The Chapters

It was on the night of the first falling star that I saw the thing myself. I had been sitting late, writing at my desk upon the moral prospects of humanity, and about three in the morning, my head heavy with the argument, I stepped out into the garden to clear it before I went up to bed. The night was very still, and Mars was setting in the west, a red spark low among the trees. As I stood looking at it, there came a swift greenish streak across the sky, a brilliance, and then a shower of sparks, and it was gone. I remember thinking it a particularly fine shooting star, but I attached no further importance to it. I did not even mention it to my wife, who was already asleep. I have wished since that I had waked her, though I do not know what good that would have done.

I did not connect it in my mind with the Martians at all. In those days a falling star was a thing to name and forget, one of the nightly commonplaces of the sky, and I went up to bed thinking, so far as I thought at all, of the morning's work.

I knew nothing more of it until Ogilvy, who had seen the fall and believed it to be a meteorite, went out before anyone was stirring to find it. He found it, and I heard the story of that finding within a few hours, for the district was already busy with the news when I came down. It had fallen on the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, and Ogilvy, with the enviable enthusiasm of the astronomer, had gone out at once, reasoning that it must have fallen within a mile or two of his own house, and had spent the early hours of the morning looking for it among the pine trees and the heather.

The thing itself lay almost entirely buried in the sand and gravel it had thrown up in its fall, in a pit of its own making. The pit had cut into a small pool or soak of water that lay among the furze on that side of the common—hardly a pond, rather a boggy hollow where the rain gathered—and the object lay half sunken in this water, canted on its side, with the yellowish-green sand and clods of the torn-up turf heaped in a great embankment about it. It looked, Ogilvy said, more like a huge cylinder than anything else, coated over with a thick scaly incrustation that hid its shape and disguised it, so that at first he was not sure whether it was artificial or not. It was still enormously hot, and a thin thread of smoke or vapour rose from it continually where it lay in the water, so that the water about it steamed and bubbled gently, and the ground round the pit smelt scorched and sulphurous.

I heard of it first from our neighbour's gardener, a little after eight, and it was so odd a piece of news, and told with such circumstantial gravity, that I dressed at once and walked over to see for myself, leaving my wife at breakfast. I found perhaps half a dozen people gathered at the rim of the pit when I got there, staring down at the thing in a sort of dumb, wondering silence, exactly as one might stare down a well. A butcher's boy I remember, and a couple of golfers with their clubs, and an old man in his shirt-sleeves who had left, apparently, in the middle of some domestic task, for he still carried a garden fork. Ogilvy himself was down in the pit, at the very edge of the water, examining the thing with the peculiar proprietary excitement of a man who has been first upon a discovery.

"It's a meteorite," he said to me, almost before I had greeted him, as though he anticipated some rival theory and meant to have the first word against it. "A big one, certainly, and hot enough to fry an egg on, but a meteorite for all that. I've never known one so large, nor one so regularly shaped, but there's nothing in that. Iron meteorites are often more or less cylindrical, especially the smaller ones."

"But the shape," I said. "It's monstrously regular. That's a lid, or a cap, isn't it—that flat circle at the end?"

"Weathering," said Ogilvy. "Or a fault in the cooling. You'll find the strangest symmetries in a common iron meteorite if you look for them. I've a piece at home no bigger than a walnut that's as round as a bullet." He was down on his knees at the very brink, careless of the wet, peering at the curious ridged pattern of the scale, and I could see he was not nearly so sure of himself as his voice.

"It's hollow," I said, for it seemed to me, looking at the great girth of the thing, that no solid mass of metal could have come down so and thrown up so little dust of its own substance, that it must be shell rather than solid.

"Nonsense," said Ogilvy, but he said it, I thought, without conviction, and fell to a rapid, rather irritable explanation of the pitting and vesiculation one finds in meteoric iron, and how a mass falling through the air is apt to be hollowed and blistered on the windward face. I did not follow all of it, nor, I think, did he greatly attend to his own argument, for his eyes kept going back, in the pauses of his talk, to that flat, unaccountably regular end of the cylinder, as a man's eyes will go back to a thing that troubles him though his tongue denies it.

"In any case," he said at last, straightening up and wiping his hands on his handkerchief, "it's a big and important find, and quite enough of a wonder without dragging in men from Mars. That's what they're saying in the village already—that it's a message, or a ship, or some such moonshine. It's a meteorite, my dear fellow, a big meteorite. I shall get Stent down from the Observatory before the day's out, and we shall have it properly recorded."

I did not press the argument, though I own the flatness of that end stuck in my mind, and the way the sand had been thrown up all round in so even a ring, as though the thing had come down true and had not rolled or ploughed sideways as I should have expected a tumbling mass of iron to do. But Ogilvy was the astronomer and I was not, and I let it go.

By the time I walked back for breakfast the story was all over the near cottages, and by the time I had told it my wife would not rest until she had seen the thing herself. She was not, I think, greatly alarmed—it was excitement rather than fear that took her—and we walked out together a little after ten, along the send road and across the golf links, the common lying out grey and purple in the September sunlight, with the smoke of the thing's pit already visible from a good way off, a thin persistent haze hanging low over the furze.

The crowd had grown a good deal since my earlier visit. There must have been twenty or thirty people now standing about the rim, and more coming across the links every few minutes, singly and in twos, in the unhurried, curious way people will come to see anything at all out of the common. A little group of boys had got down almost to the edge of the water and were pelting the cylinder's exposed side with clods of earth and pebbles, a game that pleased them mightily until the heat of the thing made itself felt at a surprising distance, and they retreated, laughing and calling to one another about how it had scorched their fingers.

My wife stood at the top of the bank, holding my arm, looking down at the grey-green curve of the thing amid the steam and the churned mud, and she said it was a horrid, uncanny-looking object, more like a monstrous slug than anything made by man or God, and she wondered that Mr. Ogilvy should be so confident about it. Ogilvy was still there, and Stent had by now arrived from the Observatory, a brisk, decided little man, and the two of them were in a species of technical colloquy at the edge of the pit, gesturing at the striations in the scale, quite absorbed and, for the moment, oblivious of the crowd thickening about them.

It was while we stood there that the accident happened. A labouring man—I did not know him, though I gathered afterwards he was one of the platelayers from the railway, come up on his way home—had climbed down into the pit, more venturesome or more careless than the rest, meaning I suppose to lay his hand on the thing and be able to say he had touched the meteorite. He got down close beside it, put out his palm flat against the scaly side, and in the same instant gave a kind of shout and snatched his hand back, staggering away with a cry that was more of astonishment than pain at first, and then unmistakably pain, nursing his hand against his chest and swearing in a steady undertone.

There was a general movement in the crowd, a pressing forward and a pressing back together, and several voices at once asking what had happened, was he burnt, and Ogilvy scrambling round the rim of the pit to him with an air half of concern and half of vindication, as though the man's scorched palm were an argument in his own favour.

"Hot!" the man kept saying, holding out his hand for anyone to look at, the palm reddened and already blistering a little across the heel of the thumb. "Hot as a kitchen range, that thing is, and no more meteor stone than I am!"

"It's been falling through miles of atmosphere," Ogilvy said, to him and to the crowd generally, in the tone of a man repeating a lesson. "You might expect it hot. Any large meteorite is hot for hours, sometimes for days, after its fall. There's nothing there but plain natural heat, my man, and you'd do well to keep your hands to yourself and let it cool."

But the man was not to be argued out of his blister, and went off across the common still nursing his hand and telling his story to whoever would listen, so that within a quarter of an hour, I should think, there was scarcely a soul left in Woking who had not heard that the thing on the common had burned a man, and the crowd, instead of thinning at this news, as I should have expected, grew visibly larger, drawn on, I suppose, by the same appetite that draws people to a fire.

I began now to be anxious for my wife, both on account of the growing press of people, which was not altogether orderly, and because the day was drawing on and there was nothing further, after all, that either of us could usefully see. The thing lay where it lay, steaming faintly, its lid-like end—if it was a lid—dumb and unstirring, exactly as it had been an hour before; and Ogilvy's explanations, however little they satisfied me, satisfied the greater part of the bystanders well enough, so that the general temper of the crowd was curiosity rather than alarm.

"There is nothing more to see," I said to her, "and it will only get more crowded and more foolish as the day goes on. You had far better go home and let me stay and hear the end of it."

She was reluctant, I think chiefly from not liking to leave me standing about in a crowd for no more than my own idle curiosity, but I made light of that, and pointed out that Mr. Ogilvy and Dr. Stent both seemed satisfied there was no danger in it, whatever it might be, and that one of us at least should be at home to see to things. In the end she agreed, a little unwillingly, and I walked with her as far as the edge of the links, promising to follow within the hour, and stood watching her go, a small, deliberate figure growing smaller along the send road towards Ottershaw, until the furze hid her from me. Then I turned back towards the pit, where the crowd, under the high, indifferent noon sun, was thicker than ever.

The rain had stopped by the time Eve reached the street again, and the sun, with the bland effrontery of the English climate, was making a great parade of never having been absent at all. She looked at the umbrella in her hand and felt a pang of conscience. It was a beautiful umbrella, a silk umbrella of the first quality, and it was not hers.

There seemed to her only one honest course. She recrossed the road, mounted the steps of the gloomy building into which the hatless young man had vanished, and addressed herself to a majestic personage in a frock-coat who materialised out of the shadows of the doorway with the air of one who intends, courteously but firmly, to prevent all further progress.

"I wonder if you could help me," said Eve. "A gentleman lent me this umbrella about an hour ago, outside the coal place opposite, and dashed in here before I could thank him. I'm afraid I don't know his name, but he was very tall and thin, and he had an eyeglass."

The majestic personage received this description with the mild interest of one to whom tall, thin young men with eyeglasses were the staple product of the establishment.

"That would be one of our members, miss. If you would care to leave the umbrella, I will see that it is restored to its owner."

"Would you? That's very kind. And--I think I ought to leave a note, so that he'll know it was appreciated. Could you find me a piece of paper?"

The paper was found. Eve, resting it upon the little shelf provided for members' hats and gloves, considered for a moment and then wrote:

*"Thank you so much for the loan of your umbrella. It saved me from ruin, as I was wearing my only presentable hat. I am sorry I don't know your name, so that I could thank you properly, but I hope this reaches you.--E. H."*

She sealed this in an envelope borrowed for the purpose, wrote "The Gentleman with the Eyeglass who lent me his umbrella" upon the outside, feeling as she did so that it was perhaps the oddest superscription that dignified doorway had ever received, and departed, leaving the porter holding the umbrella and the note with the stunned solemnity of a man who has had a good deal of experience of the vagaries of the young gentlemen upstairs but is conscious of having just topped his previous high score.

* * * * *

It was some twenty minutes later that the Honourable Hugo Walderwick, a large young man with a face like a genial ham, descended upon the porter's lodge in a state of some agitation.

"Look here, Mac," he said, "my umbrella. Left it here yesterday. Silk, with a malacca handle and my initials on the band. Seen it?"

"It was here this morning, sir," said the porter, with the pained reluctance of a man who sees trouble coming and cannot head it off. "A young lady called and left a note for the gentleman as had borrowed it, and I understood him to have took it away again, sir."

"Took it away? Who took it away?"

"The gentleman as borrowed it this morning, sir. Mr.--" the porter hesitated, groping for a name which, now he came to think of it, he realised he had never actually possessed--"the tall gentleman, sir, with the eyeglass, what was in the smoking-room."

This description, though not narrowing the field so much as might have been wished in a club which appeared to breed tall young men with eyeglasses as naturally as a summer pond breeds gnats, was sufficient to send Mr. Walderwick storming up the stairs two at a time. He found the object of his suspicions draped gracefully over an armchair in the smoking-room window, an illustrated paper open, unread, upon his knee, gazing out at the street with the benevolent detachment of a philosopher surveying the antics of the human race from some remote and windless height.

"I say," said Mr. Walderwick, without preamble, "did you take my umbrella?"

Psmith turned his head slowly, and through his eyeglass surveyed the newcomer with the gentle, respectful interest of a naturalist examining some rare and unexpected specimen.

"Your umbrella?" he said. "Now that is a very far-reaching question. Which umbrella did you have in mind?"

"The one I left here yesterday. Silk. My initials on it. Mac says you took it out this morning and lent it to some girl, and now it seems to have vanished into thin air."

"Ah," said Psmith, with the air of a man to whom a difficult point of theology has suddenly been made clear, "the umbrella. Yes. I believe I did make some use of an umbrella this morning. A pressing case of distress presented itself to me beneath my window--a young lady of amiable appearance marooned by the inclemency of the weather beneath the awning of a neighbouring coal merchant's--and it seemed to me, taking the broad view, that the situation called for prompt and decisive action. I acted. I do not now recall with any precision whose umbrella it was that I pressed into service."

"Well, it was mine, and I want it back."

"A perfectly reasonable desire, and one which does you credit. Unfortunately I am unable to lay my hand upon it at this precise moment. It has gone--where all good umbrellas go."

Mr. Walderwick's genial countenance darkened. "Look here, this isn't a joke. That umbrella cost me the best part of three guineas."

"Three guineas," repeated Psmith thoughtfully, as one weighing a nice point of value. He surveyed Mr. Walderwick for a moment in silence, then, reaching into his breast pocket, produced a notecase. "I will be candid with you, Comrade Walderwick--I believe I have the honour of addressing Comrade Walderwick?--and admit that the umbrella, wherever it now is, is beyond my power of recovery. It has passed, so to speak, out of the sphere of practical politics. In the circumstances, the only course open to a man of nice conscience is to make an offer for it. Would ten pounds meet the case?"

Mr. Walderwick, who had opened his mouth to continue the argument on more heated lines, closed it again and stared.

"Ten pounds? For an umbrella?"

"For that umbrella," said Psmith, with the gravity of a man correcting a loose use of language, "yes. It had, if I may say so, a certain sentimental value which its market price would not adequately represent."

"But--I mean--dash it, it's only an umbrella."

"There," said Psmith, extracting two five-pound notes and pressing them with quiet firmness into the other's unresisting hand, "we must agree to differ. I am a man of enthusiasms, Comrade Walderwick, and when an object has once engaged my affections I do not haggle over it. The transaction, I take it, is now complete, and the umbrella, in the eye of the law and of simple justice, is mine."

He resumed his seat and his illustrated paper, leaving Mr. Walderwick standing in the middle of the smoking-room gazing from the notes in his hand to the back of Psmith's head with the expression of a man who has come in to collect a small debt and gone out a comparatively rich one, without in the least understanding how the transformation has been achieved.

* * * * *

Psmith, left to himself, permitted a slow and thoughtful smile to spread across his face. He had, he reflected, done the fair thing by Comrade Walderwick, and considerably more than the fair thing; and in return he had secured, at a price which he did not for one moment grudge, an umbrella now inseparably associated in his mind with a vision in fawn stockings and a hat with a bird of Paradise feather. It was not every morning that a man had the privilege of purchasing so agreeable a memory.

Some little time later, having strolled down to the porter's lodge with the idle intention of asking whether any word had come from that quarter, he was handed the note.

He read it standing in the doorway, and something in his lean, solemn face relaxed into an expression which, in a man less carefully schooled in the equable demeanour proper to a Shropshire landscape, might almost have been called pleasure.

"E. H.," he murmured to himself. "A woman, Watson, and a woman of discrimination and feeling. I detect a soul above the common." He folded the note with some care and bestowed it in the pocket where the notecase had recently reposed. "The moral of all this, I think, is that virtue, even when practised at another man's expense, does not go unrewarded."

He was still in a reflective frame of mind, indeed, when, an hour or so later, business connected with the winding-up of his affairs with the firm of his uncle--for the resolution formed the previous evening had been acted upon that morning with a promptness which had left the senior partner gasping--took him along Shaftesbury Avenue in the neighbourhood of the Palace Theatre; and it was here, as he loitered at a crossing waiting for a breach to appear in the traffic, that Fate, showing a pleasing sense of the dramatic proprieties, brought him face to face with the young lady of the umbrella, coming down the steps of a building whose sign, "Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau," was not calculated to convey much to a man in his position, but which he noted, in an idle sort of way, as one notes the small furniture of a scene one intends to remember.

She had seen him at the same moment, and stopped.

"Oh!" she said. "You're the man who lent me the umbrella!"

Psmith removed his hat with the unhurried grace of a man greeting an old and valued acquaintance.

"The umbrella?" he said. "I fear you have the advantage of me."

"But you must remember. Outside the coal shop, this morning, in the rain. You gave me an umbrella without a word and rushed off into that club before I could even say thank you."

Psmith regarded her with the mild, faintly puzzled courtesy of a man doing his best to be helpful in a matter which does not concern him.

"I can only say," he said, "that if I had had the good fortune to be of assistance to you in such circumstances, I should certainly remember it, and the fact that I do not is proof, I fear, of my innocence. There are, however, a great many young men in London who wear eyeglasses--a deplorable want of originality on their part, but there it is--and I have no doubt one of them will be found, on inquiry, to answer to your description. I can only regret that I am not he."

He said this with such an air of gentle and sincere regret that Eve, who had been perfectly certain of her ground a moment before, found herself wavering.

"You're exactly like him," she said doubtfully.

"I have frequently been informed that I possess one of those faces," said Psmith. "It is a great trial. Complete strangers are constantly stopping me in the street under the impression that we were at school together, or that I owe them money. I have grown philosophical about it."

Eve looked at him a moment longer, then laughed.

"Well, if it wasn't you, I apologise for insisting. But it really was the most extraordinary likeness."

"The world," said Psmith gravely, "is full of these bewildering coincidences. It is what makes it so interesting a place to potter about in." He glanced at his watch. "I fear I must be tearing myself away. A most agreeable meeting, even under a misapprehension." He bowed, and, recrossing the street with the leisured stride of a man to whom time is a servant and not a master, left her standing on the pavement, more puzzled than before, but oddly cheered.

* * * * *

It was not until close upon five o'clock that Eve, having lunched frugally and spent a restless afternoon turning over in her mind the peculiar behaviour of eyeglassed young men in general, presented herself, according to appointment, at the flat in Ovington Square where she was to be interviewed regarding the cataloguing of the library at Blandings Castle.

The door was opened to her by a severe-looking parlourmaid, who conducted her into a drawing-room heavy with the scent of hot-house flowers, and it was here, after a wait of some minutes, that Lady Constance Keeble came sweeping in upon her, a tall and still handsome woman with a manner which contrived to be gracious and formidable in the same breath.

"Miss Halliday? So good of you to come." Lady Constance seated herself and regarded Eve with the keen, comprehensive glance of a woman accustomed to summing up her fellow-creatures at a single sitting. "My brother, Lord Emsworth, tells me that you have excellent qualifications for the work. The library at Blandings has been shamefully neglected--my nephew has spoken very highly of your capabilities, and I understand you have done similar work before."

It was at this point, precisely, that the interview began to go wrong. For Lady Constance, warming to her subject, proceeded to speak of the late Mr. Halliday, Eve's father, in terms of a respectful vagueness which showed all too plainly that she had confused him, in her mind, with some other and more eminent Halliday--a bishop, it emerged after a moment or two of mounting confusion, who had written largely on ecclesiastical architecture, and whom Lady Constance had once met at a garden-party.

"I'm afraid," said Eve, choosing her moment, and doing her best not to laugh, "that you're thinking of somebody else. My father wrote--well, all sorts of things. Detective stories, mostly, at the end. He never wrote about cathedrals in his life."

There was a pause of perceptible chilliness, during which Lady Constance appeared to be recovering from a blow.

"Indeed," she said, at length, in a voice from which most of the graciousness had withdrawn itself. "I see. I must have been misinformed." She looked at Eve for a moment as though debating whether a young person whose father had contented himself with detective stories, and had not even had the decency to be a bishop, could be a suitable custodian for the Blandings library at all; but whatever doubts assailed her, she put them, visibly, to one side. "Well, no matter. My brother was insistent that we do not delay in the matter, and I understand you come well recommended in other respects. We will consider the arrangement confirmed. You will come down to Blandings on Friday."

And it was in a mood divided pretty evenly between relief and suppressed laughter that Eve, a few minutes later, found herself once more in the street, an engaged woman of business, with a situation, a salary, and a curiously vivid recollection of a tall young man with an eyeglass who denied, with such perfect and unruffled courtesy, ever having lent her an umbrella at all.

* * * * *

Psmith, that evening, sat alone in the window of the Drones smoking-room, the recovered umbrella propped with a certain tenderness against the arm of his chair, and gazed out over the darkening street with the air of a man engaged in profitable meditation.

He had dined; he had, in the course of dinner, submitted with unruffled amiability to a certain amount of chaff from Hugo Walderwick, now comfortably reconciled to his loss and disposed to regard the whole transaction as the best joke of the season; and it was Walderwick, indeed, cheerfully refilling his glass some twenty minutes before, who had let fall, without in the least knowing that he did so, the one fact for which Psmith would cheerfully have paid a further ten pounds.

"By the way," Walderwick had said, "ran into young Threepwood at lunch. Freddie. You know him? Talking about some girl who's going down to catalogue his father's library at Blandings. Halliday, I think the name was. Eve Halliday."

Psmith set down his coffee-cup with the slow and reverent care of a man handling a sacred relic, and turned the name over in his mind, once, appreciatively, as a collector turns over a new and valuable specimen.

"Eve Halliday," he said softly, to the umbrella and the darkening window, and to nobody else at all.

Well, there we sat on the sand, Mr. Franklin and I, staring at each other like a couple of fools, until at last I got the better of my own astonishment enough to speak.

"Four hours before your time, sir!" I said. "What's brought this about?"

"A letter, Betteredge," says he, jumping up, and pulling me up after him with a strength I hadn't given him credit for, being used to think of him as a boy still, though he was five-and-twenty if he was a day. "A letter that I got in London yesterday morning, and that hurried me out of my bed before I had properly finished sleeping in it, to catch the early train. I'll show it you. Read it for yourself, and tell me what you make of it—for upon my life I don't know what to make of it myself."

He put his hand into his breast-pocket, and gave me a letter. It had a foreign look about the paper, and it was directed to Mr. Franklin at his lodgings in London, in a handwriting that sprawled and straggled over the envelope as if the writer had been in a hurry, or had been writing with the paper on his knee. I am not a quick hand at reading other people's letters, having always had a scruple about it in the case of my betters, and no great turn for it in the case of my equals. But Mr. Franklin was so set on my seeing the thing with my own eyes, that there was nothing for it but to put on my spectacles, and do as I was told. This is what I read—the reader shall have it exactly as it stood, misspelling and all:

"SIR,—You don't know me, and I don't ask to be known to you; but I know a piece of your family history that concerns you nearly, and I put it to you as a gentleman whether you don't owe it to your own safety to hear what I have to tell. It is about the Yellow Diamond that come to your uncle in India. I have reason, that I won't set down here, to believe that there is watching going on, of the sort that watched him to his death, and I believe further that the young lady it is left to in his will may be watched too if the Diamond ever comes into her keeping. I don't ask you to believe me on my word only. Bring the Diamond down with you to the house it is going to, and see for yourself whether there is not something in what I say. I write this because I once had good reason to be grateful to your family, though the person who did me the kindness is dead and gone, and can't be thanked for it now except in this way. Burn this letter, and ask no questions, for I can tell you no more than I have told you, and I dare not sign my name.—A WELL-WISHER."

I gave the letter back to Mr. Franklin, hardly knowing what to say to it. It had a queer, disorderly look, to my eye, like a thing written in a fright; and yet there was something about the caution of it—the not signing, the "ask no questions"—that gave me an uncomfortable feeling I couldn't justify to myself.

"Well, Betteredge," says Mr. Franklin, "and what do you say to that?"

"What I say, sir," I answered, "is that it fits like a key in a lock with something that happened at this house no later than to-day." And with that I told him of the three Indians, and the boy and the ink, and all the rest of it, exactly as I have set it down for you in the last chapter. Mr. Franklin listened with a face that grew graver as I went on, and when I had done, he stood a while looking out at the Shivering Sand, saying nothing.

"I believe the boy was right," he said at last. "I believe the diamond has followed me from London, and that those men are watching it now, at this minute, wherever it may be. Betteredge, I have got the accursed thing in my pocket at this moment."

I own that a kind of cold feeling took me about the small of the back on hearing that. I looked round, half expecting to see a brown face pop up out of the sandhills. But there was nothing to be seen but the gulls, and nothing to be heard but the sea.

"If it's all the same to you, sir," I said, "I would take it as a favour if you would put the horrid thing out of your pocket, and into somebody else's, as soon as may be. It's Miss Rachel's birthday next month; you have brought it down for her, and hand it over to her you must, in the end. Let's have done with the carrying of it about, sir, the sooner the better."

Mr. Franklin laughed—not quite so heartily as usual, I thought—and put his hand into his breast-pocket again. What he took out this time was not the diamond itself (of which, please to remember, neither he nor I saw so much as a glimpse, that day, on the sands, or at any other time I have yet got to tell of), but a small packet, sealed in several places, and about the bigness that a lady's watch and chain might make, done up small.

"There's the reason of my journey down four hours before my time, in your hand this minute, Betteredge," he said. "I have had this precious lump of trouble sewn up in leather, as you see, and I don't mean to open it, or let anyone else open it, till my aunt's birthday comes. In the meantime, it has been at my banker's, and it has been in my portmanteau, and it has been in my pocket, and I give you my word I am sick to death of the sight and the feel of it. Take it, and lock it up in that iron safe of yours to-night—the plate-room, or whatever you call it—and let me know it's out of my hands and out of my thoughts till the day when it must come out again."

Well, I took the packet from him, feeling, I don't mind confessing, rather queer about the fingers as I did it—for who was to say what might or might not be inside that leather covering, or what ill-luck might not come sticking to it, like burrs to a dog's coat, from the black-hearted heathens it had belonged to? But service is service; and I am not the man to let a fancy stand between me and my duty, at my time of life.

"It shall go into the plate-room to-night, sir," I said, "under lock and key, along with the spoons and the rest of the family silver; and there it shall stop till you please to have it out again. As for what's inside it, I ask no questions, and I wish to be told nothing. It's no business of mine, and, if you'll excuse my saying so, sir, the less I know about it the better I shall be pleased."

"Spoken like the head of my aunt's establishment," says Mr. Franklin, clapping me on the shoulder, and looking more like his own light-hearted self again. "Come along, Betteredge, and let's get up to the house. I am famished, and thirsty, and dusty, and I want a change of clothes, and I have not the least desire in the world to talk any more about Indians, or diamonds, or letters from anonymous well-wishers, for the rest of the blessed day."

We set off back through the plantation together, I carrying his bag, and he walking on ahead of me with that quick, light step of his, humming a tune to himself, for all the world as if he hadn't a care in life—though I could see, when he thought I wasn't looking at him, that his eye would go wandering off towards the hedges and the ditches, this side and that, as if he still had half a suspicion that a black face might be lying in wait for him somewhere among the leaves. I said nothing about it. There's a time for speaking, and a time for holding your tongue; and I judged this to be a case for the latter.

We had not got far before who should come running to meet us but my daughter Penelope, quite out of breath, and with her cap-strings flying behind her.

"If you please, sir—if you please, father," she says, dropping her curtsey to Mr. Franklin and gasping out her news to me in the same breath, "Rosanna's not come back, and cook's in a way about it, and I said I'd run and tell you before you got to the house."

"Not come back!" says I. "Why, I left her on the sands not a quarter of an hour since."

"She's not on the sands now, father," says Penelope. "I went that way myself to look for her, thinking she might have got round the sandhills out of your sight, and I met one of the fisher lads from Cobb's Hole, and he told me he'd seen her walking that way, towards the village, as fast as her feet would carry her, crying, he thought, though he couldn't be sure at the distance."

"Cobb's Hole?" I said. "What in the world does she want at Cobb's Hole at this time of day, with her dinner waiting for her here?"

"She's gone to see Limping Lucy, I shouldn't wonder, father," says Penelope; "she's took to going there a deal of late, when anything's put her out."

Now Limping Lucy was the name our people had given to a young woman of the village, a fisherman's daughter, lame from a child, who was, as I have said before, the only friend, out of our house, that Rosanna Spearman had made for herself in the neighbourhood. I own the news didn't please me. It's an unsettling thing, at the best of times, to have a servant take it into her head to go running off, without word given, at the very hour of the day when she's most wanted; and coming, as it did, on the back of her queer talk to me on the beach, about graves and drowning people, it left me with a heavier feeling than I cared to show before Mr. Franklin.

"Well," I said, "there's no help for it now. She'll come back when she pleases, I suppose, and hear what I have to say to her when she does. Go on to the house, Penelope, and tell them Mr. Franklin's come, and see about his room being got ready."

Off went Penelope, and on went Mr. Franklin and I, he asking no more questions about Rosanna Spearman than if she had been the man in the moon—having, as I have remarked, other and heavier matters of his own to think about—and I keeping my own thoughts to myself, which is a habit I recommend to everybody, gentle and simple, as one that saves a world of trouble in this thinking world of ours.

We found my lady in the library, and a prettier sight than her face, when she saw Mr. Franklin come in half a day before he was looked for, you would go far to discover, even among ladies of her time of life, which, I may say without offence, was not so very far short of my own. She had him by both hands in a minute, and was looking him over from head to foot with that motherly sort of pride that a woman gets from long friendship with a young man's family, and that no relation of his own blood, in my experience, can better.

"Franklin!" she says. "This is a surprise! What has brought you before your time?"

Mr. Franklin was ready with his answer, having plainly considered beforehand how much he would tell and how much he would keep back. "The desire to see you and Rachel a few hours sooner, aunt, than I had allowed myself to hope," says he, as glib as you please, with never a word about the letter, or the Diamond, or anything else that had truly hurried him on his journey. I looked at him, and he looked away from me, and I understood, as well as if he had told me in so many words, that his uncle Herncastle's cursed Diamond was to be kept, on his side, as close a secret from my lady as it had already been kept, on the Indians' side, from everybody.

My lady, however—and here I may as well set down at once what happened, seeing that it bears heavily enough on what is still to come—my lady was not to be so easily satisfied on one point. She held Mr. Franklin's hand a moment longer, and looked at him with a certain gravity that I had not often seen in her face.

"Franklin," she said, "before we say another word, there is one subject I must ask you never to raise again while you are under my roof. You know to what I refer. Your uncle Herncastle's name, and his history in India, and the accursed stone he is said to have brought home with him, are not to be spoken of here—not before Rachel, not before the servants, not before me. I have my reasons, which I do not choose to give even to you. Will you oblige me in this?"

I declare I could have jumped where I stood, hearing her light on the very subject, of all others, without knowing it! Mr. Franklin, to his credit, never so much as changed colour.

"Willingly, aunt," he said, and bowed over her hand, in his foreign way, as if it were the easiest promise in the world to keep—he having that leather packet, that very minute, locked away for me to lock away again, not a stone's throw from where we stood!

Well, I said my say, and did my duty, and there's no more to tell of that afternoon that need trouble the reader. Mr. Franklin's packet went into the plate-room that same night, along with the spoons and the rest of the family silver, under my own lock and key, and no soul in the house, myself excepted, one bit the wiser as to what was sewn up inside it. I asked no questions, as I had promised, and I got no answers, which came, in this case, to exactly the same thing.

But Rosanna Spearman never came back to her dinner, nor to her tea, nor to her supper; and when the last light was fading over the sandhills, and I sat down, as my custom is of an evening, in my own snug little room, with my pipe and my Robinson Crusoe to keep me company, there was still no Rosanna to be heard of, high or low. I own her staying out so late, on a night like that, with all the house astir over Mr. Franklin's coming, gave me more uneasiness than I much liked to confess, even to myself. However, there was nothing to be done but to wait; and wait I did, turning it over once or twice in my mind, and then turning to Robinson Crusoe instead, which I have generally found the wholesomer employment of the two.

When Mary awakened it was because the train had stopped, and she sat up with a start, her cheek stiff from being pressed against the window glass. Mrs. Medlock was already gathering up her umbrella and her bag.

"We're there," she said. "There's further to go yet, but not by train."

The rain had not stopped. On the small, dimly lighted platform there stood only two or three porters, and one tall figure a little apart from the rest, wrapped in a long dark coat, who did not come forward but waited where he was. Mrs. Medlock seemed a little flustered at the sight of him.

"Well, I never," she said, under her breath. "Master's come himself."

Mary looked at the man with all the curiosity she had been trying not to show for the whole of the journey. She had expected, from the things Mrs. Medlock had said, that Mr. Archibald Craven would look strange, and he did. He was not so old as she had thought he would be, and he was handsome in a dark, sallow way, but he stood with one shoulder raised a little above the other, so that his back had an unhappy look. His eyes were dark and gloomy and seemed to see very little that was before them.

"This is the little girl?" he said, when Mrs. Medlock had brought her up to him.

"This is Miss Mary, sir," Mrs. Medlock answered.

He looked down at Mary for a moment. She looked back at him and said nothing at all, because there did not seem to be anything to say, and she was not in the habit of saying things merely to be polite.

"How do you do," he said at last, in a low voice, as if he found it an effort. He did not put out his hand, and Mary did not put out hers.

"Get her into the carriage, Medlock," he said then. "I will follow." And he turned and walked out into the rain ahead of them, not waiting to see whether they came or not.

Mary was lifted into a closed carriage with lamps, and Mrs. Medlock climbed in after her and settled herself with a great rustling of her mantle. Mr. Craven did not get in with them; Mary heard him say something to the coachman, and presently there was the sound of another carriage door, farther off, and then the whole equipage moved out into the dark.

"He doesn't talk much, does he," Mary said, when they had gone some distance.

"No, that he doesn't," said Mrs. Medlock. "And you'd best get used to it, for you'll get little enough talk out of him, first or last."

The carriage jolted on through the wet dark for what seemed to Mary a very long time. She could see nothing at all outside but blackness, except when now and then the lamps showed a dripping hedge or a stretch of low stone wall, and after a while even the hedges disappeared and there seemed to be nothing on either side but a vast, empty darkness that had a strange, huge feeling to it, as if it went on and on without end. The wind made a wild, low sound that was not like any wind Mary had heard in India.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock, feeling her shiver a little without knowing she did. "There's miles and miles of nothing on it but heather and gorse and rock, and nothing lives on it but wild ponies and sheep."

"I don't think I like it," said Mary.

"Nobody does, that's not bred to it," Mrs. Medlock answered. "Though there's them that come to be fond of it, in time."

Just then the carriage gave a sudden lurch and stopped so sharply that Mrs. Medlock was thrown forward against the seat in front of her.

"What is it! What's happened!" she called out.

There was a low exchange of voices outside between the coachman and someone else, and then the coachman got down and came to the window.

"There's summat lying across t' road, ma'am," he said. "Can't rightly tell what, in this dark. I'll not drive over it wi'out looking."

"Well, look, then, and be quick about it," said Mrs. Medlock, "in this rain."

Mary, without in the least meaning to ask permission, had already found the handle of the door and let herself down onto the road before Mrs. Medlock could stop her.

"Miss Mary! Come back in, you'll take your death!"

But Mary stood a moment on the road all the same. The rain had thinned to a fine drizzle and the wind came across the open dark with a great soft rushing sound, as if the whole night were breathing, and there was a wet, strange, bitter smell in it that she had never smelled before. She could see almost nothing--only the two swinging carriage-lamps throwing a little broken light on the wet road, and beyond that, nothing at all but blackness that seemed to go up into the sky itself, with no walls anywhere and no house-lights and nothing that told her where she was in the world. It was the loneliest thing she had ever stood in the middle of, and yet it was not exactly like being afraid of India-dark, either. She had barely time to feel it before Mrs. Medlock's hand closed on her arm and pulled her back toward the carriage-step.

"There's nothing for it," Mrs. Medlock was saying crossly, half to Mary and half to the coachman, "but a body will take a chill of the lungs standing about on a moor at this hour. Get in, get in."

The coachman had found that it was only a fallen branch and had dragged it to the side, and in another minute they were moving again, and Mary sat with her wet shoes on the carriage floor and said nothing, though the smell of the moor seemed to have got into her clothes and stayed with her the rest of the way.

It was quite late when the carriage at last turned in under some great trees and then in through an arched door which opened into a stone-flagged passage, and Mary was so tired and stiff and cross that she scarcely noticed anything about the house except that it was enormous and that there were suits of armour and dark pictures on the walls, and that everything smelled old.

"You'll not see much of it tonight," said Mrs. Medlock. "You're to have your supper and go to your bed."

Mary was taken up a wide staircase and along a corridor and into a room where a fire had been lighted, and here Mrs. Medlock left her, saying she would send someone up directly. Mary sat down on a stool near the fire and looked about her at the heavy furniture and the dark curtains, and presently there was a knock, and instead of the maid she had expected, a tall, big-boned manservant came in carrying a tray, which he set down upon the table near her.

"Here's tha supper, little missy," he said. "Tha mun sit thee down and eat it."

Mary stared at him. She had understood only a little of what he said, and that little sounded so odd to her that she frowned.

"I don't understand you," she said. "I can't tell what you are saying."

The man seemed rather taken aback, and then he laughed a short laugh, not unkindly.

"Eh, I forgot," he said, more slowly, though it was still strange to her ears. "Tha's not used to Yorkshire talk. I said tha's to sit thee down and eat thy supper."

"Why do you talk so queerly?" Mary asked, because she never thought of not asking a question that came into her head.

"That's not queer," he answered, setting a chair for her. "That's Yorkshire. It's queer enough to thee, happen, but it's not queer to us as is bred here." And he went out and closed the door, leaving her alone with her tray.

The supper was bread and butter and some milk and a little meat, and Mary ate a little of it, though she was too tired to be very hungry, and then she sat by the fire without moving until Mrs. Medlock came back and took her along more passages, up more stairs, to a bedroom where a fire was also burning, and a nightgown was laid out upon the bed.

"This is your room," said Mrs. Medlock. "You'll stay in it, and in the two rooms next to it, which is your own nursery. Mind you don't go wandering about the passages and poking into corners. Mr. Craven wouldn't like it."

"Why should I want to go wandering about?" said Mary, in her sour little voice.

"No reason at all, that I know of," said Mrs. Medlock. "Only see you don't." And she showed her a small locked door in the corner of the nursery which she said led into a set of rooms nobody used, and then, after seeing that everything was in order, she said good night and went away with her candle, and Mary heard her footsteps going off down the long corridor and then heard nothing at all.

Mary undressed slowly, being unused to doing it for herself, and got into the big bed, which had cold sheets that seemed to swallow her up, she was so small in it. The fire had sunk to a red, unsteady glow, and outside the wind was blowing about the house with a great hollow sound, rising and falling, so that the curtains at the window seemed to be pushed and drawn by it though the window was shut fast.

She was almost asleep, in the strange, heavy way one falls asleep in a strange bed, when she heard it--a low, thin sound, far off down some corridor, that was not quite like the wind and not quite like anything else. It rose a little and then died away, and then, after a silence, seemed to come again, faint and far, somewhere in the great house below her or beside her, she could not tell which.

She sat straight up in bed and listened with all her might. The sound did not come again just then, and after a minute she got out of bed, in her bare feet on the cold floor, and opened her door a little way and looked out into the dark passage, but there was nothing to be seen, and after a moment the sound came once more, so faint and far off that she was not perfectly sure she had heard it at all, and it seemed almost to be crying, though she told herself at once that it could not be that, for there was no child in such a house.

She went back to her room and rang the bell that hung by the fireplace, and by and by Mrs. Medlock came, looking as if she had been disturbed getting ready for bed herself, with her hair in a net.

"What is it? Why do you ring at this hour?" she asked, rather sharply.

"I heard something crying," said Mary. "A long way off. What is it?"

Mrs. Medlock's face changed suddenly, though Mary could not tell what the change meant.

"You didn't hear anything of the sort," she said. "It's only the wind. On a moor-edge house like this it can sound very strange indeed, and set you fancying all manner of things. It's the wind, and nothing else. Now get into your bed and go to sleep, and don't be ringing bells over nothing." And she went out and shut the door rather more firmly than was needed.

Mary got back into the cold bed and lay quite still, staring up into the dark where the ceiling would be if she could have seen it. She did not believe, somehow, that it had been the wind, though she could not have said why she did not believe it, and Mrs. Medlock's voice, when she said it, had not sounded quite as if she believed it herself. Mary was a contrary, obstinate little thing, and the more she was told there was nothing to find out, the more she made up her mind that she would find it out for herself, whatever it was and however long it took her; and with that thought fixed firmly in her disagreeable little head, and the wind--if it was the wind--still rising and falling far off in the house, she lay wide awake in the dark.

Mr Shepherd was the first to be admitted, waiting upon Sir Walter one morning in the library at Kellynch Hall with a countenance of professional gravity, and a great many papers, which he laid upon the table with the air of a man who wished them to speak for him before he need speak for himself. He was a cautious, civil sort of a man, who, whatever might be his own views, wished to have everything proposed by Sir Walter himself; and he had, therefore, brought his figures and his suggestions in such a form that they might seem to arise, if possible, from Sir Walter's own reflection rather than his agent's presumption.

He spoke, accordingly, in general terms of retrenchment; of the excellent effect which a system of economy, steadily pursued, must have upon the credit of any gentleman, however elevated; and ventured, with many apologies for his freedom, to lay before Sir Walter a scheme by which, without any radical alteration of his way of life, a very material reduction might in a few years be effected.

Sir Walter heard him with an increasing coldness which Mr Shepherd, long used to the ways of his employer, knew better than to mistake for attention. When the paper was pushed back across the table, it was with a look of such settled displeasure as put an end to that day's negotiation.

"If you mean, Mr Shepherd, to recommend that I should live like a man of no name at all, that I should give up my carriage, and dismiss my servants, and eat my dinner in a farmhouse parlour, you may spare yourself the trouble of the proposal. I did not send for you to hear how a tradesman might contrive to make both ends meet upon a hundred a-year. I sent for you to relieve me of my embarrassments, not to increase them by insult."

Mr Shepherd protested, with great humility, that nothing had been further from his intention; and the subject was, for that morning, allowed to drop.

Lady Russell, who arrived that same afternoon, primed by Mr Shepherd himself with an account of his ill success, came prepared with a scheme of her own, more considerate of Sir Walter's feelings, but not less decided in its requirements. She had thought over the situation with the earnestness of a true friend, and had drawn up, in her own neat hand, a plan which specified, article by article, the reductions which she considered indispensable: fewer horses, fewer servants, less company, a total abstinence from the little elegancies which had hitherto seemed to Sir Walter as necessary as the air he breathed.

She laid it before him with all the gentleness of her manner, and all the firmness of her judgement, observing that if such measures were adopted, in seven years he would be clear of debt; and she trusted that they might, together, convince Sir Walter and Elizabeth that respectability of character did not depend upon an unvarying appearance of grandeur, and that their real dignity would not be lessened, in the eyes of sensible people, by a determined show of prudence now.

"What!" cried Sir Walter, "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, I will sooner quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms."

He had not, in saying so, the smallest intention of doing any such thing; it was merely a manner of expressing his contempt for the plan itself; and having thus, as he believed, demolished the argument by shewing what monstrous alternative it must lead to, he considered the whole business as satisfactorily concluded for that day also, and desired that no more might be said of it before dinner.

"Quit Kellynch Hall." The words were caught up by Mr Shepherd, who had remained, at Lady Russell's desire, to hear the event of her application, and who found in them, though spoken only in anger, an opening which he had for some time privately meditated, but had not yet dared to approach.

"Since your feelings on this subject are so strong, Sir Walter," said he, with the caution of a man testing thin ice, "may I take the liberty of suggesting, that were such a measure ever contemplated—merely as a supposition, you understand, and one to be viewed only in the last necessity—there are gentlemen at this time, of the first consequence, who, being desirous of a situation in this part of the country, and finding Kellynch to answer their wishes in every particular, would be glad to treat with you upon terms which you yourself should name. A twelvemonth's absence, judiciously employed, might do wonders; and in the meanwhile the house need not stand empty upon your hands, if you could reconcile yourself to receive a tenant of good character and unquestionable fortune—"

He got no further. Sir Walter rose from his chair as if the word had scalded him.

"A tenant! In Kellynch Hall! Mr Shepherd, I must beg that you will never let that word pass your lips again in my hearing. I did not think, after five-and-twenty years' acquaintance with this family, to hear its head advised to let his house, like any lodging in Bath, to the first stranger who can pay for it! It shall never be spoken of again, sir, if you please, either now or at any future time."

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said no more; feeling, however, with the sagacity of his profession, that a seed had been planted which anger could not wholly uproot, and that Sir Walter, in the very violence of his refusal, had shewn how nearly the thought had touched him.

It was in the drawing-room, later that evening, when the family had gathered before dinner, that the subject was renewed, in a manner which none of them had anticipated. Anne, who had sat through the discussion of the morning in her usual silence, listening with an aching heart to schemes which she believed alike inadequate to the case, now spoke, with a colour rising in her cheek at her own temerity, but with a steadiness which surprised herself as much as her hearers.

She thought, she said, that neither Mr Shepherd's plan nor Lady Russell's went far enough; that half-measures could do nothing but postpone an evil which timely resolution might remove; and that if her father and Elizabeth would only consent to a more complete and immediate system of economy—a reduction of every unnecessary expense, and a settled determination to pay off the debts of the family in a period of years, rather than to nurse them along by small savings which could never overtake them—the object might be secured with less real suffering, in the end, than any of the milder schemes which had been proposed.

"You would have my father live like a hermit, I suppose," said Elizabeth, but not with the sharpness which such a speech might once have provoked; and to the astonishment of every one in the room, she presently added, "though I own, Anne, that between Mr Shepherd's timidity and Lady Russell's rules, I begin to think nothing at all will be done, and that a shorter method, disagreeable as it must be, might, after all, answer better, and be sooner over."

Sir Walter looked from one daughter to the other with an expression of mingled affront and bewilderment, unused as he was to opposition from either quarter, and least of all to finding them united against him upon a single point.

"I am glad to find," said he, with as much dignity as he could summon, "that my daughters have taken it upon themselves to regulate my household. I had supposed that the head of the family might still be permitted some voice in the disposal of his own economy; but since you are both so eager in the cause of retrenchment, I shall leave you to enjoy the contemplation of it, and content myself with remarking that no Elliot before me has ever found it necessary to count the candles in his own drawing-room."

Nothing further, however, was determined that evening. Lady Russell, seeing that the ground gained by Anne's speech, however creditable to her sense, was not likely to be pressed further while Sir Walter remained in so irritable a temper, judged it wisest to let the subject rest, and turned the conversation, with her usual tact, to less contentious matters; while Mr Shepherd, gathering up his papers, took his leave with the private conviction that Sir Walter would come, in his own time, and by his own road, to the very measure he had that day forbidden to be named.

It was in the midst of this unsettled state of things—the debts unacknowledged in their full extent, the remedy unchosen, and the whole family divided between resentment and irresolution—that a letter arrived by the evening post from Mary at Uppercross, addressed to Anne, and full of complaint. She was very unwell, she wrote; more unwell than she had ever been in her life; Charles was gone out shooting and left her quite alone; old Mrs Musgrove never came near her when she was ill; the children were noisy and troublesome beyond bearing; and she did not think anybody cared how she suffered, unless Anne would be so good as to come to her directly, for she was sure she should not know what to do with herself otherwise, and nobody understood her constitution as Anne did.

It was not the first letter of the kind that Anne had received, for Mary's health, though not without its real weaknesses, was apt to fail her most conveniently whenever she wanted company or attention; but there was, on this occasion, something in the timing of it which struck Anne with a sensation almost of relief. She read it over twice, and folded it, and sat for some minutes looking into the fire, while the voices of her father and sister, returning to some lesser point of the day's dispute, went on unheeded beside her.

She had no real fear for Mary; but she had, mingled with her habitual willingness to be useful, a growing consciousness that she could do no good by remaining at Kellynch. Nothing that she could say would alter her father's determination, nor Elizabeth's habits; the one plan which she had ventured to propose, and which Elizabeth had, for a wonder, seconded, seemed already sinking again beneath the weight of Sir Walter's displeasure and Mr Shepherd's caution; and she was too little consulted, and too little heeded, to hope that her presence in the drawing-room could hasten a decision which two more considerable voices had failed to produce.

At Uppercross, at least, she would be wanted, however imperfectly; and there was a kind of comfort, humble as it was, in going where her care, of whatever quality, would not be entirely thrown away.

She resolved, therefore, before she went up to her room that night, that she would write to Mary in the morning, and propose to go to her within a very few days; and having so resolved, she sat for a while longer by her window, looking out upon the dark shapes of the shrubbery which her mother had planted, thinking, not without a certain melancholy amusement, how strange it was that the fate of Kellynch Hall—whether it should be preserved entire in its ancient dignity, or given over, in whatever form, into the hands of strangers—should remain, on this night as on every other, wholly unsettled; while she herself, whose voice had counted for so little in the debate, was already quietly determined upon her own removal from it.

The First National Bank was on the corner below the Herald building, a granite cube with brass doors. I asked for somebody who could tell me about a customer's account, and was passed along to a smooth pink man named Albury, who had "Assistant Cashier" on a little walnut block on his desk.

I told him who I was and what I wanted to know. He looked at me the way bank men look at everybody, as if I might be trying to pass a rubber check, and asked why the Continental Detective Agency was interested in Mr. Donald Willsson's checking account.

"His murder," I said, "is why."

That softened him. He went away for a few minutes and came back with a ledger sheet.

"Mr. Willsson's account is in excellent shape," he said, as if that settled everything.

"He drew a check yesterday afternoon for five thousand dollars," I said. "Who was it made out to?"

Albury ran a manicured finger down the sheet, frowned, ran it down again.

"No such check has come through," he said.

"You're sure?"

"Positive. I have here every item that has been posted to Mr. Willsson's account through this morning's mail and this morning's clearings. There is no five-thousand-dollar item, certified or otherwise. If it had been drawn to cash and presented over the counter here it would show as a debit at once. If it went to another bank for collection it would take a day or two to come through, but there's been no request from us for verification of signature, no telegraphic inquiry, nothing of that sort. As far as this bank is concerned, no such check has been presented for either payment or certification."

"Could a check that size be cashed over the counter here without you people wanting to check on it?"

"Not without an officer's approval, and I'd have heard of a five-thousand-dollar item, believe me." He smiled the professional smile bank men keep in stock. "We're a small city, Mr.⁠—?"

I let him go on wondering what my name was. I thanked him, got his name for my notes, and left.

So the check had been written and, so far as anybody knew, never cashed. That put a few new wrinkles in a thing that already had plenty of them. A man doesn't write a check for five thousand dollars, go out for twenty minutes, apparently to deliver or mail it, and then have it vanish, without there being some story back of the vanishing.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on it⁠—the Recorder's office, the county clerk, two title companies, a couple of real estate men I knew slightly⁠—trying to find whether Donald Willsson had been dickering for property, paying off a debt, or buying anything at all that would run to five thousand dollars. I found nothing. Wherever the money was supposed to go, it hadn't got there by any route the public records or the local gossip-mongers knew about.

I gave it up at half-past five, ate dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, where the food was better than the tablecloth, and walked back to the Great Western through a light drizzle that had started sneaking down out of a sky the color of a week-old bruise.

The hotel clerk stopped me as I came through the lobby.

"There's a lady waiting for you," he said, dropping his voice the way hotel clerks do when they think they're saying something delicate. "In the writing room."

She was sitting very straight in one of the leather chairs, gray gloves folded in her lap, a small gray hat with a slanted brim shadowing the upper part of her face. She had taken off her hat and coat's fussiness for the day; there was nothing fussy about her now. She looked tired in the way that isn't fixed by sleep.

"Mrs. Willsson," I said, and pulled a chair around to sit facing her.

"You went to see my father-in-law this morning," she said. No hello, no apology for coming to a hotel to see a man she'd talked to for one evening.

"Word travels."

"He telephoned me. He was extremely unpleasant." Her accent thickened a little on the last word, the way it had the night before. "He said I killed Donald."

"He's got that notion," I agreed. "Have you got any way of showing him wrong?"

She looked at her gloves.

"I did not kill my husband," she said. "I did not love him⁠—I will not pretend to you that I did, since you will find it out in any case, from someone, if you have not found it out already⁠—but I did not kill him."

"Where'd you go, driving out at twenty after ten?"

"I have told the police this. I went to meet a friend. I would rather not say who."

"A man."

She didn't answer that, which was answer enough.

"You came back at five after eleven with what looked like blood on your slipper," I said. "That's a long twenty minutes for a lady to keep a date and get home streaked."

Her chin came up.

"I stopped the car near⁠—near where it happened. I heard people. I got out to see. There was a crowd already, and a policeman coming. I didn't wait. I don't know how the⁠—the mark got on my shoe. Perhaps from the sidewalk. There would have been⁠—" She stopped and pressed the gloves flat between her palms.

"You went out at ten-twenty and you say you stopped near Hurricane Street. That's a good half hour from your street to there and back, allowing time to keep your date in between. It doesn't fit together very neatly."

"I am not clever at making up neat stories, Mr.⁠—" She used the same trick the bank man had, leaving the blank for me to fill, and I left it empty for her too. "I am telling you what happened."

"Does your friend know you were near Hurricane Street?"

"I did not see my friend that night," she said, very low, and looked at the window where the drizzle was making the glass swim. "He did not come. I waited and he did not come, and then I heard of Donald and I drove toward Hurricane Street because that is where they said it had happened, and I don't expect you to believe any of this, and I don't greatly care whether you do."

That was either the truth or a woman who had had all day to build a story and build it well. I couldn't tell which from her face; it was a good face for not telling things.

"Elihu Willsson thinks you did it out of jealousy," I said. "Any reason for him to think that?"

"My father-in-law," she said, "would like it to be me instead of⁠—instead of anyone closer to himself."

"Meaning?"

She stood up, drew her gloves on finger by finger, unhurried about it now that she'd said her say.

"I came to tell you I did not do this thing, in case my father-in-law had convinced you otherwise. That is all I came for." She picked up the small gray hat, looked at it, didn't put it on. "Good night."

I watched her go out through the lobby, straight-backed, not hurrying, the house detective and two drummers by the cigar counter turning to watch her go by. She hadn't told me anything I could put a hand on, but she'd told me she had no alibi worth the name for the half hour that mattered, and she'd come a long way out of her road to tell me that in person instead of letting it wait. People don't do that without a reason, and the reason isn't always innocence.

I was still turning it over when the boy from the desk found me.

"Message for you," he said, and held out a plain envelope, no stamp, hand delivered.

Inside was a sheet of hotel stationery⁠—not this hotel's, but the Hotel Randall's, three blocks over⁠—with four lines typed on a machine that dropped its a's a little below the line:

*You are asking questions in a city where questions get expensive. Go back to San Francisco and send somebody who doesn't like Personville so much. Nobody sent for you twice.*

No signature. I asked the boy who'd left it.

"Fellow I never saw before, in a brown suit. Didn't come in⁠—just came to the door, gave it to the doorman, and got in a car and went off. Doorman said it was a Stutz."

Thaler's Stutz. I hadn't laid eyes on Whisper since Quint and I had watched him sitting in it outside this hotel two nights running, and it seemed he meant to keep it that way, doing his talking on paper and through hired hands, the way careful men do. I put the note in my pocket, told the boy no answer, and went up to my room.

I got out my report blank, thought a while, and boiled the day down into a telegram, the way the Old Man liked them⁠—short, plain, no guessing dressed up as fact. It read:

DONALD WILLSSON MURDERED NIGHT OF TENTH BEFORE I COULD SEE HIM STOP FOUR SHOTS FROM AMBUSH HURRICANE STREET STOP WIFE UNABLE ACCOUNT FOR HALF HOUR COVERING TIME OF KILLING STOP FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK DRAWN BY DECEASED SAME AFTERNOON PAYEE UNKNOWN NEVER PRESENTED AT DRAWEE BANK STOP LOCAL CONDITIONS FAVOR POLITICAL MOTIVE ALSO POSSIBLE BUT NOT ESTABLISHED STOP HAVE BEEN WARNED OFF BY PARTY BELIEVED CONNECTED WITH LOCAL RACKETEERS STOP REQUEST PERMISSION REMAIN AND CONTINUE STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS.

I read it over twice, changed nothing, and took it down myself to have it put on the wire that night rather than trust it to the morning boy.

Back in my room I hung my wet coat over the foot of the bed, sat down by the window with a cigarette, and looked out at Personville's lights smearing themselves through the drizzle on the glass. Somewhere out there was a check for five thousand dollars that had been written and had gone nowhere any bank or lawyer or clerk in the county had a record of. A man had carried it out of his office for twenty minutes and had come back without saying who got it, and that night he had gone to Hurricane Street instead of home and had been shot for his trouble. The check hadn't shot him. But it hadn't been cashed either, and paper like that doesn't just evaporate.

I finished the cigarette, started another, and went to bed still turning it over, no nearer an answer than I had been at the bank window that afternoon.

"I'm miserable too, Brett," I said. "Where should we go?"

"Drive to the Select. I want a brandy and soda and I can't have it in that place we've left, and it's too far to anywhere else, and I don't want to sit in this taxi feeling the way I feel."

"All right," I said, and leaned forward and told the driver.

"Do you feel very rocky?" I asked her.

"Rocky as hell."

"What about?"

"I don't know. I just feel terribly. Do you ever feel that way?"

"Plenty."

"Talk about something. It stops it."

"What sort of something?"

"Anything. Tell me about that boy with the wavy hair. Or tell me who you met last week. Nobody I know."

"I don't know anyone you don't know."

"You wouldn't. Do you know a man called Mippipopolous? A Greek. He's got a title, a real one, one of those old Greek titles."

"No. Never heard of him."

"He's got the most amazing amount of money. I met him last week. He wants to take me to Biarritz."

"You'll go?"

"I might. He's very rich, and very nice, and he doesn't ask a thing."

"That must be a strange sensation for you."

"Don't be nasty."

"I wasn't being nasty. I was being clever."

"Were you? I couldn't tell."

We came up on the lights of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the taxi stopped in front of the Select. There were tables outside on the terrace, but I did not want to sit outside.

"Do you mind if we sit inside?"

"I don't care where we sit."

We went in and sat at a table against the wall and I ordered a whiskey and soda for myself and a brandy and soda for Brett.

"Well," I said, "here we are."

"Here we are." Brett looked at herself in the mirror behind the bar, put her hands up and started to fix her hair. I saw her face in the mirror, and she looked lovely, and lonely, and I could not think what to say.

"You look like hell," I said.

"My dear, you don't look so ripping yourself." She laughed, though, and I felt better.

"We're a fine pair," I said.

"What's happened to us? I say, give a chap a cigarette." I gave her a cigarette and lit it.

"You know I've been rather a fool," she said. "I promised him last week I'd go down to San Sebastian with him, and then I never went."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Something better to do, I suppose."

"Was there?"

"Not really." She looked at the drink and turned the glass on the marble with two fingers. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"Neither do I."

"You're the best friend I have, Jake, and I don't even know why I like you."

That was not what I wanted to hear, and it was not what she meant, either, or I did not think it was, and I could not tell her that hearing her say it made something twist inside me that had no business twisting, because there was nothing I could do about any of it, and no way to say so that would not sound like whining.

"You're a fine friend yourself," I said.

"Am I? I don't feel very fine."

"Nobody does at this hour."

"Don't be superior."

"I'm not being superior. I'm agreeing with you."

She smiled at that, not much of a smile, and put her hand on the bar, not on my hand, just on the bar near it, and left it there.

"I say, do you suppose Michael would mind about Biarritz?"

"Why should he?"

"I don't know. Would you mind?"

"That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it, though."

I did not say anything, and she looked at me and then looked away, down the bar toward the door, where two people were coming in out of the night, laughing about something that had happened to them outside, and I felt, in that silence, exactly what I did not want to feel, which was that I would have minded very much, and that there was no way on earth I could tell her so.

"I ought to go back for that fifty francs," I said. "I hate to think of the patronne keeping it."

"Go on, then. I'll sit here and be dismal by myself."

"Come with me."

"No. I'll wait. Go on."

I finished my whiskey and went out and found a taxi at the corner and told the man to take me to the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The streets were emptying out and it was cooler now, and I sat back and did not think about anything in particular, or tried not to, which came to the same thing.

The bal musette was still going when I got there, though the crowd had thinned. The proprietor was still on his high stool, playing, with the bells on his ankle, and a few couples were dancing in a tired sort of way, and at a table near the door Georgette was sitting with the tall dark one called Lett, who had his head down on his arms on the table, apparently asleep, or drunk, or both.

"Well," I said, "here you are."

"Where have you been? Your friends are lovely. They dance with you and then they don't buy you a drink. This one went to sleep." She pushed Lett's shoulder and he did not move. "I could kill him."

"I came for my fifty francs."

"Your patronne has it. She kept saying, is Monsieur coming back, is Monsieur coming back. I told her you had gone off with the tall woman. The English one."

"That's right."

"Is she your mistress?"

"No."

"No. Nothing is ever anybody's mistress with you people. You just go off in taxis." She said it without much bitterness, as though it were a fact about foreigners she had noted before and found only mildly interesting.

I went to the bar and the patronne gave me the envelope, unopened, and counted it out to make sure, though I had not asked her to, and I gave her a franc for keeping it.

"Your fiancée," she said, smiling, "is not so faithful, eh?"

"No," I said. "Not so faithful."

I went back to the table. "Do you want a ride home?" I asked Georgette.

"In your taxi? Why not. This one isn't taking me anywhere tonight." She stood up, straightened her skirt, and looked down at Lett with a kind of professional disgust. "Wake up," she said to him, not loudly, and when he did not wake up she left him there.

I put her in the taxi and gave the driver the address she gave him, some street off the Boulevard Sébastopol, and gave her a hundred francs.

"You're a good type, after all," she said. "It's a shame about you."

"What's a shame?"

"That you're sick." She said it kindly enough, the way you would say it about the weather, and I shut the door and told the driver to go on, and stood on the corner and watched the taxi's tail-light go down the hill.

I walked back to the Select. Brett was still at the bar, with another brandy and soda in front of her, and a man I did not know was sitting near her, but not talking to her, and when she saw me she looked relieved in a way that pleased me more than it should have.

"Get your money?"

"Got it."

"Good chap. Sit down." I sat down. "I've been sitting here thinking. It's a rotten game, isn't it?"

"What game?"

"This one. Whatever it is we're all playing." She turned the glass again. "I say, Jake, do you think I'm a bitch?"

"Not more than usual."

"Don't be a beast. I'm serious."

"I don't think about it."

"You do, though."

"Well, then, I don't think you're a bitch."

"That's a lie, and a very poor one, but I love you for it." She said it lightly, the way she said everything, so that it could mean nothing at all, or everything, and there was no way to ask her which without spoiling it, so I did not ask.

"It's getting light," I said. There was a grayness at the tall windows that had not been there before.

"Is it? How ghastly." She stood up and gathered her things. "Take me home, will you? I'm done in."

"Of course."

We went out and I found a taxi at the stand and told the driver where to take her, off in the Neuilly direction, and I stood by the door for a moment before she got in.

"You are a good friend, Jake," she said. "You've been an angel this evening."

"It was nothing," I said, which was the second lie of the night, and probably not the last, but she did not seem to notice, or if she noticed she did not say so.

"Good night, darling."

"Good night, Brett."

I shut the door and the taxi pulled away down the empty boulevard, and I stood there a moment watching it go, and then I started to walk.

It was quite light now, the gray, even light of early morning before the sun is up, and there was no one in the streets except a man watering the pavement in front of a café with a hose, and far off a milk-cart going somewhere on its rounds. I walked down toward the river. The plane trees along the quai were perfectly still, and the water had that dull metal colour it has before the sun touches it. I stopped on the bridge and looked down at the water going by, smooth and heavy-looking in that light, and did not think about anything, or tried to keep from it, and then walked on across and along the quai toward the Ile Saint-Louis, with the bells starting somewhere for early Mass, and the city coming awake very slowly around me, and I did not hurry.

*Letter, Herr Leutner, of Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*28 June.*

“Madam,--

“I write to you as a stranger, and I beg you will forgive the liberty, but I have found your name and address from a card in the pocket-book of an English gentleman, Mr. Jonathan Harker, who lodged in this town some weeks since upon his way to the country beyond the forests. I am a merchant of this place, and I had some small dealings with the gentleman before he went on into the mountains. He told me he was travelling on business for a firm of lawyers in England, and that he was betrothed to a lady to whom he wrote very faithfully.

“I would not trouble you, madam, but that Mr. Harker has not come back to Bistritz as he said he would, nor has any word been sent to me, though I promised to forward his letters. I have heard, through the drivers who go into the Borgo Pass, that the gentleman was to stay for a time as guest at a castle in the mountains, and that he was well and in good spirits when he went. It is not uncommon in these parts for a guest of standing to be kept long by his host, for the roads are poor and the posts uncertain, and I would not have you alarmed beyond reason. But some weeks have now gone by, and I think it right that you should know that he has been delayed, so that you be not anxious at his silence, nor yet wholly easy.

“If I hear further news I will write again at once. I am, madam, with great respect,

“Your obedient servant,

“EMIL LEUTNER.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*30 June.*--I have had the strangest and most disquieting letter, from a Herr Leutner of Bistritz, a place I had never heard of until Jonathan’s own letters taught it me. He says only that Jonathan has been delayed, and bids me not be anxious; and yet the very writing of such a letter, from a total stranger, is enough to make me anxious past all bidding. Jonathan’s own letters, the last dated the 29th, told me nothing of any change of plan, and were, I thought, oddly stiff for him, though I set that down to the fatigue of travel. I have written at once to Mr. Hawkins, to ask if he has had any more direct word from his own correspondent, the Count, and I have written also to the herr, thanking him and begging him to send me any further news the instant he has it. I will not let myself think the worst. Business delays a man in strange countries in a hundred dull ways, and I have heard that the roads in that part of the world are little better than cart-tracks. All the same, I wish with my whole heart that he were safe home in Exeter, and this only a tale to laugh over.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*29 May.*--Renfield continues to interest me more than any other case in the house. To-day, as I sat with him going over the small matters of his diet, of which he is always so particular, he asked me, quite without prompting and in the mildest voice, whether Mr. Holmwood was to be married soon, and whether the lady, Miss Westenra, was as beautiful as it was said. I own the question startled me more than anything he has said in a month, for I have never spoken to him of my own affairs, still less of Arthur’s, and I cannot conceive how the name should have reached him, unless through some careless talk of the attendants, who will gossip over anything that comes from the town. I answered him shortly that I believed the engagement not yet given out, and asked him in turn why he wished to know. He only smiled--that curious close smile of his, which shows no teeth and yet somehow suggests them--and said that a happy marriage was a fine thing to hear of, "for it multiplies the chances of life, doctor, and I am a great student of chances." Then he would say no more on the subject, however I pressed him, but fell to talking of flies, of which he has begun again to keep a small store on his window-sill, so that I left him no wiser than I came, save that I must warn the staff more strictly against talking within his hearing of matters that do not concern them. It is a small thing, but it has left me uneasy all the evening, more, I think, than the thing itself deserves.

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

“*27 May.*

“My dear Art,--

“Just a line to hold you to your word, camp-fire to-morrow night, seven sharp, at my rooms, and Jack Seward has already sworn on the honour of his profession to be there before the soup is cold, which for a man who keeps a whole asylum waiting on his convenience is no small vow. Bring nothing but your appetite and your health-drinking arm, for I mean to see both well exercised.

“Yours,

“QUINCEY.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*28 May.*--A very pleasant evening at Quincey Morris’s rooms, and I set down something of it here while it is fresh, for such evenings do not come often in a life like mine, hedged in as it is with other men’s madness.

We were but three, as Quincey had promised, and dined well and not too soberly, for though we drank Art’s health with a will, and Quincey made a very droll speech over it, comparing Art to a steer that has at last let itself be roped after a deal of fine running, none of us were the worse for the wine after. Art himself was in tremendous spirits, and told us more of Miss Westenra than perhaps he knew he was telling, for a man in love is the worst-guarded witness in the world; and I confess I listened with a better grace than I should have thought possible a week ago, for the wound Miss Lucy gave me, though it is not healed, is at least decently bandaged, and good company is the best surgeon for that sort of hurt.

Quincey was in his best vein, full of tales of Texas and of stranger places yet, and told us of a night on the Pampas when he and a comrade sat up with pistols across their knees against a beast that never came, until Art laughed so that he had to beg him to stop for the pain of it. But under all the fun I could see, and I think Quincey saw too, that Art was a little graver than the occasion called for, and once, when the talk had run down for a moment, he said, looking into his glass rather than at either of us, that he wished his father had lived to see this day, for the old lord had wanted nothing so much before he died as to know Art settled and happy. There was a silence after that which even Quincey did not try to fill too quickly, and I thought the better of both of them for it.

We parted a little after midnight, with more handshaking than the occasion, soberly considered, required, but a man does not measure such things too nicely among old friends. I walked home the long way round, by the river, for I did not want my bed just yet, and found myself thinking, not for the first time, that of the three of us it is Art who has drawn the prize, and that he deserves it as much as any man I know, which is the best thing I can find to say and mean it.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*1 July.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have not written for some days, and I am afraid this will be but a poor return for your last delightful, dreadful letter, with its three proposals in one, over which I laughed until I cried, and then cried a little more for poor Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris, though I am glad with all my heart that it is Mr. Holmwood who has won you, for from all you say he sounds the very man to deserve you.

“I write, dear, in some anxiety, for I have had a letter from a stranger, a merchant of a town called Bistritz, telling me that Jonathan has been delayed upon his journey, and is stopping longer than he looked for at some castle in the mountains as the guest of the gentleman whose business he went out to settle. The letter is kind, and bids me not be alarmed, and I am trying very hard to take its advice; but you will understand, dear, that a woman does not find it easy to be reasonable about the man she loves when he is some thousand miles away and has not written to say why he does not come home. I have written to Mr. Hawkins, and to the merchant again, and I mean to go on being sensible and busy until I hear something more definite, one way or the other.

“Forgive a short letter; I have no heart for gossip to-night, though on any other night I should have made you tell me twice over every word Mr. Holmwood said to you.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Telegram, Peter Hawkins to Mina Murray.*

“*3 July.*

“RECEIVED WORD JONATHAN QUITE SAFE STOP SIMPLY MARRIED STOP WRITING FULLY.”

"She seems to me to be capricious," Robert said, as he and Madame Ratignolle moved slowly along the sandy path, she leaning upon his arm. "A little inconsequent, you know, like the summer day that can't make up its mind what humor it will settle into. This morning when I came down she had already slipped away from me somewhere. And half the time I can't tell whether she is jesting or in earnest."

"Perhaps," said Madame Ratignolle, "it is only that she is not yet used to us—to our ways. She is not one of us; she is not like us. She has the American reserve, though I think she is beginning to lay a little of it aside."

"Oh! I know all that," he went on, with a shade of impatience that was not usual with him. "But there is something else. I could not tell you what. Something in the eyes, when she forgets herself, that makes me think she is not so much thinking of what is before her as remembering, or wishing, or—I don't know. It is only a fancy of mine, Madame Ratignolle; don't take me too seriously. I have known her a month and she still puzzles me more than any woman I ever knew."

Madame Ratignolle only smiled, and pressed his arm a little, being tired, and they went on to the house without further talk of Mrs. Pontellier.

It was not until the afternoon, when the two women found themselves alone for a moment on the gallery of the Ratignolle cottage, the children being taken off by the nurse-maids and the sun still too strong to venture far, that Adèle, half in play and half in earnest, repeated to Edna something of what Robert had said.

"He thinks you a great puzzle, *ma chère*," she said, smiling and fanning herself. "He says he cannot tell whether you are in jest or in earnest, and that there is something in your eyes when you forget yourself which he cannot make out at all. I told him it was only that you are not used to us yet."

Edna laughed a little, not quite knowing why the words pleased her, or why they lingered so persistently afterward in her thought, returning to her at odd moments through the rest of that day, as a strain of music will return, unbidden, long after the hearing of it.

A messenger came out from the wharf during the afternoon with a telegram for Mrs. Pontellier. It was from her husband, saying that he would not be out on Saturday as he had expected, but would remain in the city, business detaining him, and that he would try to come the following week instead. Edna read it through twice, standing in the sun on the gallery steps, and then went in and laid it upon the table without any appearance of great feeling one way or the other. Old Monsieur Farival, who happened to be near, and who had heard of the telegram, as everybody at Lebrun's heard of everything sooner or later, asked her if it was not bad news that had come, seeing something in her face; and she assured him, with a look of surprise that he should think so, that it was not bad news at all—that Mr. Pontellier only found it impossible to leave the city, which was disappointing, of course, but not by any means bad news.

She did indeed feel a kind of relief that came with the reading of the message, though she did not stop to question herself very closely as to the nature of this relief. She went out and sat under the children's tent for a while, watching the boys at their play in the sand, and when Robert came to look for her, as he did most afternoons, she asked him to walk with her along the beach, saying she felt restless and wanted the air.

They walked a long way, farther than usual, past the last of the bath-houses, to where the beach grew wilder and there was no one else in sight but a few fishermen far off with their nets. The talk between them ran along easily upon indifferent things—upon the heat, upon a schooner that lay becalmed far out, upon some plan of Robert's for taking the children fishing the next day—and neither of them spoke again of what Adèle had repeated, though it hovered, unspoken, somewhere near the edge of everything they did say.

Later, when the sun had begun to slant and the worst heat of the day was past, Edna left Robert at the house and went down to the beach alone. She had said nothing of her intention to any one; it was a sudden whim that took her, unaccountable even to herself. She had often gone into the water during the past month, timidly, like the other women, wading a little way out and then losing courage, clinging to the ropes that Madame Lebrun had had stretched from post to post for the timid bathers to hold to, and always a little ashamed afterward of her own fear.

But this evening she went down by herself, and stood a while alone on the beach, feeling very small and solitary in the face of the water and the sky, and something in the touch of the sea, coming as it did at the close of a day in which she had been stirred by a thousand new awakenings, seemed to reach into her and caress her, body and soul.

She waded out a little way, as she had always done, and then, with a sudden splendid recklessness, without any thought of danger, she threw herself forward and worked her arms and body, and for a few strokes—a very few—swam. A quick spasm of fear at her own daring, at the newness of the sensation, made her seek the shallow water again; but not before she had felt the exultation of the thing.

She had tried it many times through the summer, always in vain, always with a despairing sense of her own inability, and now, at the very last, when she was thinking of anything but that, she had succeeded. She stood in the shallow water, panting a little, exulting like a child that has by chance stumbled upon some treasure, or a swimmer who, in a flash, realizes his power and revels in his newly discovered ability to control the working of his body and his soul. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

She said nothing of it to any one when she came up to the house, wet and glowing. It was her own; a secret which she hugged closely, feeling that it belonged to her alone and had no need of being shared.

As she came up from the beach she passed the bath-house where the lady in black sat reading her devotions on the gallery, as she so often did at that hour. The lady looked up, and for the first time since Edna had known her—by sight only, through all the weeks of the summer—she spoke to her.

"You have been in the water late, Madame," she said, in her thin, precise voice, closing her book upon her finger. "It is not wise, so near the evening. The chill comes with the dark."

Edna thanked her, said something about the water having been so pleasant she had not thought of the hour, and passed on, faintly wondering, as she went, at the sound of that voice addressed to her for the first time, grave and a little melancholy, like the woman's own black-robed figure among the gay muslins and ribbons of the other women on the beach.

That night, after the children had been undressed and put to bed, and the house grown quiet, Edna sat alone on the gallery of the cottage. Léonce's telegram lay somewhere within, already half forgotten. Robert had gone off early, and she had not seen him again since their walk on the beach. The night was warm and softly black, with a great many stars, and away off she could hear the low, restless voice of the sea, which she had that day, for the first time, felt to be almost her own.

She sat there a long while, not thinking connectedly of anything, but letting the day come back to her in pieces—the water closing warm about her, the lady's grave voice, the yellow lamplight from the windows behind her falling across the boards of the gallery. And through it all, returning again and again, unbidden and persistent, were the words Adèle had repeated to her that afternoon: that Robert found her a puzzle; that there was something in her eyes, when she forgot herself, which he could not make out at all.

I hurried out into the fresh morning air, glad to be rid for a moment of the shadowed house, and set off almost at a run along the road to the village. I had gone perhaps half the distance when I perceived a small, familiar figure advancing towards me. It was Poirot.

"Mon ami," he said, "I was coming to you."

"Poirot," I cried, "you have heard, then?"

"Yes, I have heard. That is why I was coming."

"But how could you have heard already? It is not an hour since—"

"You forget, Hastings, I lodge with the good Belgians whose kinsman is gardener at Styles. It was the boy who brought the milk this morning who told them, and they, being naturally excited, ran to tell me at once. Mrs. Inglethorp is dead—the boy did not know how, or from what, but he had it from one of the maids that there had been much running about and knocking on doors in the night."

"It was a young fellow, Fearn's boy, I fancy," I said.

"Precisely. He had it, I understand, from Annie the housemaid, who had it herself before she was sent for the brandy."

I could not help marvelling, even in that moment of anxiety, at the manner in which news travels in a country village faster than any telegraph. "Come at once," I said. "I have a fly waiting."

He asked no unnecessary questions, but caught up his hat and stick, and we set off at a good pace along the road. As we went, I gave him a brief account of the night's events, dwelling particularly on Mrs. Inglethorp's dying words, and on the strange and continued absence of Alfred Inglethorp.

"Ah, the husband is not to be found?" said Poirot thoughtfully. "That is curious. Where do they suppose him to be?"

"He went, so I am told, to walk to the village with Dr. Bauerstein last evening, and has not since returned."

Poirot's eyebrows went up a little, but he said nothing further until we reached the great iron gates of Styles. There, coming up the drive towards us at the same moment, we perceived none other than Alfred Inglethorp himself.

He was dressed as he had been the evening before, but his black beard was in some disorder, and his face wore a haggard, exhausted look, as of a man who has been many hours abroad. He started at the sight of us, and then, recovering himself, hurried forward with outstretched hands.

"My God! Is it true? Is Emily really——" His voice broke off, and I saw genuine emotion, or a very passable imitation of it, working in his face.

"It is quite true, Mr. Inglethorp," I said gravely. "Your wife died early this morning. It has been a terrible night for all of us."

"Where were you all this while?" I could not forbear asking, though I strove to keep the question free of accusation.

He passed his hand across his brow. "Denby kept me late over some accounts—I was with him at his cottage until past one o'clock, and, the night being so warm and still, I did not care to disturb the household, and slept in the little outhouse where the garden tools are kept—there is an old settee there, as you know. I have done it before, on occasion, sooner than knock people up at an unearthly hour."

"You have only just heard, then?" I asked.

"Denby's boy told me on the road, not five minutes since. I came at once. My poor Emily! Her devotion—her unsparing energy—she thought always of others——" He seemed genuinely overcome, and turned away towards the house. Poirot and I followed a little behind him.

We had not gone twenty yards, however, before we encountered Dorcas, coming from the direction of the kitchen garden with a basket of vegetables on her arm. At the sight of Mr. Inglethorp she gave a little cry.

"Why, sir, whatever's happened to you? We've been that anxious, not knowing where you'd got to! And Annie said the outhouse door was locked all night same as usual, sir, for she tried it herself not an hour since, looking for the trowel—so you can't have been sleeping there, surely?"

Inglethorp's face, for one instant, seemed to me to change—though whether with annoyance at being questioned, or with something else, I could not have said.

"Nonsense, Dorcas," he said sharply. "The door cannot have been locked. You are mistaken." And, without waiting for her reply, he went on into the house.

Dorcas looked after him, her homely face full of bewilderment, then turned to me. "Well, sir, I know what Annie told me, and Annie's not one to make mistakes about a locked door." She shook her head and went on her way.

Poirot had said nothing during this small scene, but I saw that his green eyes, usually so mild, had taken on a sudden brightness, and that he was following the retreating figure of Alfred Inglethorp with a long, considering look.

"That is curious," he murmured, half to himself.

"You mean about the outhouse?"

"The outhouse—yes. It is a detail. One should always note the small things, Hastings, the little things that do not fit. But come, let us go in. There will be time enough for questions."

At the door we were met by John, who looked worn and grey with the night's anxiety. I presented Poirot, and explained in a few words the service I had asked of him. John's brow cleared somewhat.

"I am glad you have come, Monsieur Poirot," he said simply. "It is a bad business, whatever the truth of it. My mother's own doctor and Dr. Bauerstein between them have made it necessary to have a post-mortem, but I will own to you that I hardly know what to hope."

"I understand, Monsieur Cavendish," said Poirot, with a gravity that sat well upon his small figure. "I will ask you to allow me the freedom of the house for an hour, and, in particular, I should wish to see the room in which the tragedy occurred, exactly as it was left."

"That can be managed. Dr. Bauerstein locked both doors last night, and has the key of one; I have the other."

He produced it, and himself led us up the stairs, along the gallery, to the door of Mrs. Inglethorp's room. Poirot turned the key, and we went in.

The room was much as I had last seen it, save that the body had been removed. The overturned table still lay upon its side, its little scattered ornaments strewing the carpet near the window; the bed was in disorder from the violence of those last convulsions. The morning sun streamed in cheerfully through a gap in the curtains, falling in a bright bar across the floor, and it seemed to me a monstrous thing that such sunlight should fall upon a room where death had done its work.

Poirot moved about with a curious, delicate care, touching nothing, but bending now and again to examine some object minutely, his head tilted a little to one side like an intelligent bird. He went first to the door which connected with Alfred Inglethorp's room, tried it, examined the bolt, and grunted. Then he did the same with the door into Cynthia's room, and again with a small dressing-room door I had not previously remarked. He spent a long while by the cold ashes of the grate, sifting them delicately with a pair of tongs he had taken, I could have sworn, from nowhere at all, and I saw him lift out some tiny fragment, no larger than a scrap of burnt paper, and lay it upon a sheet of notepaper which he folded with scrupulous care and placed in his pocket-book.

Then he turned his attention to the overturned table and its litter of small things—a candle, some books, matches, a bunch of keys, and, I think, a smashed coffee-cup. This last object he handled with especial interest, lifting the pieces one by one, and sniffing at what remained in the fragments with his curious, birdlike movement.

"The coffee she did not drink," I murmured.

"So it would appear," said Poirot absently.

He rose at last from his knees, and stood for a moment surveying the whole room, his eyes travelling slowly from the bed to the washstand, from the washstand to the windows, from the windows back to the mantelpiece with its row of prim ornaments—the same ornaments, I remembered with a start, at which Lawrence had stared with that ghastly, petrified look. I mentioned this to Poirot, and he listened with close attention, but made no comment beyond a murmured "Ah—the mantelpiece. That is interesting."

He went across to it and studied the ornaments one by one—a little china shepherdess, a clock, a vase of dried grasses, and one or two photographs in frames. Then, quite suddenly, he stooped, and from behind the clock, where it had evidently fallen or been thrust out of sight, he drew out a small object which he held for a moment cupped in his hand, so that I could not see it.

"Poirot, what is it?" I asked eagerly, coming to his side.

He opened his hand. Lying in his palm was a very small object indeed—so small that I could make little of it at first glance. It seemed to be a mere fragment of some dark, hard substance.

"What is it?" I asked again.

Poirot's eyes twinkled with that maddening look I knew so well. "What does it look like, my friend?"

"It looks like nothing at all—a splinter of wood, perhaps, or wax."

"Perhaps," said Poirot, and closed his hand upon it again, slipping it into his pocket-book with the same care he had bestowed upon the ashes.

"But you will tell me what it means?" I protested.

"Not yet, Hastings. Not yet. It is too soon to say anything. We must not theorise before we have all the facts. It is a great mistake. It biases the judgment."

I knew better than to press him further when he wore that particular expression, and so I held my peace, though with considerable impatience.

There came a light tap at the door, and Cynthia Murdoch looked in, her face still pale and heavy with the strange drowsiness of the night before, though she had evidently dressed and made an effort to compose herself.

"I heard you were here, Monsieur Poirot," she said. "Is there anything I can do?"

Poirot turned to her with great gentleness. "Mademoiselle, you are very kind. I have but one small question to ask you. Last night, did you sleep well?"

She looked a little surprised at so simple a question. "Why—yes, I suppose so, though it is odd you should ask, for I generally sleep lightly. Last night I slept like the dead—nothing woke me, not even all the noise there must have been, until Mrs. Cavendish was actually shaking me by the shoulders, and even then I could hardly rouse myself. I have felt very queer and heavy all morning, as if I had not slept at all, if you understand me."

"That is exactly what I wished to know," said Poirot gravely. "I thank you, Mademoiselle."

She lingered a moment, as though she would have asked a question in her turn, but, receiving no encouragement, went out again, softly closing the door behind her.

Poirot stood looking after her, and then his glance travelled once more, thoughtfully, round the room.

"Sleeps like the dead," he repeated softly. "That, too, is interesting, Hastings."

"You think there was something odd in that?"

He did not answer at once. He walked to the window, looked out for a moment upon the sweep of lawn below, and then came back to where I stood by the mantelpiece. He drew his pocket-book from his coat, and from it took the small dark fragment he had found, laying it upon the palm of his hand between us, in the strong morning light.

"Look at it well, my friend," he said. "Consider it. And tell me—does it not strike you as a very great pity that a person so careful, so much in the habit of taking every precaution, should on this one night of all nights have left her door locked on the inside?"

I stared at him, altogether at a loss. "I don't understand you in the least, Poirot."

He smiled a strange, small smile, and said nothing more.