kellynch! I am to be a lodger in the world, and some person of fortune and character, as you are pleased to call him—some man enriched by nobody knows what, with a wife who never saw a picture-gallery and a pack of children in my nurseries—is to sit at my table, and walk in my grounds, and be spoken of in this county as of Kellynch? I would not have it said of me for the whole value of the property. My father held this house, and his father before him, and it has never been let, and it never shall be. Let me hear no more of it. I forbid the word. It shall not be uttered in this house again in my hearing.”

Mr Shepherd, who had been forbidden things before, and had generally found that the interdict was of a temper to be outlived, made his apologies with great correctness, said that he had spoken only from a sense of duty, and never with a thought of urging what was so justly repugnant to Sir Walter's feelings, and was very glad to be gone soon afterwards. Lady Russell went too, having said little more, but pressing Anne's hand as she went, and observing to her in the hall that she had spoken exactly as her mother would have wished her to speak, and that it was a great pity that being right had so little to do with being attended to. Nothing whatever was settled. The debts stood precisely where they had stood at breakfast; the tradespeople's bills lay in the drawer of the library table; and Sir Walter, having been much agitated, went out to look at the young plantations, and recovered his spirits in observing how well they were coming on, and how very unlike the ruinous appearance of Sir Henry Crabbe's.

The post came in while they were at dinner, and there was a letter from Uppercross, which Elizabeth, seeing the hand, passed to Anne with a look of contempt for the whole subject.

“My dear Anne,” Mary wrote, “I am sorry to say that I am very far from well, and nobody can tell what I suffer. Charles has been out all day after the birds, and I have been alone from breakfast till now, with nothing but the children, who are so unruly that they do me more harm than good; and Mrs Musgrove has never once come to me, though she must know how ill I am, and Henrietta and Louisa did not think it worth their while to walk over, which I do think is very unkind, but I never complain. My sore-throat is much worse than it was, and I have a good deal of pain in my side, and I really believe I am worse than any body imagines. I am sure you will come to me. You have nothing to do at Kellynch that anybody else could not do as well, and I have nobody. If you can come to-morrow, or the day after, it would be doing me the greatest kindness, for I am not fit to be left, and Charles thinks so too, or at least he would if he thought about it at all.”

Anne read it twice, and gave it to her father, who read three lines of it and returned it.

“Mary is always ill,” said Elizabeth. “She was ill the whole of last Michaelmas, and danced twice at Winthrop in the middle of it. But you had better go, if she wishes it. There is nothing to keep you here.”

“Certainly,” said Sir Walter. “Mary should be persuaded to walk more, and to keep out of the sun; she has a coarse skin, and a person of her complexion cannot afford to be careless. But go, by all means. It will make no difference to us.”

So it was settled, in five minutes, and with less discussion than had been given that morning to the question of a pair of carriage horses.

In the evening Anne was left alone. Elizabeth had gone up to her own room, Sir Walter to the library and the Baronetage; the fire was low, and the long light of the summer evening lay upon the lawn beyond the window, where she could see the shadows of the trees stretching quite across it. She was going, then; on the morrow, or the day after, the three miles to Uppercross, to be useful, and to be found fault with, and to hear about the sore-throat, and to be sent for whenever any body was in a difficulty and forgotten whenever they were not. She thought of it without repining. To be wanted, even by Mary, was something; and she owned to herself, with a smile that was not quite a happy one, that Uppercross had this advantage over Kellynch, that in the one house she was of no consequence and knew it, and in the other she was of no consequence and was expected to be grateful for the arrangement.

But her mind went back, before she took her candle, to the morning; to the papers on Lady Russell's lap, and Mr Shepherd's bow, and her father walking to the window; and to the fact, which no one else in the house appeared to feel at all, that after every body had spoken, and nothing had been agreed, the money was still owing, and every day that passed added to it. That was the thought she carried up-stairs with her: that all of them had been busy, that morning, in defending what they could not afford, and that not one shilling of the debt was the nearer to being paid.

She wakened because the train had stopped, and because Mrs. Medlock was shaking her arm.

"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."

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. There was a lamp swinging in the wind under the low roof, and beyond the lamp the rain was still falling, though not so heavily as it had fallen in the afternoon. The station-master spoke to Mrs. Medlock in a broad, slow, good-natured voice, pronouncing his words in a queer way. Mary found out afterward that this was Yorkshire.

Then a tall man came out of the shadow at the end of the platform and stood in the light of the swinging lamp, and Mrs. Medlock quite suddenly stopped talking.

Mary looked up at him. He was a very tall man with black hair streaked with white, and he wore a long black coat with the collar turned up, and there was rain on the shoulders of it. His shoulders were high and crooked, and his face was thin and haggard and worn, and it looked as if it were sorry about something. He did not stoop to her or hold out his hand. He looked at her from under his black brows for as long as one might count ten.

"Is this the child?" he said. His voice was short and cold, exactly as Mrs. Medlock had said it was.

"This is her, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, and it was plain that she was startled almost out of her wits, though she tried not to show it. "We're up to time, sir. I never thought—"

"The carriage is waiting," he said, and turned and walked away down the platform without waiting for her to finish, and without looking at Mary again.

That was all. Mary had heard so much about him that she had expected something, though she did not know what. She had expected a hunchback in a book, or perhaps that he would ask her whether she had had a good journey, as people did. He had said seven words, and none of them had been to her at all.

The carriage was a comfortable one, and the footman who helped her in had rain running off the shiny cape of his coat. Mr. Archibald Craven got in and sat in the corner farthest from her with his face turned to the window, and Mrs. Medlock sat bolt upright and did not talk at all, which was so unlike her that Mary thought it must be a rule. The door was shut, the horses started, and they drove away into the wet dark.

Mary sat in her corner and looked out. There were a few lights of a village, and then a bridge, and then a rough road that seemed to go up and up. On either side there was nothing to see but blackness. Presently the rain stopped, but the wind did not; it came against the carriage in long pushes and made a sound in the dark outside which Mary had never heard the like of—a wide, hollow, rushing sound, as if the whole world outside the windows were empty and swept bare.

She had been jolting on in the dark a long time when the carriage slowed and then stopped altogether, and the driver said something in a loud voice from the box.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Medlock sharply, letting down the window an inch.

There was more shouting outside, and the sound of the footman getting down and his boots slipping in the mud. Mrs. Medlock put her head out into the wind and drew it in again with the flowers on her bonnet trembling.

"It's sheep," she said. "There's sheep lying in the road. They'll do it in the wet nights, the silly things—they lie in the road because the ground's warmer. They'll have to be got up."

Mary had never seen a sheep except in a picture, and she had never in her life been forbidden anything by anybody who mattered. She put her hand on the handle of the door and opened it and got down before either of them could speak, and stood in the road in the dark.

The wind took her breath away and blew her black crêpe hat sideways on her head, and she had to hold it. Under her feet the road was wet and gritty, and at the side of it, close by, there was something growing which she could not see but which the wind moved and made a low, thin, hissing noise in. There was a smell she did not know at all—a strong, cold, sweet smell of wet earth and something growing, quite unlike the smells of India. Far off, low down, a light showed once and went out again. Above her, when she turned her face up, there was a torn place in the clouds with two stars in it. All the rest of the world was black, and it was not the blackness of a room. It went on and on. She could feel it going on, though she could not see it, and she had never felt anything of the kind before.

She stood quite still in it for a minute, holding her hat, feeling smaller than she had ever felt.

Then the footman's lantern swung round the corner of the carriage and made a yellow ring on the road, and in the ring there were sheep with rain on their wool, getting up on their thin legs in an offended way, one after another, and pushing off into the dark.

"Get in with you!" cried Mrs. Medlock from the window. "Whatever will you do next! On the moor at this time of night—"

"Let her be," said Mr. Craven's voice out of the corner of the carriage. He did not raise it, and he did not turn his head, and he did not say anything else at all. But Mrs. Medlock stopped, and Mary climbed in by herself, and the door was shut, and they went on.

"Is that the moor?" Mary asked at last.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock, in the voice of a woman who does not intend to be encouraged into talking. "Miles and miles of it. Nothing on it but heather and gorse and whins, and nothing living on it but wild ponies and sheep."

Mary said nothing more. She thought about the blackness that went on and on, and she was not sure whether she disliked it or not.

They drove for what seemed a very long time. Then they turned in at gates and went along a drive with trees on both sides that met over their heads, and came out into an open place, and the carriage drew up before a house so long and low and dark that Mary could not see the end of it, and where there was only one window lighted, high up. They went in through a great door into a huge hall so dimly lighted that the faces in the pictures on the walls and the figures in armor made Mary feel she did not want to look at them. An old servant with a candle was standing waiting.

Mr. Archibald Craven took off his hat, and the light fell on his worn face.

"You will take her to her room," he said to Mrs. Medlock. "I don't want to see her."

Then he went away up the great staircase with the old servant lighting him, and Mary stood in the middle of the stone floor, a plain little black figure, and looked after him.

"Well," said Mrs. Medlock, "here you are! And you may think yourself lucky, for that's more of him than most folk get in a twelvemonth. Come along with me."

She took Mary up the same staircase and then down a long corridor and up a short flight of steps and through another corridor and another, until Mary was quite lost, and at last she opened a door and there was a room with a fire in the grate and supper on a table.

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

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

Mrs. Medlock went away and shut the door, and Mary sat down on the rug before the fire and stared at it with her lips pinched together. She was too proud to say she was hungry and too tired to be anything but cross.

She had sat there some time when the door was opened, not by a maid, but by a big young man in a striped waistcoat, with a very red face and hair that stood up like a brush. He carried a tray on which there was porridge and a plate of bread and butter and cold ham and a jug of milk, and he set it down on the table and looked at her cheerfully, as though she were something well worth looking at.

"Eh!" he said. "Tha'rt nobbut a little un after aw. I browt thee thy supper mysen, for there's nobbut two women i' this end o' th' house an' they're baith at th' linen. Sup it up while it's warm, an' tha'll feel better. Tha' looks starved wi' th' cold."

Mary stared at him. She could not tell whether he was being rude to her or not.

"I don't understand you," she said. "I don't know what you are saying. Say it in English."

The young man threw back his head and laughed out loud, and then seemed to think better of it and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.

"That's Yorkshire, that is," he said. "I forgot. Th' housekeeper said tha'd come fro' India. I said as tha' should have thy supper. Tha' mun eat it." He said the last words very slowly and loudly, as people do to foreigners, and Mary understood some of them and thought it very impertinent that a servant should laugh.

"You may go," she said.

"Aye, I'm goin'," he answered, quite unoffended, and grinned at her from the door. "Tha'll larn Yorkshire i' time. Everybody does i' these parts—they mun."

When he had gone Mary ate the bread and butter and drank some of the milk, because she found she was hungry after all, and then a maid did come, a thin one who scarcely spoke at all, and helped her out of her clothes and put her into bed and took away the candle and left one small light burning.

Mary lay in the big bed and looked at the ceiling, which was too far away to see. The fire had sunk low and made a red flicker. Outside, the wind went round the house, and every now and then it came at the window in a rush that made the panes rattle in their frames.

And then, when the wind dropped for a moment, she heard something else.

It was a long way off—so far off that at first she thought she had made it up out of the noise of the wind—but when it came again it was quite plain: a thin, low, fretful sound that seemed to be inside the house and not outside it, and that stopped, and began again, and stopped. It was not like the wind at all. The wind was wide and hollow and out-of-doors. This was small, and shut up somewhere, behind walls.

Mary sat up in bed. Just then the door opened, and Mrs. Medlock came in with a candle, looking cross at being still awake at such an hour.

"What are you sitting up like that for?" she said.

"I heard something," said Mary. "Listen. There it is again. Some one is making a noise somewhere in the house."

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still for a second with her hand on the door, and Mary, watching her over the top of the bedclothes, saw her look toward the corridor and then back again.

"It's the wind," she said. "That's all it is. It's the wind on the moor. It gets into the passages of an old place like this and it makes all manner of sounds. You'll hear it many a night. Now lie down, and don't let me hear another word about it."

She pulled the door shut behind her, rather hard, and her candle went away down the corridor and the light under the door went with it.

Mary lay down in the dark. The wind rushed at the window and went away again, and in the space between she listened, and it was there, small and far off, behind the walls.

It was not the wind. She was quite certain it was not the wind, and Mrs. Medlock had known that it was not, because she had looked at the door before she said it. Mary lay in the great dark room with her eyes wide open and her small hands shut tight, in a house with a hundred rooms in it, nearly all of them locked; and she made up her mind that some day, when nobody was watching her, she would find out for herself what the sound was.

The book told me little enough that I did not already know, but it left me with an impression of the words tetanus and *risus sardonicus* burnt upon my brain, and with the memory of that arched and rigid body on the bed which I have never since been able to shake off. I shut the volume, put it back in its place—I remember that I was absurdly careful to put it back in its exact place—and let myself out by the side door into the morning.

It was a beautiful morning. The storm that had hung over us all the previous evening had drifted away in the night without breaking, and the air, though still heavy, had a washed sweetness about it. The larks were going up over the park as though nothing whatever had happened. I have often noticed that Nature has no manners at all on these occasions.

I walked fast down the drive and along the village street. Leastways Cottage, where the Belgians were housed, stood at the far end, next but one to the house occupied by Dr. Wilkins. The village was hardly awake. A milk-cart stood at the corner, and a boy was whistling somewhere behind a hedge.

To my astonishment, the door of the cottage opened before I had touched it, and my friend Poirot himself appeared upon the step. He was fully dressed, and, as always, immaculate from the crown of his egg-shaped head to the tips of his very pointed patent leather boots. He was drawing on a pair of grey gloves.

“Mon ami!” he cried. “I have been expecting you this half-hour.”

I stared at him.

“Then you know?”

“That the good Madame Inglethorp is dead? But yes. It was Baily who told me.”

“Baily?”

“The chauffeur. He drove past here at a quarter to five to knock up Dr. Wilkins, and again ten minutes later with the doctor beside him. I was at my window—at my age, my friend, one sleeps badly in the hot weather—and when he came back through the village on foot, having left the car at the house, I called down to him and asked him what was wrong. He is a good fellow, Baily, but he has not the discretion. He told me everything—the locked door, the convulsions, the *two* doctors.” He paused, and repeated softly, with a queer emphasis: “The two doctors. That is what I have been sitting here thinking about, Hastings, for one hour and a quarter.”

“Poirot,” I said, and my voice was not quite steady, “they will not give a certificate. There is to be a post-mortem to-night. And I have come to ask you—John has given me leave—to look into the matter.”

He took off his hat, and stood for a moment bareheaded in the empty street, which surprised me until I understood.

“She was a good woman,” he said. “To me and to my compatriots, who had nothing, she was generous, and she did not make us feel it. If she has been helped out of the world, the affair concerns Hercule Poirot.” He put his hat on again, and became instantly brisk. “But I do not come with you this moment.”

“Not come!”

“In ten minutes, no more. There is one thing I must say to Madame here, and there is a spot of grease upon my sleeve, which is an abomination.” He was scraping at it delicately with a fingernail as he spoke, and I own that I could have shaken him. “Go you on ahead, my friend, and do two things for me. See that those two rooms remain locked, and that nobody—nobody, Hastings, not even the good John—goes into them before I come. And if by chance Monsieur Inglethorp should have returned, listen to what he says. Do not question him. Listen. And do not forget the little things, for it is always the little things that matter.”

With that he shut the door in my face, and I walked back to Styles considerably annoyed, and in the last degree impatient.

I was met in the hall by Dorcas, who came out of the dining-room with a face like a wrung-out cloth, and behind her, hanging up his hat on the peg with the utmost composure, was Alfred Inglethorp.

“Ah, Hastings,” he said, turning. “I have just heard—Dorcas has just told me. This is a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”

He came forward with his hand out. I did not see how I could avoid taking it, and I took it. It was a warm, rather flabby hand, and the touch of it was oddly disagreeable to me. His black beard hid whatever his mouth was doing, but his eyes behind the pince-nez were quite steady.

John came out of the dining-room, and stopped dead when he saw him. There was a silence of perhaps five seconds, and in it I heard the clock on the stairs ticking as though it were beating a drum.

“You have been out all night,” said John. It was not a question.

“I have. I have come straight up from the station—I walked from Tadminster, the early train being what it is. You will forgive me, John, if I am not very coherent. I cannot yet take it in that Emily——” He stopped, and passed his hand across his forehead, and sat down rather suddenly on the oak settle. “When did it happen?”

“At a few minutes before five.”

“And I was not here.” He said it heavily. “I shall not forgive myself. I shall never forgive myself. And it is my own stupidity. I walked down to the village with Dr. Bauerstein—you know that—and left him at his door about a quarter to nine. Then I remembered that I had promised Denby to go through the account of the Church Restoration Fund with him before the meeting, and it seemed to me better to do it then than to make a second journey. I walked over. It was well past one o’clock when we had finished. And then, when I got to the door here—it was nearly two—I found that after all I had come away without the latch-key.”

“Without the latch-key,” repeated John slowly.

“I searched every pocket. I had it in my mind that I had taken it, but there it was, gone. I stood on the step like a fool for five minutes. I did not care to knock and rouse the whole household at that hour—Emily slept so badly at the best of times, and the doctor had been most particular about her not being disturbed—so I walked back to Denby’s, and he made me up a bed on the sofa. I did not sleep much.” He raised his eyes. “If I had knocked—if I had only knocked—I should have been with her.”

It was, I confess, exactly the right thing to say, and exactly the right voice to say it in, and for that very reason I did not believe one word of it.

And then Dorcas spoke. She had been standing all this time by the baize door, with the ends of her apron gathered up in her hands, and her old face was crimson.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, “but the master never come away without the latch-key. I gave it him myself. He asked me for it in the hall, when Dr. Bauerstein was putting on his coat, and I fetched it from the drawer of the hall table and put it into his hand, and he put it in the right-hand pocket of his coat—that coat, sir, that’s hanging there now—and he said as we wasn’t to sit up for him. I heard him say it, and Annie heard him too.”

Nobody said anything at all. Inglethorp did not move. Then he got up, and went to the peg, and turned out the pockets of the coat, one after the other, with the deliberation of a conjurer; and his hands, I noticed, were not quite so steady as his eyes.

“You are quite right, Dorcas,” he said at last, quietly. “Here it is.”

He held it up between finger and thumb—a small, worn latch-key on a bit of string.

“It must have worked down into the lining. I searched that pocket a dozen times.” He looked round at us all with a sort of mild bewilderment. “A man does not think clearly at two in the morning. It seems I have been sitting up all night on a sofa for the want of common sense.”

“It seems so,” said John.

Inglethorp turned to him, and there was, for the first time, a faint edge in his voice. “I should like to go up to her.”

“The rooms are locked. Dr. Bauerstein locked them, and gave me the keys. There is to be a post-mortem.”

I have wondered many times since exactly what passed across Alfred Inglethorp’s face at that moment. It was gone before I could put a name to it. He bowed his head, said, “Of course. Of course. Whatever the doctors think best,” and went into the morning-room and shut the door; and John looked at me, and I looked at John, and neither of us said what we were both thinking.

Poirot arrived at half-past seven, and I took him into the little room off the hall where I had first been shown the picture-postcards of Styles in the days when it had been a happy house. He was presented to John, who was, I could see, doubtful of the little man with the stiff moustache and the almost dandified neatness; but Poirot’s manner at such moments is admirable. He said very little; he expressed his sympathy simply and without a word too much; and within five minutes John had told him everything and had put the two keys into his hand.

“I ask only this,” said John. “No scandal that can be avoided.”

“Monsieur,” said Poirot, “the truth is not a scandal. It is the concealment of it that becomes one.”

I gave him then, upstairs in the passage, a full account of Inglethorp’s return and of what Dorcas had said about the latch-key. He listened with his head a little on one side, like a bird, and at the end he said only, “That is very interesting,” in a voice that told me nothing whatever, and began to straighten the pictures on the wall, which hung, it is true, abominably.

We had reached the head of the stairs when Cynthia came out of her room. She was in her V.A.D. dress, but she had made no attempt to put on her cap, and her hair was all anyhow. Her face was still flushed, and she looked, poor child, thoroughly ill.

I introduced Poirot. He bowed over her hand.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I shall ask you one question only, for you are tired. Do you sleep always so soundly as you slept last night?”

Cynthia opened her eyes wide.

“That is the odd part,” she said. “I never sleep soundly—never. If anyone shuts a door on the other side of the house I am awake. And last night they broke down a door within thirty feet of me and shook me and pulled me about and called my name, and I knew nothing at all until I was standing in the passage with Mary’s arm round me, and even then I could not keep my eyes open. I have never in my life slept like that. I feel now as though my head were full of wool.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Poirot, and bowed again, and said not another word; and Cynthia went slowly down the stairs.

It was, however, close upon eleven o’clock before we entered the room, for Poirot would not be hurried, and there were the servants, and Dr. Wilkins came again, and the household had to be fed, or at least to sit in front of food. When at last he turned the key in the lock of the door that gave on the corridor, the sun was high and the room, with its drawn curtains and its shut windows, was hot and stale, with a faint sweetish smell of cocoa and burnt wick.

He would not let me stir a step beyond the threshold. For fully four minutes he stood there without moving, only his eyes travelling round and round—the disordered bed; the overturned table with the lamp on the floor and the little brass box beside it; the despatch-case on the writing-table; the fine grey feathers of burnt paper in the grate; the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece, at which poor Lawrence had stared so strangely.

Then he began. He went over that room as I have seen a woman go over a length of silk for a flaw. He was down on his hands and knees on the carpet; he smelt things; he lifted the lamp and set it down again in precisely the position it had occupied; he spent, I should think, three minutes at the grate without touching anything in it. He examined the lock of the corridor door, and the bolt of the door into Alfred Inglethorp’s room, and then he crossed to the far side and stooped over the door that led into Cynthia’s rooms—the door that Dorcas had assured us had not been undone within living memory.

He remained there so long, and so still, that I said at last, “What is it?”

He straightened himself. Between his finger and thumb he held something so small that at first I could see nothing at all; then, as he turned to the light, I made it out—a few threads of dark green stuff, three or four of them, no more, caught upon the shot bolt.

“Voyons,” he said softly. “Regard it well, Hastings.”

He took an envelope from his pocket, dropped the threads into it, wrote something on the outside, and bestowed it carefully in his breast pocket.

“Green,” I said, casting about in my mind. “There is nothing green in this house that I have seen. Mrs. Cavendish wears white; Cynthia’s dress is blue. What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Poirot, “that everything in this room has been thought of by somebody, and thought of very well; and that is why I do not look at the things that have been thought of.” He glanced round him with a kind of affection. “Order and method, my friend. Somebody in this house has been most beautifully methodical—and to be methodical at four o’clock in the morning, one must have begun at eight o’clock in the evening.”

I looked at him, and then at the little envelope in his hand, and back again at him.

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

The rain had stopped by the time Eve came out into Shaftesbury Avenue, and a pale and apologetic sun was doing its best to persuade the world that nothing had happened. She stood on the step for a moment, looking at the umbrella in her hand, and the umbrella, so to speak, looked back at her.

It was, now that she had leisure to examine it, a remarkable umbrella. The handle was of some rare wood, and there was a gold band round it, and the whole effect was of an umbrella which had been accustomed to move in the best circles and would be missed at home. Eve, who had spent a great part of her life in the society of objects belonging to other people, was conscious of a distinct sensation of guilt. A girl who accepts a strange umbrella from a strange young man in Dover Street may plead the weather in extenuation; but there is no possible defence for a girl who keeps it after the sun has come out.

Besides, one wanted to know things. One wanted, for instance, to know why. Eve had a healthy curiosity, and it seemed to her that the least a young man could do, after dashing across a public thoroughfare in the rain in order to press umbrellas upon her, was to remain in the offing and be asked about it. This one had gone into his club and stayed there, like a rabbit that has thought the whole thing over and decided to give the open country a miss. It was not, felt Eve, playing the game.

She went into a stationer's in the Charing Cross Road and bought a sheet of paper and an envelope, and, the stationer obligingly lending her a pen which he described as a fountain-pen and which behaved like a garden syringe, she wrote as follows:

“Dear Sir,--Thank you very much indeed. It was a lovely umbrella and it kept the rain off beautifully, and I am extremely grateful. I hope you did not get too wet crossing the road.--Yours sincerely, THE GIRL UNDER THE AWNING.

“P.S.--The gold band is not scratched. That was done before.”

She read this over twice, and considered adding her name; then reflected that a young man who did not tell you his name had no earthly claim on yours, and, having addressed the envelope in a large firm hand to “The Tall Gentleman with the Eyeglass,” she took a bus to Dover Street.

The porter of the Drones Club had been eleven years in his glass box, and there was not much in the way of human oddity which he had not seen come through the swing doors. He accepted the umbrella without emotion.

“The tall gentleman with the eyeglass, miss?”

“Yes. He is quite easy to recognise,” said Eve. “He is about eight feet high, and he looks at you as if he were going to preach a sermon and then didn't.”

“That,” said the porter, with the sombre certainty of an expert, “would be Mr. Psmith, miss.”

But he said it into his moustache and to the middle distance, and Eve, who had already turned to go, heard nothing but a respectful mumble. She went out into Dover Street, and the swing doors closed behind her.

* * * * *

Upstairs, in the smoking-room, Psmith had abandoned the window and was reading a weekly paper in one of the deep leather chairs when there came upon him the shadow of the Hon. Hugo Walderwick.

Hugo Walderwick was a large, solid young man with a face which, though not actively hostile to thought, had never gone out of its way to encourage it. He was accustomed to say that he liked things straight. He now stood over Psmith and breathed heavily, in the manner of one who has come a long way on an important errand.

“I say,” said the Hon. Hugo, “you've got my umbrella.”

“Have I?” said Psmith courteously. “Then that,” he said, “is one thing cleared up.”

“The man downstairs says you took it. Out of the rack. My umbrella.”

“Comrade Walderwick,” said Psmith, laying down his paper and putting up his monocle, “I do not deny it. Indeed, I go further. I glory in it. There are moments in a man's life--”

“But, dash it, it was raining.”

“It was,” agreed Psmith. “Heavily. I remarked upon it at the time.”

“Well, but where is it? I want it. I'm going out.”

“Ah,” said Psmith, “there you touch the very core and centre of the matter. It is not in my possession. It has passed, as one might say, into the great world beyond.”

The Hon. Hugo's face darkened. He had come up two flights of stairs, and he was a man who liked to see some return for his labour.

“You mean you've lost my umbrella?”

“That,” said Psmith, “is a way of putting it which does the umbrella scant justice. Let us rather say that it has gone to fill a high and honourable position, and that we, who remain behind, can only hope to be worthy of it.”

“Look here, Smith--”

“Psmith. The p is silent, as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan.”

“Whatever your beastly name is, I want to know what you've done with my umbrella.”

Psmith rose. He laid a hand upon the other's shoulder in the manner of a bishop conferring a benefice.

“Comrade Walderwick,” he said, “there are matters into which it is best not to enquire. This is one of them. I do not propose to explain. Explanations are the death of friendship. But I recognise that a wrong has been done, and I am here to make reparation. What did the umbrella cost?”

“Eh? About five-and-twenty bob, I suppose. But--”

“Say ten pounds,” said Psmith, producing a cheque-book.

There was a silence such as falls upon a room in which somebody has said something in a foreign language.

“Ten quid?” said the Hon. Hugo at length. “For an umbrella?”

“For that umbrella,” corrected Psmith. “You must not confuse it, Comrade Walderwick, with the common or garden umbrella of commerce. It was an umbrella of destiny. Beneath its shelter history has been made. I could not, in decency, offer you less. Indeed, I feel a certain shame at offering you so little.”

He wrote, blotted the cheque upon his knee, and handed it over. The Hon. Hugo Walderwick looked at it for some time in the way in which a man looks at a horse which has unexpectedly finished first at forty to one. Then he put it in his pocket, because there did not seem to be anything else to do with it.

“Well, I call it dashed odd,” he said.

“Life is full of these strangenesses,” assented Psmith. “I have often noticed it. And now, if you will forgive me, I have to think.”

It was some five minutes later, when Psmith had settled down again and was looking with mild interest at a photograph of the Eton and Harrow match of some years back, that a waiter approached with an umbrella and a letter upon a salver.

“Left for you downstairs, sir.”

Psmith took them both without visible emotion, but there was a light in his eye which had not been there before. He inspected the umbrella first, as a collector inspects a piece of jade. Then he opened the letter and read it twice. Then he read it a third time.

“Splendid,” he murmured. “Superb. The girl has a mind.”

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick, passing through the smoking-room a moment later on his way to the street, observed with astonishment that the man Psmith was sitting beside an umbrella which was undoubtedly his, the Hon. Hugo's, umbrella; and he was about to raise the point when it occurred to him that he had ten pounds in his pocket which he had not had at eleven o'clock that morning, and that in this world one should not press these things too far. He went out and bought a new umbrella, and, the day having turned fine, left it in a cab.

* * * * *

At half-past three that afternoon Eve Halliday, in the second-hand bookshop of Messrs. Bunce & Widgery in the Charing Cross Road, was standing at the foot of a ladder and looking upwards with the strained expression of one who has come out to buy a conscience.

It had occurred to her at lunch, over a poached egg, that a young woman who is about to be interviewed with a view to cataloguing a library ought perhaps to know something about cataloguing libraries; and it had further occurred to her that she knew nothing whatever. It was a defect which four shillings and a well-chosen volume might do something to repair, and she had located the volume--“The Arrangement and Care of Private Libraries, by an Old Hand”--on a shelf some eighteen inches above the topmost point to which she could reach.

A long arm came over her shoulder from behind, and the book was in her hand.

“Oh, thank you,” said Eve, and turned; and, turning, uttered a small sound which in a less well-brought-up girl would have been a squeak.

“You!” she said.

Psmith regarded her with grave and kindly interest, as an eminent surgeon might regard a patient who has begun to talk about the weather.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You gave me an umbrella this morning.”

“I am afraid,” said Psmith, “that there is some mistake. I have never given anybody an umbrella in my life. I have never even possessed one. It is one of the tragedies of my career. From my earliest years umbrellas have avoided me. They seem to feel that we should not get on.”

“But it was you. In Dover Street. It was pouring, and you came across the road without a hat and put an umbrella into my hand and went away again.”

“It sounds,” said Psmith thoughtfully, “an admirable action. I should like to have done it. But no. London, you must remember, is full of tall men with eyeglasses. It is one of the things that make London what it is. Sooner or later they all cross Dover Street. Statistics show--”

“You have a monocle.”

“I have. But so, in this great city, have some four thousand others. We form a loosely organised body, without officers or subscription. Now and then one of us does something reckless with an umbrella, and the rest of us have to bear the blame. It is the price we pay for our position.”

Eve looked at him searchingly, and Psmith bore the scrutiny with the untroubled calm of a cathedral.

“Then it wasn't you?”

“Consider the evidence,” said Psmith. “Would a man who had performed so signal a service remain silent about it? Would he not, rather, be extracting from it, at this moment, all the gratitude that the traffic would bear? Whereas here am I, handing you a book off a high shelf and asking nothing whatever in return.”

“You're a fraud,” said Eve, “and I've a very good mind to--” She stopped, because she was laughing, and it is not possible to be severe and to laugh at the same time. “Well, anyway, I sent it back this morning, with a note. So if you should happen to meet the other tall man with the eyeglass, you might tell him.”

“I will mention it at the next meeting of the executive committee,” said Psmith. He glanced at the book in her hands. “You are proposing to arrange and care for a private library?”

“I am proposing to catalogue one. In a castle in Shropshire, if the owner takes me, and I'm being interviewed at four o'clock, and until half an hour ago I had never thought about it at all.”

“There is no need,” said Psmith, “for the smallest uneasiness. I have arranged libraries all my life. The whole art may be put in a nutshell. You take the books off the shelves. You put them back. Between these two operations you make a noise with a pencil, and from time to time you say 'Ah, the Bodleian has an inferior copy.' That is all. The rest is temperament.”

“Is that in the book?”

“It is the book,” said Psmith. “The Old Hand has merely spread it out.”

Eve looked at the clock over the door and gave a little exclamation.

“I shall be late. Good-bye--and thank you for reaching it down.” She hesitated at the door. “I suppose you wouldn't care to tell me your name?”

“Names,” said Psmith gently, “are a great mistake. They pin one down. They limit the horizon. I have known men ruined by their names.”

“I thought so,” said Eve, and went out into the sunshine.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club, that vast and solemn building, received Eve at four o'clock precisely and passed her, by way of a hall in which several elderly gentlemen were sleeping, into a small room off the smoking-room, where a long, thin, amiable person in a rather baggy grey suit was standing at the window with his back to the door, gazing out at a flower-seller's barrow on the pavement below.

“Lord Emsworth?”

His lordship turned, blinked, and peered at her in a manner which suggested that she was some considerable distance off and possibly in a mist.

“Ah!” he said. “Yes. Precisely. You will forgive me--I have mislaid my glasses. Extraordinary thing, they were here a moment ago. My secretary, Baxter, is an excellent fellow, but he is not here, which makes it very difficult. Do sit down, my dear young lady, do sit down.”

Eve sat down. There was a crisp and pleasant sound, like the crunching of a very small biscuit.

“Oh!” said Eve, rising quickly.

Lord Emsworth advanced a step, peering.

“I fancy,” he said mildly, “that that was my pince-nez.”

It was. Eve, on her knees, gathered the fragments together and laid them out on the little table beside the chair, where they looked like the remains of something that had died in the interests of science. Her cheeks were scarlet.

“I am so dreadfully sorry. They were in the chair. I never saw them.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Lord Emsworth cordially. “I am delighted. I have been looking for them since two o'clock. My mind is now at rest.” He picked up a piece of glass, examined it benevolently, and put it in his waistcoat pocket. “I have another pair at the hotel, unless--Now, was it the hotel? A luncheon. A very curious luncheon. A poet, I understand. He got up in the middle of it and went away, and I have never been able to remember why. Do you write poetry, Miss--er?”

“No,” said Eve. “And I ought to tell you at once that I have never catalogued a library in my life. I don't know anything about it. I bought a book about it half an hour ago, and I haven't read it.”

She said it firmly, as one who steps off the end of a pier, and waited.

“Ah,” said Lord Emsworth, gazing out of the window. “Precisely.” There was a pause of perhaps five seconds. “Do you know anything about hollyhocks?”

Eve blinked.

“Not much,” she said. “But I love them.”

“Ha!” said Lord Emsworth, wheeling round with the first sign of animation he had shown. “Now that--that is very interesting. There is a man--a neighbour of mine--I will not mention his name--who tells me that hollyhocks are common. Common! I said to him, ‘My dear fellow--' Where was I?”

“Hollyhocks,” said Eve.

“Exactly. You have a very clear mind, my dear young lady, if I may say so. A very clear mind. My sister Constance was saying only last week that what a library needs is a clear mind. Or was it my son Frederick? Frederick,” said Lord Emsworth, with a certain sadness, “has ideas about libraries.” He beamed at her. “When can you come to us? There is a train on the Friday which is not at all bad, though they have taken off the good one, I cannot conceive why. You will find the library in a shocking state. My father collected books, and nobody has looked at them since. Beach will see to your luggage.”

“Then--you want me to come?” said Eve.

“Certainly, certainly, certainly,” said Lord Emsworth, who had returned to the window and was watching, with rapt attention, a man below unloading a tray of geraniums. “Charming. Quite charming.”

And Eve, going down the great staircase five minutes later into Northumberland Avenue, found that she was engaged to catalogue a library about which she knew nothing, that she had destroyed her employer's spectacles, and that she was, in about thirty-six hours, going to be under the same roof as Mr. Joseph Keeble, of whom she had a good deal to say on the subject of Phyllis. On the whole, she reflected, it had been a satisfactory day.

* * * * *

Dinner at the Drones that evening was a small affair, Psmith having as his guest Mr. Michael Jackson, who had come up from West Kensington and who ate like a man who has been thinking a good deal lately about other things than food. It was not until the coffee that he became conversational.

“By the way,” said Mike, “you're going to be a working man, and I want you to hear about somebody who's got a job. Cheer you up. There's a girl called Eve Halliday, a great pal of Phyllis's--they were at school together--and she came to tea yesterday and told Phyllis she'd got herself taken on to catalogue the library at some place in Shropshire. Blandings Castle. Lord Emsworth's. Phyllis says she's the best sort in the world, and always broke, and she was wearing a hat you could see from the end of the street.”

“With,” said Psmith, “a black feather.”

“How the deuce do you know that?”

“I make a study of hats,” said Psmith. “It is my life-work. Tell me more about Comrade Halliday.”

But Mike had a train to catch, and, having caught it, was borne away westward; and Psmith went up alone to the smoking-room, where the fire had been lit against the chill which follows a wet morning, and sat down in the deep chair by the window.

Beside him, propped against the arm, stood an umbrella with a gold band, purchased that day at a cost of ten pounds. Psmith looked at it for a long time in silence. Then he took a letter from his breast-pocket, unfolded it, and read it once more, dwelling with quiet satisfaction upon the signature.

“Eve Halliday,” said Psmith aloud to the empty room. “Eve Halliday. Blandings Castle, Shropshire.”

And, replacing the letter in his pocket, he lay back and gazed at the ceiling with the expression of a man to whom the future, hitherto a blank, has suddenly begun to look extremely interesting.

I did not say anything. The taxi went up the steep street and turned and we passed the dark front of the church and the trees on the little square, black against the lights of a café that was closing. The driver had his flag down and was in no hurry.

"Don't," Brett said.

"I haven't done anything."

"No. You haven't."

She sat up and looked out at the street going by.

"Where are we going?"

"Parc Montsouris. I told him."

"Oh, God, no. There's nothing there but a park. Take me to Zelli's."

"You had a date up at Montmartre."

"I've broken it. Take me to Zelli's, Jake."

I leaned forward and told the driver Zelli's, in the Rue Fontaine, and he swung around at the next corner and we went down toward the river. The night had turned cool. Under the bridge lamps the water was flat and oily and there was a barge going down with a light on it. Brett put her head back against the leather.

"You're a good chap," she said.

"I'm a hell of a good chap."

"Don't be nasty. It doesn't suit you."

"No," I said. "It doesn't suit me."

We went up through the Place de la Concorde and along past the lighted shop windows and then up into the streets that get narrow and dirty and full of light again as you go north. Brett had her eyes shut. She was not asleep.

"I say," she said. "Do you know Pardoe?"

"No. Who's Pardoe?"

"Tony Pardoe. He's got all the money in the world. I met him last week at the Braddocks', or somewhere. Not the Braddocks'. Somewhere else."

"I never heard of him."

"Nobody's ever heard of him. That's the beauty of it. He's got mines or ships or something, and he can't talk about anything but them, and he's forty-eight and looks a hundred and he's been very decent to me."

"How decent?"

"Don't be a fool, darling."

"I only asked."

"He wants to take me to Cannes. He has a car and a man to drive it and he told me all about the man for twenty minutes."

"You ought to go."

"Yes," Brett said. "I ought to go."

The taxi stopped and I paid the driver and we went in. It was hot inside and full and there was a band, and the drummer was a Negro from Chicago who knew Brett and grinned at her over the top of the drum and beat the rim of it with the stick and shouted something in the noise. Brett waved to him. We got a table at the edge of the floor and I ordered two brandies and soda.

"He's a fine drummer," Brett said. "Isn't he a fine drummer?"

"He's fine."

"Everything's fine," Brett said. "Everything's absolutely first rate."

We drank and watched the floor. There was a girl in a green dress dancing with a man in evening clothes who was too drunk to keep his feet under him, and everybody was very pleased about it. Brett was smoking and looking at nothing at all.

"Dance with me," she said.

We danced. The floor was so crowded you did not have to do anything but move a little and stand still.

"You're not talking," Brett said.

"There isn't anything to say."

"There's always something to say. That's what's so frightful about it."

We came back to the table and the waiter brought two more.

"Are you going to Spain this summer?" Brett said.

"In July. There's the fiesta at Pamplona."

"Bulls."

"Bulls."

"Take me sometime."

"Any time you like."

"I'd only be a nuisance," Brett said. "I'm always a nuisance where there's anything worth seeing."

"You wouldn't be a nuisance."

"That's a lie, but it's a nice one."

She turned the glass around on the table and looked at the wet ring it made.

"When are you going to Cannes?" I said.

"I'm not going to Cannes."

"You said you ought to."

"That's a different thing altogether."

"It's a fine climate," I said. "You'd get brown."

"I'm brown enough."

"You'd have the car and the man to drive it."

"And Pardoe," Brett said.

"And Pardoe."

"You're being splendid about it, Jake."

"I'm a splendid chap."

"Do you know," Brett said, "there are moments when I could hit you with a bottle."

Neither of us was saying anything we meant, and we both knew it, and we kept it up because it was easier than the other thing. What I felt was that I did not want her to go anywhere with anybody, and that I had no right to say so, and I did not say it.

"Let's have another," Brett said.

"You said you were never going to get tight any more."

"I said it. I say a lot of things."

We had another. The band was playing and the drummer sang and the people at the next table were English and were being very gay in the way that costs a great deal of money. Brett watched them.

"That's Mrs. Furness's boy," she said. "The one with the ears. He's a fool."

"You know everybody."

"Everybody who doesn't matter. It's a talent."

Along toward three the place began to empty a little. Brett was not tight. She was not anything. She sat with her chin on her hand and her hair brushed back and looked like something you would want to look at for a long time. The drummer came over between numbers and shook hands and said, "Hahre you? Hahre you?" and Brett said he was the only man in Paris with any sense, and he went back and hit the cymbal for her.

"I've got to go back down to the Montagne Sainte Geneviève," I said.

"Whatever for?"

"My fifty francs."

"Oh, Jake."

"I left it in an envelope with the patronne."

"You said you'd lose it."

"I probably will. But I want to see about it."

"You want to see about the girl," Brett said.

"That, too."

"You're a sentimental ass," Brett said. "Come on. I'll ride down with you."

We got a taxi outside and went down through the empty streets. The market carts were coming in and there were men sitting up on the loads of vegetables with their heads down. The sky was still dark but it was the kind of dark that is only waiting. Brett held my arm and did not talk. At the top of the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève the taxi stopped and I got out.

"I'll wait," Brett said.

"You needn't."

"I'll wait, all the same."

The accordion was still going inside but slowly, and there were not more than a dozen people left. The floor was wet where they had been dancing on it and there was sawdust down along the bar. The policeman was gone. The proprietor was still on his high stool with the bells on his ankle, playing to nobody in particular, and the daughter of the house was stacking saucers.

Georgette was sitting at a table against the wall with her hat on the bench beside her and three glasses in front of her. She was quite alone. The crowd of young men had gone.

"Hello," I said.

"Ah," said Georgette. "It's you."

"I came back for something."

"Your friends left," she said. "All of them. The whole cargo."

"I see that."

"They dance well," Georgette said. "They dance very well and they buy nothing. Not one drink. They put a saucer under my glass and they talk to each other about their hair."

"I'm sorry."

"Why sorry? It isn't your affair."

The patronne came over from behind the zinc, wiping her hands.

"Monsieur," she said. "Your envelope. Mademoiselle did not ask for you."

"I didn't ask," said Georgette. "Why should I ask? A man goes out, he's gone."

The patronne gave me the envelope and I broke the seal and took out the fifty-franc note and put it in front of Georgette on the table, and put another fifty with it.

"What's this?"

"For the dinner," I said. "And for the taxi home."

"For nothing at all, you mean." She looked at the notes and then at me and then she picked them up and put them in her bag and closed it. "You're not a bad type," she said. "You're only sick."

"That's right."

"Sit down and drink something."

"I've got somebody waiting."

"Naturally. The tall one with the hair, the one who came in with the fairies."

"Yes."

"She's chic," Georgette said. "One sees that. She's very chic."

"Yes."

"Well," said Georgette. "Amuse yourself well."

"Good night, Georgette."

"Good night, Jacob. That's still a Flemish name."

Outside the street was steep and empty and the taxi was standing with its lamps on and the driver asleep over the wheel. Brett was smoking in the corner.

"Well?" she said.

"She was there."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

"Poor girl," Brett said. "Did you get your fifty francs?"

"I got it and gave her another."

Brett laughed. "That's you all over, my dear. You go back for your money and you leave twice as much."

"It was worth it."

"What was it worth?"

"I don't know," I said. "Something."

We drove down the hill and out onto the boulevard. It was getting gray now and the street lamps looked yellow and tired and a man was watering the pavement in front of a café that had not opened yet. Two gendarmes went by on bicycles. Brett sat looking out.

"I'm dead," she said. "I'm absolutely dead."

"You ought to go to bed."

"I ought to do a great many things."

"You could go to bed."

"Do you know," Brett said, "I very nearly did stay at that dancing place all night. That's the truth. I'd have stayed until they put the chairs on the tables."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because you'd have stayed too," she said. "And that would have been rather more than I could bear."

"I don't mind staying."

"That's just it," Brett said.

We stopped at the corner where she wanted, near the Boulevard Raspail, and I got out and helped her out and we stood on the pavement. There was a taxi rank down the block and I whistled and one came up. It was light enough now to see her face and she did not look well, only lovely. She put her hand on my coat.

"Don't look like that," she said.

"How am I looking?"

"Like a chap watching a train go out."

"I'm looking at you."

"Well, don't." She took her hand away. "I'm going to be very good. I'm going to sleep until four in the afternoon and then I'm going to be very good."

"I'll see you," I said.

"You will. You'll see altogether too much of me. That's the trouble with me, Jake. One sees too much of me."

"Good night, Brett."

"Good night, darling."

I opened the door and she got in and gave the driver the address herself, and did not look back through the glass, and the taxi went off up the boulevard and turned. I stood there a minute after it turned.

Then I walked. I went down toward the river and came out on the quai with the light coming gray behind Notre Dame and the trees along the water still black. There was mist lying on the river and a tug went down with three barges behind it and a woman hanging wash on the last one. The bookstalls were locked. A man was sweeping the gutter with a twig broom and the water ran along the stones and shone. Somewhere back of the quai a shutter went up with a bang. It was cold and clean and smelled of the river and of bread beginning somewhere, and I walked along beside the water with my hands in my pockets and it was a fine morning and it did not do me any good at all.

Being still on the sand, and Mr. Franklin's arm being still round my neck, the first thing I did was to get up on my legs—which took time; and the second thing I did was to look him over from head to foot, as you look over a horse you have known as a colt. He was thinner than when he went away, and browner, and the beard he had grown abroad was gone again; but the eyes were the same bright eyes that had got him out of forty scrapes in the old days, and had got me into most of them along with him.

"Mr. Franklin," I said, "you are four hours before your time. Have they altered the trains, sir, along with everything else that they have altered since I was a young man?"

"I came by the early train, Betteredge, and left my luggage at Frizinghall to follow me. I have walked over the moor and through your plantation on purpose to come on the house from behind, like a thief."

"And why, sir, if I may make so bold?"

He put his hand in the breast-pocket of the beautiful fawn-coloured coat, and pulled out a letter.

"Because of that," he says. "Read it. And read it here, where there is nobody within a mile of us but the sea."

I am obliged to confess that I put on my spectacles with a certain flutter about the region of my waistcoat, which I have no business to own to at my age. The letter was written on a small sheet, in a lawyer's hand—and a lawyer's hand, when I see one, always seems to me to be saying, "You will pay for this presently." I set the whole of it down here, word for word, because Mr. Franklin has since been good enough to lend it to me for that purpose; and because (as he tells me) Mr. Bruff, our family solicitor, of Gray's Inn Square—the same gentleman who is answerable, along with Mr. Franklin himself, for my being set to this business of writing at all—makes no objection to seeing his own composition in print. Here it is:

"GRAY'S INN SQUARE, Wednesday night.

"DEAR FRANKLIN,—Since we parted at noon to-day something has happened here which you ought to know of before you take your journey into Yorkshire.

"My clerk informs me that a stranger has called twice at these chambers during the afternoon, asking on what day Mr. Franklin Blake goes down to Lady Verinder's, and by what train. He is described to me as a foreign-looking person, very dark, quietly and even handsomely dressed, speaking English slowly, but perfectly well, and with the civilest manner in the world. He would give no name and would leave no message; and, on being told that we had no information to communicate, he went away without the least appearance of annoyance. My clerk, being a young man of more curiosity than I pay him for, followed him to the door, and observed that he crossed the square, and joined a second person of the same complexion, who was waiting under the trees.

"I am not an imaginative man, and I am aware that the pavements of London are free to Hindoos, or Turks, or anybody else who chooses to walk on them. But I am the trustee of a valuable article which is at this moment in your custody, and I decline to be responsible for it beyond the exercise of common prudence.

"My advice therefore is: Do not travel by the train which you have mentioned to your friends, or to anybody else. Take an earlier train, and take it from another station. Keep the article on your own person; do not, on any account, let it go into your luggage; and do not let it out of your hands for one single hour after you reach your journey's end, until you have handed it over, in the terms of the will, on the day named.

"You will perhaps tell me that I am making a great deal out of nothing at all. I hope you may be right. But the responsibility, my dear Franklin, is not yours only, and I shall sleep the better for having written this.

"Deliver your trust, and be quit of it.—Yours truly,

"MATTHEW BRUFF."

I read it twice over. The first time I understood the words. The second time I understood, as it seemed to me, a great deal less; which is a thing that happens to me constantly with letters written by lawyers, and which I mention here for the comfort of others in my own situation.

"Well?" says Mr. Franklin.

"Well, sir," I says, "it's a very pretty letter. What's the meaning of it?"

He laughed—but not with his whole face; the eyes had no share in it. "That is exactly what I have been asking myself all the way from King's Cross," he said. "Come, old friend, give me your arm up the beach."

There was a sea-fog beginning to creep in along the water, and the Shivering Sand was heaving away behind us in its own abominable manner, as if it heard every word and wanted to say something on its own account. I was not sorry to turn my back on it. We went up through the sandhills, and got into the plantation of firs, and there Mr. Franklin stopped and took out of his pocket the second thing, which was to give me a great deal more trouble than the first.

It was a packet, done up in stout paper, and sealed at each of the four corners, and again in the middle, with a seal I didn't know—some sort of a bird, or a beast, or a mixture of both, as the fashion is with gentlefolks' crests. It was no bigger than a lady's card-case, and, when he put it into my hand, it was so light that I thought, for the moment, he was joking me with an empty cover.

"Betteredge," he says, "I want you to lock this up in the plate-room to-night."

"Certainly, sir," I said. "Am I to enter it in the plate-book?"

"You are to enter nothing. You are to take it into the plate-room with your own hands, and lock it up with your own hands, and keep the key on you, as you keep it every night, and say nothing about it to any living creature in the house."

"Not to my lady, sir?"

"Not to anybody till to-morrow. To-morrow I will tell my aunt all that she has any need to know."

I turned the packet over once, and I make no doubt I looked at it in the way in which a dog looks at a door that has been shut in his face. "It's no business of mine, Mr. Franklin," I said. "But is there anything in this here that a man might be sorry to have the charge of?"

"There is nothing in it," says he, "that will burn your fingers, or blow up your plate-room, or run away in the night. Will that do for you?"

"It will have to do for me, sir," I says. And I put it in my inner pocket, and buttoned my coat over it, and there was an end of my curiosity for that day—an end, mind you, of the *asking*, not of the feeling. If any gentleman among my readers has ever carried about him, for the space of six hours, a small sealed packet belonging to somebody else, he will be so good as to explain to the ladies what I mean; and if he has not, I decline to explain it to him.

We came out of the plantation at the back of the shrubbery, and there, on the path, who should be waiting for us but my daughter Penelope. She had her cap all on one side with running, and she took Mr. Franklin's hand and made her curtsey and blushed, in the space of about a second and a half—my daughter having always been a smart girl at her work.

"Father," she says, when the civilities were over, "Rosanna hasn't come in."

"I know that," I said, "seeing that I have just left her at the sands."

"She's not at the sands now," says Penelope. "I went to the top of the sandhills after you, to see if you had found her, and I saw her going along under the low cliffs, southward, as fast as she could walk. She's gone on to Cobb's Hole, father—to the Yollands'; I'll take my oath she has. And she'll be too late for tea, as well as too late for dinner; and cook says she'll speak to my lady about it, if it isn't stopped."

"Cook," I said, "will speak to me about it, and I will decide whether it goes any further. As for Rosanna, she has taken it into her head to go and see her friend at the fishing village, and there is no crime in the statutes of England against that, so far as I know."

I said it stoutly enough. But I was not comfortable. There is a difference, which I recommend to your notice, between a servant who is a quarter of an hour late and a servant who has gone straight away in the opposite direction from her dinner, without leave asked or excuse offered; and the girl's face on the sand, and her talk about her grave, were not out of my mind. Mr. Franklin, for his part, took not the slightest interest in the matter. He was looking at the chimneys of the house, showing over the trees, in the way a man looks at a place he has been dreaming about; and all he said was, "Is my aunt at home?"

She was not; but she was not long in coming. We had barely got round to the front, and I had barely got Mr. Franklin's dressing-case (which had come on by the carrier) carried upstairs, when the pony-chaise came round the sweep, with my lady in it and Miss Rachel beside her.

Here I have to note, for the sake of exactness, that I saw nothing of what passed between the young lady and the young gentleman, for the reason that there was nothing to see. Miss Rachel, hearing from the groom that her cousin had come, did what any young woman of eighteen would do who had been out in an open carriage in a dusty wind—she went up to her own room, and stayed there, and sent Penelope up after her; and Penelope has told me since that it took a full three-quarters of an hour, and two dresses, before the plainer of the two was decided on. That is all I know about it, and all I have any wish to know.

My lady went into her sitting-room, and Mr. Franklin went in after her, and I went in after Mr. Franklin, having the excuse of the dressing-case keys in my hand, and (I am bound to be honest) no earthly business there beyond that.

You are to understand that my lady, at this time, was still a fine woman to look at, though her hair was grey; and that when she was pleased her face showed it all over, in a way that made you feel it was worth while to have pleased her. She was pleased now. She took her nephew by both hands and looked him well over.

"So you have come back to us," she says, "and you are exactly like your father, and I hope you have left your father's opinions behind you in Germany. Franklin, before you sit down, I have one word to say to you, and I choose to say it before Gabriel Betteredge, because he is the only person in this house, besides myself, who will understand it."

Mr. Franklin stood where he was.

"My brother's name," says my lady, "is not to be mentioned under this roof. Not by you—not by anybody. He was buried a month ago, and he may rest, so far as I am concerned; but the subject of the late Colonel John Herncastle, and of his life, and of his affairs, and of anything whatsoever belonging to him, is a subject which I forbid in my house. Do you understand me?"

I had heard the Colonel's name in my time—about as often as a decent household hears the name of the plague—and I knew that the family had shut its doors on him for reasons which were nobody's business but the family's. But I had never heard my lady speak in that way before; she spoke quietly, and she spoke like a person who has made up her mind a long while since, and has only been waiting for somebody to say it to.

Mr. Franklin's face changed a little—no more than that.

"I understand you perfectly, aunt," he said. "And I agree. The name shall not pass my lips in this house."

"Thank you, Franklin."

"Only," says he, "I ask leave to say one thing to you, in private, before the day is out; and then I shall be as silent as the rest of them."

My lady looked at him hard for a moment. "You may say it," she answered, "when the house is quiet, and you may say it once."

That was the end of it. They fell to talking about the roads, and about his father, and about a horse Mr. Franklin wanted for the summer; and I took myself off with my keys, and my dressing-case, and my sealed packet buttoned up under my waistcoat, and a head as full of questions as an egg is full of meat.

There was one other thing said to me that day which belongs here. After dinner Mr. Franklin came out to me on the terrace to smoke, and I told him—the promise having been made to Penelope, and a promise being a promise, whether it is made to a woman of five-and-forty or a girl of five-and-twenty—the whole story of the three Indians and the little boy, and the ink poured into the boy's hand, and the answers the boy gave about the English gentleman who was to travel to this house that day, and who had got It about him.

I told it as a laughable thing. Mr. Franklin heard me out without laughing at all. When I had done, he threw his cigar into the shrubbery, which is a wasteful trick he learnt abroad, and he said, very quietly:

"They were not conjuring, Betteredge. They were asking a question. And 'It' is not a fancy of your daughter's; I know what 'It' is."

"Then, sir," says I, my hand going, in spite of me, to the front of my coat, "perhaps you'll tell me whether *It* is at this moment—"

"I shall tell you the whole story to-morrow," he said, "and you will be sorry you asked for it. Lock up my packet, old friend, and go to bed."

Which was, I make no doubt, the advice of a gentleman who had had a long journey and wanted his own bed. I locked up the packet accordingly, when the house was shut, going into the plate-room alone with my candle, and putting the thing at the back of the second shelf, behind the epergne that my lady never uses, and turning the key on it, and hanging the key on my own bunch, and no soul in the house the wiser.

And then I came out into the back court, where it was a fine still night with a fog lying low over the plantation, and I sat down in my beehive chair with my pipe and ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I don't know whether you happen to have a habit of the sort. When I am troubled in my mind, I open that book, and it never fails to tell me something. The page I hit on this time said: "Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself." Which I took as an excellent observation, and which comforted me for as long as it takes an old man to knock out his pipe.

For, comfort me as it might, the fact remained that there was a sealed packet in my plate-room which had no business in my plate-book; that the name of a dead man had been forbidden in a house where nobody had ever mentioned it; and that, with the clock gone eleven and the dew falling, Rosanna Spearman had not come home.