The Chapters

She slept a long time, and when she woke it was because Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm, not gently.

"Sit up and put your hat straight," said Mrs. Medlock. "We're at Thwaite, and there's somebody on the platform, which is a thing I never looked to see. Don't stare, and don't sulk. Stand up when you're spoken to."

Mary sat up. The rain had stopped, or the train had run out of it, and it was quite dark outside, with one yellow lamp swinging at the end of a small wet platform. A porter went by with a lantern. The air that came in when the door was opened was cold and had a queer sharp smell in it, quite unlike any smell she knew.

A man was standing a little apart from the lamp. He was tall and thin and wore a long dark coat, and one of his shoulders was higher than the other, so that even standing still he seemed to lean a little, as if he were listening to something a long way off. His face was not old, but it was not young either. His hair was black, with grey in it, and it was rather too long. Mary stared at him in spite of Mrs. Medlock's warning. She had thought of a hunchback as a person in a fairy story, and he did not look like a fairy story at all. He looked like a person who had been shut up in a room for a very long time.

The black bonnet with the purple flowers gave a great tremble, and Mrs. Medlock, who was never at a loss, was for a moment very nearly at one.

"Why, sir," she said, "I never thought to see you. I understood Pitcher was to send the carriage."

"The carriage is sent," said the man. "I thought I would come."

He did not say why. He looked at Mary, and then he looked a little to one side of her, as people do at a thing they have been told to take charge of and would rather not examine.

"This is the child?"

"This is Miss Mary, sir."

"Mary," said Mr. Craven.

"Yes," said Mary. She had made up her mind in the railway carriage exactly how she would look at him and exactly what she would not say, but he did not seem to expect her to say anything, and it was very hard to be stiff at a person who took no notice of it.

"You will come this way," he said, and that was all. He turned and walked down the platform, with the porter hurrying behind him with the trunk, and Mary followed with Mrs. Medlock breathing hard at her elbow.

The carriage was a big closed one with two lamps and a coachman on the box, so wrapped up in coats that he looked like a bundle. Mr. Craven got in first and sat in the corner opposite, and Mary and Mrs. Medlock sat side by side with their backs to the horses. Then the door shut, and they moved off.

For a long time nobody spoke. Mrs. Medlock cleared her throat two or three times, as if she meant to begin, and once she said, "Miss Mary's had a very quiet journey, sir, I'll say that for her," but Mr. Craven only turned his face toward the window, where there was nothing to be seen but the glass with the lamplight sliding on it, and she gave it up. Mary looked at his hands. They lay on his knee, long and pale, and they did not move once.

They passed a few lighted windows and a low wall, and then the road began to climb and the lights stopped. Mary had been looking for hedges, because she had seen hedges from the train, but presently there were no hedges. There was a rough track with a lamp-lit patch of it ahead, and beyond that nothing whatever. It was the sort of darkness that has no sides. And there was a sound with it, a long, low, rushing sound that came and went and came again, and the carriage rocked a little when it was loudest.

"What is that noise?" she asked, before she could stop herself.

"Wind," said Mrs. Medlock. "You'll hear enough of it."

Mr. Craven said nothing at all.

They had been going up and up for what seemed a very long time when the carriage gave a jerk and stopped so suddenly that Mary slid forward on the seat. There was the stamp of a horse and the jingle of harness, and the coachman's voice, which seemed to come from a great way off.

"Sir! Beggin' pardon, sir--there's summat i' t' road."

Mr. Craven turned his head. "What is it?"

"It's one o' them moor ponies, sir, stood i' t' middle an' won't shift. Ah've shouted at him."

"Then get down and move him," said Mr. Craven, and he leaned back again into his corner and shut his eyes.

Mrs. Medlock gave a sniff of great impatience. Mary, who had been sitting like a stone for hours, found that she had put her hand on the door before she had made up her mind to do it. It opened more easily than she had expected, and the cold came in, and she slid down the step and was out on the road before Mrs. Medlock had seen what she was about.

"Come back this minute!" said Mrs. Medlock. "Miss Mary! You'll be blown away and I'll be the one to answer for it!"

But Mary did not come back at once. She walked a few steps past the light of the lamps, where the coachman was standing beside the horses and pulling at something with both hands. It was a small, rough, shaggy pony, with a long mane that blew across its eyes, and it stood with its head down and would not be pulled. It did not look frightened. It looked as though it had stood there a great many nights and saw no reason why a carriage should be allowed to alter that.

She did not look at it long. It was the dark that held her. When she stepped beyond the lamps and stood still, the wind came at her in a long push and pulled at her crêpe hat, and she held it on with one hand and looked out and saw nothing, and understood that the nothing went on and on. In India there had always been walls, and verandas, and a smell of hot dust and flowers and cooking, and people who stood between her and the outside. Here there was only the great, empty, blowing dark, and a smell of wet earth and something bitter-sweet that she did not know, and far, far off, or perhaps quite near, a very small sound like a bird settling. She had never in her life felt so little, and, oddly, she did not feel afraid. She felt as if she had been given something very large to look at and had not yet found out what it was.

Then Mrs. Medlock's hand closed on her shoulder.

"Well, I never did! Of all the ways to carry on!" She was quite out of breath. "In with you, and not another word."

Mary got in. As she did so she saw that Mr. Craven had opened his eyes and was looking at her. He did not say anything. After a moment he turned his face to the window again. The coachman said something soft to the pony, and the pony moved off the road with no trouble at all, as if it had only been waiting to be spoken to properly, and the carriage went on.

After that Mary was too tired to keep the rest in order. She knew that they went down a little and the wind grew less. She knew that trees began, and that the branches beat against the roof of the carriage and it seemed as if they were driving through a long dark tunnel of them. She knew that the wheels went from gravel to something harder, and then there was a great stopping, and lights, and the door was opened from outside.

She was in a hall so big and dim that the roof was lost above it, with panels on the walls and portraits she could not see the faces of. An old man was waiting there with a candle, a little bent man with a face like a dried apple. Mr. Craven got out and spoke to him, so low that Mary caught nothing, and the two of them went across the stone floor and up a wide staircase and turned to the left, and the candle went with them, and the dark shut behind it. Mr. Craven did not look round. He did not say good night. Mary stood with her hands folded, quite stiff, looking at the place where he had gone, and told herself that she did not care.

"That's Pitcher," said Mrs. Medlock. "And that's all you'll see of either of them, most like. Come along. Mind the step."

They went up stairs and along corridors and up more stairs, and Mary counted doors and lost count. The last was a room with a fire in it, and a big carved bed, and a tapestry on the wall with some people hunting on it, faded to the colour of dead leaves.

"This is yours," said Mrs. Medlock, "and you'll keep to it, and to the corridor outside it, until you're told different. Your supper's coming. There's a girl who does the fires, but she'll not be here till morning, so you must do without."

She went out, and Mary stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the hunters, who seemed to have been galloping after the same stag for a hundred years and never come up with it. She was still looking at them when there was a knock and the door was pushed open by a large man with a tray.

He was not a young man, and he was broad and red and slow, in a striped waistcoat and shirt-sleeves, and he set the tray down on the table by the fire with great care. It did not surprise Mary that a man should bring her supper. In India it was always the men who had done it. But when he straightened up and spoke she could only stare.

"Tha'll be t' little lass fro' India," he said. "Ah've browt thee thy bit o' summat. There's a drop o' broth, an' a slice o' cold mutton, an' a pudden, if tha's a mind. Happen tha'd sooner have it setten by fire nor on table? Ah'd say fire, i' this weather."

"I don't understand what you say," said Mary.

"Eh?" said the man.

"I don't understand you," said Mary, more distinctly. "You talk so oddly. What is a pudden? What did you say about the fire?"

The man scratched his head and looked at her with a slow puzzled kindness which she found more irritating than anything else that had happened to her that day.

"Well, well," he said. "Ah said, is it fire or table. Fire or table," and he pointed at each. "As for t' pudden, it's a pudden. Tha'll know it when tha's et it."

"The table," said Mary coldly.

"Table it is," said the man, and shook his head as he went out, and she heard him say to himself in the passage, "Well, well. Fire or table," in a tone as if he had never heard anything so strange.

She ate the broth, and a little of the mutton, and all of the pudding, though she would not have said so to anyone. Then Mrs. Medlock came back and took her tray and stood over her while she undressed, and told her to say her prayers, which she said she did not know how to do, and Mrs. Medlock said "Humph" and put out all the candles but one. The fire had burnt low. The wind was outside now, on the other side of the thick walls, and it sounded farther away than it had on the moor. It sounded like a large animal walking round the house.

"Now you go to sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, with her hand on the door, "and don't lie there thinking."

She had just opened it when they both heard the other sound.

It came from somewhere a long way off in the house, from the far end of some corridor or up some stair. First there was the slow shutting of a heavy door, so far away that it was more a shake in the floor than a noise. Then there was a silence. Then something moved, slow and uneven, with a pause between each step, as though whoever it was were walking up and down and stopping to listen, and walking on again. It stopped. Somewhere very faint there was one thin, long note, and it broke off in the middle.

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still with the door in her hand. Mary sat up in the big bed.

"What was that?" she said.

"What was what?" said Mrs. Medlock, rather sharply.

"That. Somebody was walking. And something else."

"There's nothing," said Mrs. Medlock. "That's the wind, that is. It gets in at the old chimneys and shakes the doors in the empty rooms. You'll get used to it. It's a big house and it's on the moor, and I told you as much."

"It was not the wind," said Mary. "I heard the wind on the moor. It was not like that."

"Then you've heard a great deal in one night for a child who has nothing to say for herself," said Mrs. Medlock. Her red face, in the light of the one candle, had gone rather a queer colour. "It's the wind, I tell you. Lie down. And if you should take it into your head to go poking about the corridors in the dark, I'll know it, and you'll be sorry."

She went out, and Mary heard the key turn, though she did not think anyone had ever locked her in before. Then she heard Mrs. Medlock's heavy step go away and away until it was lost.

Mary lay down. The candle was out and the fire made only a dull red patch on the tapestry, where the hunters had vanished altogether. She lay on her back with her eyes open, and listened. The wind went round the house. Nothing else stirred. She waited a long time, and it did not come again.

But she knew what she had heard. She had never been a child who believed what she was told merely because grown people said it, and Mrs. Medlock had not looked at her once while she said it. Somebody had shut a door in the far end of the house, and somebody had walked, and the wind did not walk.

"I shall find out what it was," said Mary, quite aloud, into the dark. There was nobody to say she must not. She pulled the blanket up to her chin and lay with her eyes wide open, keeping very still, waiting.

The taxi went down the hill, the street lamps sliding by, and Brett sat with her eyes closed and her hat in her lap. I did not touch her. I had put my arm along the back of the seat and after a while she moved her head a little and it lay against my sleeve.

"What about?" I asked.

"Oh, everything. Nothing. Those chaps."

"You went with them."

"One does. They're sweet, you know. They're perfectly sweet. It's only that one sits in the middle of them and it's like being in a room full of cotton." She opened her eyes and looked at the roof of the cab. "I say, don't go to the Parc. It's too dark and it's too far and I shall only be sorry for myself. Take me to the Select."

"It's full of people."

"I want people. Just not those people. I want to sit down at a table and have a drink with a person I can stand."

I leaned forward and slid the glass back and told the driver, and he nodded without looking round and took the next turning, and the cab swung across the Boulevard Saint-Michel and went on down toward Montparnasse. We went past the Lion de Belfort and the trees along the Boulevard Raspail, and all the way down Brett sat with her hands together in her lap looking at the lights. I paid the driver in front of the Select. The terrace was still crowded, and inside there were people at the bar and a man asleep on the leather seat with his hat over his face.

We found a table at the back. Brett said she wanted a brandy and soda and I said I would have the same. The waiter brought the saucers and the little bottle of soda and stood looking at Brett's hair.

"It's better here," she said.

"Yes."

"Isn't it?" She drank some of it. "I've been going about with rather a lot of people this week. It's a mistake. I've been meeting people. I met a man last week who's got money. Absolutely pots of it. A Count Mippipopolous. Do you know him?"

"No. I never heard of him."

"You wouldn't have. He's a Greek, or he says he's an American, or both. He's very old and very sweet and he's been everywhere. He asked me to dinner and I went, and it was dinner, and that was all there was to it. He wanted to give me a lot of things. He's terribly generous, that sort."

"That's a good sort to know."

"Yes. Isn't it? I rather think so." She turned the glass around on the saucer. "He's supposed to be at Zelli's tonight. That's the date I told your friend about. Up at Montmartre."

"You don't want to go?"

"Do you think I ought?"

"I don't see why. You said you wanted a good time."

"I said I wanted a drink."

"Well, you've got one."

"So I have." She laughed. "You're a dear, Jake. You're never any help at all."

"It's a sound principle."

"Yes, it's a sound principle. Do you know, he'd take me to Biarritz tomorrow if I said so. Or Cannes. Wherever one goes."

"It's a good time of year for both."

"Isn't it," Brett said. "Isn't it just."

She drank the rest of her brandy and I signaled the waiter for two more. She lit a cigarette and I lit mine and we sat and looked at the people at the other tables. There was a girl in a red hat who was crying quietly with a man who was patting her on the back and looking over her shoulder at the door. Somebody at the bar had a bad cough. Brett had a way of holding a cigarette a little away from her, so that the smoke went up past her eyes and she looked through it.

I thought of the fifty-franc note. It seemed a long way off and rather absurd, and I thought of it a second time, and I found that it was a very good thing to be thinking about.

"I've got to go back," I said.

"Back where?"

"To the Bal. I left fifty francs there in an envelope for that girl."

"Darling, you're not really going to go back for fifty francs."

"It's fifty francs."

"It's quite mad. She'll have gone off with one of the sweet chaps, and they'll have paid her, or they won't have, and either way she'll have your fifty francs."

"If she went, the woman is to keep it for me."

"And if she didn't?"

"Then I'll see."

"You're making it up," Brett said. "You want to see whether she stayed."

"Maybe."

"Go on, then," she said. "Go along. I'll wait. I'll sit here and be a great success and I won't drink anything at all." She looked down at her hands. "Don't hurry."

"I won't."

"Well, don't be too slow, either."

"I'll take a cab. It won't be twenty minutes."

"Lovely," Brett said. "Take your time."

I went out. There was a cab at the curb outside the Rotonde and I told the driver the rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. We went up the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and it was empty now and the shutters were down on the cafés, and the trees stood up under the lamps at the top of the hill. When we turned into the street the driver went slowly because of the pavement. There was no music. The two taxis were gone. A light showed in the door of the Bal and the policeman was gone from the door.

Inside, the benches were pushed back from the floor and the proprietor's wife was sweeping. The proprietor sat at one of the tables with his accordion in its case beside him and a glass of red wine, and the daughter of the house was sitting across from him with her chin in her hand. And at the table behind them, sitting with her hat on again and her handbag in front of her, was Georgette. She had a bowl of soup.

"Tiens," she said. "It's the fool."

"Hello."

"You came back."

"I came back for something I left."

"You left me. Don't tell me it isn't so." She put the spoon down. "They all went. They went to Montmartre in the two taxis. The tall dark one said they would come back for me. I said good, and they went, and they did not come back."

"It's a long way to Montmartre."

"It's a very long way. Madame gave me some soup. It's good soup." She looked at me with the same sullen face she had had in front of the pernod, but she was not so sullen now. "The patronne says you left something for me."

"She has it?"

The patronne was standing by the bar with the broom. She looked at me and then at Georgette and put down the broom and went behind the zinc and took the envelope out from under a saucer of change. She held it a moment.

"The gentleman said if the mademoiselle went out with one of the others he would come for it," she said. "The mademoiselle did not go out."

"That's right," I said.

"Then it is for the mademoiselle?"

"Give it to me, please."

"Ah," the patronne said, and gave it to me.

"So," said Georgette. "You were going to pay me to go off with them."

"I was going to pay you for the dinner."

"For the dinner?"

"For the trouble."

"It was no trouble. I ate very well. I danced very well." She turned the soup bowl a little on the table. "It's a shame, you know. You're not a bad type."

I took two notes out of my pocket. "Here's twenty for the taxi."

"I live near."

"Then for the soup."

"Keep your money," Georgette said. "I've had the soup." But she took the notes and folded them very small and put them inside her glove. "You're going to the other one."

"What other one?"

"The English one. With the hair like a man. Don't tell me. I have eyes. She looked at you like you were something she had bought and did not want to take home."

"She's a friend."

"Oh, yes. A friend."

"Good night, Georgette."

"Good night, Jacob. Good night, my fiancé." She laughed with her mouth open, and I saw all her teeth, and it was not as bad as it had been. "Come again to the Napolitain. I go there."

"I'll come."

"No, you won't," she said. She picked up her spoon.

The proprietor nodded at me over his wine. I went out and the cab was waiting with the driver asleep against the wheel. We went back down the hill.

Brett was at the same table. There was a brandy in front of her and she had not touched it, and a man in evening clothes had been standing beside the table and went away as I came in. She looked up.

"You got it?"

"Yes."

"And she was there?"

"She was there. She had some soup."

"Poor lamb," Brett said. "And what did you do?"

"Gave her twenty francs and came away."

"That's rather nice."

"It isn't nice. It's the going rate."

"You're a fraud, Jake."

"Yes."

We sat there. The place emptied, and the waiters put chairs on some of the tables, and the man on the leather seat woke up and went out. It was getting gray in the windows. Brett sat with her hat off and her face turned to the door, and she looked tired and much younger and very pretty.

"I might go to Cannes," she said. "It might be rather good for me."

"It might."

"There's the sea, and one lies about."

"You'd like the sea."

"I like it in the abstract. Do you think it would be a mistake?"

"I think you'd know."

"That's not an answer."

"No," I said. "It's not."

"You could come down for a bit, if you liked. If I went."

"I've got the office."

"Of course. The office." She stubbed out her cigarette. "Well. It's a good thing to have."

"It's all right."

"It's simply enormous, being all right."

I did not say anything. I sat and looked at the marble top of the table and at the ring the glass had made on it. I did not want her to go to Cannes, and I did not want her to stay in Paris, and I did not want her to go anywhere with anybody at all.

Brett stood up and put her hat on and looked at herself in the small mirror of her bag. "I look a fright."

"You look all right."

"I look like something the cat's been at." She shut the bag. "Take me out and put me in a cab, darling. I've got to go and sleep, and I shall be sensible. I always am, in the morning."

We went out. The street was gray and wet and the sky over the Boulevard Raspail was pale, and a boy in a blue smock was washing the pavement in front of the Rotonde with a broom and a bucket. A cab came down from the Observatoire with its flag up. I put up my hand and it swung in to the curb.

Brett got in. She leaned out of the window and I gave the driver the name of her hotel.

"Thanks so much, Jake," she said. "I was awfully miserable."

"You'll be all right."

"Oh, yes. I'll be all right." She put her hand out of the window and I took it and held it, and it was cold, and she took it away. "Don't look like that. You'll spoil the morning."

"I'm not looking like anything."

"No," she said. "You never do."

The driver let in the clutch and the cab went off down the boulevard, and I stood on the curb until it turned at the corner. I had the envelope in my pocket. I took it out and looked at it, and put it back.

I walked up the Boulevard Raspail. It was light enough now to see the color of the houses, and the shutters were still closed, and a cart came along with bread in long baskets and the horse's feet loud on the paving. At the Boulevard Saint-Germain a woman was opening the iron shutters of a crémerie, and I could smell the coffee from a little bar where the workmen stood in their blue clothes with their elbows on the zinc. I went in and had a coffee and a *brioche*, standing up. The men did not look at me. One of them was talking about a horse.

Then I went on down to the river. The sun was not up, but the sky was clear over the Louvre, and the water was gray and quiet and went by under the bridges with a little slap against the stone. There were fishermen already on the quai with their long poles, sitting motionless, and a barge was coming down with washing hung across its deck and a dog asleep on the cabin roof. A man was sweeping the gutter, and the water ran ahead of his broom, clean and bright along the curb.

I walked along the quai under the plane trees. Across the river the Tuileries were green and wet, and the last lamps went out one by one on the Pont Royal. I was tired, and it was a good morning. I walked slowly, and I did not think about anything, and the sun came up behind me and lit the top of the Louvre and the river turned pink and then gold.

It was some nights after that walk, I think, that the first of the shots reached us. I say I think, for I have never been able to fix the date with any certainty. The days of that time have lost their edges in my memory, as days do that are followed by others too terrible to be compared with them. But I remember the night very well. I had sat late over my papers on the moral ideas of the future, a subject I have since had cause to regard with some humility, and had put out the lamp and thrown open the window of my study for the sake of the air. It was very still. Somewhere across the fields a dog barked twice and thought better of it. I stood a moment looking at the sky, at Mars burning a little to the south and east of the zenith, and it was then, at something after midnight, that I saw the star fall.

It was not like the shooting stars one sees on any August night, that scratch a pale line across the dark and are gone before one can say "There!" It was green, or greenish white, and it did not so much streak as descend, slowly, as it seemed to me, with a kind of deliberation, from the region of the Great Bear towards the pines beyond Ottershaw. It left a train behind it that hung for a moment on the retina and lingered a moment longer in the sky. I waited, I do not know why, for a sound; and none came, or none that I could be sure of. Perhaps the dog barked again. I remember that I said aloud, "That was a big one," as a man will when he is alone, and that I heard my wife stir in the room beyond and ask drowsily what I was doing. I told her it was nothing, a meteor; and I went to bed and slept without a dream.

I have often wondered since what I should have felt if I had known. I do not think I should have felt anything so simple as fear. It would have been more like the sensation of a man who, standing at a window, sees the first drop of a great rain strike the sill and does not yet know that it is rain.

The news came with the milk. Our milkman was a talkative person at the best of times, and that morning he came up the path in such a state of importance that he could hardly deliver his can. A great stone, he said, had fallen in the night on the common beyond Ottershaw. It had come down in the old gravel pit where the water stood after the rains, and it was steaming like a kettle. Mr. Ogilvy, the astronomer, had been at it since first light, and half the village was up there already, and the other half on the road.

I finished my breakfast with more haste than dignity. My wife, when I explained it to her, put down her cup and said that she would come too. I confess I demurred, for the common is a good two miles from our door and the morning was already close and warm; but she had lately taken a fancy to be a sharer in all my curiosities, and she pointed out with some justice that it was I who had been standing at the window while she lay asleep, and that she did not see why I should have all the falling stars to myself. So we set out together, she in her light summer hat, and I with a stick I did not need, and we joined the stream of people going the same way.

It was an odd procession. There were labourers who should have been at work, and women with children by the hand, and a butcher's boy who had abandoned his tray on a gatepost, and two clergymen, and a party of boys running ahead in an ecstasy of truancy. Everyone was talking, and everyone seemed a little ashamed of the eagerness with which he walked. We heard as we went that the stone was as big as a cottage; that it was as big as a cart; that it had burned a dozen acres of heather; that it had killed a cow. Of these accounts the last was demonstrably false, and the others, as I found, were false in the other direction, for the reality was in no way so large as rumour made it, and in every other way so much stranger.

The gravel pit lay in a hollow of the common, a great raw scoop in the sandy ground, with a fringe of scorched heather and blackened bracken along its northern lip. In the bottom of it was a broad shallow pool, the accumulation of the wet weather earlier in the summer, and it was in this pool, a little to the left of the centre, that the thing lay. I had thought of it, I suppose, as a rock. It was not like a rock. Its upper part stood out of the water a matter of four or five feet, a great dull rounded mass, dark as a burnt loaf and scaled and crusted with a coat that seemed to have flaked in places and to have been fused in others; and where it entered the water the pool seethed about it, bubbling and hissing, and sent up a thin, pale, continual vapour that drifted across the pit in the still air and thinned to nothing above our heads. It had ploughed a long furrow in the sand as it came in, and the wreck of a fir tree lay on one side of that furrow, splintered and black. The smell in the hollow was of hot wet ashes and something else which I could not name; a sharp, metallic smell, as of a newly struck match held near a copper kettle.

We stood at the rim, my wife and I, among some fifty people already gathered there, and looked at it without any of us saying much. The steam rose. The water talked to itself round the dark flank of the thing. And out on the sand at the edge of the pool, in his shirt-sleeves and with his hat pushed back upon his head, walking round and round it with the air of a man who has been given a great present and has not yet been told he may keep it, was Ogilvy.

He saw me and came up the slope with both hands out. He had not slept, that was plain; his eyes were red-rimmed and very bright, and his collar was black with the soot of the heather. He shook my hand and bowed to my wife, and then, forgetting her in the same instant, he turned and stretched an arm towards the pit.

"There!" he said. "Did I not tell you? Meteorites falling in a heavy shower upon the planet. Well, here is one falling upon us, and a beauty. Nickel-iron, I should say, from the crust; I'll swear to it when I can get a fragment off her. Did you see her come down?"

I told him that I had seen the star.

"Green," said Ogilvy. "Yes, they say so. Iron does that; there is a copper trace, or it may be the burning of the air. I have had three people tell me they heard her come down like a train going through a tunnel. I heard nothing; I was in bed, and the first I knew was the boy from the Rectory hammering on my door."

I said, and I remember hesitating over it, that it did not look to me like any meteorite I had ever seen in a museum.

"You have seen them under glass," he said cheerfully. "A thing that has come fresh out of the sky looks like nothing else, and that is the beauty of it."

"It is too regular," I said. "Look at it, Ogilvy. Look at the shape of it, where it comes out of the water. It is not a lump; it is rounded like a—" I did not like to say what it was rounded like. "It has a form," I said.

"Everything that has passed through the atmosphere at twenty miles a second has a form," said Ogilvy. "The friction moulds it. I could show you a dozen in the Museum in Kensington that look as if a potter had made them. My dear fellow, you are letting the papers get into your head. I saw the paragraph in *Punch* as well as you did."

"It was you who told me the night the flames were seen that it might be a volcanic explosion," I said. "Or a shower of meteorites."

"And so it was," he said, "and so it is. The one is the cause and the other is the consequence, and here is the consequence sitting in a puddle. I said the chances against anything manlike on Mars were a million to one, and I say it still. I am not going to abandon the odds because a stone has been so obliging as to fall in my own neighbourhood."

I have thought a great deal since about that sentence, and I do not think the less of Ogilvy for it. He was, after all, a man of science, and it was as a man of science that he was mistaken. He had reasoned soundly from what he knew, which was all that any of us could do; the fault, if there was one, lay in the smallness of what he knew. I was, I daresay, no better. I had no argument, only a sensation, and a man who argues from a sensation deserves to lose.

"It is hot," I said, feebly enough.

"Of course it is hot. It has been hot since two o'clock this morning; it is cooling now, you see, in the water. That's your steam. I would give a good deal to know how fast it is cooling. I have sent to Chertsey for a thermometer, and to Woking for a man to take a photograph of it." He looked at my wife, and seemed for the first time to remember that she was there. "Madam, you must not think me discourteous. I have not been so happy in six years."

My wife said, very gravely, that she thought it a great pity a thing should be so hot and so ugly and yet be so much admired; and Ogilvy laughed and went down the slope again.

By this time the crowd had thickened about the rim of the pit, and the boldest of the boys had slid down the sandy bank and gathered at the edge of the water. They were shouted at from above, and they took no notice. Two or three men had followed them. One of these, a big fellow in a smock with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, whom I took to be one of the brickyard hands, stood with his arms folded, expressing to the company at large his opinion that a stone was a stone and that a bit of a warm one never hurt any man. He was not a bad-natured fellow, I think; only one of those people who cannot see a thing forbidden without wishing to find out why. Ogilvy called out something to the crowd about keeping back, and I saw the man shrug, and wade in, with the water over his boot-tops, until he stood beside the thing where its flank came clear of the pool.

"Come out of that," someone cried; and someone else cried, "Go on, Jem, give it a slap for luck!"

He laid his palm flat upon it.

I do not think I shall forget the sound he made. It was not a scream at first; it was a kind of astonished grunt, such as a man gives when he is struck unexpectedly in the pit of the stomach; and then he snatched his hand away and looked at it, and only then did the cry come. He stumbled back through the water, holding the wrist in the other hand and staring at the palm, which was already puckering and whitening, and a dozen men were down the bank to him in a moment. They took him up to the rim, swearing and wiping his face with a wet handkerchief, and a woman in the crowd began to say that she had always known there was something wrong with it. Ogilvy, I noticed, had come running from the far side of the pit with a face grown very grave, and his first words were a rebuke; but his second, as he bent over the man's hand, was a kind of murmur that I think was meant only for himself.

"Well, it is hot," he said. "The devil of a heat. It ought to have cooled more than that."

"You said it had been cooling since two," I said.

"So it ought to have been," said Ogilvy shortly; and he sent a boy running for the doctor, and went back to the pool, where he stood for some time looking at the dark crusted mass without going near it, and I fancy that from that hour he was somewhat less positive about the thing than he cared to say.

My wife had taken my arm during the excitement and had not let go of it. She was pale, and she had not, I think, been looking at the man, but at the thing itself, with a fixed and rather puzzled attention, as if it reminded her of something she could not place. By now it was nearly noon and the sun stood high, and the sand of the pit threw back a glare that made the eyes ache. The crowd along the rim had doubled since we came. There were dog-carts drawn up on the road, and a cab from the station, and a man with a camera on legs, disputing with a constable about the best place to stand. The steam went on rising from the pool, thin and pale and steady. The hiss of the water had not abated by any sound I could detect.

I said to my wife that she had seen all there was to see, and that the crowd would be worse before it was better, and that the sun was no fit thing for her to stand in. She said at first that she would stay while I stayed. I said, and I am afraid I said it more sharply than I meant, that there was nothing to be done there, nothing whatever, that a stone was a stone and had already burned one fool's hand, and that I would follow her home directly. She looked at me for a moment. Then she put up her veil, and smiled a little, and said that I was to be sure to eat something, and that if the thing began to explode I was to remember that she had said so. She went away up the road between the carriages, a small figure in a light dress, and I watched her until the people closed about her and I lost sight of the hat.

I ought to have gone with her. I know it now, and I think some part of me knew it then. But I turned back to the pit; and I stood there among the strangers on the heated sand, with the sun on my neck and the smell of scorched heather in my nostrils, looking down at the dark round shape that steamed in its pool and waited, with such complete and patient silence, for whatever was to come next.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Head like a bell that has been struck and left to ring, so I dictate while I can still find the words. Mem., the phonograph is a merciful confidant: it does not look at one. I got in by the first train down to Purfleet, and Hennessey met me at the door with the face of a man who has resolved to say nothing about the hour.

The dinner was last night, and I record it because I promised myself that I would keep an accurate note of whatever I felt, being a physician and having, as I suppose, no right to feel anything I cannot classify. Quincey’s “camp-fire” proved to be his rooms, made barbarous for the occasion. He had a buffalo robe thrown over the sofa, a Mexican saddle in the corner, and on the mantelpiece a pair of spurs that I would swear he had polished. The dinner was excellent, and the wine better. He had ordered, he said, “the real stuff, boys, the kind that wants to be looked at before it’s drunk.” It was some time before either of us looked at anything but our plates.

Art came in late, and flushed, and he had the look of a man who is trying not to walk on air in front of his friends and is failing. He wrung each of our hands in turn and said nothing whatever, which is unlike him. Then he laughed, and it broke the ice for all three of us. He said that he had messages from a certain lady, and that he had been charged to deliver them word for word, and that if he did not remember them exactly he would be sent back for them. She had bidden him tell us that she would never forget how good we had been to her, that she had cried over us both, and that she wanted us for friends until we were all three old and quarrelsome. Quincey looked hard at the wine for a moment. I looked at the ceiling. It was Quincey who spoke first, and he did it very simply.

“Boys,” he said, “I ain’t much on speeches. I’ve seen Art pull me out of a bad place, and I’ve seen Jack hold a lantern steady over a man who was bleeding to death, and I guess a girl who can pick from among the three of us is a girl with a sight more sense than most. Here’s to her. And here’s to the man she picked. He’s got to be worth it, that’s all, and I reckon he is.”

We drank it standing. Art’s eyes were wet, and he made no pretence of the contrary. I said a few words in reply which I have forgotten, and which I hope Quincey has too. What I remember is that for the space of a minute I was as glad as I have ever been of anything, and that the gladness was quite real and quite as heavy as lead. I am not sure that I ought to record that, but the thing is out, and the wax cylinder will not repeat it.

After that we were a good deal easier. Quincey told the story of the Marquesas landing, in which Art, it appears, was bitten by something that the natives regarded as a great honour. Art told, with dreadful gravity, the story of the Titicaca boatman and the sheep. We talked of the Korea, and of the fever, and of a man whose name I cannot now recall but whom we all agreed to have been a scoundrel. Somewhere about two in the morning Quincey sang, in a voice like a saw in a wet log, a song about a lone prairie, and Art, who cannot sing at all, joined in. I did not sing, but I beat time, and I am told I did it fairly. At the door Quincey took a hand of each of us and said that whatever came, the three of us were not to be broken up by a girl. “She’s made us three friends instead of one,” he said, “and that’s a pretty fair bargain for a lady to drive.” I do not know how a man is to answer such a speech, so I did not, and we parted.

It was daylight when I walked to the station. It is a curious thing that the sun of a May morning seems to mind so little what has happened to us.

*28 May.*--A curious incident, which I set down at once, before I can rationalise it.

I made my rounds early, as a cure for last night. R. M. Renfield was in a calm humour; he has been calm now for some days, and busy with a small occupation of his own. He has been saving the sugar from his tea and spreading it on the sill of his window, where, I am bound to say, it has attracted a good many flies. I have made no comment, because in his case a mania that has found a harmless outlet is best let alone. He received me civilly, with the dignified courtesy of a man who has a great deal of business to transact and will spare me five minutes of it. I asked the usual questions. He answered them with care and, I think, a little impatience.

Then, as I turned to go, and without any prompting whatever, he said:--

“Doctor, will you tell me one thing? Is Miss Westenra happy?”

I do not think I moved. I am certain that I did not answer for some moments. He stood looking at me with his head a little on one side, quite gravely, with no sign in his face of the fixed idea that is generally so plain on it. He might have been a curate inquiring after a parishioner.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“Miss Westenra,” he repeated, with the same gentle patience one uses to a child. “It is a good name. It sounds like something one is glad to have been told. I should like to know that she is happy.”

I asked him where he had heard the name. He said, quite pleasantly, that he could not remember, and then turned his back on me and went back to his sugar, and would say no more. Nor did he say anything further to the attendant, who was with me and heard it all.

I have gone over the matter these two hours. I have never spoken the name in this house, save once, into this instrument. Hennessey, whom I asked, protests that he has not heard it, and I believe him. The explanation, when I found it, was as commonplace as the difficulty was disagreeable. On the morning of the 26th I had Renfield brought to my study for examination, and her note, the kind little note that she wrote to me after--after the 24th--lay on my desk in its envelope, and her name and address were on the flap. I was called away for a few minutes and left him there with the attendant. A man of his acuteness could have read it upside down from the door. That, I am satisfied, is all.

Yet why he should trouble to ask whether she is happy, in the tone of one who has a right to be told, I cannot make out. And why, of all the persons in the world, he should ask me!

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street*,

“*3 June*.

“My dearest Mina,--

“I am ashamed to say that I have been so happy for a whole week that I have thought of no one but myself, and I have not the smallest excuse. Arthur has been here every day. Mamma pretends that she does not notice, and then goes out of the room in the middle of a sentence, and I know she is dying to be told that she may cry for joy. Arthur came to me the morning after Mr. Morris’s dinner looking like a schoolboy who has been out all night, and swore that he had only drunk my health twice, and that Dr. Seward was so sad and so kind to him, and Mr. Morris so jolly, that he felt quite unworthy of the pair of them. I made him tell me every word they said. I was very good and did not cry at all, until he had gone. Mina, I think they are the two best men in England, and I should like to see them each married to a princess.

“Now I have a reproach to make, dear. You said in your last that you had heard nothing of Jonathan since the middle of May. Has he not written? Do not tell me you are anxious; you never are, and you would say so with a laugh, and I should know you were only being brave. Write to me by return, and tell me all.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Herr Gottfried Weiss to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, Transylvania*.

“*28 May*.

“Honoured Fräulein,--

“Pardon that a stranger writes, and pardon the English, which I have from a book and from some travellers. I am the keeper of this hotel. The young English gentleman, Herr Jonathan Harker, was my guest in the first week of May before he went on to the mountains, on business for a noble of that country. He was good to my wife and me, and he gave me your name and address in Exeter, and asked that if there were any matter concerning him I should write. I do it now.

“There is no cause for great fear. A message has come down to me by a carrier from the mountains that the gentleman is in health, and that his business is longer than he thought, and that his friends should be told he will be delayed. It says no more, and the road over the Pass is bad and the post is slow, so that a letter from him, if he has written, may be long on the way. I do not know how long. It is possible that he will be here again in some weeks, and if he comes I shall write to you the same day. I have kept for him the small case which he left with me.

“My wife, who is anxious for all travellers to those parts, begs to be remembered to you, and prays that you will not be distressed.

“I remain, honoured Fräulein, your servant,

“GOTTFRIED WEISS.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*Exeter*,

“*8 June*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“You ask if I am anxious, and I will not be brave with you, for you would see through it. I am, a little. I had your letter yesterday morning, and by the afternoon post there was another, which I enclose, though you will be puzzled by it as I was. Read it first, and then come back. I have copied nothing; it is Herr Weiss’s own hand, with all his funny spellings, and I would not spoil it.

“Well, dear, what do you make of it? I have read it eleven times. He says there is no cause for fear, and I believe him; there is nothing in it that a sensible person could be frightened at. It is only that Jonathan said he would be home in a week from the ninth of May, and it is now a month, and I have had no line from him but the few hurried ones I told you of. And it is so strange to hear of him from a stranger! I have been walking about all day telling myself that a solicitor’s business is always longer than a solicitor thinks, that Mr. Hawkins says the same, and that the mails from those far mountain places may take a month to cross a river. I said it so many times that at last I was quite convinced, and then I found I had left my pen in the schoolroom and had to walk back for it in the dark.

“I took the letter to Mr. Hawkins at once. He read it standing, and then sat down, which he never does, and read it again. He said that Jonathan was quite the best clerk he ever trained and would come to no harm, and that his client, a very rich foreign nobleman, was doubtless enjoying the conversation of an educated Englishman and had no notion of the time. But he said also that he would write that night to the client himself, at the address he has for him, to ask when we may look for Jonathan. Dear Mr. Hawkins! He patted my hand, and I could see that he was thinking a good deal more than he said.

“Do not worry about me, and do not tell Arthur, for I do not want him to think I am the kind of girl who makes a fuss. I want to be as well behaved as you were, Lucy dear, and I mean to be. But it does help so to write it all out, and I am practising my shorthand in the evenings, so that I shall be ready to take down every word of his travels when he is home again. Kiss Arthur for me, if you like; I give you leave, being your oldest friend.

“Ever your loving

“MINA.”

*Telegram from Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*10 June.*

“Hawkins has letter from client himself. Jonathan well, detained by business, home in July. Thank God. Love, Mina.”

It was not to be supposed that a matter of this delicacy could be settled without ceremony, and the ceremony was a good deal longer than the settlement. Lady Russell had been applied to on the Monday; she had passed the Tuesday in a very serious examination of such papers as Sir Walter's agent could be brought to produce; and on the Wednesday morning, by an appointment which Elizabeth had taken care to make sound like a favour conferred, she walked up to the Hall with a small portfolio under her arm, and found Mr Shepherd already in the breakfast-room, arranging his own papers with the air of a man who wished it to be understood that they were, on the whole, the more presentable of the two sets.

Sir Walter received them in the library, in the chair that had the best light upon his profile. Elizabeth sat near him. Anne, who had not been asked, but who had not been forbidden, had taken her work to the window-seat, where she might be supposed to have no opinions; and it was there that she saw Lady Russell's colour rise a little, as it always did when she was about to be reasonable in the face of opposition.

Lady Russell spoke first, by right of precedence, and spoke well. She had no wish, she said, to distress Sir Walter by a catalogue of particulars; she would only lay before him what a few years of self-denial, honestly begun, would accomplish. The debts were not so large as to be beyond a regular liquidation; it was not the amount, but the habit, that was to be corrected. She proposed that the income should be divided, and a fixed proportion be paid over each half-year to the creditors, before one shilling was spent upon anything else; that the household should be reduced by so many servants, the stables by so many horses; that the number of dinners should be lessened, and their quality, in one or two articles which she named with great forbearance, a little altered; and that the annual journey to London, which was the most expensive of all their habits, should, for a period of not fewer than three years, be given up.

“Give up London!” said Sir Walter.

“For a time only,” said Lady Russell.

“There is no such thing as a time only, in a case of this kind. It would be observed. It would be talked of. Elizabeth, you hear what Lady Russell proposes. We are to be missed in town, and the town is to be told the reason. I do not know what my acquaintance would think. I do not know what I should think of any man who did it.”

“I should think that he was paying his debts,” said Lady Russell.

“Precisely; and that is what no man of any consequence would wish to be thought of him.” He waved the portfolio away with the back of his hand, which was a very fine one. “I am sure Lady Russell means it kindly. I only say that it is impossible. A baronet does not reduce his stables like a country attorney.”

Mr Shepherd, who was himself a country attorney, and who had listened to this with a face of the most flexible sympathy, now stepped forward with his own proposal, which was of a softer texture. He would not for the world have Sir Walter deprived of any real comfort. His idea was simply that of a little management; a small reduction in one or two branches, which would scarcely be perceived; a stricter attention to the rents; a good deal of the timber in the outer plantations, which was standing to no purpose, and might be cut with advantage; and a fresh arrangement of the mortgages, with a gentleman of his acquaintance in Taunton, who would take them over at something under the present interest, and would be, he ventured to say, in no hurry whatever about the principal.

“Cut the timber!” Sir Walter repeated, in a different voice from that in which he had spoken of London, and with a countenance of real pain. “My father planted those oaks.”

“Your grandfather, Sir Walter, I think,” said Mr Shepherd, who knew the dates; but seeing that he had not chosen his ground well, he added, that the plantations might of course be spared, and something else be found.

“And a fresh mortgage; you propose a fresh mortgage, when I am already—when the estate is already—” Sir Walter did not choose to finish the sentence. “No, Mr Shepherd. I have gone as far as a man in my situation can be expected to go. I will not have Kellynch treated as a farm to be turned over from one hand to another. Lady Russell’s scheme would make me ridiculous, and yours, I am afraid, would make me poor; and I cannot say which I should least like.”

There was a silence, in which the clock upon the chimney-piece became very audible. Elizabeth looked at her father with an expression of the kindest indignation; and Lady Russell, who was not used to see her plans go by like this, looked at nobody.

It was then that Anne, who had been for some minutes conscious that she had a sheet of figures in her work-bag which she ought not to have made, and a sentence in her head which she ought not to say, found, to her own great surprise, that she was speaking.

“I beg your pardon, Papa. I have been trying to reckon what Lady Russell has said, and I think it would not be enough.”

Sir Walter turned his eyes upon her, as upon a chair that had spoken.

“I think,” she continued, with a colour that she could feel, but a voice that did not shake, “that if the creditors are to be paid, and paid without any mortgage or sale, it will be necessary to do more than has been named, and not less. If we gave up the London journey, and reduced the servants, and the horses, as Lady Russell says, there would still be the house in the way it is kept, and the table, and the carriage, and the whole manner of the thing, which would go on, I think, exactly as before. I have put down what might be saved if the carriage-horses were sold altogether, and only the one pair kept for the farm, and the number of the household made what it was in my mother’s time; if the dinners were for the family only, or nearly so; and if the yearly allowances,” she coloured more deeply, “were fixed for every one of us, myself among the rest, at a sum that could not be exceeded. It would make a difference of nearly twice as much as Lady Russell has calculated. It would be very disagreeable for a while. But it would be done in five years, and Kellynch would be untouched.”

She stopped, rather frightened at what she had said. Sir Walter had risen a little in his chair. Mr Shepherd looked with lively interest at his papers. Lady Russell’s face said, plainly, that this was her own Anne, and that she was afraid it was not going to be forgiven.

“Really,” said Sir Walter, “I did not know that I was to hear a lecture upon housekeeping from—I am not certain that I understand you, Anne. Sell the carriage-horses? I shall be much obliged if you will tell me how Elizabeth is to be seen at church.”

“I think Anne is right,” said Elizabeth.

If the chimney-piece had spoken, the company could not have been more astonished. Elizabeth had not looked at her sister; she was looking at the opposite wall, with a very handsome composure, and spoke in the voice she used for the housekeeper. “I have been thinking a great deal about it, Papa, since Lady Russell’s note came. I do not say that I like it. But if anything is to be done, I would rather it were done thoroughly, and at home, where nobody sees it, than be picked at in a small way, and have everybody know that we are picking. It is the being seen to retrench that is disagreeable. If we stay quietly at Kellynch, and see only the people we choose, there is not a creature who can tell what we spend. I would sooner give up a dozen carriage-horses than be pitied in Bath, or in London either.” She paused, and a shade of something like feeling passed over her fine features. “I am sure I have no great pleasure in the town this year. One is asked where one has been for the last twelvemonth.”

Anne, who understood, from this last sentence, more of her sister’s motives than she had ever done before, and who thought them, on the whole, very much like her other motives, was still too grateful to be critical. Lady Russell, quicker than any of them, saw the opening, and would have pressed it; but Sir Walter, who felt himself deserted in his own family, and in his own library, and who had that sense of injury which in weak minds is nearest to the sense of dignity, drew himself up.

“I see how it is. I am to be managed by my own children. I am obliged to you both. But I have not yet learned to think that the master of Kellynch Hall is to be turned out of his own carriage by his daughters’ arithmetic. Let there be no more of it to-day. I shall consider what has been said.” And the consideration, it was evident, was to consist in not thinking of it at all.

Mr Shepherd, who had been waiting, with the professional patience of a man used to see clients come round, for the moment when that sort of thing was said, now judged it right to clear his throat. It had been his business, for some days, to find a way of saying a very disagreeable thing agreeably; and he had hit upon none better than to say it as if he were relieved of the necessity of saying it. He hoped that Sir Walter would pardon a suggestion which, he was perfectly aware, might not be entertained for a moment. There was, however, one resource which had not been named; and it had occurred to him only from having observed what a very great number of persons of the first respectability were, at this time, in search of a residence in the country, from motives of— He would say, of health. A house like Kellynch Hall, so well placed, so admirably kept, with such grounds, and such a name; if Sir Walter should ever be induced, for a very limited period, and with every circumstance of precaution as to the character of the person, to think of a tenant—

“Mr Shepherd.”

“Sir Walter?”

“I will thank you not to use that word again in my house. I do not know what may be the custom of your profession; but I will not hear it. I have never heard it applied to Kellynch, and I do not intend to begin. If you have any further proposal which can be made without it, I shall be glad to receive it; if not, I imagine that we have all done as much as can be expected of us for one morning.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and gathered up his papers with the humility of a man who has not, on reflection, said anything at all; only, as he passed Lady Russell in the doorway, he gave her a small, rueful glance, which was perhaps, of all that had happened, the one most likely to be remembered. Elizabeth was at the same moment observing to her father that she thought the room very cold; and the party would have broken up in this manner, with nothing whatever effected but the exhibition of everybody’s opinions, if the servant had not come in with a letter upon a salver.

“From Uppercross, Sir Walter; brought over by the Musgroves’ man, who is waiting to know if there is an answer.”

It was addressed to Anne. Sir Walter, who had taken up the Baronetage as the letter came in, and did not care to have it supposed that he had done so for any purpose, said that he hoped Mary was well; and did not attend to the reply.

Anne broke the seal, and read as follows, with a face which Lady Russell watched, and which grew, by degrees, more resigned than alarmed.

“MY DEAR ANNE,—I am sorry to trouble you, but I have been so very unwell these three days that I hardly know how to hold a pen, and nobody here seems to think it of the least consequence. Charles says it is my nerves, and went out shooting directly after breakfast, which was a very odd way of shewing his concern. I had a most dreadful pain in my side all night, and Mr Robinson, when he was sent for, said it might be a great many things, which I thought no answer at all. I am sure I do not know what I am to do. The children are very noisy, and Mrs Musgrove will have them in the drawing-room; and yesterday, when I was so ill, they were let in twice, and the little one has such a cough. I have not had a creature to speak to but the servants, except Charles’s sisters, who came, and stayed a quarter of an hour, and went away again to some party at the Great House, where I was not asked. I dare say that is not meant, but it is what one feels. Do come to me, Anne, as soon as ever you can. You know how much better I am when you are here, and there is nobody at Kellynch who wants you half so much. Papa will not miss you, I am certain, and Elizabeth never does. I should be so glad if you would stay a good while. I do not think I can be long for this world, and it would be a great comfort. Pray send word by the man. Yours ever, MARY M.

“P.S. I hear that there is some talk of money at the Hall. Charles does not know anything about it, and I am sure I should not ask.”

Anne folded it, and said to the servant that she would send an answer presently; and, being directly asked by Sir Walter what Mary had to say, replied that Mary was not well, and wished for her company. Sir Walter said that Mary was always wishing for something; and Elizabeth, that the arrangement of the flowers for the dinner-table would fall, in that case, to her; and no more was said upon the subject by either of them. Lady Russell, walking down the steps with her, only pressed her hand, and asked whether the Uppercross carriage was to be sent, or whether she should be so good as to be driven over in her own; and Anne, with her thoughts still in the library, was surprised to find that she had, in that short time, already decided.

The day went on as such days do. Sir Walter was very civil at dinner, and a little injured; Elizabeth talked of the Christmas party at Camden Place of two years back, which was in nobody’s way; and the subject of the debts was allowed, with the tacit consent of all, to lie where the morning had left it, under the Baronetage, and on the library table.

It was late, and the house had gone quiet, when Anne came up to her own room, and sat down by the window, without wanting a candle. The evening was mild, and the light had not quite gone from the park; she could see the lines of the old trees, standing very still, against the paler sky, and the roof of the lodge beyond them. She thought of her father in the chair, and of Lady Russell’s colour, and of Mr Shepherd’s bow; she thought of the astonishing moment at which her sister had said, in her own voice, that she was right, and could not tell whether it was a promise of anything, or only an accident of the day. Nothing was settled. Nothing was likely to be settled by any thing that had been said or by any thing that she could say. The bills would come, on Saturday, as they had come before; and Sir Walter would take up the book, and turn to his own page.

But there was, in Mary’s letter, something so foolish, and so entirely certain to be wanted, that it was almost a relief to her; here, at least, was a claim that could be answered. She should go, then; it was but three miles; she would write to Lady Russell in the morning, to say that the plan should be only laid by, not given up; and she would take with her the paper of figures, which had been so ill received, and put it in her trunk. There was no knowing. She rose, and drew the curtain, and went to write her answer.

I ran most of the way to the village. The morning was already warm, with a thin haze lying over the fields, and the air had the heavy stillness of a day that had never got its storm. Poirot's cottage stood close to the park gates. I was about to hammer on the door when I saw that the window above was open, and that a small figure in a dressing-gown was leaning out of it.

“Ah, my friend Hastings! I had thought you would come.”

“Then you know?” I gasped.

“That Madame Inglethorp is dead? Yes. It was Baily who told me. He lives at the end of the lane, you comprehend, and when he had set Dr. Wilkins down at Styles he walked home by way of the village. He passed under my window at a quarter to six. I do not sleep much, and I heard his boots. I called down to him to ask what made him walk so fast at such an hour.” He gave a little shrug. “He told me all that he knew, which was not everything. Wait one moment. I descend.”

He was as good as his word, though I should have said that for Poirot the moment was a long one. When he appeared he was dressed with his usual meticulous care, his moustache waxed to two exact points, and he carried a small case in his hand. I began to pour out my story as we set off, and I think he heard all of it. The convulsions, Dr. Bauerstein’s manner, the locked doors, the post-mortem, Alfred’s absence: he took each in turn and said nothing, nodding his egg-shaped head. When I told him of the book on strychnine I had been reading, he glanced at me sideways.

“You have been very industrious, Hastings. It is a good habit, to read. It is a better one to read after, and not before.”

“Before what?”

“Before one has seen.”

I was a little hurt, but I let it pass.

We had gone perhaps half-way up the drive when Poirot stopped short. A flash of yellow had caught his eye in the border by the lodge, and he was bending over it with every sign of interest.

“Come along, Poirot,” I said impatiently. “They are waiting for us.”

“Go on, my friend. I follow. It is nothing, a small matter that I would like to satisfy myself about. Present my compliments to Monsieur John, and say that I come in one little minute.”

I did not wait to argue, and I confess that I was glad to go on alone. It seemed to me that a great many things were waiting to be done, and that Poirot was not the man to hurry them.

I had barely reached the terrace when I heard voices in the hall. The front door stood wide open. In the middle of the hall stood John and Lawrence, and between them, with his hat still in his hand, was Alfred Inglethorp. His face was grey and drawn under the black beard, and the glasses he wore seemed to have slipped down upon his nose. He looked to me like a man who had been struck a blow and had not yet learnt where it came from.

“It is not possible,” he was saying, in his precise and rather artificial voice. “It cannot be true. I left her, to all appearances, in the best of health. She was upset, yes, but no more than usual. Poor Emily! Poor, dear Emily!”

He sank into a chair, and covered his face with his hand. Whatever else I felt, I could not help observing that the hand was steady.

“Where were you, Alfred?” said John. He did not say it harshly. He said it like a man who is very tired and would rather not ask. “We have been looking for you since five o’clock.”

Inglethorp raised his head.

“I am ashamed to say that I can hardly tell you how it happened. I walked down to the village with Dr. Bauerstein, as you know. At the corner by the church I left him, and as I was in no mood to go straight back to the house, after—after what had passed between my wife and myself in the afternoon—I walked on to Abbey Farm. Denby is an old friend of mine. He kept me talking, and then we sat over a game of chess, and when I looked at my watch it was past one o’clock. I set out to walk home, and found”—he passed his hand across his eyes—“that the front door was bolted. I had the latch-key, of course, but the bolt held it. I knew that if I began knocking and ringing at that hour I should rouse the whole household, and my wife had been so unwell and so put out all day. So I walked back to Denby’s, and he gave me a bed on the sofa in his study. I came home as soon as I woke.”

There was a short silence. Lawrence looked at him fixedly and then away.

“Beg pardon, sir.”

It was Dorcas. She had come out from the back of the hall with her apron pressed against her mouth, and her eyes were red, but her voice was perfectly firm.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Inglethorp, but you must have made a mistake. That door was never bolted last night. I never bolt it when the master’s out with the latch-key; it’s always been the rule. I left it on the latch at ten o’clock, same as I always do, and it was on the latch when Mr. Baily ran out for the car, for I saw him go by it myself. It was never bolted until I did it myself this morning, after the doctors were gone.”

Inglethorp turned very slowly towards her. I could not read his expression. It was perhaps only the weariness of a man who has been contradicted by a servant at the worst moment of his life.

“Then I must have been mistaken, Dorcas,” he said gently. “The lock is stiff, and I was tired. It was dark under the porch. I daresay I pushed at it and thought it held.”

“Very likely, Alfred,” said John hastily. “It doesn’t matter in the least. Dorcas, that will do. Thank you.”

Dorcas withdrew, though not before she had thrown a look at the sofa-cushions which I found hard to interpret. Nobody said anything more. It was, I think, a relief to us all when a shadow fell across the doorway and Poirot stepped into the hall, smiling apologetically, and holding his hat before him.

I introduced him to John, who murmured a few words of thanks, and to Lawrence, who did not trouble to conceal that he thought the whole business a piece of officiousness. Poirot bowed to Inglethorp with grave sympathy.

“Monsieur, I am desolated to intrude upon such a grief.”

“Mr. Hastings has told us of your kindness,” said Inglethorp stiffly. He rose. “You will forgive me if I go to my room. I—I find I can hardly bear it.”

He went up the stairs slowly, with one hand on the balustrade. Poirot watched him go. Then he turned to John.

“It is by your permission, Monsieur Cavendish, that I look at the room?”

“Of course. I have the keys.” John took them from his pocket. “But there is one thing. I would rather, if you don’t mind, that my wife and Miss Murdoch were not distressed. Dr. Wilkins has told Cynthia to rest. She has had a bad shock.”

“Naturally. I shall not disturb them more than I must.”

But it was not to be avoided. As we crossed the hall towards the stairs, the door of the morning-room opened, and Cynthia came out. She was in a loose dressing-gown, and her hair, usually so bright, hung lank about her shoulders. She was still very pale, though the flush that I had noticed in the night had gone. She stopped when she saw the stranger.

“This is Monsieur Poirot, Cynthia,” said John.

“Oh, yes. Mr. Hastings’ friend.” She gave him her hand, listlessly. “I don’t know what you can do. It’s all so horrible. I only got up because I couldn’t bear lying there.”

“Mademoiselle, I will not keep you. I will ask only one thing, and then you shall go back to your rest.” Poirot’s manner was extraordinarily gentle. “Last night, when they burst the door of Madame’s room, and there was all the noise and the shouting, you did not wake. I understand that they had to shake you. Is it your habit, mademoiselle, to sleep so heavily?”

She looked at him in some surprise. Then a puzzled frown crossed her face.

“No,” she said slowly. “No, that’s just what’s so strange. I’m generally a very light sleeper. The least sound wakes me, a mouse in the wainscot even. I can’t think what came over me. It was like being at the bottom of a well. I didn’t hear anything at all until Mary was shaking me.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all.”

He bowed to her, and she went slowly up the stairs, holding the rail. I looked at Poirot, expecting him to say something, but his face had assumed that blank politeness that I knew of old, and he merely nodded to John.

“And now, if you please.”

It was close upon eleven o’clock before we were alone in the room. There had been a great deal of coming and going in the interval. Poirot had spent a long time with Dorcas in her pantry, and I do not know how much longer with the servants, and he had spent nearly an hour in the grounds, pacing up and down beneath the windows of the right wing, and stooping now and again to look at the earth. I had chafed a good deal at the delay. Now, at last, John unlocked the door and let us in, and then, at Poirot’s request, withdrew, and I turned the key on the inside myself.

The room was very quiet. The blinds had been drawn half down, and the sun came in in long bars across the carpet. The table by the bed still lay on its side, as it had fallen in the convulsion, and the pieces of a broken cup were scattered across the floor beside it. The bed had not been touched. I found that I could not look at it for long.

Poirot stood for a moment just inside the door, with his eyes travelling slowly round the room, as though he were learning it by heart. Then he began to move about, with a curious lightness for so precise a little man. He knelt by the overturned table and looked at the stain on the carpet without touching it. He stood before the writing-table in the window, where the despatch-case lay with its key in the lock, and he did not open it. He examined the fireplace, and the row of ornaments on the mantelpiece, and here I thought that he paused for an appreciable time.

“It was at the mantelpiece that Lawrence Cavendish was looking,” I said. “I can’t think why. He looked as if he had seen a ghost.”

“Did he?” said Poirot absently. “Yes, you told me.” And with one finger he moved a china vase a quarter of an inch to the left, and then, with a little frown of disapproval, moved it back again. “The Monsieur Lawrence has, I think, a great deal of imagination. It is a dangerous quality in a man who is frightened.”

“Frightened of what?”

But Poirot had gone on to the door which led into the corridor, the one I had unbolted the night before. He examined the bolts, and the lock, and then crossed the room to the door of communication that we had forced. It hung crookedly from one hinge. The wood of the frame was splintered where the bolt had been torn out of it. Poirot went down on one knee, and I saw him peering at the splinters with the greatest attention, his head on one side like a bird’s. Then he drew a small pair of tweezers from his case, and I saw him detach something from the jagged edge of the wood.

He held it up to the light for a moment. Then he rose, and beckoned me to the window.

“Regard, Hastings.”

He opened his palm. On it lay a very small object, hardly larger than a grain of rice, and of no colour that I could name in that light. I bent over it. It meant nothing to me at all.

“What is it?” I said.

“It is what you see.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

“Ah, that I do not say.” He shut the tweezers on it again, and wrapped it carefully in a fold of tissue paper, which he placed in an envelope, and put the envelope into his pocket-book. “That, my friend, I keep for myself.”

“Come, Poirot,” I said, a little heated. “You needn’t be so mysterious. After all, I brought you here. If you have found something, I ought to be told.”

“And you shall be told, Hastings. At the proper moment. But a thing that is told too soon is a thing that is not believed. If I say to you now, ‘Hastings, it is this, or it is that,’ you will go about the house with a face so full of knowledge that the whole household will read it. No, no.” He laid a hand on my arm. “You have the honest countenance, my friend. It is a precious gift. I do not wish to spoil it.”

I found this scarcely flattering, and I said so. Poirot only smiled. Then he took the envelope out again, looked at it, and held it between us in the sun, so that I saw it as a small pale oblong in the shadow of his fingers.

“It is a little thing,” he said softly. “A very little thing. And yet, Hastings, think how much sleep it has cost. It was not lost here, this is what I ask myself. It was left here. Voilà the difference.”

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

“No,” said Poirot gravely, and put it away. “Not yet. But you have seen it, and that is something. And now we will ask ourselves why a door that was locked on the inside should be so careful to leave a message on the outside.”

I stared at him. Somewhere below us a clock began to strike eleven, and I counted the strokes, and for the life of me could not tell whether he was speaking of the door, or of the woman who had died behind it.

Robert carried the little girl no farther than the turning of the path, where she was reclaimed by her nurse, and after that he gave his arm to Madame Ratignolle, who leaned upon it with the deliberate weariness of a woman who intends to be amused. The sun stood almost overhead. The camomile lay flat and yellow on either hand, and the dark oranges gave out no shadow at all.

What passed between the two on that long sandy path Edna did not learn until some hours afterward, and then only in part. Robert was a young man who said a great many things in the course of a day, most of them to no purpose. But he was silent for some little distance, and when he spoke it was in a voice quite unlike the one he used for teasing.

“Have you noticed, Madame Ratignolle, how Mrs. Pontellier looks at things?” he said. “Not at us. At the water, at the sails, at a lizard on the wall. She looks as if the world had been made that morning and nobody had yet told her what to call it.”

“Ah, bah!” said Madame Ratignolle. “You have been in the sun, Robert.” But she said it comfortably, and she pressed her handkerchief to her lips and went on limping upon his arm. She made him no answer that could be called an answer. She had a talent for letting a remark lie where it fell, and Robert, having said what he had not perhaps intended to say, whistled a little air and began to speak of the price of shrimp.

The noon dinner at the long table was a noisy affair. Madame Lebrun presided, with her eye upon the dishes and her mind, as usual, upon a dozen small disasters that had not yet taken place. Edna had scarcely unfolded her napkin when a boy in a battered cap appeared at the door of the dining-room, hesitated, and was passed along the benches by many hands until he stood at her elbow with a yellow envelope. It had come over from the landing.

She opened it with a pleasant sense of expectation and read it through twice, though it contained but a dozen words. Léonce was detained by business of importance. He would not be able to come out on Saturday; she was not to look for him until the week following. He sent his love to the boys.

“No bad news, I hope?” said Madame Lebrun across the table.

“Oh, no. My husband cannot come at the end of the week. That is all.”

She folded the paper small and put it in her pocket. She was aware of examining her own feelings with some curiosity, as one turns over a coin of foreign mintage. There was disappointment, certainly, of a mild and reasonable sort; she supposed she ought to be sorry, and she tried the sorrow and found it a trifle thin. Underneath it there was something else which she did not care to name, and which, having no name, she suffered to remain at the bottom of her mind. She ate her dinner. Raoul upset his glass of water, and she mopped it up with her napkin and did not scold him.

Madame Ratignolle was going home to lie down; it was her habit at that hour, and her husband, she declared, would not know her if she gave it up. Edna walked with her as far as the steps of the Ratignolle cottage. They stood a moment in the glare, and Adèle, with her hand upon the rail and her head tilted, looked at her friend with a small, arrested smile.

“I must tell you something Robert said this morning. It made me laugh, but it has stayed with me, too.” She paused, and gave the remark exactly, with the little inflections of his voice, which she had an ear for. “The world made that morning, and nobody had told you yet what to call it. Is it not droll? He has been studying you, *chérie*.”

“He is very foolish,” said Edna quickly. A slow color had risen to her face. “He would say as much of a cat on a hearth-rug.”

“Perhaps,” said Adèle placidly, and went in to her rest.

Edna stood a moment longer where she was. She could not have said why the words had touched her, unless it was because they were so nearly true. Then she turned and went back across the yard, past the cottage where the children were being put to sleep with a good deal of protest, and did not stop.

She was not sure at what moment she made up her mind. Toward four o'clock the wind fell, and the Gulf, which had been so choppy in the morning, lay in long slow undulations, glittering and heavy. The beach was almost deserted. The bathers had gone up to their naps or their card-tables, and the tent stood empty with its flap idle in the little breeze. Robert had disappeared somewhere with a group of the younger people; she had heard them going off with a great noise of laughter, and she was glad to have escaped him again, though this time she had done nothing to bring it about.

She went into her bath-house and put on her bathing-dress, which she had worn all summer without ever quite trusting the water. She had waded, and she had let the waves lift her and set her down, and she had held to the hand of Robert or of her husband and gone out as far as her shoulders. But she had never gone alone. She had a dread of it that she could not account for, having no memory of an accident, nor any tale of a drowned relative to explain it. It was simply that the water was so large, and she was not.

When she came out upon the gallery the lady in black was there, in her accustomed place on the porch of the neighboring bath-house, with her prayer-book open upon her knee and her rosary wound about her fingers. She had a thin, dark, patient face, and Edna had passed her a score of times that summer without receiving so much as a glance. The lady in black did not seem to see any one; she moved among the crowd at Lebrun's like a person walking in a different weather.

She looked up now. Her eyes were very clear.

“The water is kind at this hour, madame,” she said, in French, and in a voice so low that Edna was not certain at first she had been addressed. “It is the hour when it is kindest.”

“Thank you,” said Edna, surprised. “I think it is.”

The lady returned to her book. It was all she said, and it was said without smile or emphasis, as one might remark that a door stood open. Edna went down the three wooden steps and across the hot sand.

The water was warm about her ankles, and then her knees, and she went forward until it reached her waist and she felt the slow pull of it against her skirts. She did not look behind her. She stood a moment with her arms held out from her sides, as she had once held them in a green meadow in Kentucky; and then, without exactly deciding it, she leaned forward and let her feet go from the bottom.

For an instant there was nothing but terror, and the sea rising cold and salt into her face. Then her arms moved, awkwardly, of themselves, in the old motion of beating down the tall grass; and her body, which she had always regarded as a thing to be carried about and dressed, answered her. She struck out once, twice, three times. She felt the water hold her. It was a very little thing. She might have covered the length of a small room. But she stopped, and set down her feet, and stood there panting with the salt running from her hair, and she laughed aloud, alone, at nothing.

She did not look toward the bath-houses. She did not know whether the lady in black had raised her eyes. When she had dressed she went up the long path in the softening light, and she said nothing of it to any one; not to Madame Ratignolle, who came out upon her gallery to wave a fan at her, nor to Robert, who joined the family at supper, sunburned and full of a wager he had lost, and who said nothing more that evening that could not have been said before the whole table. The thing was hers. She held it as a child holds a shell in a closed hand.

It was late when the house grew quiet. Raoul and his brother had gone to sleep at last, one with his arm flung over the edge of the bed, the other curled small beneath the mosquito bar; and the nurse's breathing came evenly from the room beyond. Edna drew the door softly to. She took the rocker to the far end of the gallery and sat there in the dark, without a lamp.

The night was warm and full of small sounds. A piano was being played somewhere in the main house, badly, and then not at all. The water spoke continually beyond the trees, low and unhurried, with a sound like breath. She thought of Léonce, in the house in Esplanade Street, with his papers and his cigar, and found she thought of him kindly and from a great distance. She thought of the lady in black.

But it was neither of these that kept her sitting there with her hands loose in her lap. It was the voice of Madame Ratignolle at the foot of the steps, giving out the sentence in its little dry sweetness. The world made that morning, and nobody had told her yet what to call it. She said it over to herself, slowly, and each time it seemed to mean a little more than the time before. She did not know what she was to call it. She only knew that she had stood in the water that afternoon and been held up, and that she was not at all sleepy.

The First National Bank was a gray stone building on Broadway, four blocks from the Herald, with a lot of brass on its doors and a lot of marble inside. It was a quarter to three when I got there. A guard the size of a piano told me the man I wanted was the assistant cashier, and pointed me at a railed-off desk in the corner.

The assistant cashier was named Ballard. He was fifty or so, plump and pink, with thin sandy hair combed carefully across a wide scalp and a gold pencil clipped in his vest pocket. He stood up when I gave him my card and sat down again when he had read it.

"Continental Detective Agency," he said. "I don't believe we've done business with your firm."

"You may. Donald Willsson had an account here."

"Yes." His face arranged itself into the expression of sympathy that goes with the word. "A terrible thing. A terrible thing for the whole city."

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

Ballard's pink face lost some of its sympathy. He touched the gold pencil.

"I'm afraid that's a matter⁠—"

"I know. Depositor's business. But the depositor was murdered a few hours after he wrote it, and I was hired by him. Old Elihu is still the biggest stockholder in this bank, as I understand it, and he's interested in finding out who killed his son. I could ask him to phone you. He'd enjoy it. He's in a mood to shout at somebody."

That did it. Ballard said he would see, and went away through a gate in the rail. He was gone eight minutes. Across the floor a woman in a black hat argued with a teller about a savings book, and the guard shifted his weight from one foot to the other. When Ballard came back he had a slip of paper in his hand and had lowered his voice.

"That check has not been presented, Mr.⁠—ah⁠—" He looked at my card. "It has not come through the window, it has not come through the clearing house, and it has not been certified. We've closed our books on yesterday, and there's nothing with that number on them. Mr. Willsson's balance was ample to cover it."

"You're sure? A check that size, on a day like yesterday⁠—somebody would have remembered."

"I asked the paying teller and the note teller both. And the bookkeeper. Nobody has seen it."

"Could it have been cashed at another bank? It'd still have to come back to you."

"In the ordinary course, yes, but not so soon. A check drawn yesterday afternoon on a local bank and taken to another local bank would reach us in this morning's exchange. It didn't." He smiled with a little relief, as if that closed it. "Wherever it is, it hasn't been used."

"Would you let me know if it turns up?"

"Naturally⁠—if Mr. Willsson's estate⁠—"

"Never mind the estate. Let me know."

He said he would. I thanked him and went out past the guard into a thin afternoon sun.

A check for five thousand dollars, written out in a hurry by a man who had twenty minutes, had gone somewhere and hadn't been cashed. Either the man it was made out to hadn't wanted to be seen at a bank window, or the man was dead, or the check had gone into a pocket that wasn't in a hurry. There were other possibilities, but none of them were any better.

I walked back toward the hotel by way of Union Street, looking at faces that looked back at me a shade too long. Personville had learned who I was, or some of Personville had. It showed in the way a man in a doorway found something to do with his hat when I came abreast of him. I didn't mind. Some of the eyes might be worth knowing later.

At the Great Western the clerk behind the desk was a hollow-chested young man with pimples and a habit of not looking at you while he talked. He didn't look at me now.

"There's something for you, sir." He reached into my box and brought out a folded sheet of hotel paper. "A gentleman left it about an hour ago."

"What gentleman?"

"He didn't say. He just left it."

"What did he look like?"

"I didn't notice." He examined the ceiling. It was a poor ceiling, but he appeared to find a good deal in it.

I unfolded the paper. It was written in pencil in a round schoolboy hand:

*Max would like to see you. He is at the Elite Billiard Parlor on Cedar Street most evenings. Any time you are around. He says no hurry.*

That was all. No name. I read it twice, folded it, and put it in my pocket, and the clerk went on studying his ceiling.

"When the gentleman left this, was he alone?"

"I really didn't notice, sir."

"You're a hell of a noticer," I said, and went up to my room.

It was a dull room with a brass bed, a bureau with a cracked mirror over it, one chair, and a window that looked down on the roof of a garage. I sat on the bed and thought about the note. Thaler hadn't come himself. He had sent somebody who could be forgotten by a desk clerk, and he had put no name on it but his own first one. It was polite, and it said no hurry, which meant there was one. I decided to let him wait. A man who sends an invitation like that wants an answer, and if he had to wait for it he might get careless about the next thing he sent.

I washed, ate a bad dinner in the hotel dining room, and was on my way back upstairs a little before eight when the clerk called after me. His voice had climbed half an octave.

"There's a lady to see you, sir. She's waiting in the writing room."

The writing room was a narrow space off the lobby with two desks, a dusty palm, and a leather settee that hadn't been sat on for a year. The lady wasn't sitting on it. She stood by the window with her back to the room, and when I came in she turned around slowly.

She had on a dark blue coat with a gray fur collar, and a small hat that put one wing of hair against her cheek. She was as slender as she had been the night before, and as blond, but the face under the hat was thinner. It had been powdered carefully and the powder didn't hide much. Her eyes were blue and steady. She had on low-heeled brown shoes.

"Mr.⁠—" she began, and stopped.

"You don't know my name," I said. "I never told you."

"No. You told me you were a friend of my husband's, but you did not give me any name." The accent was slight, a shortening of some vowels and a softness in the "th." "I am Mrs. Willsson. You know that."

"Yes. I've been meaning to come see you."

"You were on your way this morning, I think." She said it without any expression. "The girl at my door told me a man had been standing on the corner across the street, and then he went away."

"That was me. You had company."

"Yes." She looked at the palm. "Would you please sit down? I do not like to stand while I say this."

We sat, she on the settee and I on one of the desk chairs, which I turned around. A man came in for a sheet of paper, looked at us, and went out again without any.

"The police have been to the house," she said. "Twice. A man named Noonan came himself in the afternoon. He was not⁠—not what you would say rude. He asked me where I was last night."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I was at home with the servants. That my husband was expected late, and that I waited for him and went to bed."

"That wasn't true."

"You know it was not true. You were there." She raised her eyes. They didn't move away from mine. "I did not tell him you were there either."

"Why not?"

"Because I did not know what you would say. I thought I should come and find out."

"Then you thought right. What did I say to Noonan? Nothing. He hasn't seen me." I got a cigarette out and didn't light it. "Suppose you tell me where you went in the Buick."

"I cannot."

"You'll have to do better than that."

She shook her head, a little at a time, as if the movement hurt.

"Somebody telephoned me," she said. "A man. He said my husband was in trouble, in Hurricane Street, and that I must come. I did not know the street. I found it. It was dark, and there was nobody in it, and I went up and down in the car and saw nothing, and then I got out. There was⁠—" She stopped. Her mouth shook, and then she got it under control. "There were people running, and someone said a man was dead. I did not go closer. I got back into the car and came home."

"Not closer? What about the blood on your slipper?"

"Blood?" Her eyes widened, and the hand in her lap closed on the other one. It was very well done, or it wasn't done at all. "I do not know about that. I did not see any."

"The green one. The left."

"I have not looked at them since last night. I threw them⁠—" She caught herself. "I gave them to the maid this morning."

"I bet you did."

"You think I killed my husband." She said it flatly. "Everyone will think so. His father already does. He has said it to the servants."

"I don't think anything yet. Who was the man on the phone?"

"I do not know. I did not know his voice."

"American? Foreign? Old? Young?"

"American. I could not say the age. He spoke very quickly, and he did not say his name."

"And this morning Max Thaler called on you. What did he want?"

Something changed in her face, so quickly I couldn't be sure what it was. She wasn't afraid. She looked at me with a kind of careful weariness.

"Mr. Thaler," she said, "came to say that he was sorry. He said he had known my husband slightly. He said if there was anything he could do, I was to send for him."

"Was there anything?"

"I told him no."

"Did you know him before?"

"No."

"And he came to say he was sorry. That's nice of him. He's a great one for it, I'm told." I lit the cigarette. "What did you come here for, Mrs. Willsson?"

"To ask what you are going to do."

"Find out who killed your husband."

"And if it is me you find?"

"Then I find you."

She got up. She was taller than I remembered, or the coat made her seem it. The fur at her collar moved a little with her breathing.

"That is fair," she said. "I only wished to know." She held out a hand in a gray glove. I shook it. It was small and cold and didn't tremble. "Good night, Mr.⁠—"

"You can call me Neill, if it helps."

"Is that your name?"

"It's one of them."

She looked at me a moment longer, not smiling, then went out through the lobby with her head up, and the clerk watched her go with his whole face. I stayed in the writing room until the end of my cigarette, thinking that she had told me a story that hung together and that I would have liked it better if it hadn't hung together so well. A woman doesn't hand her slippers to the maid in the morning unless she's got a reason, and a woman who was innocent might have kept them where somebody could see them. But an innocent woman could have handed them over out of plain fright. The trouble with the whole business was that everything could be either.

I got my hat and walked down to the Western Union office on Broadway. A tired girl with a green eyeshade pushed a pad across the counter, and I stood at it a while with a pencil. Then I wrote:

CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO ATTENTION OLD MAN. DONALD WILLSSON PUBLISHER PERSONVILLE HERALDS WHO SENT FOR AGENCY BY LETTER AND CHECK WAS SHOT DEAD TENFORTY LAST NIGHT HURRICANE STREET BEFORE I COULD SEE HIM. FOUR HITS OUT OF SIX SHOTS FROM ALLEY. NO ARREST. HIS FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS CITY AND PAPERS AND SAYS WIDOW DID IT. POLITICAL ANGLE ALSO OPEN. GANG CONTROLLING CITY GOVERNMENT INCLUDES POLICE CHIEF AND GAMBLER MAX THALER WHO HAS ALREADY SENT FOR ME. FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK DRAWN BY WILLSSON YESTERDAY AFTERNOON NOT PRESENTED TO BANK. PERSONVILLE ROTTEN AND NOBODY TALKING. RECOMMEND I STAY AND WORK IT. WIRE AUTHORITY AND EXPENSE MONEY GREAT WESTERN HOTEL.

The girl counted the words with the tip of her pencil and gave me a number, and I paid it. She looked at the message, then at me, and said she would send it right off. I said that would be fine.

On the way back I passed the Elite Billiard Parlor's cousins, one every block, with their doors wide open on the smoke and the clicking, and men leaning in the doorways who quit talking as I went by. Nobody said anything to me and nobody followed me, or if anybody did he was good at it. The night air had turned cold and smelled of smelter smoke. On the hills the lights of the mine buildings hung yellow, and somewhere behind them a whistle blew, long and dragging, and stopped.

My room was as I had left it. I locked the door, wedged the chair under the knob, and took off my coat and my shoes. The window looked out at the garage roof and a slice of sky with no stars in it. I put the pencil note from Thaler on the bureau, beside the cracked mirror, and looked at it. Then I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head.

Five thousand dollars is a lot to write out in a hurry. A man who did that at three o'clock, with a telephone call about ten o'clock still to come, and who had never once told his own secretary what it was for, either owed somebody or was buying something. If he owed it, whoever held the check was in no hurry to cash it. If he was buying, the buyer had got what he paid for and had a reason for keeping it out of the bank. Or Donald Willsson had folded it into his pocket, and a man had gone through that pocket in the dark of Hurricane Street, and the paper was lying in a dead man's clothes at the undertaker's, or in some other man's coat, waiting.

I couldn't make any of it come out. I lay there a long time smoking one cigarette after another and dropping the ashes into my shoe, until the ash tray was full, and the check was still somewhere and I still didn't know where.

The rain, which had shown all the enthusiasm of a young curate at his first bazaar, ceased at a quarter to eleven, and a watery sun came out over Shaftesbury Avenue. Eve, descending the steps of the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, found herself in the position of a girl who is carrying an umbrella through a dry and cheerful world. It is a position which has its embarrassments. The umbrella, which had seemed so providential under the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, now looked like the property of somebody else, and it was borne in upon her that this was exactly what it was.

She was not a girl who could keep another person's umbrella, even one which had been thrust into her hand by a total stranger with the air of a man delivering a summons. Her thoughts turned to the gloomy building in Dover Street. Somewhere within its walls a tall young man without a hat was presumably wandering about at this moment, hunting for something to keep the rain off, and being, if the truth were known, extremely wet in the mind.

She took a bus to Piccadilly. Ten minutes later she was ascending the steps of the Drones Club and addressing a porter of majestic aspect, who looked at her as if she had been a bailiff.

“I want to leave this umbrella for one of your members,” said Eve. “A tall gentleman with an eyeglass. I don’t know his name. He lent it to me in the rain.”

“Lent it, miss?”

“Well, gave it to me. He went away before I could say anything.”

The porter’s face underwent a subtle change. He had been at the Drones Club for nineteen years and had ceased long ago to be surprised by anything the members did, but he retained a professional interest in the more spectacular developments.

“That,” he said, “would be Mr. Psmith, miss.”

Eve did not ask for the spelling. She had taken a leaf from her bag and written on it, standing at the desk, in the round firm hand which had been so much admired at Wayland House:

*Thank you very much for the umbrella. It was most kind of you, and I hope you did not get wet. I am sorry to have been so long returning it. It has been a great success.*

She read this through, felt that it lacked something, and could not for the life of her think what, and finally, with a sudden impulse, added a postscript: *My hat is also grateful.* She then folded the sheet, handed it to the porter with the umbrella, and went out into Piccadilly, feeling that she had behaved with propriety and that the incident was closed.

* * * * *

It was a little after one o’clock when the Honourable Mr. Walderwick came into the Drones Club and asked for his umbrella.

The Honourable Mr. Walderwick was a young man to whom Nature had given a large pink face, a small moustache, and an amount of brain which, in a less sheltered walk of life, would have made it difficult for him to find employment in any field more exacting than that of a professional mourner. But he had one great quality. He was devoted to his umbrella. It had been given him by an aunt, and it was his habit to say that it was the only thing in the world which had never let him down. He took it everywhere. He had once been observed to take it into a Turkish bath.

He now stood at the desk with a dark frown, holding the umbrella at arm’s length. It was undeniably damp. It was, moreover, folded in a way that was not his way.

“Who’s been using this?” he demanded.

“It was returned this morning, sir,” said the porter, who was a man of principle and did not believe in concealing things from the members. “A young lady brought it. Mr. Psmith had lent it to her.”

“Mr. Who?”

“Mr. Psmith, sir. The tall gentleman. He is in the smoking-room.”

Mr. Walderwick’s pink face deepened by several shades. Thrusting the umbrella under his arm like a man about to storm a redoubt, he strode up the stairs.

Psmith was seated in the largest of the smoking-room armchairs, with his long legs crossed and a cigarette in his hand, meditating with half-closed eyes on the mysterious workings of Fate. He looked up as the storm-cloud entered.

“Ah, Walderwick,” he said. “Come in, come in. Pull up a chair and take the weight off your feet.”

“Look here, Psmith!”

“I am looking.”

“That porter says you took my umbrella and lent it to a girl!”

“Your porter is well informed. It is a good quality in a porter. I have often thought that if we could persuade him to take up the study of finance, the country’s difficulties would be over in a week.”

“Do you mean to say you went and lent my umbrella to some girl you’d never seen before?”

“I did not say I had never seen her. I merely said nothing on that point. But I gather from your tone, Walderwick, that you feel I acted with a certain lack of ceremony. Let me be frank with you. I did. In the crisis, I selected your umbrella as the finest in the rack. Its lines were an inspiration to me. It was the only one that did not look like something left behind by a deceased curate.”

Mr. Walderwick, who had been prepared for defiance, apology, or even violence, but not for compliments, hesitated, and was lost.

“It’s not that I mind lending it,” he said. “At least, I do mind, rather, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s my umbrella.”

“Precisely. And it is on that very point that I wish to speak. Walderwick, what did you give for this umbrella?”

“My aunt gave it to me. But it cost twenty-five bob at Swan and Edgar’s.”

“Twenty-five shillings,” said Psmith, and produced a cheque-book. “I will give you ten pounds for it.”

“Eh?”

“Ten pounds. Let us say ten, not because the umbrella is worth more, but because I have recently found myself in a position to regard money with a certain lofty indifference, and because I dislike haggling.”

Mr. Walderwick opened his mouth and shut it again. He had the feeling, familiar to those who converse with Psmith, that he had been walking along a road which had been quietly turned round behind him.

“But what do you want with it?” he asked feebly.

“That,” said Psmith, writing, “is a question which I should hesitate to answer even to a brother. Let us say that the thing has sentimental associations. Let us say that I am a collector. Let us say anything you please, so long as you take this cheque. Thank you. And now, if you will allow me, the umbrella. I shall keep it by me. It is a solemn thing, Walderwick, to hand over to another man the companion of one’s better years, and I respect your emotion.”

“Well, I’m dashed,” said Mr. Walderwick, gazing at the cheque. “You know, Psmith, I don’t know that I like this. It seems too easy.”

“Life is often so, if one goes about it in the right spirit. Go and buy yourself another umbrella. Buy two. Or buy a small motor-car.”

Mr. Walderwick went out, muttering, and Psmith, taking possession of the umbrella, leaned it against the arm of his chair and looked at it with the tender gaze of a father regarding a son who has just done well at school. The porter’s message, which had come up with a folded piece of paper an hour before, lay in his waistcoat pocket. He took it out and read it again. Then he returned it to its place, and sat for some time without speaking.

* * * * *

Eve had lunched off a bun and a glass of milk at a tea-shop in Regent Street. She had made the meal last as long as she could, for she had two hours to spare and she knew what a bun cost, and at half-past three, standing at the corner of Piccadilly and Bond Street, she found that she was without the faintest idea of how to reach Berkeley Square. Lord Emsworth’s letter, or rather, Mr. Baxter’s letter written on behalf of Lord Emsworth, had said only that the interview would take place at four o’clock at his lordship’s town residence. It had assumed that she would know the way, in the manner of these secretaries. She looked about her for somebody to ask, and her eye fell upon a tall young man in a silk hat and a beautifully cut morning coat who was standing outside a bookshop, gazing with rapt attention at a volume entitled *Hints on Rose-Culture*.

He was wearing a monocle.

She hesitated. Then, with the calm of a girl who has decided to be brave, she walked up to him.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

The young man turned, removed his hat, and inclined his head with a grave courtesy.

“Madam,” he said, “you have the advantage of me.”

“I think,” said Eve, “that I haven’t. I believe you’re the man who lent me an umbrella this morning.”

“An umbrella?” said the young man. He seemed to search his memory with the air of one anxious to oblige. “No. I fear not. Of the many things which I have lent in my time, and I say it with regret, the umbrella has not been prominent. You must be thinking of some other long, thin, monocled person. London is full of them. It is a curse of the age.”

“But you had a monocle.”

“Purely a coincidence, I assure you. One is driven to it by the modern glare.”

Eve looked at him. He was quite serious. There was not a flicker on his face, and she felt a wild desire to laugh, which she managed to control.

“Oh, then I’m sorry,” she said. “It must have been somebody else. I was going to thank him.”

“It would be a delicate task, thanking a man for something he had not done. It would be like congratulating a bishop on his hat trick. He would suffer from confusion, and blush. May I hope that, in the event of your finding him, you will convey to him my regrets that he was not myself?”

“I will.”

“Then that is settled. And now,” said the young man, “I fancy that you were about to ask me something. It is a peculiarity of mine that I look like a man who knows his way about London. I have observed it. People stop me in the street and ask for the Tube, the National Gallery, and the nearest post-office. It has become quite a burden.”

“I was going to ask how I get to Berkeley Square.”

“Nothing simpler. You proceed up this thoroughfare, turn to the left at the cheese-monger’s and keep on till you come to a large tree, which is Berkeley Square. It is the only one there is, so you cannot go wrong. I would offer to escort you, but I am aware that the sight of a strange man in a silk hat trailing behind is a strain upon the nerves of any young woman. I shall therefore remain here and study roses.”

“Thank you very much,” said Eve, and found that she was smiling. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

She went up the street. At the corner she looked back. He was standing as she had left him, his silk hat in his hand, apparently absorbed in the book, but he did not turn his head. It was extraordinary, Eve thought, how many odd people there were in London if one only knew where to look for them.

* * * * *

Lord Emsworth’s house in Berkeley Square was one of those tall and melancholy mansions which seem to have been designed for the purpose of making a family feel small. A butler with the manner of a bishop who has been kept waiting took her hat to the drawing-room, where the furniture was in dust-sheets, and after an interval, during which Eve read the titles on the covers of the only three books in the room, led her into a study at the back.

A tall, vague, stooping gentleman in a shapeless grey suit was standing at the window with his back to her, contemplating the small garden with an expression of profound peace. As she entered he turned. His hair was ruffled, and his eyes, which were mild and of a pale blue, looked at her through a pair of glasses with something of the astonishment of a man who has found a duck in his bath.

“Er--yes?” he said.

“I’m Miss Halliday, Lord Emsworth. I’ve come about the library.”

“The library?” said Lord Emsworth. “Ah, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Of course. The library. Very good of you. Sit down, my dear young lady, sit down. Baxter told me you were coming. At least, I think it was Baxter. It was somebody. Baxter is my secretary. A most efficient man. I cannot think what I should do without him. He finds things.”

Eve sat down. Lord Emsworth walked to the fireplace, looked at it, and walked back again.

“The library,” he said. “You see, the trouble with the library is that it is at Blandings. That is my place in Shropshire. Do you know Shropshire? A charming county. Now, what was I going to say? Ah, yes. It has been suggested that somebody should catalogue the books. My sister Constance has been most insistent. She is a woman of great energy. And you, I take it, are the somebody?”

“I hope so.”

“Quite. Quite. And you have--er--that is to say, you are, I trust, fond of books?”

“Very fond.”

“Splendid. So am I. At least, I used to be. I had a most interesting book on the Empress of Blandings. It was mislaid. Perhaps you have seen it?”

“I’m afraid not, Lord Emsworth. I’ve only just come.”

“So you have. So you have. Forgive me. But the Empress, you know,” said Lord Emsworth, and his whole face lit up with a warm and fanatical glow, “is a Black Berkshire sow of the most remarkable quality. She took the silver medal at the Shropshire Agricultural Show for two years in succession. Do you know anything about pigs, Miss--er--Miss Hollister?”

“Halliday. No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“A pity,” said Lord Emsworth. “A great pity. A pig is a most companionable animal.”

He then proceeded, with an eagerness which Eve found strangely touching, to explain the diet of the Empress, her weight, her habits, her ambitions, and the many outrages which had been perpetrated on her by an under-gardener named Pirbright. He spoke for twenty minutes. Eve, who had come prepared to be asked about the Dewey Decimal System, sat with her hands in her lap and made the responses proper to a well-brought-up girl listening to a man who is telling her about his sow. Once she tried to introduce the subject of the books. Lord Emsworth said “Yes, yes, quite,” and returned to the under-gardener.

Presently he broke off and began to pat his pockets.

“Dear me,” he said. “Now where can they be? I had them a moment ago. My glasses. I cannot see a thing without my glasses.”

“They’re on your nose, Lord Emsworth.”

“Eh? Bless my soul, so they are! Thank you, my dear. Most observant. Baxter would have seen it at once. Well, now, I am afraid, Miss Hollis--Miss Holliday, that I have taken up a great deal of your time. I am sure you will do admirably. Everything will be arranged. Baxter will write to you. Or possibly my sister. Somebody will write. And you must forgive an old man for being a little forgetful. I am always losing things. Yesterday it was a pin. Or was it a pen? A most curious sensation.”

He shook her by the hand, gazed at her with an expression of benign bewilderment, and drifted back to the window. Eve found herself in the hall, being handed her hat by the butler, without the slightest idea of what had happened. She had not been asked a single question. She had not been asked her qualifications, or her age, or her experience. She had not, so far as she could tell, been engaged. But neither had she been refused. She went down the steps with a strong sense that she was in the position of a person who has been to sea for the first time and does not know whether it is over.

* * * * *

The evening sun slanted through the tall windows of the Drones Club smoking-room, lighting up a dozen empty chairs and Psmith, who occupied the thirteenth. The place was quiet. Most of the members had gone off to dine, or to some entertainment involving the sale of tickets for a good cause, leaving behind them only Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, who was lying on a sofa in the corner with a newspaper over his face, and the umbrella, which leaned against the arm of Psmith’s chair.

“Barmy,” said Psmith.

The newspaper rustled. “Eh?”

“You are a man of the world. You have a wide circle of acquaintance. I wonder if you can help me. This morning, in the neighbourhood of Dover Street, I observed a young lady in a black frock and a remarkable hat, the latter surmounted by a feather of the bird of paradise variety. Her eyes, as far as I could see at that distance, were grey. Her general air was that of one who has just been told that the world is a more agreeable place than she had supposed. Have you any notion who she may be?”

Barmy removed the newspaper and considered the ceiling.

“Bird of paradise feather,” he said. “Grey eyes. Dover Street. Sounds like Eve Halliday.”

“Eve Halliday?” said Psmith.

“Rather. Bally good sort. I knew her at a dance once, and my cousin Gladys was at school with her. Her father used to write for the papers. Died some time back. Awfully hard up, I heard, and yet always dressed like a million dollars. Rummy thing. Why?”

“No particular reason,” said Psmith. “Merely a spirit of scientific inquiry.”

“Well, don’t go and get mixed up with her,” said Barmy, and sank back beneath the newspaper. “That sort of thing never leads to anything but trouble.”

There was a silence. Psmith looked out through the window at the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, over which the evening light was falling with a soft and tender gold. It seemed to him that it had acquired a certain dignity since the morning. He picked up the umbrella, ran his hand slowly down the handle, and sat looking at it for some time.

“Eve Halliday,” he said at last, softly, to nobody in particular. “A good name. A very good name indeed.”

Mr. Franklin having done with hugging me, and I having got my breath again, we came to the question of the four hours. It is not every day that a young gentleman drops out of the sandhills into the middle of an old servant's dinner-hour. I put it to him plainly.

"Why, sir, you were not looked for till the close of day. Who has been hurrying you?"

"A letter," says Mr. Franklin, and stopped there, and looked all round the bay with his bright eyes, at the sea and the spits of rock and the brown face of the sand. It struck me that he did not like it. I did not like it myself, and I proposed that we should walk back to the house. He gave me his hand to help me up. (Recollect, if you please, that the getting-up part of the business is worse than the sitting-down part. I mention it for the benefit of the young.) Then he tucked my arm under his, as if I had been the young one and he the old, and we set off through the firs together.

"It's a queer thing, Betteredge," he began, "but I have been all my life in the habit of hearing about home from the outside. My father was a great hand at explaining things. I should have made a good many mistakes in England, if it hadn't been for you. Do you remember the seven-and-sixpence?"

I said I remembered it very well. It was a bet upon the number of the cows in the home paddock. Mr. Franklin had lost it at the age of eleven, and had gone back to his school before he could pay.

"Well, here it is," says Mr. Franklin, and put a half-sovereign into my hand. "Keep the change, and consider it interest for twelve years. It's the only piece of business I've settled to my own satisfaction this week."

I cannot say that I felt the money in my hand at that moment. What I felt was that a young gentleman who could make jokes on the top of a serious thought was a young gentleman with something upon his mind. I had known his face when he was a boy, and I knew it now, with all the foreign varnish upon it. He was not a bit different underneath.

"Something has been troubling you, sir," I said. "Was it the letter?"

"You shall read it," says Mr. Franklin. "That will save me the trouble of explaining, and it will save you the trouble of not understanding me. Sit down on this tree, and put on your spectacles."

There was a fallen fir at the side of the path. I sat on it, and put on my spectacles, and Mr. Franklin took a letter out of his breast pocket. It had been folded and unfolded a good many times since it came into his hands. I have it before me while I write, for Mr. Franklin gave it to me afterwards to keep with my other papers, and I copy it here word for word.

"*Lombard Street, Tuesday evening.*

"*Sir,—We beg to inform you that during the last three days our premises have been watched, at intervals, by certain foreign persons of a suspicious appearance. Yesterday one of them addressed our porter, and made inquiries respecting the article deposited here in your name, and respecting your address in London and your movements. The porter gave no information. We have every reason, however, to believe that the inquiry will be renewed, and we do not feel able to answer any longer for the security of the deposit in our strong-room, since it appears to be known, or guessed at, by persons outside this house.*

"*We venture to advise you, therefore, to remove the article without delay, and to place it, until you have determined on a more permanent arrangement, where it will be under your own eye, or in the keeping of some person whom you can trust. We are ready to deliver it to you or your order at any hour after ten tomorrow morning.—We are, Sir, your obedient servants,*

"*Threlfall, Pryor, and Threlfall.*"

I read this twice over, and then, not being able to make head or tail of it, I read it a third time. When you are at a loss, there is nothing like the third reading for showing you that you are at a loss still.

"Foreign persons of a suspicious appearance," I said. "Well, sir, the gentleman who wrote this has not much notion of the English language, for a banker."

"Never mind the English, Betteredge. Mind the foreigners," says Mr. Franklin. "I was at their door at ten this morning. I took what they had to give me, and I took the first train I could get. I saw nobody following me. I looked out for it, all the way down. But I would rather have the thing under a good roof, and under a good lock, than carry it about another twelve hours, and so I came on by the earliest coach from the station, and walked over from the lodge when I heard at the house that you were out. Where I was, I may tell you, I had a fancy to be. It saves time to be early when one is nervous."

"Nervous, sir?" says I. "Nervous, at five-and-twenty, in Yorkshire?"

"Nervous is the word," says Mr. Franklin, and laughed, but not very heartily. He took the letter out of my hand and folded it up again. "I don't like being followed, Betteredge, even by a shadow that may turn out not to be there."

I made an observation upon this which I am not proud of. I said that the sea air would soon put that to rights. Mr. Franklin thanked me, and said no more about it, and I took care not to ask what the article was. There are two ways of getting a secret out of a gentleman. One is to press him, and the other is to let him be. The second is the slower way, and it has never failed me yet.

We were out of the firs by this time, and in sight of the house. Mr. Franklin stopped again on the gravel walk at the back, and put his hand into his coat.

"Here it is," he says. "I want you to take charge of it, Betteredge. Not my aunt, nor anybody else. I will not have the ladies troubled with it, and I will not carry it in my pocket about the house. You keep the key of the plate-room, I believe?"

I told him I had kept it for five-and-thirty years, and had never lost the plate yet, to my knowledge.

The thing he gave me was a small packet, wrapped in brown paper, tied with tape, and sealed in three places with black wax. It lay in the hollow of my hand, and I could have shut my fingers over it. It was heavier than I expected, that is all I shall say about it, for the good reason that I have nothing more to say. I looked at the seals, and I turned it over, and I looked at the seals on the other side, and I held it up to the light of the sun, which is a foolish thing to do to a packet in brown paper. I saw nothing. I was told nothing. I asked nothing.

"Lock it up tonight, and let it lie till I ask for it," says Mr. Franklin. "In the meantime, Betteredge, it is an old family friend, and no more to be talked about than the weather. You understand me?"

I understood him in the only way a servant can understand a gentleman, who is not obliged to say what he means and yet is obliged to be obeyed. I said, "Yes, sir." Then I went to the plate-room, which is on the ground floor, with a window barred like a prison's, and an iron-doored closet at the back of it, and I locked the packet up in the closet, on the top of the old plate-chest, with my own hands. Then I turned the key twice, tried the door, and put the key in my waistcoat pocket, where it stayed until bedtime. I will say this for myself. I never did a piece of work in my life with less curiosity and more diligence. The curiosity came afterwards, as you will see, in due course, and rather too much of it.

By this time it was past three, and I had seen Mr. Franklin taken up to the bedroom that was aired for him (which has been the Blue Room ever since he was a boy, and looks over the kitchen-garden and the stables), and brought down again, brushed and washed, to sit in the library over a glass of sherry and a biscuit. My lady, and Miss Rachel with her, had driven home from their luncheon a little before four. I heard the carriage on the gravel, and went out to the door to hand my lady down. It is a thing I do myself, at my age, whenever I can get there before the footman.

Miss Rachel, I ought to say here, went straight up the front stairs the moment she was in the hall. She had a headache, she said, and would have her tea in her own room. She did not so much as ask who was in the house. I mention this because it was not like her, and because the person who best knew the reason why it was not like her was the person who told me. But that comes further on.

I followed my lady into the library. Mr. Franklin was on his feet at the sound of her step, and she had both his hands in hers before I had well shut the door.

"My dear Franklin!" said my lady. "Four hours before your time! I have been expecting you to fall out of the sky, or come in by the window, ever since your father wrote. Let me look at you. You are like your mother about the eyes. I don't know that I like it. You will make me sorry for her, and I am sure you did not come here to do that."

She is the best woman I ever knew, and the best-looking, at any age, and the best judge of when a young man wants to be kissed and when he wants to be let alone. Mr. Franklin took the kiss like a gentleman, and I set about pulling the bell for the tea, in order to have a right to stay in the room.

"I have brought you a great many messages from a great many foreign people," says Mr. Franklin, "and I have forgotten all of them. You must take them as they come back to me."

"We shall have time enough for the messages," said my lady. She sat down, and made him sit by her, and I saw her face change a little, as a face does when it comes to a thing that has been on the mind for some time. "Franklin, before we begin, I am going to ask you a favour. It is not a small one. I want it granted at once, without asking me why."

"Whatever it is, aunt, you shall have it."

"There is one name," said my lady, "which I will not have spoken in this house while I am mistress of it. It is the name of my brother John. I do not mean to say anything of him, or to hear anything of him, or to have any question raised in my hearing about what he was, or did, or left behind him. You are a relation of his as well as of mine, and I know that you were with him at one time on friendly terms. I am not asking you to unsay that. I am asking you to hold your tongue. Not before Rachel, not before the servants, not before me, and above all not on Rachel's birthday. Will you promise me?"

I had been listening with my hand on the bell-rope. I let go of it, not wanting to make a noise. For thirty years I had watched my lady, and I could count on my fingers the times I had heard her speak in that voice. It was as low as ever, and as gentle. And it was a voice that would have gone through a stone wall.

Mr. Franklin, to do him justice, did not ask the reason why. He looked at her for a moment, rather hard, and I could have sworn that he coloured up. Then he said: "I promise, aunt. His name shall not be mentioned by me, nor anything about him, under your roof. You have my word."

"Thank you," said my lady, and that was all. She turned the talk to his journey, and his father, and the price of railway shares, and the difference between French cooking and English, just as if nothing had been said. I rang for the tea at last, and went out. In the passage I had to stand a minute against the wall, for my old legs were not quite what they had been. I couldn't tell you why. I was not thinking of anything. It was only the way she said the name.

Now, as to the rest of the afternoon, I shall be as short as I can, which is not very short, I am afraid. I had my own work to do, in the pantry and the cellar, and the fires to see to, and a bit of a scolding to give the footman about the sherry decanter that had been left without its stopper. I was in the yard behind the kitchen, at about half-past six, when my daughter Penelope came flying out of the back door and nearly ran into me.

"Father!" says she. "Have you heard? Rosanna isn't back!"

I told her that I had left Rosanna on the sands at two o'clock or thereabouts, and that it was now half-past six, and that a young woman of five-and-twenty is not to be worried over because she takes an afternoon's holiday.

"But she's not on the sands," says Penelope. "I went as far as the sandhills, father, and looked all along the beach. I could not see her anywhere. And then Limping Lucy came by with her fish from Cobb's Hole, and told me she had seen Rosanna go past the fishermen's cottages, straight up to Mrs. Yolland's door, as if she'd been sent for. She hasn't been seen since. Mrs. Yolland has taken her in. Oh, father, what is Rosanna Spearman to do at Cobb's Hole, at tea-time, in that state?"

"In what state?" I asked.

"Why," says Penelope, "in the state she was in when she came in from the sands this morning, before you fetched her. I did not tell you that either. She was as red as fire, and she would not answer when I spoke to her."

I told my daughter that she talked a great deal too fast, and that there is a respect due to one's elders when they are trying to consider. Then I considered. Rosanna had a friend at Cobb's Hole, and I had said so myself; a fisherman's wife, of the name of Yolland, whom she had known in her London days, and whom she visited perhaps once a month. There was no harm in that, and no rule of my lady's broken by it. But the girl had been late to dinner, and was now late to tea, and had gone to the Yollands' without leave asked, and without a word to me who had all but kissed her hand that morning. It did not sit well with me. I said as much to Penelope, and I said also that I would not send after her till supper, since the poor thing was best let alone. Nancy would say the worst that could be said, and Nancy might say it.

You will see, if you have kept your eyes open, that I am doing here what I promised not to do. I am putting a great deal of a servant-girl into a chapter that ought, on its face, to be all about the master. But I ask you to forgive me. I am recording what happened, and as a fact, Rosanna Spearman's name is a part of the chapter that follows.

We dined at seven, the family and Mr. Franklin, with me behind the chair, to see that the footman did not put down the mutton on the wrong side. It was a pleasant dinner, as such things go, though there was one empty place at the table, where Miss Rachel had not chosen to come down. My lady said she was tired and would see Mr. Franklin in the morning, and Mr. Franklin said he was in no hurry, and helped himself to the cutlets with a countenance that would have deceived any man who had not watched him under a fir tree. He looked in my direction, once, over the top of his glass. I gave him back a look which said as well as words: *it is locked, sir, and the key is in my waistcoat.* He nodded and went on with his dinner.

At nine, the ladies went up. At ten, Mr. Franklin asked for a candle, and for me to see the windows of his room fastened, which I did, feeling a fool, and he went to his bed. At half-past ten I went the round of the house, as I have done every night these thirty years, tried the plate-room door, found it fast, found the closet inside it fast, and came away.

That is how I come to be sitting, at eleven o'clock at night, in my beehive chair, in the back court, with the door of my own room open behind me, and a candle inside on the table. The night is soft and mild, with a light in the west that would not go out. The stars are coming through it. I have got my *Robinson Crusoe* on my knee, at the place where he finds the footprint on the sand, which is a place I have read some two hundred times, and never yet without a queer sort of feeling in the spine.

I could not tell you how many lines I have read. Every now and then I look up over the top of the book, at the gate leading down to the plantation and the sea. The girl's bed in the attic has not been slept in. Nancy has been to tell me so, not without a certain satisfaction. I have said that I will wait up, and Nancy has gone to bed, and Rosanna Spearman is not yet home.