The Chapters

“Tell him to take us to the Select,” she said. “I want a drink where there’s some light.”

I leaned forward and told the driver, and he swung the cab around and we went off through the dark streets toward Montparnasse. Brett had not opened her eyes.

“You said Parc Montsouris.”

“I know. I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“I don’t fancy the dark just now,” she said. “Do you mind frightfully?”

“No,” I said.

We went along without talking. Brett sat up straight and got out her cigarette case and offered it to me, and I took one and she took one, and I struck a match and held it, and the light showed her face for a second and then we were in the dark again.

“You know that Greek chap I told you about?”

“What Greek chap?”

“The one I met last week. At the Crillon. Count Mippipopolous.”

“I never heard about him.”

“Didn’t I tell you? Lovely man. Frightfully rich. Sends round orchids before lunch. Wants to take me to Biarritz.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Isn’t it. He’s got seven thousand acres of something or other in Africa. Wears a black wax dagger and cries about his ancestors. Must be a hundred years old.”

“Sounds like a serious man,” I said.

“Oh, most,” Brett said, and laughed, and then did not laugh.

The cab lights went along the wet paving-stones of the Boulevard Raspail. It had not rained but the streets looked as though they had been washed. There was almost no traffic and the few people out walked close under the shopfronts.

“I don’t know why I told you that,” Brett said.

“Neither do I.”

“I suppose I wanted you to know I still get about.”

“You didn’t need to tell me that.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose I didn’t.”

We came into the lights of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the driver slowed for the turn, and Brett put her hand on my arm, not hard, just resting it there.

“Jake,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you think I’m a bitch to go on like this?”

“I don’t think about it,” I said.

“Don’t you?”

“Not much.”

“That’s a lie,” she said, and took her hand away.

The cab pulled up in front of the Select and the lights were bright under the awning and there were people at the tables on the terrace, though it was very late. We got down and I paid the driver and Brett stood waiting for me under the light, and I saw she had been crying, or near it, though her face when she turned it to me was perfectly composed.

“You needn’t look at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“You know like what.”

“I wasn’t aware I was looking at you any particular way.”

“No,” she said. “Of course you weren’t.”

We went in and sat at a table near the door and a waiter came and Brett ordered a brandy and soda and I had the same. Across the room somebody was arguing about music with somebody else, and a girl I knew slightly waved at me and I waved back. Brett drank half the brandy and soda and put the glass down carefully, as though it were something that might break.

“I don’t know why I go on like this,” she said.

“Like what?”

“You know like what.”

“I don’t, particularly.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t suppose you do.”

She lit another cigarette and looked past me at the people on the terrace and I felt, sitting there, as low as I have ever felt. I wanted like hell to have Brett say she loved me, and I knew if I said what I felt she would only make a joke of it, and I was too tired and too something else to have it made a joke of, so I did not say it. Instead I said:

“It’s a great life.”

“Is it,” Brett said.

We sat like that for a while. The waiter came and asked if we wanted anything more and Brett said no and asked for the bill, and I said I would get it, and she let me, which was not like her.

“I ought to be getting on,” she said. “I told them I’d be back up at Montmartre.”

“All right.”

“You’re not coming.”

“No.”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.”

We went out and stood on the pavement and a taxi came almost at once, the way they do at that hour when you have stopped wanting one. Brett put her hand up and it slowed and pulled in to the curb.

“Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Brett.”

She looked at me for a second as though she were going to say something else, and then she did not say it, and got into the cab, and I shut the door, and gave the driver the name of the place up in Montmartre where she had said the others would be. The cab pulled away and I stood there and watched it go up the street and turn, and then I was alone on the pavement with the waiters starting to put the chairs up on the tables inside.

I had told the patronne I would come back for the envelope, and there was nothing else to do, so I walked back down to the bal musette. It was a long walk but the night was fine, close and soft, with no wind, and it felt good to be walking after the cab. Coming down the hill the street was empty except for a couple standing in a doorway, and I could hear the accordion still going faintly as I came near the place.

Inside it had thinned out. The wavy-haired crowd had gone on, apparently, to wherever they were going, and there were only a few couples left on the floor, dancing slowly now, not the way they had been earlier. The proprietor was still up on his stool, playing, but without much enthusiasm, and his wife was totting up something behind the zinc. Georgette was sitting alone at one of the tables, her hat off, her shoes off too, rubbing one stockinged foot with her hand.

“Hello,” I said. “How’d you make out?”

“Rotten,” she said. “They all went off and left me flat. Where’ve you been?”

“Out.”

“With the tall one? The one that came for you?”

“Yes.”

“She’s got money, that one.”

“Some.”

“I could tell. It shows.” She put her shoe back on. “You still owe me a good time, you know. This was no great success, this evening.”

“I know it.”

I went over to the bar and the patronne smiled and got the envelope out from under the zinc where she had put it for safekeeping, and I opened it and gave Georgette the fifty francs, and put the envelope in my pocket.

“What’s that for?”

“For the good time that wasn’t.”

She laughed, the real laugh this time, not minding her teeth. “You’re a funny one,” she said. “Are you going to see me home?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to walk. I want the air.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, and did not seem to care much either way, and called to the proprietor's daughter to bring her something, and I said good night and went out.

Outside the sky had begun to get gray over the roofs down toward the river, not light yet but the first thinning of the dark that comes before any of the color starts. I walked down the hill and along by the walls of the Panthéon, all shut up and blank-looking at that hour, and then down toward the river by the small streets, my own footsteps the only sound for blocks at a time. A milk-cart went by, the horse walking slowly, the cans knocking together, and the driver looked at me without any curiosity at all.

I came out on the quai and the river was low and the gray light was on the water, flat and without any movement to it, and a barge was tied up under the far bank with no light showing and a man's wash hung out to dry along the rail. I stood for a while looking at the cathedral, gray and heavy-looking in that light, the buttresses like the ribs of some old animal, and I thought about Brett, and about the Greek with the wax dagger and the seven thousand acres, and I did not think about any of it very clearly. A few of the bookstalls along the parapet were already open, the old women setting out their boxes, though there could not have been any custom for them yet.

I walked along the river toward my own part of town, taking it slowly because there was no reason to hurry now, and the gray was getting less gray over toward the east, behind Notre Dame, and somewhere a long way off a horn sounded on the river, one of the tugs, probably, coming up with the current. I felt tired, and hollowed out, the way you feel after being with somebody you want and cannot have, and glad, too, in a way, just to be walking by myself with the town so quiet, before the day started and all the noise of it came up again.

It was as she emerged into Shaftesbury Avenue, still carrying the borrowed umbrella, that Eve remembered she was, in a manner of speaking, a thief. The rain had thinned to a discontented drizzle, hardly worth the trouble of an umbrella at all, and there she stood on the pavement with somebody else's property crooked over her arm and no notion whatever of how to restore it to its rightful owner beyond the memory of a gloomy doorway on the far side of Dover Street. She had an appointment at half-past three which she was on no account to be late for, being interviewed as she was to be, for the first time in her career, about the serious business of cataloguing somebody's library; but conscience, once roused in Eve, was not easily quieted, and she turned her steps back the way she had come.

At a stationer's near Piccadilly Circus she bought a sheet of notepaper and, resting it upon the counter under the mildly disapproving eye of the proprietor, wrote as follows:

*DEAR UNKNOWN,--Very many thanks for the loan of your umbrella. It rescued me from a watery grave, or at any rate from the ruin of a new hat, which comes to very much the same thing. I return it promptly, like an honest woman, though I own I was tempted to keep it for ever as a souvenir of the most curious five minutes of my life. If you ever want your good deed acknowledged in person, you have only to haunt the doorway of Thorpe & Briscoe on a wet Tuesday--though I rather fancy you know better than that.--Gratefully, E. H.*

She folded this, tucked it beneath the handle where it could not fail to be seen, and, feeling considerably lighter in spirit, made her way once more to the grave grey building opposite the coal merchant's, where she had last seen her benefactor vanish. A brass plate beside the door, which she had been too flurried to notice in the morning, informed her that she stood before the Drones Club; and this seemed to her so richly comic a piece of information--she could not have said why, except that it sounded like the sort of club that harboured young men who gave away umbrellas to complete strangers--that she was still smiling when the door opened and a large, calm person in a frock-coat inquired what he might do for her.

"I wonder," said Eve, "if you would be very kind and see that this gets back to the gentleman who lent it to me this morning. I'm afraid I don't know his name. He was very tall, and thin, and had an eyeglass, and he came out without a hat, which I should think is rather unusual for one of your members?"

The porter's face, which had begun by being merely respectful, became suffused with the quiet joy of the man who alone holds the key to a mystery.

"That would be Mr. Smith, miss," he said. "Very tall, and no hat--yes, miss, that would be Mr. Smith. I remember him taking an umbrella out of the rack this morning, though I couldn't have told you at the time whose umbrella it was he was taking." He accepted the umbrella with the gravity of a man accepting a sacred trust. "I'll see he has it directly, miss."

Eve thanked him and went off down the steps, entirely unaware that she had just done something calculated, before the day was much older, to disturb the peace of mind of an entirely innocent third party.

* * * * *

It was perhaps twenty minutes later that the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, known to his intimates as Podge, came into the hall of the Drones with the settled aim of going out again into the rain, an errand of such urgency that only a soul of iron could have deflected him from it. He required his umbrella. He had required it, with increasing bitterness, at intervals throughout the morning, and had been obliged on each occasion to postpone his errand, there being, as every right-thinking man knows, no sourer experience than that of wanting an umbrella and not having one.

"My umbrella," he said to the porter, in the voice of a man who has reached the end of a long and trying vigil.

"Here it is, sir," said the porter, and, with the air of one bestowing a bonus, added: "A young lady brought it back not ten minutes since, sir, with a note for Mr. Smith. Seems Mr. Smith lent it to her this morning."

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick took the umbrella and turned it over as a naturalist might turn over some new and disquieting species of beetle. He was not a young man of powerful intellect, but even he could see that there was something here which failed to add up in the ordinary way of arithmetic.

"Mr. Smith lent my umbrella to a strange female?"

"So it would appear, sir."

"Without asking me?"

"I could not say as to that, sir."

Podge Walderwick, brooding darkly on the sanctity of private property, went in search of the smoking-room, and found there the man he sought, draped in a large chair with the contented look of one who has dined well in anticipation and is now digesting the anticipation.

"Smith," he said, in a voice of doom, "I want a word with you."

Psmith laid down his paper and surveyed him with the benevolent interest of a bishop confirming a large and promising candidate.

"Comrade Walderwick. This is well met. Take a chair. Take, indeed, two chairs, if the mood so moves you--I am not a man to stint a guest."

"Smith, did you take my umbrella out of the rack this morning?"

"I did," said Psmith, without a flicker.

"And lend it to some girl in the street?"

"Your grasp of recent history," said Psmith, "does you credit."

"But dash it, Smith, that's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard. Why my umbrella? Why not your own?"

There was a pause, during which Psmith appeared to be giving the question the profound consideration it deserved.

"There are moments, Comrade Walderwick," he said at last, "when explanation merely clouds an issue which is, at bottom, of a crystal simplicity. I will not attempt to justify myself to you along the tedious paths of narrative. I will do something better. I will buy the umbrella."

"Buy it?"

"For ten pounds."

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick's mouth opened and remained open for a period of some seconds, as though he proposed to take up singing.

"Ten--Smith, it's not worth thirty bob."

"Then think," said Psmith, "what a bargain I am offering you. Comrade Walderwick, in the whole history of commerce there can seldom have been a transaction more agreeably lopsided. I ask you merely to reflect how the market for second-hand umbrellas will react when word gets about, as word always does get about in a club of this select character, that ten pounds changed hands over one of them. You will be a figure of romance. Cabmen will point you out to their fares. I, meanwhile, get the umbrella, which is all I require, a plain, stout, serviceable article, wanting nothing but the absence of your name upon it in indelible ink, which I shall have removed at the earliest opportunity."

Whatever moral scruples the Hon. Hugo Walderwick might, in some more spacious moment, have entertained, they did not survive very long in the presence of ten pounds. He took the notes, surrendered the umbrella, and departed to spread among his fellow members the news of a transaction which did him, on the whole, a great deal of quiet good; while Psmith, left alone, drew from beneath the handle a small folded note which its late owner had not, in the excitement of the interview, thought to examine, and read it through twice with the peculiar care of a man to whom it mattered.

He did not learn from it who had written it. It told him only that a young woman of evident good humour called him, not unreasonably, an Unknown, and signed herself with two initials which conveyed nothing whatever. He put the note away in an inner pocket with the umbrella in his hand, and sat for some little time looking at nothing in particular with an expression which, on a face less consistently solemn than his own, might almost have been called pleased.

* * * * *

The rain had stopped altogether by three o'clock, and a pale, apologetic sun had begun to do what it could for Dover Street, when Eve, hurrying towards her appointment with her testimonials in her hand-bag and her heart beating a shade faster than the occasion, strictly speaking, warranted, came round the corner by the coal merchant's and very nearly collided with a tall young man in a grey suit who was coming the other way with the unhurried gait of one who owns the pavement and is merely lending the rest of it to the public.

"I do beg your--" Eve began, and stopped dead, staring.

"Not at all," said the young man, raising his hat with the smooth courtesy of a man to whom collisions with agreeable strangers were an everyday incident of London life. "The fault, if fault there be, is entirely mine, for occupying at one and the same moment the portion of pavement which you yourself had marked down for your own use. A selfish habit, and one I am trying to break myself of."

Eve continued to stare. There was something in the set of the eyeglass, something in the general architecture of the young man, that struck a chord; and yet he was wearing a hat, which the man of the morning had conspicuously not been, and this small discrepancy was enough to leave her more than half in doubt.

"Haven't we," she said, "met before?"

"It is the dream of my life," said the young man, "that we should. I feel, however, bound in honesty to say that if we had, I could scarcely have forgotten it, and as I have not the felicity of forgetting it, I am reluctantly driven to conclude that we have not."

"You're quite sure?"

"I am seldom quite sure of anything," said the young man, with the air of one confiding a guiding principle of life, "but on this point I will go as far as a man reasonably can. Were you, perhaps, thinking of my cousin? I have an unfortunate cousin who is very frequently mistaken for me, to his own considerable annoyance and, I need hardly say, to mine."

Eve found herself, against her better judgment, laughing.

"It must have been the cousin, then," she said.

"It was unquestionably the cousin," said the young man, with the satisfaction of a point settled. "He gets about a good deal, and always at the wrong moments. I trust he behaved himself?"

"He lent me an umbrella."

"Then I retract every hard word I have ever privately thought about him. It sounds a most creditable performance. I hope you gave him no opportunity to spoil it by talking."

"I don't believe I heard him say a single word."

"A man of sense," said the young man, and, glancing at a large watch, added that he feared he was intruding upon time which she had no doubt earmarked for weightier things, bowed, and went on his way down the street, leaving Eve to continue hers with the settled conviction that she had, in fact, been talking to the man of the umbrella, and the equally settled conviction that nothing whatever was to be got out of him by direct assault.

* * * * *

The interview, when it came, did not proceed at all along the lines Eve had rehearsed for it during a wakeful ten minutes the night before. She had pictured herself questioned closely as to her knowledge of first editions, her familiarity with the Dewey system, her views on the proper treatment of vellum; and she had prepared, with some pride, answers to all of these. She was not prepared to find the ninth Earl of Emsworth, a large, mild, scattered-looking gentleman with an expression of profound and settled anxiety, patting his pockets with mounting distress the moment she was shown in.

"Miss--ah--" he said.

"Halliday," said Eve.

"Halliday, to be sure. You must forgive me, Miss Halliday, I have mislaid my glasses, and without them I am very little use to anyone. Baxter generally--but Baxter is not here." He patted himself again, without result, and subsided into a chair with the air of a man who has abandoned, for the moment, an unequal struggle. "You have come about the library."

"Yes, Lord Emsworth. I have references, if you would care to--"

"References," said Lord Emsworth, brightening for a moment as at a word he recognised, and then dimming again as he remembered he could not read them. "Yes. Quite so. Very proper." He gazed at the folded papers in her hand with the baffled respect of a man confronted with a document in a foreign tongue. "My sister Constance tells me you are extremely well qualified. I have no doubt that is the case. Constance is very rarely wrong about these things, though I have sometimes felt--however." He seemed to recollect himself. "You are fond of gardens, Miss Halliday?"

"I--yes, very," said Eve, somewhat startled.

"Ah," said Lord Emsworth, with the profound satisfaction of a man who has found solid ground at last, and for the better part of ten minutes gave her, without further reference to catalogues, or vellum, or the Dewey system, a full and moving account of the campaign he was at that moment waging against a colony of greenfly which had established itself, with what he clearly regarded as calculated malice, among his roses. Eve, who knew nothing whatever about greenfly, said "How dreadful" and "Surely not" in what she hoped were the right places, and was rewarded by seeing her prospective employer grow steadily more cheerful, until at last, glancing at his watch and appearing mildly surprised to find so much of the afternoon gone, he rose.

"Well, well," he said, "I am sure you will do admirably, Miss Halliday. Admirably. Shall we say you come down to Blandings on the third? My sister will write to you with the particulars. I am so sorry about my glasses--most vexing--but I feel we have had a most satisfactory talk."

And Eve, who was reasonably certain that she had not once been asked whether she could catalogue so much as a laundry list, found herself out in Dover Street again, engaged, and slightly dazed by the manner of her engagement.

* * * * *

That evening the smoking-room of the Drones received, among its usual population, Mike Jackson, who dropped into the chair opposite Psmith's with the air of a man glad of company and a whisky-and-soda.

"Been a queer sort of day," he said, when the whisky-and-soda had arrived. "Phyllis's friend Eve--Eve Halliday, the girl who came to tea the other day, you remember--she's landed some job cataloguing a library down in Shropshire. Blandings Castle, if you please. Went off this afternoon to be interviewed by the old boy himself."

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith thoughtfully.

"That's the name. Nice girl. Phyllis is frightfully pleased about it--says she badly needed the money." Mike talked on for a while of other things, of Phyllis, of the farm in Lincolnshire, of nothing in particular, and presently took himself off, pleading an engagement.

Psmith remained where he was. He picked up, from the small table at his elbow, an umbrella which had cost him, by any reasonable reckoning, several hundred per cent more than its market value, and turned it over once in his hands before setting it down again. Then, in the quiet of the emptying smoking-room, he said the name over to himself, softly, as a man might try a new coin between finger and thumb to test the ring of it.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith.

The tide of astonishment, once it has fairly got hold of a man, does not spend itself in a single wave. No sooner had I made sure that this sunburnt, laughing gentleman, with his arm still round my neck, was indeed our Mr. Franklin come to us four hours before his time, than I found myself asking, in a kind of stupefaction, why he had come at all in such a hurry, and by what enchantment he had contrived to drop out of the sky, as one may say, upon the Shivering Sand. Mr. Franklin, seeing the question in my face before I could get it into words, laughed, and hauled me up off the beach by main force.

“All in good time, Betteredge!” says he. “You shall have the whole history, from beginning to end, the moment I have got the sand out of my shoes and the sea air into my lungs. Lord! how good it is to smell this place again! Come along to the house, and I’ll tell you as we go.”

We set off together, back through the sandhills and the melancholy plantation of firs, Mr. Franklin talking all the way, in that light-hearted, rattling manner of his, which put me in mind of his poor mother—she was always for taking the short road to everything, dear lady, and Mr. Franklin, though he had French and German and I don’t know what else rubbed into him abroad, had never rubbed *that* out. He talked of his journey, and of the weather, and of the crops, and of fifty things besides, before he came round, in his own good time, to the one thing I was waiting to hear.

“I daresay you have been wondering,” he said, at last, “what has become of my luggage, and my dignity, and my four hours, Betteredge. I posted here from the station like a man driving for a wager. The plain truth of it is, I had a letter in London yesterday which put wings to my heels.”

“A letter, sir?” says I.

“A letter, Betteredge, from Mr. Bruff—and here it is, for your own reading, if you have a mind to it. You are as safe as the strong-room at the bank, and safer than most strong-rooms I know of, so I don’t mind trusting you with it.”

He put his hand into his breast-pocket, and gave me a letter, a good deal crumpled with carrying, and worn soft at the folds, as if it had been read a great many times over on the journey. I put on my spectacles, and read it, standing still in the plantation, while Mr. Franklin walked on a step or two, and waited for me among the trees. Here it is, copied out fair, exactly as it was written:

> “GRAY’S INN SQUARE, *Wednesday.* > > “MY DEAR FRANKLIN,—A word of business, in haste, before you leave town. > > “I told you, when I saw you yesterday, that the Colonel’s bequest to your cousin Rachel would reach you, through me, in ample time for her birthday. I am obliged, since then, to alter my plan, and I write to explain why. > > “A person calling himself an agent for a firm of jewel-merchants in the City called at this office this morning, and asked, under pretence of some question about a debt of the late Colonel’s, a number of questions concerning the article in question, which I did not choose to answer, and which had, in my judgment, no honest object behind them. I have since had it reported to me—on authority I see no reason to doubt—that the same person, or one answering to his description, has been seen twice this week loitering in this square, apparently with an eye on the comings and goings of this office. I say nothing yet of what conclusion is to be drawn from this; I only say that a valuable thing, once it becomes known to be on its travels, attracts a curiosity which is sometimes more than idle. > > “Under these circumstances, I do not care to trust the thing to any conveyance but a safe one, and I know none safer than your own pocket. I send it to you, therefore, by this letter, in a sealed packet, to be delivered by your own hand into Lady Verinder’s keeping, or into such keeping as she may direct, immediately on your arrival, and not to be spoken of, more than you can help, on the road. Get to Yorkshire, in short, my dear Franklin, as fast as horses and steam can carry you, and let the thing be under a safe roof, and out of your hands, before you are a day older. When it is once housed at your aunt’s, and the date of Miss Rachel’s birthday still some weeks off, I shall breathe easy again, and so, I have no doubt, will you. > > “Yours truly, > “MATTHEW BRUFF.”

I gave the letter back to Mr. Franklin, and, I don’t mind confessing it, I looked at him a little harder than common. My thoughts, I am afraid, went back, in spite of me, to the three brown Indians, and the boy, and the trance, and Penelope’s frightened face, and what the boy had said about the gentleman having It about him. I am not a superstitious man, as I think I have told you already more than once in the course of this writing; but there are times when things fit together a little too neatly for an easy mind, and this, I own, was one of them.

“Well, Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, watching me, “you look as if Mr. Bruff’s letter had spoilt your dinner for you.”

“It’s not the letter, sir,” I said, “so much as a matter that fell out here yesterday, which I promised to mention to you the first opportunity—and here it comes, in the shape of your question.” And with that I told him, as shortly as I could, the whole story of the jugglers on the terrace, and the boy in the trance, and what the boy had said about the English gentleman and the Diamond. I call it the Diamond, having by this time no more doubt of what “It” meant, than I have of my own existence.

Mr. Franklin took it more seriously than I had looked for. He walked on a little way without speaking, biting his lip, and knitting his eyebrows together, foreign fashion. “Three Indians,” he repeated, half to himself, “and a boy—and a trance. Betteredge, my uncle Herncastle has more enemies than one in this world, dead as he is, and I begin to think some of them have long memories, and longer arms than we give them credit for. Well! we will keep our own counsel about it, you and I, and we will keep the thing itself under lock and key the moment we are indoors, and there’s an end of it for to-day.”

We came out of the plantation upon the drive before the house while he was speaking, and there he stopped, and felt in his breast-pocket again, and brought out a small flat packet, done up in white paper, and sealed in three places with his own seal.

“Here, Betteredge,” he said, giving it into my hand, “take this, and don’t let it out of your own keeping. I want it locked up to-night in the safest place you have got in the house—the plate-room, if that’s the safest—and I want you to see it done yourself, and to give me the key afterwards, if you don’t object to the trouble. I would rather not carry it about my own pocket a moment longer than I need, and Lady Verinder has not come in yet for me to give it into her own hands, as Mr. Bruff directs. To-morrow will do for that.”

I took the packet from him. It was not heavy, and it was not large—you might have got it, easily enough, into an ordinary greatcoat pocket—and there was nothing about the outside of it to tell a plain man like me what was inside. I am an inquisitive old fellow in a general way, as this narrative has, I daresay, shown you often enough already; but I knew better than to ask Mr. Franklin any questions about what he chose to keep sealed up. A servant who begins prying into his employers’ sealed packets is a servant who won’t be a servant long, in my opinion, and a very good opinion too. So I only said, “It shall be done directly, sir,” and carried it into the house with me, holding it, I don’t mind owning, rather more carefully than I generally carry things.

The plate-room at our house is a little stone chamber off the pantry, with a door of its own and a lock of its own, of which I keep the key, along with the rest of the great bunch that dangles at my side wherever I go, like the Steward in an old picture. I put Mr. Franklin’s packet on the shelf, among the spoons and the christening-cups and all the rest of my lady’s silver, and I turned the key on it with my own hand, and I put the key in my waistcoat pocket, and there, so far as I am concerned, this part of my story stops, for the plain reason that from that hour to the hour I am now writing of, I know no more what was inside that white paper than you do.

Mr. Franklin went off to make himself fit to be seen, my lady and Miss Rachel not being expected back from their lunching engagement till the evening; and I went off, in my turn, to see about airing Mr. Franklin’s room, and getting his portmanteaus up, and generally setting the house to rights for the reception of a guest who had taken it into his head to arrive half a day before anybody looked for him.

It was well on in the afternoon, and I was crossing the hall, when I ran against my daughter Penelope, looking, I thought, a little put out.

“If you please, father,” says she, “Nancy has come back from the sands without Rosanna.”

“Without Rosanna?” says I. “Why, what’s become of the girl?”

“She wouldn’t come in to dinner, Nancy says, and when Nancy pressed her, she said she had a mind for a walk by herself, and set off towards Cobb’s Hole, and Nancy couldn’t get another word out of her.”

Now, Cobb’s Hole, as I think I have told you, is our fishing village, a mile or so along the coast from the Shivering Sand, where Rosanna’s one friend in these parts, a good, motherly sort of woman, kept a little shop of odds and ends for the fisherfolk. It was not so very out of the way for the girl to walk over there of an afternoon, when her turn was free; and yet, coming as it did the very same day I had left her crying on the sands, with her talk about graves and suffocating people, it did not please me to hear it.

“Did she look ill?” I asked.

“She looked strange, father—that’s all Nancy could say of her. Strange, and not herself.”

I said something about young women who let their fancies run away with their common sense, meaning it more to comfort Penelope than because I believed it myself, and I sent her back to her work, and went on with mine, though I will own the matter sat uneasily on me for the rest of the afternoon, in among the beds to be aired and the towels to be counted.

My lady and Miss Rachel came home towards six o’clock, and there was, as was natural, a great to-do over Mr. Franklin’s early arrival, and a great deal of kissing and shaking of hands in the hall, into the particulars of which I need not enter, seeing that Miss Rachel had no more to do with the events of that evening than the reader has, and had best be left, for the present, out of a story that does not concern her yet. I was in the hall myself, seeing to the boxes, when I heard my lady say to Mr. Franklin, in a lower voice than her usual way of speaking, “Your letter reached me this morning, Franklin, and I have thought over what you say in it. Understand this, once for all, before we go any further: your uncle’s name is not to be mentioned under my roof. Whatever else is to be settled between us, that much is settled already.”

“Whatever you please, aunt,” says Mr. Franklin, readily enough. “I have no wish to renew old quarrels that were none of my making. Let the Colonel rest.”

“Let him rest,” says my lady, and there the matter dropped, she leading the way in to the drawing-room, and Mr. Franklin following her, and I being left, as is right and proper for a servant, to know no more of what lay under those few words than I have set down here, word for word, as I heard them. I have my own notions, as you may guess, seeing what has gone before in this statement; but a notion is not a fact, and I have promised Mr. Franklin and Mr. Bruff, in setting down this history, to state nothing but what I know.

The evening wore on, quiet enough on the face of it, with Mr. Franklin brightening up my lady’s dinner-table in his foreign, easy way, till you would never have guessed, to hear him, that there was such a thing in the world as a sealed packet in a plate-room, or a letter from a lawyer in his coat-pocket. I looked in once or twice at the servants’ hall, to ask after Rosanna, and each time the answer was the same—not come back yet. Nancy grumbled, and Penelope fretted, and I own that I myself, though I said little about it, kept half an ear turned towards the kitchen door the whole evening through, listening for a step that did not come.

The house grew quiet at last, room by room, as houses do; and when everybody else had gone up, I sat on a while by myself in my own little room, with my pipe, and my beehive chair, and my dog-eared old friend Robinson Crusoe, open at one of his most comforting chapters, on my knee. The key of the plate-room lay safe in my waistcoat pocket, where I could feel it every time I moved; and there, snug behind three locks of my own turning, lay whatever it was that Mr. Franklin had carried down from London at such a pace, and Mr. Bruff had thought fit to write such a letter about. Midnight came, and I knocked the ashes out of my pipe, and gave one last look towards the kitchen passage before I went up to my bed. Rosanna Spearman had not come home.

It came in the middle of the night, three days after that quiet walk—a splendid green streak that flashed across the sky far to the north, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Ockham described it as being about as bright as the moon. A few belated cyclists between Horsell and Maybury saw a similar green flash to the south, and Albin, going home from some belated errand, testified to a flash that lit the road green for an instant. But nobody in Woking or Ottershaw seems to have troubled about it. The thing must have fallen while I slept, for I had gone to bed early, my head still full of the Signs of the Zodiac and the pleasant tiredness of the ride. I remember nothing of that night but ordinary dreams.

It was Ogilvy who told me of it in the morning, coming to my door before I had properly breakfasted, in a state of scientific excitement that overrode even his customary reserve. He had been up before dawn, drawn by the meteor of the night before, hoping to find the fragments of it on Horsell Common; and he had found something so much stranger than fragments that he had come, hot and dusty from his bicycle, to fetch me to see it.

"It's a projectile, man—a huge cylinder, and it's still hot," he said, and would say little more until we were on the road. "Buried itself, more than half, in the sand of the pit by the golf links. Struck the earth with the most tremendous force. There's a great scar—you can see it a mile off. The sand and gravel flung every way, made a sort of embankment. Shook the whole common."

I had by this time dressed and we set off together, I wheeling my own bicycle. The morning was hot and still, the sky one high dome of blue, without a cloud, and along the road we passed labourers going to their work and gave them no more thought than they gave us; but Ogilvy talked all the way in a low, hurried voice, of the spectral analysis he meant to make, of the peculiar heat of the thing, of a hundred small technical matters that meant little to me then. He was a slight man, I should explain, with a face like a bird's, quick and bright-eyed, and he had a way of walking with his head thrust forward, as if he were perpetually about to peck at some interesting fact.

Horsell Common lies between Woking and Ottershaw, a waste of pine and heather cut up by sandy tracks, and it was on the far side of it, near the sand-pits, that we came upon the thing. Even at a distance one could see that the common had been violently disturbed: a great ragged scar of flung earth and torn heather ran towards a wide hollow that had never, to my knowledge, held water before, but held it now—a shallow, muddy pool, widened, I suppose, by the excavation of the fall, and fed perhaps by some spring the shock had opened. And there, in the middle of that new and dirty pond, lay the Thing itself.

It was a huge cylinder, caked over and its outline softened by a thick scaly dun-coloured incrustation, perhaps thirty yards across—I am not skilled at judging such distances—half buried in the mud and water, the visible end rounded and enormous, rising out of the pool like the back of some vast drowned beast. A thin thread of vapour rose from it into the still morning air, wavering and dispersing, and every now and then a faint hissing could be heard, and a fine drizzle of drops fell back into the pool with a sound like rain on a still pond. The heat of it must have been prodigious, for the mud immediately about it was dry and cracked, and where the water lapped against the curve of the thing it seemed almost to shrink back in a faint mist. A few rooks wheeled and clamoured about it overhead, and beyond that, and the trickle and hiss of the steam, the common was extraordinarily still.

There were two or three men from Horsell already standing at a cautious distance along the bank, staring, and a wagoner had left his horse and cart on the road and come across the heather to look, but no one had gone near the water's edge. I confess that for some minutes I only stood and stared, my mind curiously empty of anything but the fact of the thing's size and stillness and heat. It did not look like any ordinary bolide; the flattened top, the regularity of the curve, gave it a queer suggestion of design, of having been made rather than fallen, and I said as much to Ogilvy.

"Nonsense," he said, with a shortness that surprised me, considering his excitement of an hour before. "You're letting your imagination run off with you, exactly as the Chertsey people will. It's a meteorite, and a very fine one, and quite big enough to make its interest without inventing riddles about it."

"But the shape of it—"

"Meteorites are not all potatoes, my dear fellow. Nickel-iron masses fall in all sorts of shapes; there's nothing in a rounded cylinder to trouble a physicist. The heat has probably fused the outer part into that scaly crust—you see it's exactly the sort of surface you'd expect from a body that has torn its way through the atmosphere at cosmic speed. I shall be able to tell you more when it's cooled enough to get a fragment off it. There is nothing whatever mysterious about it except its size, and even that is not unprecedented."

"It's hollow," I said, for indeed as I looked I thought I could trace, near the rounded end, a faint line, a suggestion of a seam or rim, like the lid of a great pot.

"A flaw in the crust. Shrinkage as it cooled, very likely, or a fault in the original mass. I tell you, Wells"—which was not, of course, what he called me, but I use it here for convenience—"I have seen a good many meteorites in my time, and there is nothing about this one, beyond its remarkable dimensions, that need trouble anybody's peace of mind. It will make a very pretty specimen for the museum once we have dug it out, and that is the whole of the matter."

I did not answer him at once, for in truth the sight of the thing—the heat coming off it in visible waves, the slow, deliberate hiss and drip, the way it lay so massively and so patiently in that new-made pool as if it had every right to be there—stirred something in me that no talk of nickel-iron could quite lay to rest. But Ogilvy was not a man to be argued out of a position once he had stated it with that particular flatness of tone, and I had, besides, no evidence to set against his authority; he was, after all, the astronomer, and I only a writer of speculative essays. So I let the matter drop, and we stood a while longer watching the vapour rise and thin against the blue, and the rooks wheel, and the little group of onlookers grow by ones and twos as word of the thing spread along the Chobham road.

It was nearly nine, I suppose, and the sun well up and hot, when I left Ogilvy—who meant to stay by the pit and make what observations he could as the thing cooled—and went home to breakfast, and to tell my wife what I had seen. She was more struck by my account than I had expected; I think the notion of a thing fallen out of the sky, still hot from its flight, appealed to something in her that was not merely curious but almost tender, as though the thing might be hurt or frightened, absurd as that sounds. In any case she would come and see it, and no persuasion of mine that it was a dusty, muddy business, and hardly fit for a summer frock, had the least effect upon her; so before ten we were walking back across the common together, she in her light dress and I still faintly ashamed of the mud that had dried on my boots.

The news had travelled further than I had thought possible in so short a time. By the time we reached the sand-pits there must have been fifty or sixty people gathered along the rim of the hollow, men and boys chiefly, but a fair sprinkling of women too, and two or three governesses with children who ought, I thought, to have been better employed. A photographer had set up his camera on the bank, and a couple of cyclists lay in the heather near him, their machines flung down anyhow, watching with the frank, idle interest of men who have nothing better to do on a fine morning. The pool had shrunk a little, I fancied, as though the ground about it were slowly drinking up the water the shock had loosed, and the mud all round the cylinder had cracked into a crazed pattern like the bottom of a dried summer pond. The hissing had grown fainter, but the vapour still rose, thinner now, and the whole mass of the thing seemed, if anything, larger for being more of it exposed.

Ogilvy was still there, moving about the margin with a small note-book, stooping now and again to test the heat of the ground with his hand held close above it, and looking, on the whole, extremely pleased with himself and the morning's work. He greeted my wife with his usual courtesy, and fell at once, almost before the greetings were done, to explaining to her, as he had explained to me, the perfectly ordinary and unremarkable nature of the visitor.

"A very large meteorite, Mrs.—" he began, and went through very much the substance of what he had told me an hour before, the cosmic velocities, the fusing of the crust, the shrinkage that might account for that curious seam near the top, until my wife, who has a countryman's shrewd patience with theorising men, asked him, quite simply, why, if it were so ordinary a thing, it was taking so long to cool, and why he did not go and put his hand upon it to prove his point. He laughed at that, not entirely comfortably, and said that a mass of that size might very well take a day or more to lose its heat, being as it was, deep-fused throughout, and that he had no need to burn his fingers to establish what any physicist would grant him without the experiment.

It was, in fact, within a very few minutes of this that the thing happened which gave my wife, at least, a fright out of all proportion, as I thought at the time, to its cause. A young fellow—one of the group of labourers and idlers who had by now made a rough circle at what they took to be a safe distance—had grown impatient, I suppose, of watching, and, egged on by his companions, had scrambled down the crumbling bank into the mud to get, as he said, "a proper look," and had laid his open hand flat against the crust of the cylinder near the water's edge, where it seemed, to the eye, no longer to be steaming. He gave a most dreadful cry, and staggered back into the mud, clutching his hand and swearing in a high, startled voice, and had to be helped up the bank by two of his fellows, his palm already reddening and blistering before our eyes. There was a great deal of confused talk and sympathy and a general drawing back from the pool's edge, and someone ran for water, though there was water enough all about us, and someone else produced a dirty handkerchief, and the young man was borne off towards Chobham nursing his hand and looking, more than anything, ashamed of himself before the crowd.

It was a small enough mishap, no more than a bad scald, but it altered the temper of the gathering more than I should have thought possible; people drew back a good ten or twenty yards from the margin of the hollow, and a kind of hush went over them, though within a few minutes the talk had begun again, louder if anything, everyone offering an opinion as to the heat of the thing and the folly of the young man in touching it. My wife had gone quite pale, and pressed close to my arm, and said in a low voice that she did not like it, and would I take her home; and though I confess my own curiosity was by now thoroughly kindled, and I would gladly have stayed the whole day watching that patient, steaming shape and Ogilvy's busy, unshaken confidence, I could not in decency refuse her. I walked back with her to the edge of the common, and stood there a little while in the shade of the pines, persuading her that there was no real danger, that the poor fellow had been careless rather than unlucky, and that I would follow her home directly, having only a mind to hear what more Ogilvy might make of his specimen before the day was out.

She went at last, though reluctantly, and with more than one backward glance along the path, and I watched her small figure grow smaller among the gorse and bracken until the rise of the ground hid her from me; and then I turned back towards the sand-pits, where the crowd, forgetful already of the burned hand, was thickening steadily under the noonday sun, and the cylinder lay in its cooling mud, patient, monstrous, and still.

When she awoke she was ashamed to find that she had been asleep and still more surprised to see that the train had stopped at a station and that Mrs. Medlock was shaking her shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brougham stood on the road before the little outside platform. Mary saw that it was a smart carriage and that it was a smart footman who helped her in. But it was not the footman who spoke first. A man was standing near the carriage door and Mary knew almost before she looked at him fully that it must be her uncle. He was a tall man, and, in spite of the crooked shoulder Basil had spoken of, held himself rather well. He had black hair streaked with white and a dark face, and his black eyes seemed to look at everything and nothing at once. Mrs. Medlock's manner changed at once. She became almost humble.

"This is Miss Mary, sir," she said.

Mr. Craven bent his head slightly and looked down at Mary without any particular expression, as if she were a small, plain object which had been sent to him and which he had not asked for and did not know what to do with. He did not put out his hand.

"How do you do," he said. His voice was low and cold, and Mary, who was not accustomed to being spoken to gently, thought there was nothing strange in that. She made no answer, only stared up at him, and after a moment his eyes moved away from her as if he had already forgotten she was there.

"Take good care of her, Medlock," he said, and turned and walked away toward another carriage which was waiting a little farther on. Mary heard the door of it shut. That was all. He had not asked her about the voyage, or about her father and mother, or told her anything of the house she was going to. She was not sorry, because she did not want to be talked to; but she thought it a strange thing that a man should send for a child from the other side of the world and then have nothing whatever to say to her when she came.

She was helped into the brougham by the footman, and Mrs. Medlock got in after her and the door was shut and they drove away. The child was glad that she was not to drive with her uncle. She decided that she liked him even less than she had expected, and she settled herself in her corner of the carriage without a word.

For some time they drove through what seemed to Mary a rather grim little town, and then along smooth roads between hedges, and then, quite suddenly, the hedges stopped and the country changed. There seemed to be no more hedges at all and no trees, and in the darkness she could only feel that on both sides of the narrow road there was a wide expanse of something black which seemed to spread away and away in all directions like a black, waving sea.

"What is that?" she asked Mrs. Medlock, looking out into the dusk.

"That's the moor," Mrs. Medlock answered, with a good-natured smile. "Does tha' think there's nothing there but darkness? There's gorse and broom and bracken on it when it's daylight, and there's ponies and sheep feeding on it."

"I don't like it," said Mary. "I don't like it," and she shut her lips as if she was rather frightened, but did not mean to say so.

The wind was rushing past the carriage windows now, making a wild, low, rushing sound. And just as she was thinking this the carriage gave a sudden lurch and stopped so sharply that Mrs. Medlock was thrown forward against the seat in front of her.

"Eh! what's to do now!" she exclaimed, righting herself and pulling down the window. A man's voice was speaking to the coachman outside, low and troubled, and Mary heard the word "sheep" and something she could not make out about the road.

"There's summat in th' road, ma'am," the coachman called back. "Won't budge for th' lamps."

Mrs. Medlock gave an impatient sound but opened the door herself, grumbling about the damp, and got down to see. Mary, left alone for a moment on the seat, felt so curious that she scrambled down after her before any one could tell her not to.

Outside, the night air struck her face, cold and full of a strange, sweetish smell she did not know, of wet earth and growing things. The moor stretched away on every side, so black that she could not tell where it ended and the sky began, except that here and there a star showed through ragged clouds. The wind went past her in a long breath, and the darkness seemed enormous, much larger than any darkness she had known in India, and for a moment she felt smaller than she had ever felt in her life. Just ahead, caught in the yellow light of the carriage lamps, a sheep stood quite still in the middle of the road, staring at nothing, and would not move though the coachman spoke to it and flapped the reins.

"Get in, get in, you'll take your death," said Mrs. Medlock crossly, seizing Mary's arm and half lifting her back into the brougham, while the footman got down and drove the sheep aside with his hands. In a moment they were moving again.

"Standing about on a moor in the dark is no place for a child," Mrs. Medlock said, settling her mantle about her with a great deal of rustling. "You might have caught your death of cold, and small wonder if you had."

Mary said nothing. She sat and thought about how big and black and endless the moor had seemed, and how the wind had sounded as if it were speaking, and she found that in spite of not liking it she could not stop thinking about it.

At last, after they had driven a long time, they turned in at great iron gates, and drove up a long straight road with trees arching over it, until they came out before the immense front of a house which was so long that Mary could not see either end of it. In the darkness she could only make out that it had many windows, and that most of them were black and unlighted, though one or two high up showed a faint glow.

A big, heavy-looking man opened the door for them, and Mary was led through a great hall, hung with pictures she could scarcely see, and up a staircase, and along more than one corridor, until Mrs. Medlock brought her into a small room where there was a fire and a supper laid on a table.

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

It was in this room that Mary Lennox first realized she was to have Yorkshire spoken to her a good deal in the days to come, for it was not Mrs. Medlock but a manservant who brought in her supper. He was an elderly man with a broad, weathered face, and he set the tray down and began arranging the dishes, talking as he did so in a slow, rolling voice that seemed to Mary to have hardly any English words in it at all that she could recognize.

"Tha's a poor bit of a lass to come so far," he said, or something like it, for Mary could not be sure. "Tha mun sup thi milk while it's warm, an' there's a bit o' cold mutton an' apple tak' if tha's a mind."

Mary stared at him. "I don't understand you," she said, in the cold, plain way she always spoke to servants. "Speak so that I can understand."

The man seemed a little taken aback, but not offended. He gave a short laugh and glanced at Mrs. Medlock.

"Eh, she'll noan understand Yorkshire yet awhile," he said, in the same broad speech, and went out shaking his head.

Mrs. Medlock, who was arranging some things on a shelf, glanced round.

"That's Martha's father, or her uncle, I don't rightly know which, but he's been about the house forty years," she said. "You'll get used to the way folks talk here soon enough."

"I don't want to get used to it," said Mary. "I don't like it."

Mrs. Medlock looked at her a moment as if she thought this a very disagreeable remark, but said nothing more about it, and after telling Mary to eat her supper and go to bed, since they would both be tired in the morning, she went away and left her alone.

Mary sat down to the mutton and the bread and butter without much appetite, for she was more tired than hungry, and she thought about the man's broad, brown face and his queer talk, and about her uncle's cold eyes which had looked at her and seemed to see nothing, and about the sheep standing so still in the road, and the great black moor going on and on into the dark. It was all so unlike India that she felt as if she had been carried to the other side of the world, which, in fact, she had.

When she had eaten as much as she meant to, she did not ring for any one, but stood up and looked about the room, which was strange to her, with its heavy curtains and its old dark furniture, and then, because there was nothing else to do, she undressed slowly and got into the large bed, where she lay staring at the fire, which had sunk to a red, dull glow.

She was almost asleep when she heard it--a low, dull, wailing sound, coming, it seemed, from a long way off inside the house, rising and falling, and then dying away, and rising again. It was not like the wind on the moor, which had rushed and gone; this sound seemed to come from within the walls themselves, from somewhere far along the dark corridors.

She sat up in bed and listened with all her might. The sound had stopped, but in a few moments she heard it again, farther off, or so it seemed.

"What is it?" she said aloud, though there was no one to hear her.

Mrs. Medlock's step came along the passage just then, and she opened the door to see that all was right, a candle in her hand.

"Did you hear anything?" Mary asked her.

"No," said Mrs. Medlock, "I heard nothing but the wind. It sounds like there's voices on the moor sometimes, this time of year, if you're not used to it. Go to sleep."

She shut the door and her footsteps went away down the corridor, and the house was quiet again except for the far-off rushing of the wind outside. But Mary lay awake in the dark, quite sure in her own mind that the sound she had heard had been no more like wind than the barking of a dog, and she made up her thoughts, stubbornly, as she made up her thoughts about everything, that whatever it was, and whoever said it was the wind, she meant to find out for herself what it really was.

I set off for the village on foot, for I did not care to wait for the car to be brought round, and my mind was in such a whirl that the exercise was welcome. The dawn had given place to a grey, sullen morning; the storm that had threatened overnight had passed us by, spending itself elsewhere, but the air was still heavy and oppressive, as though in mockery of what had gone before.

I found Poirot's little house without difficulty, and was surprised, on knocking, to have the door opened to me at once, before I had well finished. Poirot himself stood there, fully dressed.

"Hastings!" he cried. "But come in, come in! You bring me bad news, I fear?"

"You have heard, then?" I said, taken aback.

"But yes, I have heard." He drew me in, and closed the door. "It was Mademoiselle Cynthia's little friend, the one from the dispensary, who lodges with old Mrs. Mace at the chemist's shop. She came running with the milk this morning, all agog with the story. Madame Inglethorp is dead, and it is thought—but I need not tell you what is thought, my friend, since I see it very plainly written on your own countenance."

"Poirot," I said, "I have come to ask you—to beg you—to come back with me and investigate this matter thoroughly."

He laid his hand for a moment on my shoulder. "I will do all that I can, be very sure of that. But tell me, is there suspicion?"

"Bauerstein suspects it. There is to be a post-mortem. But, Poirot, I am sure it is more than suspicion."

"Do not excite yourself, mon ami. Let us be exact, and let us be calm. Tell me the symptoms, and I will tell you my opinion."

I described, as accurately as I could, all that had occurred during the night—the convulsions, the tetanic rigidity, the final arching of the body. Poirot nodded once or twice.

"The rigidity after death—did you observe it?"

"I did not remain to see."

"It is important. There are few poisons which produce that particular symptom. It gives me, already, an idea." He was pulling on his boots as he spoke, with the neat, precise movements that characterized all he did. "You have brought a suit of my clothes for me, I hope? No? No matter, I will not detain you. Let us go."

We walked back to Styles at a good pace, but Poirot, though clearly as anxious as I was to arrive, would talk of nothing on the way but the details of the previous evening—the guests, the household, Mrs. Inglethorp's manner and appearance. He questioned me minutely about the scene at supper, and about the quarrel Dorcas had reported, and listened with his head a little on one side, like an attentive robin, saying nothing beyond an occasional "Precisely" or "Continue, I pray you."

As we turned in at the lodge gates we heard the sound of a car behind us, and stood aside to let it pass. It slowed, however, and stopped, and Alfred Inglethorp's black-bearded face looked out at us.

"My God! Is it true?" he cried, springing down. His face was working with agitation. "Baily met me with the news at the station. I could not believe it—I cannot believe it now."

"It is quite true, Mr. Inglethorp," I said.

He passed his hand across his face. "Emily—dead! And I not here! Where was I? At the very moment—" He broke off, and I could not tell whether the emotion he displayed was genuine grief, or something less creditable. I introduced Poirot, who watched him with those queer green eyes of his, missing, I felt certain, nothing.

"You have been from home all night, monsieur?" Poirot asked gently.

"Yes, yes—I was detained at Mr. Denby's, over at Marston. I had some papers to look through with him regarding the estate, and it grew so late that he pressed me to stay the night rather than walk back. I have only this moment heard, at the station, on my way home."

"I see," said Poirot. "And Dr. Bauerstein, who walked with you as far as the village—he returned home directly, I suppose?"

"Yes—that is—I believe so. I did not see him again after we parted at the gate of Mr. Denby's garden."

We went on together to the house. John met us in the hall, his face grey and drawn with the sleepless night. He shook hands with Poirot without a word, and it was left to me to make the necessary explanations.

Dorcas came through the hall at that moment, and stopped, dropping a little curtsy at the sight of Mr. Inglethorp.

"Oh, sir, thank God you're back! We were that anxious—and to think of you walking in from Marston this morning, and you not knowing!"

"I did not walk, Dorcas," said Inglethorp, a shade impatiently. "I came out in the trap from the station just now, as you saw."

"But surely, sir," said Dorcas, staring, "I made sure you'd have come from Marston on foot, seeing as your boots was that clean and dry when I brushed them—and you left them outside your door, sir, in the small hours, or leastways I found them there when I came down." She stopped, confused, evidently feeling she had said more than was tactful, and, with another curtsy, hurried away towards the servants' quarters.

Inglethorp had gone rather red. "The woman is talking nonsense," he said, but his eyes did not meet mine. "I—I dare say Baily brought them in for me from the trap without my noticing." John said nothing, but I saw a look pass between him and Poirot, and I knew that the little Belgian's attention had been sharply caught, though his face betrayed nothing beyond polite interest.

"No matter, no matter," Poirot murmured smoothly. "These are details we can clear up at our leisure. For the moment, monsieur, permit me to offer you my sympathy in this terrible loss."

Inglethorp muttered something and went on into the house. Poirot detained me with a touch on the arm, and let him get out of earshot.

"That is a curious little contradiction, is it not, my friend?" he said softly.

"You think he is lying?"

"I think nothing, as yet. I observe, that is all. It is my business to observe. But now, I should much like to see the room where the tragedy occurred, and I should like to hear the exact arrangements of last night from someone who was here throughout. You yourself were not in the house all the evening, I think you said?"

"No, Lawrence and I dined at the dispensary with Miss Murdoch, and did not return until after Mr. Inglethorp had gone out with Dr. Bauerstein."

"Then let us find Mademoiselle Cynthia, or Madame Cavendish, presently. But first, the room."

John, on being applied to, produced the key which Dr. Bauerstein had given him, and led us up. I noticed that his step lagged as we approached the door, as though he shrank from entering; and, indeed, he did not come in with us, but left us on the threshold, murmuring something about seeing to the servants, and went away down the passage with evident relief.

Poirot unlocked the door, and we went in together. The room was much as I had last seen it, save that the bed had been straightened, and the little table by the bed set upright again. The pale morning light came coldly through the curtains.

Poirot stood for a moment just inside the door, and I saw his glance travel swiftly and methodically round the room—to the bed, to the overturned table, to the grate with its feebly smouldering remains, to the row of ornaments on the mantelpiece, to the windows. Then he moved forward, and began an examination so minute that I could hardly keep from smiling, in spite of the tragedy of the occasion. He went down on his knees and examined the carpet by the bed inch by inch. He picked up the little table, still lying where it had fallen, and studied its position with great care, measuring, with a small tape he took from his pocket, the distance from the bed. He examined the ashes in the grate, sifting them delicately with a pair of tongs. He went to the mantelpiece and looked long and earnestly at the row of ornaments there, though what he expected to find among such prim and innocent objects I could not imagine. Once he gave a little exclamation, quickly suppressed, and I saw him incline his head, as a dog does when it has picked up a scent.

"You have found something?" I asked eagerly.

"Chut!" was his only answer, and he went on with his search.

Presently his eye fell upon a despatch-case standing on a table near the bed—the very one, I remembered, which Mrs. Inglethorp had asked Cynthia to bring up to her the evening before. He tried the lock; it was locked. He looked at it a long time without touching it further, and then turned his attention elsewhere.

At last, he went to the dressing-table, and stood before it, very still. I came and stood beside him, but I could see nothing there beyond the ordinary litter of a lady's toilet—brushes, a hand-glass, a little tray of hairpins. Poirot's fingers moved delicately among these things, and then, so quickly that I hardly saw the movement, something passed from the table into his waistcoat pocket.

"Poirot! What is it? What have you found?"

He turned upon me those extraordinarily green eyes, alight now with a suppressed excitement he was at pains to master.

"Nothing, my friend. Nothing of importance—that is to say, nothing that I can speak of yet."

"But you must tell me!"

"Not yet." He shook his head, smiling a little at my evident vexation. "A trifle, Hastings—perhaps nothing at all. You shall see it, since you insist, but you must ask me no questions." And he drew from his pocket, cupped in his hand so that I had to bend close to see it, a tiny fragment—no more than that—of some dark, waxy substance, hardly bigger than a match-head. I turned it over with my eye as best I could without touching it.

"What is it?" I demanded.

"What does it look like?" he countered, with an irritating little smile.

"I have no idea. It might be a scrap of sealing-wax, or—I really cannot say."

"Precisely," said Poirot, and shut his hand upon it again, and returned it to his pocket, leaving me thoroughly exasperated.

It was at this moment that a soft knock came upon the door, and Mary Cavendish looked in, saying that Cynthia was in her room, if Monsieur Poirot wished to speak with her. Poirot thanked her, and we went along together.

Cynthia was sitting by her window, still in her dressing-gown, looking pale and heavy-eyed, and there was something listless and slow in her movements that was quite unlike her usual brisk self. Poirot greeted her with great gentleness.

"I am sorry to disturb you, mademoiselle, at such a time. I have only one little question to ask you. Last night, you were sleeping in the room next to Madame Inglethorp's, and yet, I am told, you did not wake, in spite of the noise of the door being broken in, and all the commotion that followed. Tell me, mademoiselle—did you sleep very soundly last night?"

Cynthia looked at him with her tired eyes. "Yes," she said slowly, as though the question surprised the answer out of her before she had considered it. "Yes, I slept much more soundly than usual—I can't think why, for I hardly ever sleep well. I remember Mary shaking me and shaking me before I could properly wake at all. It was horrible—as if I were coming up through deep water."

"I thank you, mademoiselle. It is exactly as I thought." He bowed over her hand, and we withdrew, leaving her still gazing after us with a puzzled, half-frightened look.

Once outside, I turned on him. "Poirot, what does that mean—about her sleeping so soundly?"

But he only shook his head, and led the way back towards the fatal room, saying that there was yet more to be done there before the day was much older. Once inside, with the door shut behind us, he stood for a moment looking down at the overturned table, and then drew from his pocket once more the little waxy fragment, and set it upon the palm of his hand, holding it out towards the pale light of the window, turning it this way and that as though it might, under sufficient scrutiny, be persuaded to yield up its secret.

"It is strange," he murmured, half to himself, and there was in his voice a note I had not heard before, "it is very strange, Hastings, that a piece so small should trouble me so much."

"Trouble you? Why should it trouble you? What can it possibly signify?"

He did not seem to hear me. He was still gazing at the fragment, his brow furrowed in that intense, concentrated way I had already learned to associate with the working of his extraordinary mind.

"Unless," he said at last, slowly, as though the thought had only that instant presented itself to him, and did not please him at all, "unless, of course, I am wrong from the very beginning."

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Last night was, I think, the pleasantest evening I have spent in months, though it began with an ache in me that I did not look to feel again quite so soon. Quincey had engaged a private room at his club, and had laid on such a supper as only Quincey can order without seeming to have ordered anything at all. Art was late, and came in stamping the rain from his boots and looking, I thought, like a man who has been given the whole world to carry and finds it lighter than a feather. He would not sit down before he had wrung us each by the hand twice over, and Quincey said that if he did not stop he would have him up before the College of Surgeons for malpractice.

Then Art told us, though neither of us needed the telling, that Miss Lucy Westenra had promised to be his wife, and he stood there with his glass in his hand and could not for a full minute say another word, so that Quincey had to give the toast for him, which he did in that grave, gentle way of his that is so much more moving than any amount of fine speaking. "To the best girl that God ever let live," he said, "and to the man that had the sense to ask her before I could work up the words." We drank it standing, and I do not think I have ever meant anything I drank more.

I will set down here, since this diary hears everything else, that there was a moment, while the others laughed over some story of Quincey's about a Texan mule and a revival meeting, when I found I could not laugh with them, and had to busy myself with the decanter until it had passed. It is a small enough wound, and I am ashamed to give it phonograph-room beside Art's happiness. But it went, or very nearly, and I would not for the world have either of them know it had been there at all. We stayed talking till past one, of old times and rough places we had seen together, and parted the best of friends, which we were before and shall be after, whatever else changes about us. I came home a poorer man for the news and a richer one for the evening, if that makes any sense, which I doubt it does to anyone but myself.

I must get back to my work in earnest to-morrow. I have let Renfield's case go three days without a proper note, which is not like me.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*29 May.*--Renfield continues to interest me more than any patient I have had in my five years here. To-day I went to him meaning only to look over his window-fastenings, which he had been tampering with in the night, and found him sitting very quietly with his hands upon his knees, in the attitude of a man waiting for a train. He did not look up at once, and when he did his eyes had that curious clearness they get before one of his outbreaks, though none came.

"Doctor," he said, without any preamble whatever, and in the mild, almost drawing-room voice he can put on when it suits his purpose, "is Miss Lucy Westenra to be married soon?"

I own the question startled me so that I did not answer for a moment, and in that moment he watched me with a queer, patient attention, as though my face would tell him more than my tongue would. I have not spoken her name within these walls, not to the attendants, not even, I think, above a whisper to myself; and how the thing reached him I cannot conceive, unless it be through the servants' talk, which travels through a house of this kind in ways one can never quite trace to their source. I told him, as steadily as I could manage, that I understood the young lady was lately engaged, and asked him in turn why he wished to know.

He smiled then, the close-lipped smile he keeps for the times he means to tell me nothing at all, and said only, "One likes to keep account of one's friends, doctor, even friends one has not had the pleasure to know," and would say no more upon the subject, though I pressed him twice over. He spent the rest of the visit counting flies at the window with his old satisfaction, and I could get nothing further out of him. I have set the exchange down exactly as it passed, for I mean, when I have leisure, to go back over my notes and see whether there is a method under all this madness, as I begin more and more to suspect there is.

*Letter, Sister Elisabeth to Miss Mina Murray.*

“Hospital of St. Joseph, “Klausenburg, “24 July.

“Dear Madam,--

“I write to you at the request, though he does not know I write to-day, of a patient now under our care, whose name I understand from his own papers, and from what he says in his fever, to be Jonathan Harker; and among the little that was found upon him was a note-book with your name and direction written in it as the person to be told in case of need. I trust you will forgive the writing of a stranger, but there was no other course open to me that I could see was honest.

“He was brought to us for some weeks now by carriers from the hill country beyond Bistritz, who found him upon the road in a condition of great exhaustion and high fever, able to tell them nothing of himself, not even his own name. He has lain since under a severe fever of the brain, and though the worst of it is now, I am thankful to say, well behind him, he is still very weak, and his mind is not yet altogether his own. He will talk, sometimes in his sleep and sometimes out of it, of matters so wild and so confused that I set them down to the fever only, as any sensible person must; and I would beg you, when you write to him, as I hope with all my heart you will do very soon, to say nothing that might lead his thoughts back over the ground of his illness, but only such cheerful and homely matter as will help to steady him.

“He has asked for you almost from the first hour he was able to ask for anything, and it is my belief that nothing in the world will mend him so quickly as the knowledge that you have been told, and are not anxious beyond what the case deserves. I would not have you alarmed more than is just; our doctors here are of good skill, and he gains a little, if slowly, with every day that passes. But I could not, in conscience, let so much time go by without a word to the one person whose name he never lets fall from him, waking or sleeping.

“I am, dear Madam, with much sympathy,

“Yours faithfully,

“SR. ELISABETH.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*25 July.*--I have had a letter that has frightened me more than I can well say, and yet I must not let it master me, for Jonathan will need all my courage by-and-by and none of my tears now. A Sister at a hospital in Klausenburg--I had to find it upon the map, and it is such a long way off--writes that he has been very ill of a fever of the brain, and that he asks for me continually. I have written to him at once, though she says he is not yet fit for letters that could trouble him, so I have made mine as light and foolish as I could, all about the school and the weather and nothing at all of my own fright, which was hard work with my hand shaking as it was over the page. I have not told Lucy yet; she is so happy just now, poor dear, with her own good news, that I cannot bear to cloud it, and there is nothing she could do but grieve alongside me, which would help neither of us in the least. I shall write to Mr. Hawkins to-morrow, for he ought to know before anyone, and he may have it in his power to do for Jonathan what I, so far away and so helpless, cannot.

*Telegram, Peter Hawkins to Mina Murray.*

“28 July.

“Harker discharged, quite cured. Sails Thursday. Will be home before you have time to worry.--HAWKINS.”

Lady Russell was the first to come forward with any thing like a definite scheme. She had turned the matter over with all the earnestness of a friend who feels another's distress as her own, and she brought to Kellynch Hall, one morning in July, a paper of figures, closely written, in which every article of the household expenditure had been considered, compared, and, where she thought it possible, reduced. Her plan was serious and honourable; it left Sir Walter still a very fine gentleman, only a less expensive one; it touched the stables, it touched the number of servants, it touched, with a gentle but unflinching hand, the biannual visit to town; and it proposed, by a course of some years' rigid saving, to see him clear of debt without any measure so painful as a change of abode.

Sir Walter heard her to the end with a countenance of increasing suffering, and when she had done, said only, “Is this all?” in a tone which shewed how little he thought it worth the trouble of having been written.

“All that I can, in conscience, ask of you at once, Sir Walter. More might be done in time, as you found the comfort of it.”

“Comfort! There can be no comfort, madam, in living the life of a labouring attorney upon an estate like Kellynch. Robbing the horses of their exercise, turning off servants who have been in the family since my father's time, denying myself the commonest offices of hospitality—these are not the economies of a gentleman, they are the economies of a man who has ceased to be one. I had rather find money any way, than in a way so degrading.”

“I only wish, Sir Walter, that any way could be found which should be less degrading, and yet effectual.”

“There is none. I have considered the subject in every light, and I can find none.” And with this, folding the paper without having read it a second time, he laid it upon the table, in a manner which closed the discussion as effectually as if he had thrown it into the fire.

Mr Shepherd waited on him the same afternoon, having been sent for to give in some account of arrears; and finding the ground already broken, he too ventured, with all the caution of a man who lives by keeping the good will of his employer, to submit a scheme of his own. It was more moderate than Lady Russell's, and, being expressed in the language of business rather than of affection, gave less pain in the hearing, though it went, in effect, very little further. A few economies here, a postponement there, an arrangement with the more pressing of the tradespeople—such was the sum of it; and Sir Walter, though he heard Mr Shepherd with more patience than he had heard Lady Russell, being a man whose vanity was less wounded by the opinion of his lawyer than by that of his friend, was in the end no more disposed to act upon it.

“It will not do, Shepherd. I have already told Lady Russell it will not do. Retrenchment! What is retrenchment to me? I am not asked to give up an unnecessary elegance; I am asked to sink myself to the level of a man of no name at all. Kellynch Hall has never yet been the scene of any thing paltry, and it shall not become so while I have the ordering of it.”

It was in the drawing-room, that evening, with Lady Russell still of the party, that the whole was talked over again before Elizabeth and Anne; Sir Walter repeating, with fresh indignation, the several affronts which he considered himself to have suffered from the two schemes of the morning, and Elizabeth agreeing that neither of them could possibly be borne. Anne had sat through it all in her usual silence, listening with an aching heart to details of embarrassment which she saw growing, under her father's own account of them, greater than either Lady Russell or Mr Shepherd yet supposed; and at last, when appealed to by nobody, and expecting to be attended to by nobody, she spoke.

She said that in her opinion something must be done, and done at once, upon a scale very different from what had yet been proposed; that half-measures could only put off the evil day at the cost of making it heavier when it came; that if the debts were what her father had described them to be, no reduction short of a real and thorough one—the giving up of the carriage entirely, a very material reduction in the number of servants, a strict rule against all but the plainest hospitality, and an income laid out beforehand upon a settled scheme, from which nothing should be allowed to draw them—could have any chance of restoring the family's independence within a reasonable time. She spoke gently, for she was speaking against her father's dearest habits, but she spoke with a clearness and a decision which shewed she had thought long and closely on what she now, for once, ventured to say aloud.

There was a short silence when she had done. Sir Walter's look was that of a man who could scarcely believe his own daughter capable of proposing anything so shocking, and he was on the point of saying so, when Elizabeth, to the astonishment of everybody in the room, and perhaps most of all to her own, said that she believed Anne was right.

“I do not like it, any more than my father can,” said she, “but I have been considering, while she spoke, what Mr Shepherd told us this morning of the sum total, and I do not see how anything less will answer. If it must be done, I had rather it were done completely, and once, than that we should be forever making shabby little cuts which nobody thanks us for, and which leave us disgraced without leaving us safe.”

This was so unlike Elizabeth, who had never yet been known to support any opinion of Anne's against her own first impression, that even Lady Russell looked at her with surprise, and with something like the return of hope. Sir Walter alone remained unmoved; he heard his elder daughter with visible displeasure, observed that youth and inexperience were no judges of what became a man in his situation, and that he had not supposed his own family would combine against him upon a matter which concerned the honour of the Elliot name more nearly than it concerned their momentary convenience; and there, for the evening, the subject appeared to rest, all further real progress in it being merely referred to Mr Shepherd, who was to look again into the accounts, and to Lady Russell, who was to think again what might yet be devised.

It was on the following morning that Mr Shepherd, calling once more, and finding Sir Walter and Elizabeth together, with Lady Russell also present, and Anne sitting a little apart with her work, brought forward, with all the diffidence natural to a man who knows he is about to give offence, a suggestion which he had, he said, hesitated long before venturing to mention. He spoke of the wealth of persons in the present day who were looking about them for a handsome house to hire in a good situation; of the very great sums that such persons were known to give; of the credit and even the advantage that might sometimes attend an arrangement of the kind, which need be thought of as nothing more than temporary, while the family's own affairs were quietly recovering themselves elsewhere; and he had, in short, got as far as observing that should such a tenant present himself—

He was not allowed to finish the sentence. Sir Walter rose from his chair.

“A tenant! Kellynch Hall let to a tenant! Mr Shepherd, you forget yourself. I had thought better of your understanding than to suppose you could bring me such a proposal in seriousness. My house, Mr Shepherd—the house of my ancestors—let, like a lodging in a watering-place, to the first stranger who can pay for it! I will not hear the word again. I desire that word may never be repeated to me, under this roof, by you, or by any one.” And he walked to the window, and stood there, with his back to the room, in an attitude of such offended dignity that Mr Shepherd, colouring, begged pardon for having touched on so unwelcome a subject, and made haste to turn the conversation to safer ground; while Lady Russell, though she had heard the proposal without any of Sir Walter's horror, thought it wisest, for the present, to let it drop unsupported. Elizabeth said nothing; but her countenance, for one who could read it, was not quite so unmoved as her father's.

Nothing further, therefore, was settled that day, beyond a general and rather sullen agreement that the accounts should be gone into yet more closely, and that some plan—though what plan, or upon what scale, remained as undecided as ever—must, before very long, be come to. Mr Shepherd took his leave; Lady Russell, after sitting a little while longer, and pressing Anne's hand as she passed her, with a look that said more than she had liked to say before Sir Walter, went away also; and the day, which had begun in so much agitation, wore on, in the Hall, to its usual quiet evening course, the great question of the family's embarrassment left exactly where it had been found in the morning, except that everybody concerned in it had grown a little more out of temper.

It was while they were sitting thus, Sir Walter with the Baronetage open before him for consolation, and Elizabeth turning over a fashion-print with less than her usual interest, that the evening post brought in a letter for Anne. It was from Mary, at Uppercross Cottage, and was, as Mary's letters generally were, longer in complaint than in matter. She had been very unwell, she said, worse than anybody would believe, worse than she had been for months; she could get nobody to feel for her as they ought; she was left alone a great deal more than agreed with her; and though she would not accuse anybody of neglect, she must say that she thought it very hard, when she was so far from well, that Anne, who had nothing in the world to do at Kellynch, could not come to her, if only for a fortnight, and see how she was left to shift for herself. She concluded by hoping that Anne would not disappoint her, as she really believed, if nobody came to her soon, she should be very ill indeed.

Anne read it over twice, with the mixture of feelings which a letter from Mary never failed to produce in her—a little anxiety, a little amusement she was ashamed of, and a great deal of that patient, unresisting tenderness which was so much a part of her nature that she scarcely knew it for a virtue. She was aware that Mary's illnesses were seldom so serious as Mary believed them, and that her chief complaint was very often nothing more than the want of somebody to listen to her; but she was aware, too, that at Uppercross, just now, she might at least be useful, and be loved for being so, which was more than could be said of her situation at Kellynch, where her own opinion, given at last and after so long a silence, had been heard, considered, and set aside in a single evening.

She said nothing of the letter that night, beyond mentioning that Mary was not very well, and asking her father's leave, which was given with entire indifference, to go to her as soon as it should be convenient. But when the house was quiet, and she was alone in her room, with the candle burning low and the debts of Kellynch no nearer settlement than they had been four-and-twenty hours before, she sat for some time with Mary's letter still in her hand, and found that her mind was already made up. She would go to Uppercross. There, at least, something might be asked of her which she could really do; and it was, perhaps, no very unworthy relief to a heart that had just discovered how little weight its counsel carried at home, to be wanted, however unreasonably, somewhere else.

Robert did not join them at once with the other children, but lingered a moment, as it were, in Madame Ratignolle’s wake, offering her his free arm across the uneven places in the path. He was not by nature reflective, and it was perhaps for this reason that whatever thought possessed him found its way out through his lips almost as soon as it had formed.

"Do you know," he said to her, "I sometimes think Mrs. Pontellier is not quite so happy as she appears to be—or as she would have herself appear. She struck me this morning as one carrying something heavy, though I could not say what."

Madame Ratignolle turned her head to look at him, but he was walking with his eyes upon the sand, and offered nothing further. She thought it a strange, presumptuous sort of speech for a boy of twenty-six to make about any woman, and strange, too, that he should choose herself to make it to; but Robert had always said odd, sudden things of that kind, and she was too warm and too tired with her cramp to give it more than a passing wonder. She pressed his arm a little to steady herself, and they walked on to the house without further talk of Edna at all.

It was hours later, in the slant light of the afternoon, that Adèle, sitting again upon Edna’s gallery with her needlework, repeated the speech, half laughing, as one repeats a piece of gossip too slight to matter.

"Robert says the strangest things sometimes. This morning, coming up from the beach, he told me he thought you were carrying something heavy—that you were not so happy as you seemed. What do you suppose he meant by it, *chère amie*? I told him he was foolish."

She said it lightly, biting a thread, not looking up; and if there was any thought in her beyond the pleasure of repeating a piece of Robert’s nonsense, she did not betray it. Edna laughed too, an uncertain little laugh, and said something about Robert’s having always been given to fancies about people, ever since he was a boy; but the words stayed with her after Adèle had gone in to see about her children, and kept recurring, quiet and persistent, under whatever else she was thinking.

The telegram came a little before that, in the heat of early afternoon, brought down from the house by one of the little black boys who ran such errands for madame. Edna opened it with the mild unconcern with which she opened most of her husband’s communications, and read that he would not, after all, be able to come down on Saturday; that a matter of business detained him in the city; that he hoped to get away the following week; that he sent his love to the boys.

She sat a moment with the yellow paper in her hand, out on the porch where the sun came slanting under the low eaves. She could not have told what she felt. There was no sharp disappointment, such as she supposed a wife should feel; neither was there any leap of unworthy relief, though something not unlike it stirred faintly and was as quickly disowned. Mostly there was a kind of blankness, as when a thing expected does not happen, and the day is left to arrange itself without it. She refolded the telegram along its creases and put it away in the pocket of her muslin gown, and went to see what the boys were about under the trees.

It was that same afternoon, when the sun had begun to lose something of its fierceness and the light lay long and yellow across the sand, that she went down to the beach alone.

She had not meant, in the beginning, to do more than stand at the edge and let the water come up over her feet, as she had done a hundred idle times before. The other bathers were scattered up and down in groups; she could hear, without attending to it, the high laughter of the children farther along, and see, without particularly marking them, a few dark heads bobbing out where the water deepened. She had never yet been able to swim. All that summer she had received instruction from an ambitious neighbor, but the coordination which is necessary was lacking; she could not seem to lay hold of the trick, and had grown a little discouraged over it, half suspecting that some was wanting in her, some sense that other people had and she had not.

But this afternoon a daring, ambitious spirit was upon her, such as had not visited her before. She waded out until the water reached her waist, feeling it swirl and tug pleasantly at her bathing skirt, and then, with a sudden resolution that surprised herself more than it could have surprised any onlooker, she struck out. Her arms moved, her feet kicked, in some fashion she could not afterward have described; and she felt, all at once, the water sustaining her, felt her own body cutting through it under its own power, unaided. She may have gone a very little way—a stroke, two strokes, three—before the old terror came back and her feet sought the bottom again; but for that instant, that mere handful of seconds, she had swum.

A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

She did not call to anyone, though there were others near enough to have heard her. She stood a while in the shallower water, breathing quickly, looking back at the shore, which had suddenly, dizzily, seemed to recede from her; and then she waded in, and said nothing to anyone of what she had done. It was hers; she meant to keep it so, as one keeps the one coin in a purse that need not be spent.

She walked back toward the bath-houses a little unsteadily, still tasting the salt on her lips, and it was there, on the gallery of a neighboring house, that the lady in black, who was always reading her devotions or fingering her rosary in the shade, looked up and spoke to her for the first time that whole summer.

"You swim very well, Mrs. Pontellier," she said, in her thin, dry voice, folding her book upon her finger to keep the place. "I have been watching you. It is not a thing many women trouble to learn."

Edna thanked her, a little confused at being addressed at all by one who seemed to exist chiefly as a fixture of black bombazine upon one gallery or another, and said something about having had very poor success with it until today. The lady in black inclined her head, as if this were a matter she had already surmised, and returned to her book without further remark, and Edna went on to her own house to change her wet things.

That night, after the household was quiet, after Léonce's boys had been kissed and put to bed and had long since ceased their small stirrings behind the mosquito-netting, Edna sat alone upon the gallery of the cottage. The lamps within had been put out; only the far lights of the house, and the strip of moon breaking now and again through drifting cloud, gave any light at all. She could hear the low wash of the Gulf beyond the trees, patient and incessant, and somewhere farther off a mockingbird practicing over and over a phrase of its night song.

She sat with her hands idle in her lap, not thinking, precisely, of the swim, nor of the telegram folded away in her pocket, nor even very steadily of anything; but under all of it, returning of its own accord whenever her mind was otherwise empty, was the thing Adèle had repeated to her that afternoon, spoken so lightly, meant so little by the one who said it and yet dwelling so persistently now in the one who heard it: that she was not so happy as she appeared to be—that she was carrying something heavy. She could not have said whether it was true. She only found that she could not put it down.

The First National occupied the ground floor of the tallest building in Personville, six stories of white stone that made the rest of the block look older and dirtier than it probably was. I asked a uniformed doorman where I could find somebody who knew something about checks, and he passed me along to a floor man, who passed me along to a Mr. Albury, an assistant cashier, a narrow, polite man of thirty-some years with a high forehead and a fountain pen clipped in his vest pocket.

I gave him my Continental Detective Agency card and told him I was looking into Donald Willsson's death for reasons of my own that had nothing to do with the police.

"Yesterday afternoon, a little before three o'clock, he wrote a check for five thousand dollars," I said. "I want to know who cashed it, or if it hasn't been cashed."

Albury said he would see, and went away for a while. When he came back he had a slip of paper in his hand and a mildly puzzled look on his face.

"That check hasn't been presented," he said. "Nor certified. Mr. Willsson's account stands exactly where it stood after his last deposit, less the checks that had already cleared before yesterday afternoon. If somebody's holding a five-thousand-dollar check of his, they haven't tried to do anything with it yet."

"Would you know if he'd stopped payment on it himself?"

"There's no stop order on file. If there were, I'd know it; I'd have taken the call myself, most likely, or my chief would have told me." He turned the slip over in his fingers as if there might be something on the back of it. "It's a little unusual, a check that size just sitting."

"Any way of knowing who it was made out to?"

"None, unless the check turns up, or somebody who saw him write it can tell you. We don't know anything about a check until it comes to us."

I asked him whether the bank had any objection to somebody trying to stop payment on it now, on my say-so, seeing that the man who wrote it was dead. He said that couldn't be done except by the estate, through the proper legal channels, and that in any event nobody could stop a check that had already gone stale by never being cashed at all, not exactly, though there were ways of watching for it and I should feel free to call him if I wanted to know whether it had come in. I thanked him, gave him the Great Western's number in case anything happened, and left him standing at his wicket, still turning that blank little scrap of paper over and over as if he expected to find writing on it.

I walked back toward the hotel, killing three-quarters of an hour proving to myself that a five-thousand-dollar check made out to nobody knew whom, uncashed twenty hours after the man who wrote it had been shot dead in an alley-mouth, could mean almost anything or almost nothing. Maybe he had given it to somebody who was scared to cash it now. Maybe he had never handed it over at all, and it was in his pocket when he was killed, and whoever went through his pockets had missed it, or hadn't wanted it. Maybe the five thousand dollars had nothing to do with his death. I didn't believe that last maybe, but I filed it along with the others.

At the Great Western the clerk gave me my key and said a lady was waiting for me in the lobby. I looked around. Mrs. Donald Willsson was sitting very straight in one of the leather chairs by the front window, in a dark blue dress and a small dark blue hat, with her gloved hands folded in her lap. She was as blonde and as slender as she had been the night before, but the whiteness had gone out of her face, or maybe it had just changed into a whiteness that didn't show as much in daylight.

She stood up when she saw me and came across the lobby with her chin up and her mouth set the way you hold your mouth when you have decided beforehand not to let it shake.

"I had to see you," she said. "I didn't know how else to find you except to come here."

"Upstairs," I said, "or is this all right?"

"Here is all right."

We sat down again, she on the edge of the chair, I on the arm of the one next to it, half facing her.

"I know what you must think," she said. "I know what everybody must think. But I didn't kill Donald. I didn't."

"Nobody said you did," I said, which was a lie so far as her father-in-law was concerned, but I saw no profit in repeating his opinion of her to her face.

"His father thinks so. I know he does. He's always hated me, and now he'll tell the police, and they'll believe him because he's Elihu Willsson and I'm nobody, I'm just the French woman Donald married." Her accent got thicker as she talked faster. "I want you to find out who did it. I have money. Donald left me money, or he will have, whatever the courts say about it. I'll pay you whatever the other people are paying you, more, if you'll work for me instead."

"I'm not working for anybody just now except a dead man," I told her, "which comes to the same thing as working for whoever's willing to pay for the truth about how he got dead. I'll take your money if it turns out you didn't do it. If it turns out you did, you can save it for a lawyer. Either way I keep on digging in the same direction. That satisfy you?"

She looked at me for a while with her chin still up, her eyes⁠—they were a light gray, I saw now, not blue⁠—steady on mine.

"You are a hard man," she said.

"I get paid to be. Where'd you go last night, between twenty after ten and five after eleven?"

Her chin came down half an inch.

"I told you, I can't⁠—there is somebody I can't involve. It has nothing to do with Donald's death."

"Everything's got to do with it till I know different. Who telephoned you?"

She shook her head, a small tight movement, and stood up.

"I came here to hire you, not to be questioned as if I were on trial."

"You're going to be questioned a lot harder than this before it's over, by people with badges," I said. "You might as well get used to it. And you might as well remember that whatever you're holding back looks a whole lot worse held back than it would look told straight out, now, before the police start digging for it themselves."

She stood there a moment with her gloved hands working against each other, opened her mouth as if she meant to say something else, closed it again, and said only, "I'll think about what you've told me," and went out through the revolving door into the street, walking very straight, the way she had come in.

I went up to my room, called down for a Bulletin, and read what little more there was on the Willsson killing while I waited to see if she had told the desk anything about where I could reach her afterward. She hadn't. I hadn't really expected her to.

There was a knock at the door a little before six. A bellboy, a kid of maybe sixteen with a bad complexion and a cap too big for his head, stood there holding out a plain white envelope.

"Fellow downstairs gave me a dollar to bring this up to you," he said.

"What fellow?"

"Dunno, mister. Never seen him before. Little guy, dressed nice, didn't say nothing but your name and room number and here's a dollar, and see that this gets up there right now."

I gave the kid another dollar for his trouble and shut the door before I opened the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of hotel note-paper, no letterhead, folded once. The message was typewritten, three lines, no salutation and no signature:

_You are asking things that are none of your business. Poisonville is unhealthy for tourists. There is a nine o'clock train._

I turned it over. Nothing on the back. I went to the window and looked down at the street in both directions. A milk truck. Two women with parcels. Nobody who looked like a small man dressed nice. I hadn't expected to see anybody; Thaler wasn't a man who did his own leg-work delivering notes, and a bellboy paid two dollars ago wasn't going to remember much more than he'd already told me, and I didn't waste time going down to ask him.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the note in my hand and thought about how a man who called himself Whisper, and who by Bill Quint's account carried enough weight in Personville to make cops and gamblers walk soft around him, hadn't bothered coming to see me himself, hadn't bothered sending anybody to see me either, but had had a bellboy carry up three sentences on hotel stationery. It was either a very lazy way to threaten a man or a very careful one. I put it down to careful. A man that careful about not being seen delivering a warning was a man who had a fair notion of what could be proved against him if things went wrong, and didn't propose to add a warning to the list of things provable.

I decided I would stay past nine o'clock.

Before dinner I sat down at the writing table with a pad of the hotel's paper and roughed out a message, then walked it over to the telegraph office myself instead of phoning it in, because I wanted the wording exact and because walking helped me get it straight in my head first. What I sent, over my signature, to the Old Man at the San Francisco office, read:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD ELEVENHUNDRED BLOCK HURRICANE STREET TENFORTY LAST NIGHT STOP SIX SHOTS FROM ALLEY ACROSS STREET TWO WENT WILD NO WITNESSES SEEN OFFICIALLY UNSOLVED STOP LEARNED FROM IWW LOCAL SECRETARY THAT FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON FORMERLY SOLE OWNER CITY LOST CONTROL FOUR YEARS AGO TO GUNMEN HIRED TO BREAK TWENTYONE STRIKE NAMELY MAX THALER GAMBLER ALIAS WHISPER LEW YARD PETE THE FINN AND POLICE CHIEF NOONAN STOP DECEASED HAD BEEN RUNNING REFORM CAMPAIGN IN HIS PAPERS AGAINST SAME FOUR AT FATHERS INSTIGATION THOUGH FATHER DENIES THIS STOP DECEASED WROTE CHECK FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS PAYEE UNKNOWN THREE PM DAY OF DEATH LEFT OFFICE TWENTY MINUTES PRESUMABLY TO BANK STOP CHECK NEVER PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED PER FIRST NATIONAL STOP WIDOW ELLEN WILLSSON LEFT HOUSE TENTWENTY RETURNED ELEVENOFIVE REFUSES ACCOUNT FOR ABSENCE POSSIBLE BLOODSTAIN HER SHOE STOP SHE CALLED ON ME TODAY OFFERING EMPLOYMENT DECLINED PENDING FURTHER FACTS STOP THALER SEEN ENTERING WILLSSON HOUSE THIS MORNING STOP RECEIVED ANONYMOUS TYPED WARNING THIS EVENING SUGGESTING I LEAVE TOWN STOP CONTINUING INVESTIGATION STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS IF ANY

I read it over twice, changed nothing, and sent it.

Back in my room I sat by the window with the lights off for a while, looking down at the street without much interest, thinking about a five-thousand-dollar check that had gone nowhere, a wife who wouldn't say where she went, and a gambler who sent his threats by bellboy instead of coming himself. None of it fit anywhere yet. It was too early for it to fit. I put the note from Thaler, if it was from Thaler, in my coat pocket, turned in, and lay a long while awake, still turning over that same question the assistant cashier's blank slip of paper had started in me that morning: if Donald Willsson hadn't given that check to whoever he wrote it for, and the check hadn't come back to him, then where in all of Personville had five thousand dollars of it gone.