The Chapters

It was Lady Russell who first ventured to lay a scheme of retrenchment before Sir Walter in form. She came to Kellynch on a morning of business, with figures fairly written out, and a countenance prepared for firmness; and sitting down with him and Elizabeth in the breakfast-room, she spoke of what must be done with all the earnestness of a friend who had loved Lady Elliot, and who could not see her husband's affairs go to ruin without an effort to save him.

Her plan was not a trifling one. She proposed such a reduction in every article of expenditure as would, within seven years, clear the estate entirely; a scheme of actual, not imaginary economy, beginning at once, and confined to no single point. The carriage-horses to be given up; a third of the servants dismissed; new furniture and unnecessary journeys forgone altogether; the very silver put away. She spoke of it with the calm authority of a woman who had thought long and seriously, and who believed integrity of conduct to be as much within a man's power as within a woman's.

Sir Walter heard her with an increasing rigidity of feature which shewed how little her arithmetic could move him.

"What!" said he. "Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table—contractions and restrictions every where! To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, Lady Russell, this will never do. I had rather quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms."

The words were spoken with more heat than he generally allowed himself, and Lady Russell, though grieved, thought it wisest, for the present, to say no more; but Sir Walter's momentary threat of quitting Kellynch was uttered only that its impossibility might be more strongly felt; he had not the smallest real intention of doing any such thing, and his very next sentence made it plain that he considered the house, and his position in it, as fixed beyond discussion.

Mr Shepherd, who arrived within the hour, upon business of his own appointing, found the family still in some disturbance from this conversation, and was obliged to bring forward his own scheme under discouraging auspices. His plan differed from Lady Russell's chiefly in being milder, and in coming from a man whose interest it was rather to conciliate than to alarm. He talked of prudent, gradual reductions; of a strict revisal of accounts; of Sir Walter's own good sense being equal to seeing what might, in time, and without any thing painful, be spared.

"You are always so moderate, Shepherd," said Sir Walter, softening a little, as he always did under management, "and I honour you for it; but I must say, I see nothing in your suggestions that Lady Russell has not already proposed, and with no better success. Retrenchment! Every body is forever talking to me of retrenchment, as if a man in my situation could retrench like a farmer counting his eggs. I will hear no more of it this morning."

And so the second scheme fared no better than the first, and Mr Shepherd, a cautious man, said nothing further that day of what was really in his mind.

It was at this point, when the two counsellors sat looking at each other in a kind of helpless agreement, that Anne, who had come in quietly with some work in her hand and had said nothing through the whole of the debate, spoke.

"I think," said she, and her voice, though not loud, had something in it that made even her father look towards her, "that a much stricter plan than either might be attempted, and with less hardship than is feared. It is not merely reducing this article or that, occasionally, but forming a system entire, and adhering to it steadily throughout. If my father could be prevailed on to do this, in seven years he would be clear; and I do think we might, by strict measures, get more effectually to the object than by any half retrenchments in this line or that. If my father does not consent to something of this nature, in a very few years we must be dispossessed of more than furniture or horses."

There was a short silence after she had done speaking, of the kind that follows an unexpected truth. Sir Walter did not look at her, but at the window; and it was Elizabeth, of all people, who spoke next.

"Anne is right," she said, slowly, as though the admission cost her something and she meant nonetheless to make it fully. "I do not like it—I like it no better than my father does—but I had rather submit to any economy now, of our own choosing, than have worse thrust upon us hereafter, by people who have no delicacy about how it is done. We have already given up the drawing-room, and Anne's presents, and I am sure I would rather give up a great deal more than that, quietly, and among ourselves, than be talked of."

Lady Russell looked at Anne with a warmth of satisfaction she did not attempt to hide, and even Mr Shepherd permitted himself a small bow of approbation in Anne's direction, as at a client who had, unexpectedly, made his own argument for him rather better than he could have made it himself. But Sir Walter was not to be so easily carried.

"Anne's opinions have not, I think, generally the weight of law in this house," said he, with the cold civility he could always summon when he was displeased, "and I do not know why they should begin to have it now. I am obliged to her for the concern she shews, but I have no notion of economy so severe as to make a baronet's establishment indistinguishable from a curate's. There must be limits, even to prudence."

Anne said nothing further. She had said what she believed, and had had the unlooked-for pleasure of her sister's support; she did not think it would answer any purpose to press the matter, against a resistance which shewed no sign of yielding, and she took up her work again, with the sensation, at once painful and a little proud, of having spoken the truth to no immediate effect.

Mr Shepherd, seeing that direct assault would do nothing, tried, after a decent interval, a different approach.

"There is, Sir Walter," said he, with the air of a man venturing carefully upon delicate ground, "another measure, which I have sometimes known resorted to by gentlemen in—not, I would say, in your situation precisely, but in circumstances requiring some relief—and which might be considered without any real sacrifice of dignity at all; indeed, quite the contrary; for the establishment of a family, in such cases, is generally understood to be a mark of very great consequence in the person who—that is to say, if a family of high considerations were to be induced to become—"

"To become what, Shepherd?" said Sir Walter, impatiently.

"To become tenant, Sir Walter, of Kellynch Hall."

The word had scarcely left his lips before Sir Walter turned upon him with an expression of such astonishment and displeasure as effectually silenced whatever else Mr Shepherd might have had ready to say in support of it.

"A tenant! In Kellynch Hall! Mr Shepherd, I did not think it possible you could suppose me equal to entertaining such a proposal for a moment. Elliot of Kellynch Hall reduced to letting! Do you know what you are saying? That any set of people—I care not who they are—should walk into these rooms, use this furniture, look out of these windows, upon my grounds—no, Shepherd, I will not hear the word again. It is not to be spoken in my presence. I desire that you will consider the subject as closed, entirely and for ever."

Mr Shepherd, who had not really expected the notion to be received with any favour at a first hearing, and who knew his man too well to press it further at such a moment, bowed, murmured something about its having been only one among many ideas thrown out for consideration, and let the matter drop; but he had said what he meant to say, and had seen, in the very violence of the refusal, that the word had lodged, and might be brought forward again, upon some softer day, with rather more hope of success. Lady Russell, for her part, said nothing on this new subject at all, though there was a thoughtfulness in her face, as she took her leave soon afterwards, which suggested that Mr Shepherd's dismissed suggestion had not fallen quite so uselessly upon her ear as upon Sir Walter's.

The family were still sitting, in the flat and somewhat exhausted silence that follows a morning of contention, when a letter was brought in for Anne, franked and directed in the hand of her sister Mary, from Uppercross Cottage.

Anne opened it without much expectation of anything beyond the usual detail of small grievances in which Mary's letters generally abounded; nor was she disappointed of that, at least. Mary wrote in a state, as she expressed it, of being "very unwell," with such headachs, and such spirits, as she had never known equalled; Charles was gone out, as he always was, and left her to bear every thing alone, and nobody considered how much she suffered; the children were wild, and gave her no peace; and she could not help saying that she thought it very unkind of her family to leave her so entirely to herself at such a time, when a little attention, she was sure, was all that was wanted to set her quite to rights. Would not Anne come to her? She had always been used to think Anne did her more good than anybody, and if her sister loved her at all, she would not delay it, for really, unless somebody came, she did not know what was to become of her.

It was the sort of letter Anne had had many of before, and might, in general, have read with a smile at the disproportion between the language and the malady; but this evening, sitting apart a little from the rest, with the debates of the morning still unsettled in her mind—the two rejected plans, her own unheeded proposal, the single forbidden word still seeming to hang in the air of the room—she read it with more seriousness than usual, and without any smile at all.

She was not wanted at Kellynch. That, at least, the day's business had made plain enough; her opinion had been asked by nobody, offered by herself, supported for one astonishing moment by Elizabeth, and then set quietly aside; and whatever was finally to be settled about her father's debts—and nothing whatsoever had been settled—it would be settled without any reference to her. At Uppercross, at least, she was wanted; imperfectly, unreasonably, but wanted; and there, whatever good she could do, she might actually be permitted to do it.

She resolved, before she went up to bed that night, that she would write to Mary in the morning, and that she would go to her as soon as it could be arranged. It was not much of a decision to have come to, after such a day; but it was the only point, amid all the uncertainty of the house she was leaving, on which her mind was perfectly and immediately made up.

When she awakened the train had already stopped at a station, and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her shoulder.

"You've had a nice 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 packages. 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 small and no one but themselves seemed to be leaving the train there. The stationmaster spoke to Mrs. Medlock in a rough, good-natured way, pronouncing his words in a queer broad fashion which Mary found out afterward was Yorkshire.

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

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

"She's rare an' well. T' carriage is waitin' outside for thee."

A brougham stood on the road before the little outside platform. Mary saw that a well dressed man was standing near it, and it was he who spoke, not Mrs. Medlock.

"So you have brought her," he said in a low voice.

"Yes, sir, this is she," Mrs. Medlock answered.

"You had a good journey, I hope," he said, and Mary knew this must be her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, though she could not see much of him because he stood with his head bent so that his back looked more crooked than his front. His hair was black and streaked with white, and his face was dark and had a look of pain and discontent on it. He had eyes something like her own, and his face was not unhandsome except for the misery in it.

"I hope so," said Mary.

He did not touch her, nor did he look long at her. She saw his eyes pass over her in a swift, uneasy way, as if she were a thing he did not know what to do with.

"You are very like your mother," he said.

He handed Mrs. Medlock into the carriage, and Mary got in unaided, and he mounted after them without another word. When the door was shut Mary sat in her corner in the dimness and waited to hear whether he would speak again, but he said nothing at all. He seemed to have forgotten her, and looked out of his own window with his hand shading his eyes, as if the last of the daylight hurt them.

It was already growing dusk and the carriage rolled through streets and then out among dark hedges. After a time they began to go uphill, and presently, though Mary could not see much through the window, she felt that they had come out upon a wide, bare place, for the wind made a wild, low, rushing sound and the carriage swayed and creaked.

"That's th' moor," said Mrs. Medlock in a low voice, as if she felt she must explain something.

Mary pressed her face nearer the glass, but she could see nothing but blackness, with here and there a faint gray streak that might have been sky. She did not know how long they had been going when the carriage gave a sudden lurch and stopped so sharply that she was thrown forward against the cushions.

"What's amiss?" said Mrs. Medlock, putting her head out of the window.

"There's summat lyin' i' th' road," the coachman called down. "I dare not drive on it wi'out lookin'."

Mr. Craven said nothing, but he opened the door on his own side and got down, and after a moment's hesitation Mrs. Medlock followed him, grumbling under her breath about the damp. Mary, left alone in the carriage, felt so curious that she could not sit still, and, since no one had told her not to, she slipped down from the seat and stepped out into the road herself.

The wind struck her at once, cold and enormous, as if it came from every side of the sky. She could see nothing that looked like trees or hedges anywhere--only a great dark space that seemed to go on forever, with the black shapes of the men and the lamps of the carriage making a small yellow blot in the middle of it. She heard the coachman say something about a sheep that had strayed into the road and could not get up, and she heard Mr. Craven's voice, low and short, telling him to lead it off if he could. The wind buffeted her skirts and made a sound so wild and huge that she felt very small standing there, smaller than she had ever felt in her life, and for a moment something almost like fright crept over her, though she would not have said so to anyone. Then Mrs. Medlock turned and saw her.

"Get in, get in!" she said sharply. "Tha'lt catch thy death standin' about on th' moor at this hour."

Mary climbed back into the carriage without a word, and in a few minutes Mr. Craven and Mrs. Medlock got in after her and the carriage went on. Mary sat very still, thinking of the great dark space and the huge sound of the wind, and it seemed to her stranger and lonelier than anything she had seen in India.

At last the horses' feet made a different sound, as if they were going over stones, and then the carriage passed through what seemed to be an arch in a wall and rolled into a sort of courtyard. There were lights in some of the windows of the enormous house that rose up before them, but most of it was dark, and it looked, Mary thought, exactly like the pictures in the books of grim old houses that she had sometimes seen.

Mr. Craven got out first, and, without waiting for the others, went in at a great door which stood open, and disappeared. Mary never saw him again that night. Mrs. Medlock took her hand and led her through the door and across a great hall, up a staircase and along a corridor and up more stairs and along another corridor, until they came to a room where there was a fire and a supper laid on a table.

"Well, here you are!" Mrs. Medlock said. "This and the next room's 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 more contrary in all her life.

She was too tired even to look about the room much before her supper was brought in, and when it was brought it was not a maid who carried the tray but a big-boned manservant, who set it down on the table with a great clatter of spoons and dishes and stood a moment looking at her with round, curious eyes.

"Well, tha's a little 'un," he said. "Tha mun eat thy supper while it's warm, or tha'lt find it cold as th' moor."

Mary stared at him. She could make out perhaps half of what he said; the rest was such a strange, broad way of speaking that it might almost have been another language.

"I don't understand you," she said, in her stiff little voice. "I can't tell what you mean."

The man laughed, not unkindly, and shook his head as if this amused him a good deal.

"Eh, I forgot," he said, or something like it, and turned and went out, still chuckling to himself, so that Mary was left more puzzled than before, wondering whether he had been laughing at her or only at the joke of not being understood.

Mrs. Medlock came in soon after and told her she must eat her supper and go to bed, for they must be up betimes in the morning.

"What is that man's name," Mary asked, "who brought my supper?"

"That's the manservant. His name doesn't matter to you," said Mrs. Medlock. "He hasn't likely got much conversation you'd care for, if it comes to that, seeing you don't seem to understand plain Yorkshire."

"I couldn't understand half what he said," Mary answered. "It's not like any English I ever heard."

"Well, tha'll get used to it," said Mrs. Medlock, and Mary noticed with some surprise that she said "tha'lt" herself when she was not thinking about it. "It's Yorkshire, and Yorkshire's Yorkshire and there's no help for it. You'll hear plenty of it before you're done."

She saw that Mary ate a little of the supper, though the child was too tired and strange to eat much, and then she took her into the next room, where there was a narrow bed already made ready, with a candle burning near it.

"You're to sleep here," she said, "and mind, you're not to go wandering and poking about the passages. There's a deal of the house shut up, and Mr. Craven wouldn't like it if he heard of you meddling."

"I have no wish to go poking about," said Mary, in her sour little way, and Mrs. Medlock, seeming satisfied with this, bade her a brief good-night and went out, taking the greater part of the light with her.

Mary got into bed and lay listening to the strangeness of everything--the enormous quiet of the house, broken every now and then by small unfamiliar creakings, as houses do at night. She had never been in so large a house, nor in one so old, and she found herself thinking of the hundred rooms with their doors locked, and wondering behind which of them her uncle now sat with his crooked back and his dark, unhappy face.

She had almost begun to grow drowsy when a sound reached her which made her open her eyes wide again. It was a curious sound, low and wandering, sometimes rising into something like a long, thin wail and then dying away again, so that she could not at first tell whether it came from outside the house or from within it. She lay still and listened until it came again, nearer, it seemed, and stranger, and then she heard Mrs. Medlock's step in the passage and called out before she could stop herself.

"Do you hear that?" she said, when the door opened. "What is that noise?"

Mrs. Medlock stood in the doorway with her candle, and for a moment Mary thought she looked oddly as if she did not want to answer.

"That's nothing but the wind," she said shortly. "It comes rough across the moor of a night and gets in among the old chimneys and passages. You'll hear it many a time before you're done with Misselthwaite. Now settle yourself and go to sleep."

She shut the door and her footsteps went away down the passage, and the house was quiet again except for the fire settling in the grate. Mary lay with her eyes open in the dark, and though she told herself that it was only the wind, as Mrs. Medlock had said, she did not feel at all sure of it; and being a contrary and curious child who was used to having her own way about finding things out, she made up her mind, before she fell asleep at last, that she would discover for herself, whatever Mrs. Medlock might say, exactly what it was that she had heard.

"I'm sorry you've been miserable, Brett."

"Don't be sorry. Just tell him to take me to the Select."

"Not Montsouris?"

"I said that to say something. Take me to the Select."

I leaned forward and told the driver, and he swung the cab around in the empty street. Brett had opened her eyes and was looking out the window at the shuttered shops going by.

"I saw a marvellous chap last week," she said. "Absolutely stinking with money. Met him at Zizi's. Fellow called Mackintosh."

"I don't know him."

"You wouldn't. Canadian, or something dreary like that. Mad about me already. Took a house at Cannes and everything, wants me to come down."

"Are you going?"

"I don't know. I don't think so." She said it looking straight ahead, and then she laughed, not a happy laugh. "Wouldn't it be nice?"

"Would it?"

"I don't know. It sounds restful."

Neither of us said anything for a while. The cab went down past the closed news-stands and the trees, all the shadows wet-looking under the arcs.

"You didn't come to see me this week," Brett said.

"I didn't think you wanted to be bothered."

"You might have rung up."

"I was busy."

"Busy," she said, and laughed again, that same short laugh. "You're always frightfully busy, Jake."

"We're all busy," I said.

We stopped in front of the Select. Brett did not get out at once. "Come in and have a drink?"

"I ought to go back for my fifty francs."

"Oh, damn your fifty francs."

"I gave my word to the patronne."

"You and your word," Brett said, but she was smiling a little now. "Go and get it, then. I'll be at the Select."

I told the driver to wait for her, and paid him for the trip so far, and started to walk back down toward the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. It was a long way and I did not mind it. The streets were emptying out and it felt cool walking, and better than sitting in the taxi not saying anything to Brett that either of us meant.

The bal musette was still going when I got there, though the crowd had thinned. The proprietor was still up on his stool with the accordion, playing something slower now, and only two or three couples were on the floor. Georgette was sitting alone at one of the long tables, her hat off, her elbows on the table, looking at nothing.

"Well," I said, "you're still here."

"Where would I go?"

"I thought you'd gone off with the crowd."

"They went off. All of them. Very lovely manners, your friends." She said it without much bitterness, as though she had known how it would be from the start.

I found the patronne and got my envelope back, unopened, and gave her a franc for keeping it, and sat down across from Georgette.

"You didn't dance any more?"

"I got tired of it. That tall one danced very badly, and then he went off with the others and didn't even say good night. Very lovely manners."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's nothing. Are you going to take me home?"

"I can put you in a taxi."

"You're not coming?"

"I have to go meet somebody."

"Your fiancée," Georgette said, and laughed, showing her bad teeth, not caring now whether she showed them or not. "The tall thin one, with the nice voice. English?"

"Yes."

"She's very beautiful. Too thin for my taste, but very beautiful. She won't marry you, you know."

"I don't imagine she will."

"Well," Georgette said, and stood up and put her hat on. "Life's like that. Get me a taxi."

I got her a taxi at the corner and gave her some money for it, more than the fare, and she took it without any fuss and thanked me quite seriously, the way she would have thanked anyone, and I told the driver where to take her, and stood a minute after the cab had gone, in the empty street with the sound of the accordion still coming faintly from the doorway behind me.

I walked back up toward the Select. It was a fair walk and the streets were very quiet, with that stillness that comes on a city between the time the late places close and the market carts start. I felt hollow and dry, the way I would after a day on the tennis court, when I had played too hard and won nothing by it.

Brett was at a table on the terrace with a glass of something in front of her, and no one else with her, and she looked up when I came and smiled.

"Get your fifty francs?"

"Every centime."

"Good man."

I sat down. The waiter came and I ordered a coffee. Across the street somebody was hosing down the pavement in front of a shop, and the water ran along the gutter shining under the arc-light.

"Georgette all right?"

"She's all right. She's gone home."

"Poor girl."

"She'll be all right."

Brett was turning her glass around on the table, not drinking from it. "Jake," she said, "do you think it's rotten of me, this Mackintosh business?"

"I don't think it's any of my business."

"That's not what I asked you."

"No," I said, "I suppose it's not."

"You could say what you thought, once."

"What good would that do?"

"None, probably," she said, and laughed, and looked away down the street.

We sat like that a while, not saying much, and the light was beginning to be different, not dawn yet but the sky over the roofs across the street losing some of its blackness, going a sort of gray-blue. Brett shivered a little, though it was not cold, and pulled her jersey closer.

"I ought to go home," she said.

"I'll get you a cab."

"You always get me a cab, Jake."

"It's what I'm good for."

She looked at me a moment as if she might say something to that, and then did not. I went to the curb and found a taxi coming slowly along, empty, and waved it down, and Brett got up and came over, a little unsteady, though she was not drunk, just tired the way we both were.

"Good night, darling," she said. "Don't come. I'm all right alone."

"Sure you're all right?"

"Always all right," she said, and got in, and I shut the door, and she leaned forward to tell the driver, and the cab pulled away down the street and I stood watching the tail-light of it until it turned the corner and was gone.

There was nothing to do but walk home, and the walking was pleasant now, along toward the river, with the sky getting lighter all the time and a little wind coming up off the water. A few carts were out already, and one milk-wagon, the horse's hoofs very loud on the paving in the emptiness. I felt tired and a little sad, and not really about anything I could have put a name to, only tired the way the night makes you tired when nothing has happened in it that you can afterward say was worth the staying up for. Down along the quay the water had that grey, secret look it has before the sun is really up, moving along steadily under the bridges, not caring about any of it, and I walked along beside it for a long way before I turned off toward the flat.

The rain had stopped by the time Eve reached the street again, and the sun, with that cheery inconsistency which is the peculiar mark of the English climate, was doing its best to suggest that it had never really gone away at all. She walked back down Shaftesbury Avenue swinging the borrowed umbrella and feeling, on the whole, remarkably light-hearted for a girl who had just been told that there was not a single situation to be had in the length and breadth of London. It is one of the compensations of a naturally sunny disposition that it can derive solid comfort from the merest trifles; and the trifle which now occupied the more agreeable half of Eve's mind was the recollection of the hatless young man with the eyeglass and the grave, unhurried manner of one conferring a benefit upon the human race. She had not thanked him. She had not even, in the confusion of the moment, said anything at all. It seemed to her, thinking it over, the most extraordinary behaviour she had ever encountered, and definitely the most agreeable.

It also seemed to her, being a conscientious girl, that the umbrella could not simply be added to her wardrobe as if it had fallen from a Christmas tree. It belonged, presumably, to the gloomy building into which its bearer had vanished, and the correct and businesslike thing to do was to return it. She accordingly retraced her steps towards Dover Street, entered the club by the discreet door through which she had seen so many young men pass, and was met in the hall by a large, solemn person in a frock-coat who had the air of one who had been personally acquainted with several Prime Ministers.

"I want," said Eve, "to return an umbrella."

"Very good, miss," said the porter, as though this were an occurrence of daily routine, as indeed, at the Drones, it very nearly was.

"It belongs to a gentleman who lent it to me this morning. I'm afraid I don't know his name. He was tall, and rather remarkable-looking, and he wore an eyeglass, and he hadn't got a hat on."

The porter reflected.

"That would be almost any of our members, miss," he said, with the gentle regret of a man forced to disappoint a lady. "We're a club that goes largely to eyeglasses and no hats, if I may say so."

"Then I'd better leave a note," said Eve, "in case he wants to know what became of it."

She was provided with a sheet of the club's notepaper and a pen, and, resting the paper against the porter's desk, wrote:

*To the gentleman who lent me his umbrella outside Thorpe & Briscoe's this morning. Thank you very much. It kept me beautifully dry. I am sorry I did not have time to say so at the moment, you disappeared so quickly. E.H.*

She folded this, gave it with the umbrella into the porter's keeping, and went off to lunch with the pleasant feeling of a debt discharged.

* * * * *

Psmith, coming down into the hall of the Drones some twenty minutes later in quest of a telephone directory, was intercepted by the porter with the air of a man who has been sitting on a piece of information and is glad to be rid of it.

"A young lady called with your umbrella, sir."

"Indeed?" said Psmith, with mild interest. "Which umbrella was that, Charles?"

"The one you took out this morning, sir. Belonging to Mr. Walderwick." The porter produced it, together with the note. "She left this, sir."

Psmith took the note and was in the act of unfolding it with the calm satisfaction of a man who feels that a good deed has borne fruit, when the swing door opened with some violence and the Hon. Freddie Walderwick—no relation whatever to the Threepwoods, but a large, pink, indignant young man with prominent eyes—came in like a minor whirlwind.

"I say," said Mr. Walderwick, addressing the porter but including Psmith in a general glare, "somebody's had my umbrella. The one with the malacca handle. I left it here yesterday and Judson says he saw a fellow take it out this morning."

"This gentleman, sir," said the porter, with the beautiful impartiality of one who has no stake in the outcome.

Mr. Walderwick turned the glare, now focused, upon Psmith.

"Here, I say! Was it you?"

Psmith regarded him with the benevolent gravity of an elder statesman confronted by a promising but impetuous young nation.

"It was," he said. "I borrowed it for a small errand of mercy. Umbrellas, Comrade Walderwick, were made for the relief of suffering, not for decoration; and it occurred to me this morning, gazing from the smoking-room window, that yours—by a happy chance the nearest to hand—was called upon to perform its true and sacred function."

"Well, I don't see what business you had—"

"None whatever," Psmith agreed cordially. "I concede the point at once. It was pure banditry. However, I am prepared to make what restitution I can. Would you consider ten pounds an adequate compensation for the temporary loan of an umbrella which, I observe, is not otherwise in use this morning, the sun having, with its usual tact, come out?"

Mr. Walderwick's indignation wavered visibly before this handsome offer.

"Ten pounds? For lending you a brolly for half an hour?"

"For lending me a brolly," said Psmith, "and, incidentally, for selling it to me outright, together with all rights, interests, and future borrowings thereunto appertaining. I find myself, on reflection, unwilling to part with it. It has associations. Shall we say ten pounds?"

"I say fifteen," said Mr. Walderwick, rallying with the speed of a young man who sees an unexpected profit looming.

"Fifteen," said Psmith, producing a note-case with the unhurried gesture of a bishop reaching for the collection plate, "let it be fifteen. You are a hard man, Comrade Walderwick, but I bear no malice."

The transaction concluded to the entire satisfaction of both parties, Mr. Walderwick withdrew, a richer and, on the whole, a more contented man, while Psmith, tucking the umbrella under his arm with the air of a connoisseur who has just secured a genuine Old Master at a bargain price, retired to a corner of the hall to read his note.

He read it twice. He then folded it with some care and placed it in his breast pocket, an action which, performed by a man ordinarily so economical of unnecessary gesture, would have struck an observant onlooker as significant.

"E. H.," said Psmith to himself, thoughtfully. "A person of taste and discernment, evidently, and one who writes a remarkably good hand for these degenerate days. I confess to a certain curiosity, Comrade Umbrella, as to the identity of your late employer."

The umbrella, however, preserved the silence of its kind, and Psmith, having nothing further to learn from it, went in to lunch.

* * * * *

It was in the neighbourhood of half-past two, the rain having definitely abandoned its half-hearted campaign against the metropolis, that Eve Halliday, walking along Piccadilly on her way to keep her appointment with the representative of the Earl of Emsworth—a Mr. Baxter, she understood, who was to interview her on behalf of his employer at the latter's London house—paused at a crossing to allow a stream of traffic to go by. And it was at this precise moment that a voice at her elbow observed, with the gentle melancholy of one who has suffered much and expects to suffer more:

"Old-fashioned people such as myself will maintain that this sort of thing was invented for the express purpose of prolonging the sufferings of the pedestrian public. I have known men grow old and grey waiting at this identical spot for a policeman to notice their existence."

Eve turned. Beside her, gazing with a sort of pained tolerance at the traffic, stood the hatless young man with the eyeglass—hatted now, but otherwise entirely recognisable, down to the same expression of one who finds the spectacle of a chaotic world a source of quiet entertainment rather than distress.

"Oh!" said Eve, and stopped, uncertain how to proceed with a gentleman to whom she owed both an umbrella and an unpaid debt of gratitude, but whom she had no earthly right to know.

Psmith, for his part, looked at her with the bland, unclouded serenity of a man who has never in his life set eyes on her before.

"You appear," he said, "to be similarly circumstanced. Might I suggest that we support each other's morale while awaiting the policeman's change of heart? I find that adversity shared is adversity halved, or possibly quartered."

"I think," said Eve slowly, looking at him with some attention, "that we've met before."

"It is the dream of my life," said Psmith, "to be able to say that to a beautiful stranger and have it turn out to be true. Alas, I fear you have confused me with some other and doubtless inferior individual. I should certainly have remembered."

"You're quite sure?"

"I am the sort of man," said Psmith, "who, once seen, is not readily forgotten. My whole appearance has been the subject of unfavourable comment from an early age. No, I think we must regard this as a first meeting, and I, for one, am not disposed to quarrel with the arrangement, whatever it costs me in the way of forfeited earlier opportunities."

The policeman, at this point, held up a majestic hand, and the traffic, with the reluctance of a beast unwillingly tamed, subsided. Eve, crossing, found her companion still at her side, apparently prepared to continue the conversation upon the further pavement.

"I am on my way," she said, with what firmness she could muster, "to an appointment, and I mustn't be late for it."

"A pity," said Psmith. "I had been cherishing hopes of prolonging this discussion of the London traffic problem, on which I hold views of some originality and no value whatever. However, if duty calls—" He raised his hat. "I trust we may renew the acquaintance we have just this moment formed. London, I am given to understand, is a small place, once you have learned your way about it."

And he stood, gravely watching her go, with the umbrella—her umbrella, or rather Mr. Walderwick's, or, to be strictly accurate, now entirely his own—tucked beneath his arm; and it did not occur to Eve, hurrying on to her appointment and a good deal occupied with wondering why a perfect stranger should have taken the trouble to deny an acquaintance she was perfectly certain existed, to look at that umbrella at all.

* * * * *

The house to which her business took her was a tall, quiet house in a square off Grosvenor Street, and the man who received her in the study, a lean, alert person with an efficient, disapproving sort of face, introduced himself as Mr. Baxter and explained, in a manner suggesting that time was a commodity of which he possessed remarkably little and grudged every particle of it, that Lord Emsworth, being detained, had left the completion of the arrangements in his hands.

"Lord Emsworth," said Mr. Baxter, "requires someone to catalogue the library at Blandings Castle—a task, I may say, that has been needed for a number of years. Perhaps you would give me some idea of your qualifications."

Eve, who had come prepared to be catechised on palaeography and the classification of incunabula, embarked with some confidence upon an account of her experience, gathered during a period of employment with a bookseller in the Charing Cross Road, and was getting on, she felt, rather well, when Mr. Baxter, consulting a paper before him, observed:

"I understand you were recommended for the post by the Honourable Freddie Threepwood."

"Yes," said Eve, "that's right."

Something in Mr. Baxter's expression—a sudden tightening, a look of a man scenting an old and familiar treachery—should perhaps have warned her, but she went on unsuspecting.

"Mr. Threepwood," said Mr. Baxter, in the voice of a prosecuting counsel who has at last secured the admission he required, "has, I believe, expressed a considerable degree of personal interest in your appointment."

"He's proposed to me four times," said Eve, with the frankness of one who sees no reason to conceal a fact so entirely without embarrassment to herself, "if that's what you mean. I keep telling him not to be silly."

She had intended this as a piece of disarming candour, calculated to show that whatever Freddie's motives, her own were above suspicion; its effect upon Mr. Baxter was unfortunately the reverse. His face, from a mere disapproval, deepened into something very like grim triumph, that of a man who has all along suspected a conspiracy and has now had it confirmed under oath by one of the conspirators.

"I see," he said, with the chilly satisfaction of a filing clerk closing a drawer upon a completed case. "That is, no doubt, of great interest, though scarcely material to your qualifications for cataloguing a library." He made a note, in a manner Eve found extremely disquieting, upon the paper before him. "I shall place your application before Lord Emsworth. You will appreciate that in a household of the kind, matters of this nature must be looked into with some care."

"But I haven't the least interest in Mr. Threepwood," said Eve, with the sinking sensation of one who feels a perfectly good case slipping through her fingers for reasons she cannot quite identify. "I only mentioned it because—"

"Quite so," said Mr. Baxter, in the tone of a man who has heard that sort of thing before and knows exactly what it is worth. "Lord Emsworth will communicate with you in due course."

And Eve, retiring some minutes later into the square, with the distinct impression that she had somehow contrived to talk herself out of a situation she had every qualification to fill, without being actually told that she would not get it, could only reflect, as she made her way home, that interviews, like the English climate, were things upon which no wise person ever depended.

* * * * *

It was evening, and the smoking-room of the Drones was full of a comfortable, leathery calm, broken only by the sound, somewhere in a distant armchair, of a member reading aloud, to nobody in particular, extracts from an evening paper. Psmith, established in the window with the umbrella propped with some tenderness against his knee, was aware of Freddie Walderwick bearing down upon him with the air of a man who has remembered something.

"I say," said Mr. Walderwick, pausing, "you might tell a fellow what you wanted my brolly for, after all that. Who was the note from, anyway—the one you had off Charles? Practically insisted on knowing, Charles did, when I was talking to him just now. Some girl, wasn't it? He said something about a Miss Halliday."

"Halliday," said Psmith, with the quiet satisfaction of a man completing a jig-saw puzzle, "did he say Halliday?"

"That's it. Eve Halliday, or some such name. Charles has a weakness for retailing gossip; you should keep him in better order." And Mr. Walderwick, having thus unburdened himself, wandered off towards the bar, leaving Psmith alone with his umbrella, the gathering dusk outside the window, and a name which he turned over in his mind with the reverent care of a collector who has, quite unexpectedly, been given the one piece he lacked.

It was on the night after this, the twelfth day of the shooting star that never came—no, I anticipate. Let me set it down as it happened.

It was the night of the first falling star. We were sitting late, for my wife had been reading aloud to me from a novel of Corelli’s, and I remember the lamp was smoking a little and I had risen to trim it, when, glancing through the window at the dark garden, I saw a brilliant green light flash across the sky. I told my wife it might be a shooting star, though it was unlike any I had seen before, greener and larger, and it seemed to fall in the direction of Horsell Common, on the other side of Woking. She would not come out to look at it, being sleepy, and I did not think much more of it myself that night, save to remark that it would give the astronomers something new to write about, and to wonder idly whether it was, after all, some kin to those puffs of flame from Mars that Ogilvy and I had watched. I did not for a moment suppose that the two things could really be connected. It seemed the wildest coincidence—no more to be entertained seriously than the notion of a message thrown across forty millions of miles of vacancy to fall in the sand of a Surrey common. I went to bed presently, and thought no more of the matter until the morning.

It was Ogilvy himself who was the first person to find the Thing, or at any rate the first of whom I have any account. He had been out before sunrise, still hoping, I suppose, to catch some fresh phenomenon upon Mars, and had heard from a labouring man of a mass of metal lying half buried in a pit near the sand-pits on the common, with vapour rising from it. This sent him hurrying to the spot, only to find a hole in the ground, made by the impact of the projectile, and a cylindrical body embedded in it—if body it could be called, being of no shape that I can compare to any natural thing.

I heard of it first from my housemaid, who had it from the milkman, who had it from someone at Horsell; and, my curiosity being aroused by the memory of the green flash of the night before, I put on my hat and walked over to see for myself.

I found a little knot of people already gathered on the edge of the pit—perhaps eight or nine of them—and among them, to my surprise, I recognised Ogilvy, down in the sand below, prodding at the object with a stick. It lay tilted on its side, more than half buried, in what had been, until the previous evening, a shallow pool fringed with heather and fir; the fall had driven up a rampart of sand and gravel all about it, and what water remained lay steaming gently in the morning air, so that the whole pit had the look of some sulphurous spring. The Thing itself I could make very little of at that distance—a huge cylinder, its surface strangely dull, discoloured, and crusted over, as if by the burning of its passage through our atmosphere, so that one could not tell at a glance whether it was of iron or of some substance altogether unfamiliar. From a rent, or possibly a seam, near what I took to be its upper end, a thin curl of vapour rose continually, drifting away over the pines.

I scrambled down the loose sand to where Ogilvy stood, and greeted him. He looked up, streaked with sand and perspiration, his eyes bright with the excitement I remembered so well from our night at the telescope.

“Well,” said I, “here is your meteorite come home to roost.”

“A meteorite, certainly,” he said, but with a certain briskness in his tone that struck me as more emphatic than the occasion seemed to warrant. “A very singular one—unusually large, and behaving in a very odd fashion, but a meteorite for all that.”

“It is uncommonly regular for a stone from the sky,” I said, for indeed the more I looked at it, the more the perfect roundness of the thing at its exposed end struck me as unlike anything I had ever seen figured of meteoric iron. “I have never heard of a meteorite that was manifestly cylindrical.”

“Erosion,” said Ogilvy, promptly. “You must remember what such a mass has been through—the friction of the atmosphere would work upon it most curiously, especially if it were spinning as it fell. I have seen stranger shapes in the collections at the Museum. There is no need to make a mystery of it, Wells,”—for so he called me,—“ though I own the vapour puzzles me a little. Sulphurous fumes, probably, from the heat of the fall acting upon whatever moisture it fell into. It is confoundedly hot; I could not hold my hand against it a minute ago.”

“You connect it, then, with nothing—” I hesitated over the word, feeling a little foolish— “with nothing from Mars?”

He laughed, not quite comfortably, I thought. “My dear fellow, we agreed the chances against anything manlike on Mars were a million to one. I see no reason to revise the figure because a lump of rock has had the impertinence to fall out of the sky two days after we happened to be watching gas-jets on a planet forty million miles away. Coincidences of that sort happen every week to somebody. If I thought every shooting star was a parcel from the Martians I should never get any sleep.”

“And yet you were out before dawn to look for it,” I said.

“I was out to look for a meteorite,” he said, a little testily, “which is precisely what I have found, and precisely what I mean to go on calling it until someone shows me better cause.” And with that he turned back to his prodding, tapping the crusted surface here and there with the ferrule of his stick, and remarking upon the slag-like appearance of the incrustation, and speculating on its probable composition, in the manner of a man determined to keep the conversation upon safe and scientific ground.

I did not press the argument further, though I confess the matter sat a little uneasily in my mind—the size of the thing, greater, as it seemed to me, than any meteorite of which I had ever read; the extreme, unhurrying regularity of that curl of steam, rising and rising as though from something that generated its own heat rather than merely cooling from the violence of its fall; and a faint, indefinable sense that the object was, in some way I could not have put into words, waiting. But Ogilvy was the astronomer, not I, and I let the thing rest, and fell to watching with the others.

More people had come up while we talked—labourers from the neighbouring cottages, a carter who had left his horse standing in the lane, two boys who ought, I have no doubt, to have been at their lessons—until quite a little crowd had gathered along the rim of the pit, most of them staring down in that dull, half-amused, wholly incurious way that Englishmen have when confronted with something they cannot immediately turn to profit or ridicule. Someone made a joke about a Zeppelin, though the word can hardly have been in use then, or something like it, and there was a general laugh. It was extraordinary, looking back, how little sense of danger there was in that crowd. A fallen star was a nine days’ wonder, a thing to tell one’s friends of, no more.

I walked home for my breakfast in a thoughtful mood, and found my wife curious about the excitement, for word had already gone round the village. I told her what I had seen, and something, I suppose, of my own unease must have shown through my account, for she asked whether it was safe, and I laughed her out of the notion, though not, I think, altogether out of my own. In the end she declared she would come and see it for herself, and we walked over together in the warmth of the forenoon, she in her light summer dress and I still turning the thing over in my mind.

The crowd had grown considerably by the time we reached the common—thirty or forty people now, I should think, drawn from Horsell and Woking and even, by the look of some of the traps standing in the lane, from further afield; news of that kind travels fast in a quiet neighbourhood. The pit itself was much as I had left it, save that the vapour seemed, if anything, to rise a little more thickly, and the crust of the cylinder, where the sun had been upon it, had taken on a curious iridescence, like the tarnish on old bronze. Ogilvy was still there, though he had been joined now by Henderson, the London journalist who had a house in the neighbourhood, and the two of them stood arguing amiably over the nature of the incrustation, Ogilvy still maintaining his meteorite with a certain dogged insistence that struck me as almost professional pride, as though the alternative were a personal affront to his science.

My wife stood at my side, shading her eyes, and I heard her murmur that it was a strange-looking thing to have come out of the sky, and did I not think it very large for a shooting star; and I said that I supposed all things were relative, and that Ogilvy had assured me it was nothing out of the way.

It was while we stood there that the mishap occurred which I have since had good reason to remember. Among the crowd was a young fellow—a labourer, I judged, by his dress, though I never learned his name—who had grown impatient, I suppose, of merely looking, and had clambered down into the pit itself, to the annoyance of one or two who called to him to come back. He went close up to the cylinder, made bold, I daresay, by the laughter of his companions above, and laid the flat of his hand against the metal, meaning perhaps to feel for himself whether it was truly as hot as was being said.

He gave a most extraordinary yell, and sprang back so violently that he tumbled over the loose sand and had to be helped to his feet by Ogilvy, who was nearest. The man held his hand out before him, palm upward, with a look of such astonished pain upon his face that a kind of nervous laughter went round the crowd, followed almost at once by a more sober murmur of concern. I saw the palm myself a little later, when he came up out of the pit nursing it against his coat—an angry, blistered redness across the whole width of it, as though he had gripped the bar of a kitchen range fresh from the fire. He would say only that it was “like putting your hand flat on an iron,” and that he had never felt metal so hot in his life, not even the boiler-plates at the gasworks where, it seemed, he was in the habit of working.

This little accident had the effect of sobering the crowd considerably, and of drawing a good many more people to the edge of the pit to see the man’s hand and hear his account of it, so that in a very short time the gathering had swollen again, and there was much speculation, none of it, so far as I could judge, tending in any very alarming direction. It was generally agreed that the thing must be uncommonly hot from its fall, and one or two of the wiser heads observed that it would be as well not to go too near it until it had cooled, which seemed to me, I must say, very sound advice, though I noticed that it did not prevent several small boys from creeping down for a closer look the moment their elders’ backs were turned.

My wife had grown a little pale over the business, and confessed that she did not care for the crowding, or the heat of the sun, which was now well up and beating strongly upon the sand of the common; and she had, besides, some notion of the man’s burn as a bad omen, which I did my best to laugh away. I own that I had no great wish to see her stand about longer in that press of people, over a thing whose nature none of us, for all Ogilvy’s confidence, could truly say we understood; and after a little persuasion—for she was reluctant to leave me there—I got her to agree to go home without me, promising that I would follow within the hour and would come to no harm in the meantime.

I watched her go up the path towards the road, turning once to wave to me, and then I went back to the rim of the pit, where the crowd, undiminished by the sun or by the burned man’s testimony, still pressed and murmured and stared down at that dull, steaming, incrusted cylinder lying half in its bed of muddy water, as patient, and as silent, as the grave.

I set out for the village at once, half running along the dusty lane, my mind full of strychnine and locked doors. I had no need to explain myself when I reached the little house where the Belgian refugees were lodged, for Poirot met me at the door already dressed, his face unusually grave.

"Mon ami," he said, before I could get a word out, "I have heard already. Mademoiselle Howard's plan, it seems, is not so absurd after all."

"You've heard? But how—?"

"The boy from the farm, who brings the milk. He had it from one of your maids—the young one, Annie, I think—who ran to the gate at some unearthly hour to stop the cart and pour out her news to the first ear she found. Bad tidings, mon ami, they travel faster than the good, and require no motor-car to do it. Come, I am ready. We will go at once."

He caught up a small overcoat despite the promise of heat in the morning air, and we set out together at a pace that taxed my wounded leg sorely, though I would not for the world have asked him to slacken it.

"Tell me everything," he said, "exactly as it occurred."

I told him, as we went, all that I have already set down: the locked doors, the broken panel, the convulsions, Dr. Bauerstein's strange authority, the two doctors' consultation, Mrs. Inglethorp's last strangled words. Poirot listened without interrupting, only now and then giving a little grunt.

"And Alfred Inglethorp—he was with her when she died?"

"No. That's the strange thing. He wasn't in the house at all. Nobody has seen him since he went off with Dr. Bauerstein last night."

Poirot's eyebrows went up.

"Not in the house? That is curious. That is very curious."

We had come by now within sight of the lodge gates, and it was there that we encountered Mr. Inglethorp himself, walking up from the direction of the village, his black beard disarranged, his face pale and heavy-eyed, as of a man who has walked all night.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, on seeing us. "Is it true? Is Emily—is she really——" He could not finish the sentence.

"Yes," I said. "I'm afraid it's quite true. She died in the early hours of this morning."

He put his hand to his head with a kind of groan.

"My God! My poor Emily! This is terrible—terrible!" He seemed genuinely overcome, and yet there was something in his manner—I could not have said what—that jarred upon me.

"Where have you been all night, Mr. Inglethorp?" I asked, perhaps more bluntly than I intended.

He did not seem to resent the question.

"I have been at the Coote's farm, over by Marston, going into some business about oats with the manager—Denby. We must have talked until well past one, and it came on so black and stormy that they insisted I should stop the night rather than walk back in it. I had a bed there. This morning I set off directly I woke, not having heard, of course, of this awful calamity." His voice broke again, and he covered his face with his hand.

Poirot said nothing, watching him with those curious green eyes of his, but made no comment, and we went on together to the house.

It was Dorcas who, without in the least intending it, put a small crack across the smoothness of Mr. Inglethorp's story. We found her in the hall, red-eyed with weeping, and when Mr. Inglethorp had gone on ahead to find John, she turned to me.

"Poor master, he do look tired out, sir. He must have started terrible early to be back by now, if he slept over at Coote's."

"He said he set off directly he woke," I said.

"That's queer, sir," said Dorcas, wrinkling her forehead, "for it wasn't gone six when I heard someone moving about downstairs in the hall, and that would have been long before any word could have reached him at Coote's, seeing as nobody was sent that way at all, sir, as I know of. And Coote's is a good four miles the other side of the village."

I said nothing, but I saw Poirot's eyes rest on Dorcas's face with a sudden sharp attention, and then travel, thoughtfully, to the door through which Mr. Inglethorp had disappeared. He tucked the little fact away, as a squirrel tucks away a nut, without remark.

I now performed the introductions that were necessary, and explained Poirot's presence to John, who received it with a grave courtesy that concealed, I fancied, a good deal of reluctance still. But he made no objection, and himself conducted us up the stairs.

"The rooms have not been touched," he said. "Bauerstein was most particular about that. Here are the keys."

Poirot took them, and slipped them into his pocket with a word of thanks. At the door of Mrs. Inglethorp's room he paused.

"You will forgive me, Hastings, if I ask that you remain here on the landing, while I make my first examination alone? No—do not look offended. It is not that I doubt your discretion. It is only that two pairs of eyes moving about a room disturb each other, and impressions are less clear."

I confess I was a little wounded, but I said nothing, and stood aside while he unlocked the door and passed in, closing it softly behind him. I heard him moving about within—the creak of a board, the small clink of some object being lifted and set down—for what seemed a very long time, though it cannot in truth have been above a quarter of an hour. At last the door opened again, and he beckoned me in.

The room, in the full light of a July morning, looked strange and pathetic in its ordinary neatness, save for the overturned table by the bed, which nobody had yet righted. The bed itself had already been made decent, at Dr. Bauerstein's own direction, before he sealed the room, so that little remained beyond the furniture and the cold ashes of the extinguished fire to speak of what had passed there.

Poirot went about the room with an extraordinary care, minute and methodical, opening drawers, examining the catch of the window that gave upon the balcony, kneeling for a long moment upon the hearthrug to look into the grate. He picked up, from the mantelpiece, a small despatch-case—doubtless the one Cynthia had been asked to bring the night before—and tried it gently. It was locked. He set it down again with evident satisfaction, as though its being locked told him something he wished to know.

Then, quite suddenly, he stooped by the overturned bedside table and picked up something so small that I did not at once see what it was. He held it a moment in the palm of his hand, turned it once with the tip of one finger, and then, before I could get a clear look, closed his fist upon it and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

"Poirot—what is it? What have you found?"

He turned to me, and there was in his face that curious, almost impish look of secret enjoyment that I was to come to know so well in the months that followed.

"Look, my friend." He opened his hand for one instant. I saw a tiny fragment—no more than a scrap—of some dark, coarse material, hardly bigger than my thumbnail. Before I could examine it properly he had closed his fingers over it again.

"What is it?" I asked eagerly. "Where did you find it?"

"It was under the table, half hidden by the fringe of the rug. Doubtless it fell there in the struggle."

"But what does it mean?"

He shook his head, smiling.

"Not yet, mon ami. Not yet. We must not put the cart before the horse of Normandy, is it not so you say? For the moment, I say nothing."

"Poirot, you're really most exasperating!"

"Do not be cross with me, Hastings. I promise you that when the moment comes, you shall know everything—everything that I know myself, and perhaps a little that you have guessed already without knowing it. But for the present, the little scrap must keep its secret, and so must I."

He would say no more on the subject, though I pressed him, and turned instead to examine, with the same minuteness, the connecting door to Mr. Inglethorp's room, and after that the further door, still bolted, that led into Cynthia's apartment.

It was at this point that a soft knock came upon the outer door, and, upon Poirot's calling out, Cynthia herself looked in, pale and heavy-eyed, still in her dressing-gown.

"They told me you were here, Monsieur Poirot. I—I wanted to say how dreadfully sorry I am. She was so good to me."

Poirot regarded her with a gentleness I had not before seen in him.

"Mademoiselle, I am very sorry to disturb you at such a time. I will ask you only the one little question, and then you shall go and rest, for you look as though you have great need of it."

"Yes—of course—anything."

"Last night, mademoiselle—you slept well? You heard nothing of the disturbance, of the struggle, of Mr. Cavendish and his brother forcing the door?"

Cynthia flushed a little, as though the question embarrassed her.

"No, nothing at all. I'm dreadfully ashamed of it, but I sleep so soundly always—I believe Mrs. Cavendish had to positively shake me before I would wake up. It wasn't until it was practically all over that I understood anything was wrong."

"You did not stir, even, until Madame Cavendish shook you?"

"Not at all. I might have been drugged, I slept so heavily. I've always been a sound sleeper, but never like that before."

"Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all I wished to know. Go now, and rest, I beg of you."

She gave him a small, grateful smile, and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

Poirot stood for a moment looking after her, a curious, considering expression on his face, and then turned back to the room and resumed his slow, careful progress about it, missing nothing, it seemed to me, from the ashes in the grate to the very folds of the curtains.

At length he came to a stand in the middle of the room, and drew from his pocket once more the little fragment he had found, turning it over and over between his fingers as though it were a puzzle whose answer lay somewhere in its texture.

"Hastings," he said at last, slowly, not looking at me, "it is a very strange thing."

"What is?"

He did not answer at once. He held the scrap up between us, so that the morning light from the window fell full upon it, and I saw that his brows had drawn together in that expression of intense, inward concentration that I was afterwards to know so well.

"Strange," he murmured again, half to himself, "and yet—if I am not mistaken—of the greatest possible importance."

"What was it Robert said to you, *chère amie*, as you walked away?" Edna asked, when they had settled the children under the awning and had a moment to themselves.

"Oh, nothing of consequence," said Madame Ratignolle, laughing a little. "He is absurd, that boy. I told him he must not be forever at your elbow, that people would begin to talk, and he only laughed and said he supposed they might as well talk of that as of anything else; that he had known you a month and loved you neither more nor less than if he had known you a year, and that you were the first woman who ever made him feel that way, though he could not tell how it was. I scolded him well, but you know it does no good to scold Robert."

She said this much later, in the course of the day, when the two women were sitting alone under the children's tent, the heat having driven them there again after the mid-day dinner; and she said it lightly, as one repeats an idle speech, not dwelling upon it, going on at once to speak of something else. But Edna kept it by her, turning it over as she might have turned over a curious small stone picked up on the beach, whose color and shape pleased her, without her quite knowing why.

It was while they were thus sitting that a boy came down from the house with a telegram for Mrs. Pontellier. She opened it there in the tent, in the presence of Madame Ratignolle, without any premonition that it might contain other than good news. It was from her husband, saying that he would not be able to come down to Grand Isle until the middle of the following week; that a matter of business detained him in the city.

"That is a pity," said Madame Ratignolle, when Edna had read the message aloud. "You will be lonesome without him."

"I shall get on very well," said Edna, folding the yellow paper and slipping it into the pocket of her gown. She spoke the truth. She was not sorry, though she could not have told why, nor would she have owned it. There was a sense, which she did not attempt to define, of having gained a certain length of unencumbered time; as though a hand that had held her rather closely had loosed its hold for a little, leaving her to her own movements.

The afternoon was far advanced when she left Madame Ratignolle and the children, and, without any settled purpose, wandered down toward the beach alone. The water was very still, unruffled by the morning's stiff breeze, which had died away entirely. There was no one bathing at that hour; the bath-houses stood deserted, their doors for the most part closed. Edna went into her own, and came out presently in her bathing-suit, which she still handled with some clumsiness, not being greatly used to putting it on and off.

She had attempted the summer through, in a half-hearted, indolent way, to learn to swim. She had received instructions from both her husband and Robert, but had always failed, growing frightened in the first venture and losing presence of mind, floundering about, striking wildly, catching for a support which was not there.

That afternoon she went down to the water alone. It was smooth and inviting, and there was no one to watch her, no one to tell her she was doing it wrong, no one to catch her if she failed. This circumstance seemed to give her unaccustomed strength and confidence. She let the water close over her and reached out blindly for a foothold that was not needed, and then—she could not afterward have told how it happened—she found herself moving, striking out with her arms and feet against the resistance of the water, and staying up. A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second appalled and enfeebled her senses; but by an effort she rallied her staggering faculties and managed to reach the shore.

She walked out to where her feet touched the sand, breathless, exultant, trembling a little with the newness and the wonder of the thing. She had swum. It was not far, and it was clumsily done, and it was over almost before it had begun; but she had done it, alone, with no one's arm or word to steady her.

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before. Her unlooked-for skill led her to reflect upon the mortal treacherous sea, and she did not remain long in the water. She came in, and stood for a while looking out over the glassy stretch, her arms folded, feeling something of the elation of a child who all at once realizes its power, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence.

She said nothing of it to any one. She dressed in the bath-house and walked slowly back up toward the house, keeping her small triumph folded away within herself, as one keeps a thing too new and too precious to be spoken of aloud.

On her way she passed the porch of a neighboring cottage, where the lady in black sat with her rosary still in her fingers, though the hour of devotions was long past. She was not reading now, but sat looking out toward the Gulf, her thin hands folded quietly in her lap. Edna, who had never exchanged more than a bow with her the whole summer through, would have passed with the same silent inclination of the head, but the lady in black spoke.

"You have been in bathing, Madame?" she said, in a voice that was low and even, with a note of gentle inquiry in it, as though the fact of any one's bathing at that hour were a small and mild wonder.

"Yes," said Edna, pausing, a little surprised, and coloring, she could not have said why, as if the woman had guessed her secret. "The water was so still and so inviting."

"It is a dangerous element," said the lady in black, "for those who do not know it. My sister's husband was drowned in the Gulf, four years ago, not far from this spot." She said it without any particular emphasis of grief, as one repeats a fact long since absorbed into the quiet current of one's thoughts. "You do very wisely to learn."

"I have only just begun to learn," said Edna, smiling a little.

"So much the better that you begin," returned the other, and bent her head again over the rosary, as though she had said all that she had to say, and Edna, feeling herself dismissed, went on up the path.

The two young lovers passed her, walking toward the beach, close together, indifferent to the failing light and to every one but themselves. Edna watched them for a moment before they were out of sight.

The children were asleep when she reached the cottage. She went in and stood a while beside their bed in the dimness, hearing their light, regular breathing, and feeling, as she sometimes did, a rush of tenderness for them that was almost like pain, and passed as quickly as it came. Then she went out again to the gallery, and sat down alone in the growing dark.

The house was quiet. Far off she could hear the voices of the guests gathered on Madame Lebrun's porch, and now and then a ripple of laughter, and the notes of the piano, poorly played, stealing across the night. The Gulf lay beyond, a vast, dim, murmuring presence that she could not see, but only feel, and hear, breathing near her in the dark.

She sat there a long while, her hands lying idle in her lap, thinking of nothing in particular, or of many things at once in that loose, unfastened way in which the mind moves at the end of a warm day. The little stone she had picked up that afternoon in the tent was still somewhere about her, turning over and over: Robert's words, as Adèle had given them to her—that she was the first woman who had ever made him feel so, though he could not tell how it was. She did not know why the words should have fastened themselves upon her so, nor why they should return to her now, of all the day's incidents, with a persistence that the sea itself, and her small victory over it, could not drive away.

“Well,” says Mr. Franklin, getting up and brushing the sand off his beautiful fawn-coloured trousers, “are you not going to ask me why I have come four hours before my time, and taken you off your dinner into the bargain?”

“I was just going to make so bold, sir,” I said.

“Then you shall have your answer, Betteredge, and a letter to prove it.” He put his hand into the breast pocket of his coat, and took out a letter, folded small, and a good deal worn at the edges, as if it had been carried about and read over more than once. “I got this in London, three days ago,” he says, “and it altered all my plans on the spot. Read it, and you’ll understand why I couldn’t wait for tomorrow.”

I have got that letter now, put by along with other papers of importance, which have come into my hands in the course of this business. Here it is, copied word for word:

*“SIR—I am asked to warn you, before you go down to Yorkshire, that you are watched by men who will not scruple at anything to gain their end. I cannot tell you more without betraying a confidence which I am bound to keep. But I can tell you this: if you have anything in your possession which was once the property of the late Colonel Herncastle, do not delay for one needless hour in placing it, and yourself, out of the reach of danger.—A FRIEND.”*

I read it through twice over, and I am free to confess it took the wind clean out of me. “Lord bless me, sir!” I said. “Who sent you this?”

“I don’t know,” says Mr. Franklin. “No name, no date, no address to answer by—nothing but the postmark, and that tells me no more than that it was posted in London.”

“And you believed it, sir, enough to alter all your plans upon it?”

“I don’t know that I believed it,” he says, turning the letter over in his fingers, and looking at it as if it could answer me for him. “I know it made me uncomfortable, Betteredge, in a way I couldn’t shake off. I had meant to loiter a day or two in London on my way here—there was nothing pressing—but after that letter came, I found I couldn’t settle to loitering anywhere. I took the first train I could get, this morning, and here I am. You may laugh at me, if you like.”

I didn’t feel in the least inclined to laugh at him; and I don’t think you will either, when you have got a little further into this story of mine. There is a時 (I beg your pardon—my pen slipped into a language I don’t know, out of pure agitation at my own recollections; I mean there is a time) coming, before long, when you and I, together, will see cause to look back at this letter, and wonder over it, and wish to heaven somebody had paid more attention to it at the time. But it is not my business to forestall my own story. Let me only say that I asked Mr. Franklin, there and then, whether he had any suspicion himself of who might have written it.

“None,” he says. “Unless it has something to do with a foreign fancy of my uncle Herncastle’s—but that’s an old story, Betteredge, and not fit for telling on an empty stomach, on a windy beach. I want my dinner as much as you do.”

With that he laughed, and put the letter back in his pocket, as if he was ashamed of having taken it so seriously; and I own I was glad to see him laugh, for the reading of it had left a chill on me that the sun himself, shining as pleasantly as he did that afternoon, seemed hardly able to warm away.

We had got, by this time, pretty near to the sandhills that hide the beach from the plantation; and it was here that Mr. Franklin, stopping short in the middle of a lively account of his adventures abroad (which I am not going to trouble you with, having more important matters on hand), put his hand into an inner pocket of his waistcoat, and brought out a little packet, sealed in several places, and about the size that would go easily into a lady’s reticule.

“Betteredge,” says he, quite serious again all in a moment, “I want you to do something for me, and I don’t want you to ask me why.”

“That’s a hard condition to put upon a naturally curious man, sir,” I said. “But I’ll do my best to bear up under it. What is it you want?”

“I want you to take charge of this,” he says, putting the little packet into my hand, “and to lock it up for tonight in the safest place you have got in the house. Not in your room, Betteredge—somewhere with a better lock and key to it than a bedroom door generally has.”

“There’s the plate-room, sir,” I said, turning the thing over, and finding it heavier than I had expected, for its size. “Nothing goes in or out of the plate-room but under my own eye, and the key of it never leaves my own pocket, day or night.”

“The very thing,” says Mr. Franklin. “Lock it up there tonight, and give it back to me tomorrow morning, the first thing after breakfast. Whatever you do, don’t ask me what’s inside it—not tonight, at any rate. I want one quiet night’s sleep first, with the thing off my mind and out of my hands. Will you do this for me, without asking questions?”

Now I put it to you, whether any man, in my place, could have refused a request put in that way, by the son of his old lady’s sister, and a young gentleman he had known and been fond of, off and on, since he was a boy in a frock, feeding the swans on our lake? I said “Yes, sir,” and I took the packet, and I asked no questions—though I don’t mind telling you, privately, between ourselves, that my curiosity, from that moment, was in a state which I can only describe as raging.

We went on, up through the plantation, in silence—Mr. Franklin, I thought, being a little ashamed of himself for the mystery he had made, and I being a good deal occupied with wondering, in spite of my best endeavours not to wonder at all, what a small hard heavy thing, wrapped up and sealed, and carried loose in a gentleman’s pocket half over Europe, could possibly turn out to be, when the sealing paper came off it. I leave you to consider whether the letter about Colonel Herncastle’s property, which I had just been reading, was likely to make my speculations on this subject any easier to bear.

We came out on the terrace just as Penelope was crossing it, on her way from the kitchen quarter to the house, with an empty dish in her hand which had held the second course.

“Well?” I said to her. “Where’s Rosanna? Didn’t I send you to help fetch her in?”

“She’s not coming in, father,” says Penelope. “I met Nancy on the sands, on my way to look for you both, and Nancy said Rosanna had told her she wasn’t hungry, and had gone on to Cobb’s Hole to see Limping Lucy, and would be back before dark.”

“Cobb’s Hole, at this time of day!” I said. “What does she want at Cobb’s Hole?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, father,” says Penelope; “unless it’s to get away from her own thoughts, poor thing—she looked wretched enough, Nancy said, when she passed her on the beach.”

Mr. Franklin, who had been standing by, half listening and half not, as young gentlemen with something on their minds will do, looked round at this, and asked who Rosanna might be, and what was amiss with her; and I told him, in as few words as I could manage, the substance of what I have already set down for you in this same chapter—leaving out, of course, all mention of her queer behaviour and her queerer talk to me on the sands, that not being, to my thinking, a subject for idle gossip, even with so old a friend of the family as Mr. Franklin. He heard me out with more attention than I looked for, seeing that his own affairs, whatever they were, seemed heavy enough on him to leave little room for other people’s housemaids; and when I had done, he only said, “Poor girl!” in a kind sort of way, and asked no more questions—being, I take it, too full of his own letter and his own packet to have much curiosity left over for Rosanna Spearman.

We went in together; and there, in the hall, was my lady herself, come down from the boudoir the moment word reached her that Mr. Franklin had arrived. I stood back, as was fitting, and saw the meeting between them—my lady holding out both her hands to him, and Mr. Franklin taking them and kissing her, as a son might a mother, being indeed the son of the sister she had loved best of all her family. “Franklin!” says my lady, holding him off a little, to look at him. “Four hours before your time! What has hurried you down upon us so unexpectedly?”

I confess I pricked up my ears at this, wondering whether Mr. Franklin would come out, there and then, before his aunt, with the letter, and the mystery of the little packet, and all the rest of it. But he did no such thing. He laughed, and made some light answer about being tired of London, and wanting a sight of Yorkshire air and Yorkshire faces sooner than he had promised himself; and my lady, who had no more idea than the man in the moon of what was really weighing on him, laughed too, and seemed mightily pleased to have got him a few hours the sooner.

It was not until they had gone in together to the library—I following, in my capacity of general utility about the house, to see that the fire was made up and the curtains drawn—that anything more particular passed between them; and even then it was my lady, and not Mr. Franklin, who opened the matter that I am now going to set down, word for word, as near as my memory serves me, it being, as you will see presently, a matter of some consequence to what comes after.

“Franklin,” says my lady, settling herself in her chair by the fire, and looking at him with that quiet, steady way she has, which always means that something serious is coming, “before we say another word, there is one subject I wish to have clearly understood between us, once for all. I have heard, from a friend in town, something of what passed between you and your uncle Herncastle before he died—and something of what he may, or may not, have left you in his will. I don’t ask you what it is; I don’t wish to know what it is. All I ask is that, so long as you are a guest under my roof, that subject, and everything belonging to it, shall not be spoken of, by you or by anyone else, in my hearing, or in Rachel’s. I have my reasons, Franklin, and they are good ones. Will you give me your promise?”

I own I stood there with the poker in my hand, doing nothing whatever to the fire, which was burning very well without me, in my anxiety to hear what answer Mr. Franklin would make. He looked, for a moment, as if the request had taken him by surprise, and perhaps touched him a little on a sore place besides; but he mastered whatever it was in a moment, and answered her, straight and simple, like the good-hearted young fellow he has always been.

“I promise you, Aunt,” he said, “with all my heart. You shall not hear that man’s name from me, under this roof, so long as I live.”

“Thank you, Franklin,” says my lady, and gave him her hand upon it; and there the matter ended, so far as anything was said about it that evening. But I have set the little scene down here, faithfully, because—as you will come to see, if you have the patience to go on with me—there are promises made in this world, with the best will in the world to keep them, which have a way of getting themselves broken by the mere pressure of events; and this promise of Mr. Franklin’s to my lady was one of them.

The rest of that evening does not call for much telling. Mr. Franklin brightened up wonderfully as dinner went on and the wine went round, and was very near his old self again by the time the ladies left the table—which is saying a good deal, seeing what a handsome, easy, pleasant-spoken young gentleman his old self always was. I locked the little packet away with my own hands, in the plate-room, in the strong box that holds my lady’s spare silver, and turned the key on it twice over, and put the key in my pocket along with my others, and thought no more that night about what might be inside it—or, to speak the plain truth, thought of very little else.

Rosanna did not come back. Nancy grumbled about it at supper in the servants’ hall, and I daresay had some cause; but Penelope stood up stoutly for her friend, and said there was no knowing what a girl might feel that had gone through what Rosanna had gone through, and that Cobb’s Hole and Limping Lucy were better company for her, that night, than any of us. I said nothing to this, one way or the other, having my own thoughts about Rosanna Spearman, which I have set down for you already, and which I did not choose to trouble the kitchen with.

By eleven o’clock the house was quiet, my lady and Mr. Franklin had gone up to their rooms, and I was left alone, as is my custom of a night, in my own little sitting-room, with my pipe, and my beehive chair, and my dear old ROBINSON CRUSOE to keep me company. I don’t deny that my mind wandered a good deal, that night, from the island and the goats and the footprint in the sand, to the letter in Mr. Franklin’s pocket, and the box in the plate-room, and the promise given at the fireside—ay, and to Rosanna Spearman too, out there in the dark, at Cobb’s Hole, with her fainting fits and her fancies about her grave in the Shivering Sand. I opened the book, and did my best to fix my attention on it, as I always do when my mind is not easy; but I am bound to confess that, for once in my life, ROBINSON CRUSOE and I did not get on very well together. The clock struck twelve, and Rosanna Spearman was not yet come home.

*Letter, Hans Wittenbauer to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Klausenburg, 24 June.*

“Dear Madam,--

“You will pardon a stranger writing to you, but I do so at the request of a young Englishman, a Mr. Jonathan Harker, whom I met at the hotel here, he being in some distress and not fit to hold a pen himself for the shaking of his hand. He desired me to say that his business in the mountains has taken longer than he looked for, the roads being bad and the persons he must deal with slow in their ways, and that he begs you will not be anxious if his letters come less often than you expect, or later. He says you are to know he is well, though tired, and that he thinks often of the wedding-day that is to come. He would have written more, but was called away by the doctor before he could finish what he wished to say, and asked me only to see this much sent safely, which I do gladly, being myself a man with a daughter far from home, and knowing what such waiting is.

“I am, dear Madam, with respect,

“HANS WITTENBAUER.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*27 June.*--A strange letter has come, not from Jonathan’s own hand, but written for him by a Mr. Wittenbauer of Klausenburg, saying that Jonathan is delayed and tired but well. I have read it a dozen times and each time it comforts me less. Why should his hand shake so that he cannot hold a pen? And why should a doctor be called away in the midst of a letter? I have written back to the address given, though I misdoubt it will find him if he is already moving on. I will not let myself imagine things. Lucy would tell me I think too much, and perhaps she is right; she has troubles enough of her own to occupy a more anxious mind than mine, and yet she writes to me as gay as a bird. I have half a mind to go out to her at once, only that Mr. Hawkins says all is well with the business, and that Jonathan is a most reliable correspondent and will surely write himself very soon.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*28 June.*--Renfield continues to interest me more than any other case in my books. To-day, coming upon him unexpectedly in the middle of his dinner, he looked up at me of a sudden, quite reasonable and quiet, and said, “Miss Westenra is well, I hope, Doctor?” I own I was taken aback, for I had never mentioned Miss Lucy’s name to him, nor do I know how he should have come by it, unless from some careless talk of the attendants, who may have heard it from me in an unguarded hour. I answered him civilly that she was very well, and asked him why he wished to know. He only smiled in his sly way and went on eating, and would say no more on the subject, though I pressed him twice. It is odd how these disordered minds will seize on some outside fact and weave it into their own web of fancy; I must be more careful in future what I say and where, for I would not have my private hopes made sport of even by a madman’s tongue. I noted the flies about his window are fewer than they were; he has, I think, given over his collecting for the present, or turned his mind to some other channel. I must watch him.

*Letter, Arthur Holmwood to Quincey P. Morris.*

“*28 June.*

“My dear Quincey,--

“Count on me for to-morrow night with the greatest pleasure in life. As for the messages that are to make my ears tingle, you shall see by my face whether they do so or not, for I mean to keep my own counsel till we are all three together and no one to overhear but the wine.

“Yours,

“ART.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*30 June.*--Quincey Morris had us both to dine with him last night at his rooms, and a right good evening it was, though I own I went in poorer spirits than I came out in, which speaks well for my host. He had got in a case of some rare old vintage that he swore he had carried half round the world without breaking a bottle, and he made us drink it out of tin cups, “for luck,” he said, though I could see three excellent glasses set ready on the sideboard that he would not use, out of some whim or memory of his own.

We had not been at table a quarter of an hour before Art, who had been trying all the while to look as if he had nothing on his mind, could contain himself no longer, and told us, with a face that went through every colour a man can go through and still keep his dinner down, that Miss Lucy Westenra had promised to be his wife. Quincey stood up at that, tin cup and all, and there was such a shaking of hands and thumping of backs as I have not seen since we were boys, and he called for a health to be drunk standing, which we did, though I confess my own hand was not so steady as I could have wished in the lifting of it. I have not told Art of my own asking and my own answer, nor do I mean to; a man does not carry his empty cup about for others to see how empty it is. Quincey, for his part, was as merry over it as though it had been his own good fortune, and if he felt anything else beneath, he is too good a fellow and too old a campaigner to let it show, save once, when he filled my cup for me and said, under the noise of Art’s talking, “We’re both of us out of the running, Jack, but by God we’ve the best horse in the race for a friend, and that’s something.” I told him it was a great deal, and I believe I meant it more than I have meant anything in a week.

We sat late, the three of us, and talked of everything under heaven except the one thing that was in all our minds at once, until at last, near one o’clock, Quincey got up and said we should drink one more health before we broke up the camp, as he called it, and that was to absent friends; and we drank it in silence, each thinking, I daresay, of somebody far away, for even Art, in the midst of his own happiness, said quietly that he wished Jonathan Harker were home again to stand godfather, in a manner of speaking, to his news, since Mina Murray and Lucy are such friends. It was well said, and it sobered us all pleasantly, and so we parted, better friends, I think, than when we sat down, which is saying much, for we were good friends before.

I record it here because it does me good to read over such an evening on a day when my other work presses heavily upon me, and because Renfield’s question of yesterday has left an uneasiness in me that this memory helps to lift. Three men can go into a room rivals, in a manner, for one girl’s heart, and come out of it, all three, better able to wish her well; I do not know that lunacy itself has anything stranger to show me than that.

*Telegram, Mr. Hawkins to Mina Murray.*

“*30 June.*

“Have wire from Jonathan. Not ill, but returning at once alone. Wedding may be sooner than we planned.”

The First National Bank was a granite building at Broadway and Union Street, with the sort of cool marble hush that makes you want to whisper even when you're asking about a murdered man's checkbook.

I gave my card to a guard, and he took it away and brought back a man named Albury, an assistant cashier, thin and gray at the temples, with the careful eyes of somebody who has spent his life adding other people's money.

"Donald Willsson," I said, "drew a check yesterday afternoon for five thousand dollars. I want to know if it's been cashed."

Albury didn't ask why I wanted to know. He went away and came back in a few minutes with a slip of paper in his hand, studying it as he walked as if he didn't quite believe it.

"No such check has been presented," he said. "Nor certified. We've nothing on it at all."

"You're sure? He wrote it out around three o'clock yesterday. Stub's marked five thousand, no name."

"I'm sure. I checked with the tellers and I looked at his account myself. Mr. Willsson's balance hasn't been touched since the day before yesterday." He folded the slip and put it in his vest pocket, the way a man puts away something he doesn't want to think about any more. "It's an unusual amount for him to have drawn without our knowing beforehand, if he meant to draw it in cash. Ordinarily he'd have told us."

"Any way of knowing who it was made out to, without the check itself?"

"None, unless you find the check or the stub tells more than you say it does."

I thanked him and went out into the street, no better off than I had gone in, except that now I knew the check hadn't bought anything anybody could point to. Willsson had written it, put it in his pocket or somewhere, and within eight hours he was dead in Hurricane Street with six bullets' worth of argument in him, and the check was gone as if it had never been.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on it without getting anywhere. Nobody at the Herald had seen the check. The girl, Lewis, hadn't seen it since he wrote it. The banks the Willsson interests dealt with hadn't seen it. I could add it up different ways, but every way I added it, it came out the same: somebody had that check, or the five thousand dollars it stood for, and wasn't advertising the fact.

Around six I gave it up for the day and went back to the Great Western to clean up before supper.

The clerk stopped me at the desk.

"A lady's waiting for you," he said, dropping his voice as if it was a secret between us. "In the lobby. She's been here upward of an hour."

I turned around. She was in one of the big leather chairs by the window, and she saw me looking and stood up. She was the slender blonde with the slight accent, Donald Willsson's widow, in a dark blue dress with a small dark hat, and she didn't look as if she had slept.

I went over to her.

"I want to talk to you," she said. Her voice was low but there wasn't any hesitation in it.

"Sure." I looked around the lobby. A couple of drummers were playing cards near the cigar counter, not paying us any attention. "We'll go up to my room, or there's a writing room back of the elevators if you'd rather."

She chose the writing room. It was a narrow place with a green-shaded lamp and a table scarred with ink, and nobody in it. She sat down across the table from me and took off one glove, finger by finger, before she spoke.

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

"How'd you know that?"

"Stanley telephoned me. He thought I ought to know what was said."

"What was said?"

"That I killed Donald." She said it flatly, watching me. "Did you tell him that?"

"I told him you left the house at ten-twenty and came back at eleven-five with something on your shoe that might have been blood, and that your husband was shot at ten-forty. I didn't tell him you killed anybody. He worked that out for himself. He seems to have a quick mind, your father-in-law, when it comes to blaming somebody."

"He's always hated me," she said, without much heat, as if it was an old fact she'd stopped being surprised by. "Since before I married Donald. He wanted Donald to marry somebody from here, somebody who would fit into his plans. I was in the way of that."

"Where'd you go, that night?"

She looked at her glove, smoothing it out on the table.

"I can't tell you that."

"You told the district attorney that, too?"

"I haven't seen the district attorney."

"You will. And unless you've got a better answer for him than you've got for me, you'll be spending some time as his guest."

"I didn't kill Donald," she said. "I loved him."

"That's swell," I said, "but it's not an alibi. Where were you?"

She shook her head, not violently, just a small definite movement that said the subject was closed whether I liked it or not.

"I came to ask you not to believe what Elihu tells you about me. That's all. I know how it looks. But I didn't do it, and I won't have people believing his lies about me because it's convenient for him to have somebody besides himself to point at."

"Why would it be convenient for him?"

She looked at me for a second as if she was deciding something, and then she stood up and put her glove back on.

"I have to go," she said. "I only wanted you to know that whatever he told you, it isn't true, all of it."

"All of it, or some of it?"

She didn't answer that. She went out through the lobby with her chin up and her back straight, walking the way women walk when they know men are going to look at them and have decided in advance not to care.

I let her go. Chasing her down the street wouldn't have gotten me anything I couldn't get some other way, and I had a notion that pushing her tonight would only teach her to push back harder tomorrow.

I went up to my room, washed, and came down again for supper. I hadn't finished my coffee when a bellhop came weaving between the tables to my elbow.

"Package for you," he said, and put down a small flat parcel wrapped in brown paper, no writing on the outside except my name in pencil, block letters, the kind anybody could make and nobody could be identified by. "Boy brought it in off the street, said a gentleman gave him a dollar to deliver it and didn't leave no name."

I gave the bellhop a quarter and unwrapped the parcel at the table. Inside was a plain white card, and on the card, in the same block pencil printing, were the words: STAY OUT OF HURRICANE STREET IF YOU WANT TO KEEP HEALTHY. Underneath that, smaller, as if it was an afterthought that amused whoever wrote it: SOME PEOPLE TALK TOO MUCH FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.

There wasn't anything else in the parcel. No pin, no bullet, none of the theatrical trimmings some people like to send with their warnings. Just the card and the brown paper, and a smell of pipe tobacco caught in the paper's fold, the sort of Latakia mixture a man with money for a sillier smoke can afford.

I didn't need a diagram. Bill Quint had told me over his whiskey that Max Thaler didn't do his own gunning, that dynamite was a good word for him because you didn't have to be within a mile of it when it went off. I hadn't seen him since the Stutz in front of the hotel, and I didn't figure to see him now. He'd sent his regards by messenger, the way a man sends flowers, and expected me to take the hint the way I'd take a hint from anybody with sense enough to leave his own name off it.

It didn't scare me any. I've had that kind of invitation before, from men who could back it up better than Thaler had shown me yet, and I was still eating three meals a day. But it told me something worth knowing, which was that whatever had happened on Hurricane Street the night before, Thaler had an interest in nobody poking around out there, an interest strong enough to spend a dollar on a bellhop and a card. That was more than the police, so far as I'd heard, had managed to work out for themselves.

I put the card in my pocket and went up to my room and got out a pad of the hotel's paper, and wrote out, in the code the Continental uses for wires, a report to the Old Man at the San Francisco office. When I had it in shape I called down for a bellhop and sent it off, plain language re-translated over the counter at the telegraph office two blocks up, the way we always do it so nobody but us can make sense of the coded original if it's read along the way.

The wire, decoded back to English the way I'd first drafted it, ran:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT TO DEATH TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT HURRICANE STREET SIX SHOTS FROM ALLEY TWO WENT WILD NO WITNESSES POLICE HAVE NOTHING. WIDOW LEFT HOUSE TENTWENTY RETURNED ELEVENFIVE POSSIBLE BLOODSTAIN ON SHOE WONT ACCOUNT FOR TIME. FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS CITY AND HERALD PAPERS BLAMES WIDOW OUTRIGHT REFUSES DISCUSS POLITICAL ANGLE THOUGH TOWN SPLIT BETWEEN HIM AND GANG HEADED BY GAMBLER MAX THALER ALIAS WHISPER BOOTLEGGER LEW YARD AND ONE PETE THE FINN WITH POLICE CHIEF NOONAN TIED IN. DEAD MAN DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK YESTERDAY AFTERNOON PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NEVER PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED BANK CONFIRMS NOT CASHED. DEAD MAN HAD PHONE ENGAGEMENT WITH UNKNOWN WOMAN FOR TEN OCLOCK SAME NIGHT HE WAS TO MEET ME AT HIS HOUSE. THALER SEEN ENTERING WILLSSON HOUSE THIS MORNING WIDOW CALLED ON ME HERE THIS EVENING DENIES GUILT WONT SAY WHERE SHE WAS. RECEIVED ANONYMOUS WARNING THIS EVENING TO STAY OUT OF HURRICANE STREET BELIEVE FROM THALER THOUGH NO PROOF. REQUEST INSTRUCTIONS WHETHER CONTINUE OR RETURN AM INCLINED THINK ORIGINAL JOB WILLSSON HIRED US FOR DIED WITH HIM BUT CASE LOOKS LIKE IT WONT STAY BURIED.

I read it over twice before I let the boy take it, decided it said what I wanted said, and let it go.

Then I sat by the window a while with the lights of Personville making their sooty glow against the sky, that same low dirty light Bill Quint had pointed out to me my first night in town, and turned the five-thousand-dollar check over in my mind the way you turn over a puzzle piece that ought to fit somewhere and doesn't fit anywhere you've tried yet.

Willsson had written it. Willsson hadn't cashed it. Willsson was dead within eight hours of writing it, and whoever he'd meant it for hadn't come forward to collect, which either meant they didn't need the money any more, or they didn't want anybody to know they'd had a claim on Donald Willsson at all.

I didn't have an answer. I put the light out and went to bed with the question still open, and the card with its pipe-tobacco smell on the table beside me where I could reach it if I wanted to smell trouble again before I slept.