The Chapters

They went slowly along the sandy path, Madame Ratignolle leaning more heavily upon her escort with every step, as though the cramp in her limbs had a particular fondness for that side. Robert, who was in the habit of returning a pleasantry for every one he received, walked for some distance without speaking. It was not like him. Adèle, who observed a great deal without appearing to observe anything, glanced up beneath her veil and found his face turned straight before him along the path, and quite serious.

“She has been telling me about Kentucky,” she said presently. “A meadow, and a little girl walking through the grass. I think she had never told it to any one.”

“To you,” said Robert. “A month I have been at her elbow, and of Kentucky I know only that it is somewhere else.” He laughed a little, but the laugh did not last. “Do you know, Madame Ratignolle, she is not in the least like the ladies who come to Lebrun’s. When she looks at a person it is as though he had that moment been made, and she were the first to notice it. And she has not the least idea that she does it.”

“Tiens!” said Madame Ratignolle softly, in the tone of one who turns over some small object found in the road and lays it down again where it was. She smiled behind her veil, and a few steps further on she spoke again of her joints. Robert slackened his pace to suit hers and fell to rallying her upon her laziness. By the time they reached her cottage, where the voices of her children could be heard from within, he was quite himself again.

Mrs. Pontellier stayed with the little ones under the awning until the sun stood so high that the very sand seemed to hold its breath. Then she led her two boys home, their small pails dragging behind them like captives. It was at the door of the cottage that the telegram was put into her hand. It had come across with the noon boat and had been carried down from the wharf by a barefooted urchin, who stood on one leg and then on the other until she found a coin for him.

She read it standing in the doorway, with the children pulling at her skirts to know what was in it. “Business detains me. Shall not come Saturday. Will write. Léonce.”

“Is it from papa?” asked Raoul. “Is he coming?”

“Not on Saturday,” said his mother.

“Why?”

“Because of business.”

Raoul considered this and pronounced business a stupid thing. Edna, folding the yellow paper into her pocket, did not contradict him.

She had stood for an instant waiting for the disappointment which a wife might reasonably be expected to feel, much as one waits upon a platform for a train that is known to be due. It did not arrive. What came instead was a lightening of the air about her, a schoolgirl’s sensation on hearing that the class is dismissed. She was a little ashamed of it, though she could not have said precisely of what, and she went in to wash the children’s hands.

Robert did not appear at dinner. His mother, it was said, had need of him. Afterward came the long hour when Grand Isle lay prostrate behind its shutters, and the children were put to sleep in the care of their nurse. Edna, who could not have said why she was restless, took her hat from the peg outside the door, and the key from its nail, and went down to the beach alone.

She had been trying all summer to learn to swim, and all summer the water had refused her. It had let her wade, and be buffeted, and cling to the bottom with her toes, but nowhere would it hold her up. The wind of the morning had fallen. The sea lay under a long, slow swell, and the beach was empty as far as the eye could reach, save for the lady in black, who sat with her beads on the gallery of her bath-house as she sat everywhere.

Edna dressed for the water in her own compartment and waded out until it stood at her breast. There, with no thought whatever in her head, she threw out her arms as the little girl had done in the meadow, and struck out.

The water held her. It was so simple that she did not at first believe it. She struck out again, and again, three strokes or four—she could not afterward have told how many—and the sea bore her up and forward with a large, indifferent kindness, as though it had been waiting all the while for her to stop being afraid. Then her feet found the sand. She stood upright with her hair streaming, and a breath came out of her that was almost a laugh. She was not twenty feet from where she had started. But she looked back at the bath-houses, at the whole small landscape of Lebrun’s, as if she had travelled a great way from it and did not altogether care to return.

She waded in slowly and came up the beach wringing the water from her hair.

“The wind has gone down, madame,” said a voice. “It falls always toward four o’clock.”

It was the lady in black. She had raised her eyes from her beads and was regarding Edna from the neighboring gallery. She spoke in French, in a low, dry voice, a little harsh from disuse. Edna had somehow taken it for granted that the lady, like the pictured saints in a church, had no voice for the affairs of this world. She stood for a moment with her hands in her hair, like a person addressed by a statue.

“Yes,” she said. “It is quite calm now.”

The lady’s eyes rested for an instant upon the dripping hair and the wet sand about Edna’s feet, and Edna could not tell whether they saw or merely looked. Then they went back to the beads, and the lips resumed their silent business.

A moment before, Edna had been ready to tell the whole beach. She found now that she was not going to tell anybody. She dressed, locked the door, and went home between the acres of camomile, carrying the thing as one carries something that would lose by being shown. She said nothing of it at supper, nor to the nurse, nor to any one that evening. It seemed to belong to that other life of the meadow and the tall grass, in which one did not report.

Madame Ratignolle came by in the dusk, when the boys had been fed and were being got to bed. She had left her own in the care of Monsieur Ratignolle for a quarter of an hour. She sat down upon the gallery with her sewing, in defiance of the failing light, and Edna told her of the telegram.

“Ah, poor Monsieur Pontellier!” she said. “But you do not look very sorry, *chère*.”

Edna felt the color come into her face. It was one of those direct remarks to which she was not accustomed, and she answered nothing. Adèle, who never pressed a point, took up another.

“I have been keeping something for you since morning. Robert said a thing about you as we walked home. It was so unlike Robert that I have not been able to put it out of my head.” And she repeated it word for word, with the care of one who carries a full cup. When Mrs. Pontellier looked at a person, it was as though he had that moment been made, and she were the first to notice it; and Mrs. Pontellier had not the least idea that she did it.

“Robert talks a great deal of nonsense,” said Edna.

“He talks nonsense always,” Adèle agreed placidly, biting off her thread. “But he was not laughing when he said it. That is why I tell you.” She gathered up her needlework, and a little later went away down the path, a whiteness that grew dimmer among the dark trees until the dark took it.

The children slept early. Edna went in twice to look at them. She drew the sheet over the smaller one, who had thrown it off, and stood a while listening to their breathing, which had a small, even, faraway sound like the sea. Then she came out and sat down in the rocker on the gallery. There was no wind. The night was warm and thick with stars. From the main house came at intervals a few chords upon the piano and a burst of voices, which fell away again. From farther off, beyond the trees, the sea talked to itself upon the sand. The telegram lay in her pocket, forgotten. She thought once of the strokes in the water and of the lady’s dry voice, and put them away, as one puts by the things that are one’s own.

But it was neither of these that kept her in her chair when the lights in the main house began to go out one by one. It was the sentence which Adèle had carried to her so carefully. As though he had that moment been made, and she were the first to notice it. She tried to recall whom she had looked at. She had looked at no one. She had looked at the sea, at the motionless sails, at the grass in a meadow long ago. She could not tell whether it was a jest or a compliment, or something for which neither word would do, and she was not sure that she wished to know. She sat on, and the words came back to her unhurried, as the tide comes up the sand, each time a little further than the last.

“I know,” I said.

“You don’t, darling. But it’s sweet of you to say so.”

I put my arm around her and she leaned against me with her eyes still shut. The cab went down the hill and the street lamps went across her face one after the other and left it dark again. She had taken off her hat and held it in her lap. At the bottom of the Rue Soufflot the trees of the Luxembourg were black against the sky.

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want the park.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“The river. The end of the island, where the trees are, under the bridge. There’s a king on a horse.”

“The Pont Neuf.”

“Is that what it’s called? There’s a little garden down at the point. A chap took me there once at four in the morning. I’ve always meant to go back.”

“It isn’t four.”

“It will be,” Brett said.

I leaned forward and told the driver. He shrugged his shoulders, and at the Boulevard Saint Michel he swung the cab around and we went down to the river and along the quai. The bookstalls along the parapet were shut and padlocked, and on the other side of the wall the water was black with the lights of the bridges in it. The driver stopped in the middle of the Pont Neuf, by the statue. I paid him and he turned the cab and went off toward the Châtelet, and we went down the steps.

At the bottom there was a small park shaped like the bow of a ship, with chestnut trees and a few benches and nobody in it. The water went by fast on both sides. We walked down under the trees to the point and sat on the stone edge, and Brett put her hat down beside her.

“Have you a cigarette?”

I lit one for her and one for myself. Her hand was quite steady. A barge came down under the bridge with a lantern at the bow and a man leaning on the tiller. The wash of it slapped against the stones and went away.

“It’s lovely,” Brett said. “It’s frightfully unfair, being lovely.”

“What’s been the matter?”

“Oh, everything. Nothing. I’ve been about with that crowd for a week. You saw them.”

“I saw them.”

“They’re perfectly harmless. That’s the beastly part of it.”

“Why go with them?”

“One has to go with somebody.” She flicked the cigarette out and it lay on the water, still red, and floated toward the bridge. “I met a man last week. Count Mippipopolous. Do you know him?”

“I never heard of him.”

“No. Nobody has. He’s a Greek, I think, or was. He has the most extraordinary amount of money. He took me to dinner and the head-waiter kept bowing and bowing, and he never asked for a single thing.”

“That’s a bad sign.”

“Isn’t it? He wants to see me again. Tonight, I suppose. Or last night. It’s all so muddled.”

“He sounds like a good thing.”

“He’s a very good thing.”

“You ought to see him.”

“Do you think so?”

“Why not? He’s got money and he likes to spend it.”

“That’s terribly sound of you, Jake.”

“I’m a sound man.”

“You’re the soundest chap I know.” She looked at the water. “I might ring him up, then.”

“It’s late,” I said.

“It’s always late.”

“You ought to get some sleep.”

“Yes. I ought.”

Neither of us moved. I could hear the water against the stones under the point, and somewhere up on the bridge a man walking, and then not walking.

I was in love with her and I wanted her to stay where she was.

“I’m thirsty,” Brett said. “Awfully.”

“Everything’s shut.”

“Then take me somewhere it isn’t.”

“I have to go back for my fifty francs.”

“Your fifty francs?”

“The envelope. At the Bal.”

“Oh, the girl,” Brett said. “You’ll want to see how she’s got on.”

“I want the fifty francs.”

“Of course you do. You’re such a hard man about money.”

“It’s the principle. I’m a newspaperman.”

“I’d forgotten,” Brett said. She picked up her hat. “Do go and get it. I’ll sit in the cab and be a lady.”

We climbed the steps and crossed to the other side. There was a taxi in front of the Samaritaine with its flag down and the driver asleep, his cap over his eyes. I woke him and gave him the street, and Brett got in and put her head back. She rode with her hat in her lap and I did not know whether she slept. We went back over the river and up through the dark streets, and the shutters were all down and there was not a light anywhere until we turned into the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève.

The Bal was still lighted and the accordion was going. The taxi stopped, and Brett said she would stay where she was, and I went in.

The dancing-club had gone. The benches were pushed back and a workman in a cap was dancing with a girl whose head lay against his chest and whose eyes were shut. The proprietor sat on his high stool with the bells on his ankle, playing slowly. The daughter of the house was asleep at a table with her head on her arms. At the table by the wall Georgette sat with her hat on and a cold cup of coffee in front of her.

“Tiens,” she said. “The fiancé.”

“Good evening, Mademoiselle Leblanc.”

“Hobin. You always forget.”

“Where are your friends?”

“Gone. To Montmartre. They said they would come back for me. They all said it.” She shrugged. “I had a sandwich. The blond one said to put it on his account.”

The patronne looked up from behind the zinc and came around the end of the bar. “Ah, Monsieur. You return. The mademoiselle did not go with the gentlemen, so I have kept it.” She took the envelope from behind a bottle and gave it to me.

“What is that?” Georgette asked.

“It was for you, if you had gone with one of them.”

“I did not go with one of them.”

“No.”

“They are not serious people,” Georgette said. “They dance and they laugh and they do not pay. Me, I know that kind. I danced. That is all. It is not forbidden to dance.”

“No.”

“And you went off with the English one. She is very chic.”

“Yes.”

“She is waiting?”

“In a taxi.”

I stood there with the envelope. It was a good deal of money. Georgette looked at it and did not put out her hand. I gave it to her.

She opened the flap and looked in and shut it again. “Fifty francs.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not a bad type,” she said, and put it in her bag without counting it. “Good night, Jacob.”

“Good night.”

“Flamand,” she said, and grinned, and showed all her bad teeth.

“American.”

“Ah, yes. American. Good.”

I went out. Brett was sitting in the corner of the cab with her hat on again and a cigarette going.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I gave it to her.”

Brett laughed. “You’re a perfect fool.”

“It was a matter of principle.”

“Oh, damn your principles.”

I stood with my hand on the door. The sky at the bottom of the street had gone gray, and the lamps looked yellow and unnecessary.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Tell him the Rue Fontaine. They’ll be up the hill still, the whole lot of them, being amusing.”

I told the driver and gave him the money for it.

“Aren’t you coming?” Brett said.

“No.”

“It might be rather fun.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No,” Brett said. “I don’t either.”

She took my hand and pressed it hard, as she had in the bar, and let it go. “Good night, darling. You’ve been a lamb. Thank you for the king.”

“It was your king.”

“So it was.”

I shut the door. The driver let in the clutch and the cab went down the hill. It turned at the bottom by the Place Maubert and I could not see her in it. I stood in the street until I could not hear it any more.

Then I walked down to the river. It was not the way home. The way home was up through the Luxembourg, but I wanted to be by the water. The Place Maubert was empty and the cafés were shut, and a cat crossed in front of me and went under a stall. When I came out on the Quai de la Tournelle it was light enough to see Notre Dame across the water, gray and very large, with the flying buttresses going down the side of it like the ribs of something. A man was already sitting under the bridge with a long pole, not fishing, only holding it. A wagon loaded with lettuces and carrots went along the quai, the horse walking and the driver asleep on the seat with the reins in his lap.

I walked along the river. I passed the booksellers’ boxes, still shut, and the Pont Saint Michel and the Quai des Grands Augustins. At the Pont Neuf I looked down and saw the trees at the point of the island. There was nobody in the little garden. I did not go down.

The river went from black to gray and then to no color at all. The sun came up behind me. My shadow went ahead along the parapet, very long and thin, and I walked after it.

It was not many nights after that quiet walk that the first of the missiles reached us. I, who had been taught by Ogilvy to expect nothing, was the only person in my household to see it come.

I had sat late over my papers, for the night was warm and the lamp drew every moth in the parish to the open window, and my wife had gone up to bed some while before. I remember that I was in the middle of a sentence upon the probable softening of the moral sense under the influence of increasing prosperity, a sentence I have never had the heart to finish, when the room, which had been yellow with lamplight, went suddenly white and green, and the shadow of the sash-bars swung across the wall. I ran out upon the lawn.

High over the pines to the westward a streak of greenish flame was running down the sky. It was not swift as a shooting star is swift, but had a kind of deliberate ferocity, and it trailed a train of sparks behind it. It lit the garden so that I saw every leaf upon the pear tree, and my own hands were pale as a dead man's. It lasted perhaps three seconds. Then it dropped behind the black edge of the woods, and the garden went out as a room does when a door is shut. I stood there with the patches of green and crimson swimming before my eyes, and I thought of nothing but the size of it. A long while afterwards, so long that I had turned to go in, there came a dull single concussion from the direction of the common, more felt than heard. A pane hummed in its frame behind me, a dog began barking in some yard, and another took it up, and then all was still.

“What was that?” my wife called from the window above.

“A falling star,” I said; “a big one. Ogilvy will be delighted.”

I went to bed and slept as soundly as I have ever slept in my life.

We had scarcely begun breakfast when the milkman brought the news with the milk. He was full of it, and told it to our maid on the doorstep with a great deal of breath. A star had fallen on the common, in the old gravel-pit, and had set the water boiling. Mr. Ogilvy had been up there since first light, and half Chertsey had gone across to look. I confess that I rose from the table before he had done, and that I had my hat in my hand.

“You will not go without me,” said my wife.

“It is only a stone, my dear.”

“Then it can be no trouble to look at it. You have talked of nothing but that planet for days, and I mean to see what all the talking has come to.”

So we went together, she in her straw hat with a parasol against the sun, which was already hot at nine o’clock, and with a bottle of water in her basket, which I thought absurd at the time. We fell in with a stream of people as soon as we left the lane. There were carters who had left their horses standing, boys running in twos and threes, and a man wheeling a bicycle he had no intention of riding, and a party of women with baskets, as though bound for a fair. The air upon the heath smelt of scorched heather and of something else that I could not name, like hot metal, or wet ashes in a grate. Above the pines a thin white plume stood up in the windless air, leaning a little, like the smoke of a distant engine standing in a cutting.

The pit lay on the edge of the common, where the road-makers had once dug for gravel and had long since abandoned it to the frogs and the bathing boys of Chertsey. A spring in the bank kept it a third full of dark water, and at one end there was a shelving beach of sand where the carts used to come down. On the western side the heather was blackened for a hundred yards about, and torn and flung with clods and gravel, and one of the pines stood stripped to the bare wood. The beach was ploughed into a great raw furrow that ran straight down into the water. And in the water lay the Thing.

I do not know what I had expected. A stone, I suppose, a great grey boulder such as one sees in a museum with a label beneath it. What lay in the pit was not that. It was canted at a slant, the greater part of it beneath the black water, and only a rounded hump of it stood out, higher than a cart and many yards across. It was coated with a dull, scaly crust of brownish black, cracked here and there to show a leaden colour underneath. About its edge the water seethed and sputtered, and the steam went up in ragged gouts with a continual hissing. Now and then a great bubble rose beside it, and burst with a sound like a sigh. How much of it lay hidden I could not tell, and I remember that this troubled me, as a man is troubled by a face half seen in a doorway.

Ogilvy stood on the crest of the sand-bank, hatless and in his shirt-sleeves, with the shine of a sleepless night upon his face, addressing a knot of people who did not appear to be listening. He saw us and came down with his hand held out.

“Here you are,” he said. “You saw it come? I thought you might. It is the finest fall on record, by a hundred times. I have sent a boy to Chertsey with a telegram for South Kensington, and they will think me drunk.”

“It is very large,” said my wife.

“It is, Mrs.—it is enormous, and I wish you could have seen the furrow it made, before the crowd trampled it out. It must have come in at a very low angle.” He turned to me, and his face changed a little. “Well? You have something to say. You had it in your face when you came over the bank. You were going to say Mars.”

I had been going to ask him whether he still gave the odds at a million to one; and I said as much.

“I do. I do, upon my soul, and I would give them again this minute. Good heavens, man, ten days ago you would have had the same fancy about the volcanoes. It is a meteorite. It is a meteorite of iron and nickel, the biggest that ever fell in England, and that is glory enough for one morning without dragging in the inhabitants of other planets.”

“It is too hot,” I said. “It has lain here since midnight, half in a pond, and the water is still boiling round it. A stone that has been cooling nine hours—”

“A stone that has come through a hundred miles of air at twenty miles a second,” said Ogilvy, “and has been heated by friction till its outside ran like wax; that is your crust. And it is a mass the size of a cottage. Put a cannon-ball in a furnace and take it out, and tell me whether it is cool by breakfast. Then multiply the ball by some thousands. You are not thinking, my dear fellow; you are looking at it with your head full of the *Daily Telegraph*.”

“Then why is it so regular?”

“It is not regular.”

“That is what I mean. It is not like a stone at all. Look at the curve of it where it leaves the water, and how even it is. It has the look of having been turned. Meteorites are lumps, Ogilvy; you have shown me pictures of them yourself, lumps like potatoes.”

“Some are like potatoes and some are like cheeses,” he said, “and this one happens to be rather like a—” He hunted for the word, and finding none that did not favour me, went on more loudly. “Turned! By whom? Do you suppose there is a lathe in the sky? It came end-on, man, at twenty miles a second, and the air has ground it smooth, as water grinds a pebble. I can show you the same thing in miniature at the Museum. You will see, when it is cool enough to get a hammer to it.”

I had no answer that would not have sounded like foolishness in that sunlit, chattering crowd, and I remember that I was half ashamed of the fancy I had had. Yet I looked at the thing and it did not look like a stone. It looked like something that had come from a long way off, and had come on purpose. I said so, or something like it, and Ogilvy shook his head with kindly exasperation, and turned to answer a man in a bowler hat who wished to know whether it was true that it was made of gold.

It was while he was so engaged that the accident happened. A young fellow in a butcher’s apron, who had come out with his basket to see the sight and had been standing near us with his mouth open, laughed at something one of the girls said to him, and made some remark about hot stones. The girl dared him. She stood among her friends with her arms folded, and it seemed to me at the time that she was rather frightened of her own daring. He slid down the sand to the edge of the water, where a shoulder of the crust stood out above the surface, and, to show what he thought of it, slapped his open palm flat upon it.

I heard the hiss, and then a cry that was scarcely human, and he came scrambling back up the bank holding his hand out in front of him as if it belonged to somebody else. The palm was white and puckered, and even as we looked it began to rise in blisters. There was a great commotion. One woman advised butter, and another cold water, and a man cried that he should be taken to the doctor. My wife had already thrust her way through them with the bottle from her basket, and had soaked her handkerchief and wound it about the lad’s hand with a steadiness that I have often had cause to remember since. He was crying, in the shameless fashion of a boy who has been very much hurt, and did not seem to hear her; but she went on talking to him quietly as she tied the knot, and presently he was led off towards Chertsey by two of his friends, looking very white.

“He will do,” said Ogilvy, who had come across at the first cry. “It is a nasty burn, but he will do. And that, you see, is precisely what I was telling you. It is hot; of course it is hot. It is what a meteorite is.” He said it with a kind of triumph, but I thought he looked a little shaken to find the crust so much hotter than his theory strictly required, for he called out immediately for the constable, and asked him, with a good deal of sharpness, to keep the people back from the edge.

The constable was a young man from Chertsey, whose helmet was too large for him, and who was not yet sure what law had been broken. He marked out a line with his boot, some twenty yards from the water, and stood with his back to it, and for a minute or so the people fell back. The whole crowd had drawn away by a yard at the cry, all together, like a flock of sheep; and I have thought since how instructively they came creeping forward again, as soon as they were persuaded that it was only the butcher’s boy who had been foolish. By eleven o’clock the constable’s line was a memory. There must have been three or four hundred people about the rim of the pit, standing in the heather in their Sunday hats, and more were coming across the heath every minute. Children sat on their fathers’ shoulders. A man had set up a camera on a tripod, and thrust his head under the cloth with an air of great importance. Before noon a fellow with a barrow of ginger-beer had come out from Chertsey, and was doing a very good trade. The thing was taken by them, so far as I could tell, in the spirit of a Bank Holiday, as if some monstrous whale had been stranded upon their beach for their entertainment. I do not think that one in ten of them supposed it to be anything but a very large stone. Now and then it made a small sound, a ticking, such as a kettle makes when it is taken off the fire, and the people near it would laugh a little and nudge one another.

The sun had grown fierce. The heat that rose from the pit, added to the heat of the day, made the air above it shake, so that the far side of the common seemed to quiver as one sees it above a lime-kiln, and the smell of scorched sand and hot metal was heavy upon us. I saw that my wife had grown pale under the shade of her hat, and that she had said nothing for some while.

“You are tired,” I said. “You should go home.”

“I am not tired.”

“You are, and it is a great deal too hot for you here. There is nothing more to be seen, my dear. It will lie there till it cools, and Ogilvy will have his hammer to it this afternoon, and I shall hear all about it. I will come as soon as I have seen what he does. An hour, or two at most.”

She looked at me, and then past me at the thing in the water, and for a moment I thought she would refuse, and I do not know what I should have done. “You will not go near it,” she said.

“I shall not go within twenty yards of it.”

“Promise me.”

I promised, and I kept my promise that day. She hesitated a little longer, and then took up her basket and her parasol and went away from me through the crowd, and I watched the little round of her hat go up the path between the pines, until the trees took it. Then I turned back to the pit. The steam still went up into the blue sky, and the water sputtered, and the Thing lay under the sun, with no more sign of life about it than there is in a stone.

She slept a long time, and when she woke it was because Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm and the train had stopped. The rain had stopped too. Beyond the window there was nothing but blackness and one smoky lamp with a wet platform shining under it.

"Wake up!" said Mrs. Medlock. "You've done nothing but sleep since we started, and it's a deal too late in the day for that. Stand up and let me set your hat straight. This is our station and we've a long drive before us."

Mary stood up and let her hat be set straight without saying thank you, since it did not occur to her that anybody had done her a kindness. Mrs. Medlock gathered up her bag and parcels and stepped down onto the platform with the purple velvet flowers nodding on her bonnet. Then she stopped so suddenly on the step that Mary very nearly walked into her back.

"Well, I never!" she said under her breath.

A man was standing under the lamp. He was tall and thin, and his long dark coat hung on him as if it had been left on a peg. One of his shoulders was higher than the other, so that he seemed always to be leaning a little away from something, and his black hair had white in it above the ears. He might have been called handsome if his face had not looked like a house with all the shutters closed. He held his hat in his hand, though it was not raining now, and was looking at nothing at all until they were quite close to him.

"I never looked to see you here, sir," said Mrs. Medlock. She was out of breath, and her cheeks were redder than ever. Mary had thought her a woman nothing could put out, and she observed with interest that the flowers on her bonnet were shaking. "I hope I've not kept you waiting. The train was--"

"You have brought her," said the gentleman. It was not a question. His voice was low and tired, like a voice not often used.

"Yes, sir. This is Miss Mary, sir."

Then he looked at Mary, and she looked back at him, because it was a habit of hers to stare when she was stared at. She had expected something dreadful. Basil had said "hunchback" as if it were the name of a wicked animal. She found, rather to her annoyance, that Mr. Archibald Craven was not in the least like an animal, and not much like the poor man in the fairy story either. He only looked like a person who had waited a long while for something and did not want it when it came.

He looked at her for about as long as one looks at a clock to see the time.

"You are Mary," he said.

"Yes," said Mary.

That was all. He gave a short nod, as though a small matter had been settled, put on his hat, and turned to give some order about the trunk to a porter. He did not touch her or ask whether she was tired. Mary had been getting her face ready to be unresponsive, and she found she had no use for it and was faintly aggrieved. Mrs. Medlock had said that ten to one she would not see him. Well, she had seen him, and it made no difference whatever.

Outside the station stood a large old-fashioned carriage with two lamps and a pair of black horses steaming in the cold. Mr. Craven got in first, stiffly, and took the far corner, and Mrs. Medlock and Mary sat opposite with the parcels between them. In the train Mrs. Medlock had talked more than any person Mary had ever met. Now she sat with her hands folded on her bag, staring at the carriage lamp, and it appeared that she dared no more to make a remark than to ask a question.

Nobody spoke. The wheels went through a village, and then the road began to climb, and the hedges dropped away on either side. After that there was only the small circle of light the lamps threw upon the road, and beyond it a darkness such as Mary had never seen. The dark in India had been warm and full of noises. This dark was cold and had nothing in it. It seemed to have no edge. She pressed her forehead to the glass and tried to think what a moor could be, and found she knew no better than she had in the train.

She was nearly asleep again when the carriage gave a jolt and stopped so short that the parcels slid to the floor.

"Whoa, lad--whoa, then!" cried the coachman, and after a moment, in a different voice: "Beg pardon, sir. There's a pony in the road, and he'll not shift."

Nobody answered. Mr. Craven sat with his face toward the black window as if he had not heard. Mrs. Medlock looked at him for orders, and got none, and pressed her lips together. The box creaked as the coachman climbed down, and his voice went forward to the horses' heads, coaxing and grumbling. The silence inside the carriage was worse than the dark outside it, Mary thought. Because it was, and because nobody had told her not to, she took hold of the handle, opened the door, and got down.

"Come back here this minute!" said Mrs. Medlock. She said it in a whisper, with an eye upon the far corner, and when the corner made no movement she did not say it again.

It was very cold, and the ground under Mary's shoes was wet and springy. The wind struck her in the face all at once, so that she caught her breath. It was a huge, steady, rushing wind which seemed to have come a very long way without meeting anything to stop it. In the lamplight stood a small shaggy pony planted crosswise in the road with its head low, watching the horses out of the sides of its eyes. It was not in the least afraid. It looked as though the road were its own and the carriage had come uninvited. The coachman slapped its flank, and it moved a step and stopped again.

Mary did not go on looking at it. She turned her back on the lamps, and her eyes, growing used to the night, found that it was not all one blackness after all. There was a paler strip which was the road, and beyond it something wide and dim that rose and fell, like a sea which had stiffened in the middle of a wave. Somewhere not far off water was running over stones. There was a smell of wet earth and of something sharper and cleaner which she had no name for. There was no wall anywhere, no veranda, no roof. She had never in her life been where nothing was near her, and she found that she was neither frightened nor pleased, but only very wide awake.

"So this is a moor," she said aloud, to nobody. "It is like nothing."

She took three steps from the road, and her foot sank in something soft that pushed back, and she stood there for perhaps a minute, which was a long time for Mary to wish to stay anywhere. Then there was a clatter of hooves, and the pony was gone. She saw it thin away into the dark and was not sure where it had been. The coachman called that the road was clear.

Mr. Craven had not moved. But as she climbed in, and Mrs. Medlock drew her skirts away with a sniff, Mary saw in the swing of the lamp that his eyes were turned upon her. It was the second time he had looked at her, and it lasted no longer than the first. Then the carriage lurched forward and he turned his face to the window again.

It seemed a great while before they stopped once more, and then it was under a dark porch, where a great door swung open upon a hall so large and so dimly lit that Mary could make out only a stone floor, some tall shapes on the walls, and a staircase going up into the dark. A man in black stood holding the door. Mr. Craven went past him and across the hall without a glance behind, his steps ringing, and somewhere far off a door shut. That was how he said good night.

"This way," said Mrs. Medlock, "and keep close, for I'll not be coming back for you."

Up the stairs they went, and along a corridor, and through a door, and along another, and up three steps and down two. Always there were doors on either side, all shut and all alike. At last Mrs. Medlock pushed one open upon a room with a fire burning, and an enormous bed with dark posts, and old tapestry on the walls where faded huntsmen rode among faded trees.

"Here you are," said Mrs. Medlock. "This room and the next are yours, and you'll keep to them, mind. Someone will bring your supper." And she went away and shut the door.

It was not a maid who brought it. The person who knocked and came in was a short, bandy-legged man with grizzled whiskers, a striped waistcoat, and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. In India it had always been men who brought Mary her food, but they had set it down without a sound and salaamed. This one put the tray on the table so that the covers rattled, and stood with his hands on his hips, looking at her with frank interest.

"Well, then," he said. "So tha's t' little lass fro' India. Ah've browt thi supper, an' it's nobbut cold mutton an' a bit o' bread pudden, but there's a hot pot o' tea, an' tha'll be fair clemmed, Ah'll be bound, after all that road." (Clemmed is a Yorkshire word and means starved.)

Mary stood by the fire and regarded him coldly.

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

"Nay?" He scratched his head. "Ah said sit thee down an' get it inside thee while it's warm."

"I still don't understand," said Mary. "Nobody talked like that where I lived."

"Eh, tha'lt soon get t' hang on it," said the man, not in the least offended. "Ah'll fetch t' tray i' t' mornin'." He looked at her once more with his head on one side, and shook it, and went away down the corridor, whistling through his teeth, until she could hear him no longer.

She did not mean to be interested, and she was not. But the mutton was better than she had expected, and she ate all of it, and the pudding too, without admitting to herself that she was hungry.

Mrs. Medlock came back when the tray was empty, unfastened her buttons with rough quick hands, and put her into the great bed, where she seemed to sink into a hollow far too big for her. Then she took up the candle and stood a moment with her hand about the flame.

It was then that Mary heard it. It came from a long way off, from somewhere beyond the walls of the room and beyond the corridor. It was a slow, soft knocking, uneven, three beats and then two, as of a stick or a heavy foot on boards. It stopped. There was a stillness. It came again. And then, farther away, a door was closed very gently, as a door is closed by someone who does not wish to be heard.

"What is that?" said Mary.

Mrs. Medlock had gone quite still with the candle in her hand, and for a moment her face looked as stiff as a board. "What's what?"

"That noise. Someone is knocking."

"I heard nothing but the wind," said Mrs. Medlock. "It's the wind. It gets into the old chimneys and rattles the doors all along the passages. You'll hear it all night and be used to it in a week. Go to sleep."

She pinched out the candle, and the door closed, and Mary heard her heavy steps go away until they were swallowed up in the great silence of the house.

The fire had sunk to a red glow that lit nothing but the bottom of the bed-curtains. Mary lay on her back and listened. The wind was blowing outside. She knew what it was like, for she had stood in it: a long, huge thing which rose and fell and pushed at the windows and went on and on without a stop. What she had heard had not gone on. It had begun and stopped and begun again, and it had ended with a door. Mrs. Medlock had known that, too, for Mary had noticed that people who tell the truth do not usually stand so still.

She did not know why she was so certain. She only was. In the train she had said she should not want to go poking about. But that was in the train, and it was a good deal darker now, and nobody in all her life had ever told her anything she wanted to know. It was quite contrary of her, and she did not mind. She lay wide awake with her eyes open in the dark, and made up her mind that whatever the sound was, and wherever it came from, she would find out for herself.

I did not run, for the day was too close for that, but I walked at a pace so near it that the white dust of the road rose about my boots at every step, and I was short of breath before I reached the first cottages of Styles St. Mary. The sky hung low and heavy, the colour of pewter, and not a leaf stirred in the hedges.

I had made up my mind to hammer upon the door of Poirot’s lodging, and to bandy explanations with a nightcapped head at an upper window. Nothing of the kind occurred. The door opened while my hand was still raised to knock, and there stood Poirot himself, fully dressed, his moustache waxed to its accustomed splendour, and his hat in his hand.

“Ah, it is you, my friend,” he said. “I was on the point of coming to you.”

“You were?” I gasped. “Then you know?”

“That Madame Inglethorp is dead? But yes.”

I confess I was considerably taken aback. I had arrived with my news like a man carrying a lighted lamp, and it appeared that someone had been there before me and blown it out.

“But who told you?”

“Doctor Wilkins.” A smile flickered beneath the moustache. “He passes my window in the motor from Styles before it is yet six o’clock, and I, who sleep very little, am looking at the morning. He sees me. He cries to the chauffeur to stop. And behold, Hastings—a small man with a great piece of news, who must pour it into somebody or burst!” He drew himself up and puffed out his cheeks in an imitation so admirable that I could almost hear the voice. “‘Ve—ry sad. Ve—ry sad. The heart, Monsieur Poirot. She would do too much.’ Three times he tells me it is the heart. It is two times more than is necessary for a man who is quite sure.”

“And Bauerstein? Was he with him?”

“The other one, with the beard? He sits beside him and says nothing at all.”

“Because it isn’t the heart,” I said, and dragged the medical book from my pocket. “I believe she was poisoned, Poirot. Strychnine. It’s all here—the convulsions, the arching of the body, everything. Bauerstein wouldn’t give a certificate. There is to be a post-mortem to-night, and John Cavendish has given me leave to ask for your help.”

“Put away your book, my friend,” said Poirot gently. “I know what strychnine does, and I do not care to have it read to me before breakfast. It is enough. I come.”

He paused only to give a few words in rapid French to a stout woman in the passage, and then he was beside me on the road.

I gave him, as we went, an account of the night. He listened without a word, save that twice he made me repeat what Mrs. Inglethorp had said at the last, and once asked whether Mr. Inglethorp had been in the house.

“He was not.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know. He hadn’t come in when I left.”

“Ah,” said Poirot, and said no more.

We found the hall of Styles in that hushed disorder which follows a death in a house. The blinds were drawn, doors stood ajar, and a group of servants melted away from the foot of the stairs as we entered. John came forward and wrung Poirot’s hand.

“Thank God you’ve come, M. Poirot. Inglethorp is back.”

He was standing by the staircase, a stiff figure in yesterday’s clothes, his face very pale above the black beard. I found myself, as I always did, searching it for something, and finding only a sort of careful blankness.

“He was just telling us where he’d been,” said John. “Perhaps, Alfred, you wouldn’t mind saying it again?”

“Not at all.” He spoke in his flat, even voice, and addressed himself to Poirot. “It is quite simple, monsieur. I left the house soon after nine, as everyone here knows, with Dr. Bauerstein, whom I walked as far as the village. From there I went on across the fields to Abbotsbury, where an old friend of mine, a Mr. Hollis, has been good enough to advise me on a small private matter. We talked a great deal later than either of us intended. About eleven o’clock the storm broke—a perfect deluge—and as I had not so much as an umbrella, Hollis would not hear of my starting back in it. I had told them not to wait up for me, and I did not think—” His voice wavered, and he passed a hand across his forehead. “He made me up a bed. I walked back at first light, the roads were like rivers, and the first I knew of this dreadful thing was when I reached my own door.”

There was nothing in it, I suppose, to which one could take exception; and yet I could not rid myself of the impression of a lesson well learnt. Lawrence, who had been standing at the window with his back to us, did not turn round.

Poirot bowed. “Monsieur, I offer you my sympathy.”

“I am obliged to you.” Inglethorp hesitated, and turned to John. “But is this really necessary? Dr. Wilkins is perfectly clear upon the point.”

“It’s Hastings’s doing,” said John, “and I have agreed to it.”

“Then I have nothing to say.” He inclined his head stiffly, said that he would be in the morning-room if he were wanted, and left us.

John drew two keys from his pocket. “Bauerstein locked both rooms. You had better have them.”

“I thank you. Until I have finished, monsieur, no one enters. The servants, the family—no one.”

“Certainly.”

Poirot went up the stairs before me. I was following when a hand plucked at my sleeve, and I found Dorcas at my elbow, her apron twisted in her fingers and her eyes red.

“Mr. Hastings, sir—if I might have a word. I don’t like to make trouble, and it’s not my place.”

Poirot had turned on the half-landing. “Speak, my good Dorcas.”

“It’s what Mr. Inglethorp said, sir, about the rain. It never rained in the night. Not a drop. When I went round to the yard to see if Baily had got off with the motor, the flags were as dry as a bone, and Baily said only yesterday that the garden would be burnt to a cinder if the weather didn’t break.”

“You are quite sure?”

“As sure as I’m standing here, sir.”

“Bon. You have told this to me, Dorcas. For the present you will tell it to nobody else.”

“Very good, sir.”

I thought of the white dust that had risen about my boots on the road to the village, and to which I had paid no attention at the time. I glanced at Poirot, but his face told me nothing whatever, and he went on up the stairs.

The room had the peculiar stillness of a place that has been shut up upon a great event. Someone had put out the gas, and the curtains were still drawn, so that everything was steeped in a brownish half-light. Poirot locked the door behind us and put the key in his pocket. Then he stood quite motionless for a full minute, his head a little on one side, like a bird. I did not dare to speak.

The dead woman lay as we had left her, though someone had drawn the sheet up to her chin. Poirot went and stood beside the bed, and I saw his lips move; then he turned away, and began, with a swiftness that I could hardly follow, to go over the room.

He examined the door we had broken down, and the splintered wood about the socket where the bolt had been torn out. He tried the door into Cynthia’s room and found it bolted on this side, as we had been told. He looked at the little table which had been overturned in the convulsions, and at the litter that lay about it, and did not touch either. He drew back the curtains, and the light showed the grey ashes in the grate, now quite cold. He put into line, with his own small precise fingers, two of the prim ornaments on the mantelpiece which had been ranged with a fraction of inequality, an action so characteristic that in the midst of my anxiety I nearly smiled.

“The bolts, you see, Poirot——” I began, thinking to help.

“I see, Hastings. I see very well.”

He went down on one knee at the hearth, and I saw his eyes narrow. When he rose, he held between his finger and thumb a tiny fragment of something, which he carried to the light and turned over. It was a little crumb of dull red sealing-wax, no bigger than a lentil, flat upon one side.

“What is it?” I asked. “Where was it?”

“On the tiles, at the edge of the hearth.”

“But it’s only a bit of sealing-wax. What does it mean?”

“That, mon ami, is precisely what I shall ask myself.”

“You have an idea?”

“I have nothing. I have a piece of wax.” He folded it into a scrap of paper, and the paper into his pocket-book, and the pocket-book into his breast. “Do not ask me, Hastings. If I tell you what I think, you will begin to see what is not there, and the face of Hastings is not made for keeping secrets. No, no. I refuse absolutely.”

I was too well acquainted with him to press the point.

“And now,” said Poirot, as he unlocked the door, “we shall see Mademoiselle Cynthia.”

We found her in the drawing-room, on the sofa, with Mary Cavendish sitting beside her, still in the white smock she had worn all night. A cup of tea stood untasted at Cynthia’s elbow. Her face, which had been so flushed in the dawn, was now quite colourless, and she looked no more than a child.

“Must you, M. Poirot?” said Mary quietly. “She is not well.”

“One question only, madame. It will not distress her.” He bowed to the girl. “Mademoiselle, I ask you this. Is it your habit to sleep so very soundly?”

Cynthia stared at him, and then, to my surprise, gave a small, shaky laugh.

“Why, yes—always. Everyone laughs at me for it. Evie used to say the house might be burnt down round my ears and I should only turn over. But last night——” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “It was as if I were at the bottom of a well, and they were calling to me from a long way up. I could hardly get my eyes open, even when Mary was shaking me. And now I feel so stupid and ashamed, when she was so——” Her voice broke, and Mary’s arm went round her.

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “That is all I wished to know.”

He made her a little bow, and we left them. In the hall I could contain myself no longer.

“Is that all you were going to ask her?”

“It was all I wished to know.”

“But surely, Poirot——”

“A question, Hastings, it is like a key. One does not need a bunch of them, if one has the right.”

“And was that the right one?”

“Come,” said Poirot.

The morning wore on. I do not propose to describe every step of it, for a great part of it was spent by Poirot in going about the house and the garden by himself, and by me in trying to look as if I had some part in the proceedings. But it was close upon eleven o’clock when he sent word to John that he desired, before the doctors returned, to take one last look at the room, and I found myself once more mounting the stairs behind him, and hearing the key turn in the lock.

The light had grown yellow and thick behind the curtains. Poirot went to the little table by the window, and, taking out his pocket-book, unfolded the scrap of paper and laid the fragment of wax upon the bare wood between us. It looked absurdly small. For a long time he said nothing, but stood with his hands behind him, and let his eyes travel slowly round the room, from the bed to the broken door, and from the door to the hearth. I began to feel, as one does in the presence of a man at prayer, that I ought not to speak.

“It is not for what it is that I have kept it, Hastings,” he said at last, very quietly, “but for the place where it is not.”

I looked at him, and I looked at the wax, and I have seldom felt so completely at sea. Had he spoken in Flemish I could hardly have been more in the dark.

The rain had stopped by the time Eve reached Piccadilly Circus, and a watery sun was pushing its way out from behind a bank of cloud with the nervous air of a curate entering a drawing-room. She looked at the umbrella. It was a beautiful umbrella. It had a handle of some smooth, dark, expensive wood, with a silver band about it, and it furled itself with a well-bred reluctance which suggested a lifetime spent among the best people. Eve, who had passed her days among possessions that were either second-hand or on approval, felt for a moment a distinct yearning towards it. Nobody could prove anything. The young man had forced it into her hand and bolted, and a man who forces umbrellas on strange girls and bolts can scarcely complain if he never sees them again.

But there are principles which are bred in the bone. Her father, who had borrowed in his time most things that can be borrowed, from the vicar’s step-ladder to five pounds, had always, money excepted, given them back. Eve sighed, and turned her face westward along Piccadilly.

The hall porter of the Drones Club had held his post for twenty years, and had schooled himself to regard without emotion anything that came through the door of that institution. He had seen members enter on all fours, and, on one memorable Boat-Race night, in a wheelbarrow. But a girl in a hat like that, asking for a member whom she could not name, was outside his experience, and he permitted an eyebrow to rise perhaps an eighth of an inch.

“I want to leave this umbrella for one of your members,” said Eve. “I don’t know his name. He is very tall and thin, and he wears an eyeglass.”

“Yes, miss.”

“And he hadn’t a hat on,” said Eve, feeling that the description lacked finish.

“Yes, miss,” said the porter, who now had no doubts whatever. “If you would care to leave a note, miss, I will see that the gentleman gets it.”

He produced a sheet of the club’s paper and a pen. Eve wrote rapidly, with her head a little on one side, smiling once at what she had written; and when she had handed over the envelope and the umbrella and gone out into the sunshine, the porter summoned a page.

* * * * *

Psmith, meanwhile, had abandoned the window, from which the front of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, now that it had lost its chief ornament, could be seen for what it was--merely the front of a coal merchant’s--and had sunk into an armchair to consider the future in a spirit of tranquil pessimism. He was interrupted by a small boy in buttons bearing an umbrella and an envelope.

“Young lady left these for you, sir.”

Psmith put up his monocle and read the note twice, which was once more than he read most things.

“Thank you very much for lending me the umbrella. It kept the rain off my hat, which is a better hat than I ought to have and needs looking after. I am sending it back because it must belong to somebody, and because I like it far too much to be trusted with it. I don’t know whom to thank, so I am thanking the Club at large. I hope you did not get wet crossing the road, but as you hadn’t a hat on I am afraid you did.

“Yours gratefully, “THE GIRL UNDER THE AWNING.”

He folded the letter with care and placed it in his breast-pocket. Here, he felt, was a girl of sterling worth. She returned umbrellas, she wrote a clear hand, and she had the rare gift of being amusing on paper.

He was still glowing gently when the Honourable Mr. Walderwick rolled in. Mr. Walderwick was a large, pink young man with the resentful eye of one who has been done out of something, and behind him, wearing the look of a servant who has done his duty at some cost, came Barlow, the cloak-room attendant.

“I say, Psmith! Barlow tells me you walked off with my umbrella.”

“Barlow,” said Psmith, “is a man of rare acumen.”

“Well, dash it, I’ve been hunting for the thing for half an hour. I’ve got to lunch in Bond Street, and the sky looks like a bad debt. And--why, there it is! That’s the very one!”

He pointed an accusing finger at the umbrella, which leaned against Psmith’s chair with an air of conscious innocence.

It was a moment which would have tried most men. To explain would be to mention a girl, an awning and a letter signed in a manner which would be a gift to the wags; and the smoking-room of the Drones is no place in which to admit the existence of a lady. By dinner-time a book would be open on the date of the wedding.

Psmith rose, slowly, like some dignified creature emerging from the deep.

“Walderwick,” he said, “your grievance is a just one, and I shall not insult you with extenuations. Explanations are the last refuge of a weak cause. Let us be practical. You value this umbrella?”

“Well, it’s a jolly good umbrella.”

“It is a superb umbrella. What did you give for it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Couple of quid. Got it in the Burlington Arcade.”

“Then I will give you fifteen pounds for it.”

There was a silence. Mr. Walderwick’s mouth, which had opened in order to say a number of things, remained open, but nothing came out of it.

“Fifteen quid!”

“Twenty, if you prefer. I dislike to haggle in a matter which is, at bottom, one of the heart.”

“But, I say, what do you want it for?”

“That, Walderwick, is a question which goes to the roots of things, and if we started on it we should be here till dinner.” Psmith produced a cheque-book. “Fifteen will suffice?”

For a moment Mr. Walderwick had the air of one who suspects a practical joke. But as the pen moved across the paper the suspicion faded, and its place was taken by the quiet, unquestioning happiness of a man who has found a ten-shilling note in an old waistcoat, only bigger.

“Well, thanks awfully,” he said, pocketing the cheque. “Dashed decent of you. I mean, if you ever want any more umbrellas--”

“I shall know where to come,” said Psmith courteously.

When the door had closed Psmith handed the umbrella to Barlow, with instructions to guard it as he would his life. The transaction had made a serious inroad on a bank balance which had not been robust when the day began, but he did not regret it. There are things which a man buys for their intrinsic worth, and things which he buys for their associations, and he had never found the second class dear.

* * * * *

At half-past two Eve, having lunched on a bun and a cup of coffee, found herself with an hour to spare and the Green Park to spend it in. The sun had by now established itself, and she paid her tuppence for a chair and settled down to rehearse the coming interview. She had rehearsed it a dozen times, and in every rehearsal she was calm, capable and something of a wonder. Her prospective employer was an earl and, if Freddie was to be believed, quite harmless; and she was in the middle of the seventh rehearsal when a tall figure in a beautifully-cut morning-coat came strolling along the path, and she saw the monocle.

Cynics have suggested that the presence of Psmith in the Green Park at that hour was not entirely the work of chance. This is unjust. He had come to think about the future, and had chosen the Green Park because it had trees. That the trees were in the immediate neighbourhood of a girl in a black hat was one of those things which will occur in a well-ordered universe.

He had a hat on now, a top-hat which shone like a mirror, but a hat cannot disguise an eyeglass, and Eve was on her feet before she had time to reflect.

“Excuse me!”

Psmith halted, and swept the hat from his head with a movement of infinite courtesy.

“It’s a silly thing to say to a stranger,” said Eve, “but this morning a man lent me an umbrella in Dover Street. And he was--well, rather like you.”

“Indeed?” said Psmith, with polite interest. “An admirable practice, lending umbrellas. I hope it becomes general.”

“He hadn’t a hat on. But he had an eyeglass.”

“Ah, the eyeglass! A common affliction. It is the tragedy of the man who wears one that the world sees the eyeglass and overlooks the man behind it.” He regarded her gravely. “And the story ended happily?”

“I took the umbrella back to his club. I thought he might want it. But it was such a funny thing. He simply put it in my hand and ran away. Do you know him?”

“I have heard,” said Psmith, “that those who have known him longest find him difficult to know.”

“Well, I only wanted to say thank you.”

“Should I chance to encounter anyone answering to the description, I will convey the message. I feel that it would be received with gratification.”

Eve laughed. She was not sure--she was, as a matter of fact, almost sure--but there was something about that solemn face which made it impossible to press the point. It was like cross-examining an archbishop. Then she glanced at her wrist-watch and gave a little gasp.

“Oh, dear! I must fly. I have an appointment at half-past three.”

“An ordeal?”

“An interview. If I’m lucky I shall be cataloguing a library.”

“A noble calling. I trust the books will prove worthy of you.”

She smiled, and hurried off along the path; and Psmith, who held that to ask a girl’s name in a public park on so short an acquaintance would be a crude approach, put on his hat and watched her go. Not until she was out of sight did it occur to him that delicacy is a luxury, and that luxuries have to be paid for.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club was a large, grim building which seemed to have been constructed for the express purpose of keeping the wrong sort of person out. Eve, arriving at twenty-five minutes past three, was received by a footman with the expression of one asked to admit a germ, and conducted to a small room off the hall which was reserved for the entertainment of women, nephews and tradesmen. It contained a table, four hard chairs, a stuffed pike in a glass case, and an atmosphere of disapproval. Presently the door opened and a tall, stooping man of about sixty drifted in. He had the mild, worried look of one who has lost something and is not sure what. He had. The pince-nez which should have adorned his nose were not there.

“Miss--er--?” said Lord Emsworth, addressing a spot some feet to her left.

“Halliday.”

“Halliday. Yes, yes. Quite. Baxter said . . . My secretary. Excellent fellow. Very efficient. He tells me you have come about the--the--”

“The library.”

“The library. Precisely. Pray sit down. I had my glasses,” said Lord Emsworth, patting himself in a series of places. “I distinctly remember. However. Baxter has given me a paper--questions, you know. I am to ask them. Very sound scheme.” He drew from his pocket a folded typewritten sheet, and held it at arm’s length, and then close to his nose, and then at arm’s length again, like a man playing the trombone. “Extraordinary. Baxter types most beautifully, but I can’t read a word.”

“Shall I read it?”

“Eh? My dear young lady, capital! Capital!” He handed it over with the relief of a drowning man who has been thrown a rope.

Eve read the questions aloud and answered them, and Lord Emsworth, seated with his head on one side and gazing benevolently at the fireplace, nodded at the replies as a professor nods at a favourite pupil.

“‘One,’” read Eve. “‘What previous experience of cataloguing has applicant had?’”

“Well?” said Lord Emsworth encouragingly.

“None at all,” said Eve. If she was to go down, she preferred to go down with her colours flying.

“Quite,” said Lord Emsworth. “Very proper. Next.”

“‘Two. Is applicant methodical and punctual in her habits?’”

“I try to be,” said Eve, who had been late for the last four things in her life.

“Excellent!” said Lord Emsworth warmly. “Go on.”

Eve turned the sheet. At the foot, in capitals, stood a final line, and she had read it aloud before she saw what it was.

“‘Note for Lord Emsworth. On no account permit the conversation to drift to the subject of the Empress.’”

She looked up. “What is the Empress?”

It was as though somebody had switched on a lamp in a dim room. The mild face lit; the vague eyes came round and rested on her for the first time.

“The Empress?” said Lord Emsworth. “Ah! You don’t know the Empress? My dear young lady, she is the finest Berkshire sow in the county of Shropshire. Twice silver medal at the Shropshire Agricultural Show. She has a way of looking at one--”

For twenty minutes Eve heard about the Empress. She heard of her appetite, her constitution and her dislike of draughts, and said “Really?” and “How wonderful!” at the proper places, and looked wildly at the clock. Then Lord Emsworth stopped abruptly.

“Bless my soul! I am keeping you.”

“Not at all.”

“Yes, yes. The library. Well, I see no objection. Baxter will write. Or--no, I shall tell Baxter to write. Or he will tell me. Very nice to have met you, Miss--er--”

“Halliday.”

“Exactly.”

He drifted out, and Eve was left with the stuffed pike, which regarded her with a glassy and unhelpful eye. It had not been, as interviews went, a triumph. She had been interviewed by herself in the presence of a man who had not once looked at her, and had received the family history of a pig. But she had not been turned down; and she walked out into the sunshine feeling that, if she was not exactly in, at least she was not out.

* * * * *

At nine o’clock that evening the smoking-room of the Drones was empty save for Psmith, who sat in the depths of an armchair with the umbrella across his knees, regarding it with the fond, speculative gaze of a father contemplating a promising infant.

He was thus engaged when the door opened and there entered a plump young man in a dinner-jacket, known to his intimates as Bunny for reasons buried in the mists of a preparatory school. Sighting Psmith, he made for him with the eagerness of one who has been saving something up.

“I say, Psmith, I saw you this afternoon.”

“Indeed?”

“In the Green Park. I was on my way to my dentist, and I can tell you it bucked me up no end to see a chap chatting to a pretty girl. There you were, talking away to Eve Halliday as if you’d known her all your life. I never knew you knew her.”

“Eve Halliday?” said Psmith.

“The girl in the black hat. Ripping girl. I used to meet her at dances in the days when I was asked to dances. Well, cheerio. Got to find someone to play bridge with.”

He wandered out, and the door closed behind him. Psmith sat without moving for some time. Then he took the letter from his breast-pocket, unfolded it, and glanced at the signature. It was a charming signature, but it had its limitations. He replaced it, and turned his monocle upon the umbrella.

“Eve Halliday,” said Psmith, addressing the umbrella. “Well, well!”

He sat for some time in silence. It seemed to him that, all things considered, fifteen pounds was remarkably little to have paid for an umbrella.

The council was held in the library at Kellynch Hall, on a morning when the sun lay so pleasantly across the carpet that nothing in the room, except the persons assembled in it, could have suggested the idea of distress. Sir Walter had placed himself where the light fell most advantageously, and Elizabeth sat by him. Lady Russell, with a paper in her hand, had taken the chair opposite. Mr Shepherd was a smooth, careful man, with a horror of being the first to say a disagreeable thing to a client and a habit of leaving such things to be said by anybody else, so he had been very glad to find himself second in the order of speakers. Anne sat at a little distance with her work. She had been requested by Lady Russell to be present, and Sir Walter had consented to her presence as he would have consented to that of the clock.

Lady Russell had been at more pains than any of them. She had passed an entire evening over the tradesmen's books, which Elizabeth had put into her hands with the air of a person surrendering a relation to the surgeon. She had risen from them with a very grave countenance, and with a new and sincere respect for the powers of a man who could contrive to spend so much upon so little that could be shewn for it. She was not a woman to be alarmed into folly, nor to be softened into it. She began by saying that the case was neither so bad as it might be nor so good as it ought; that the income, honestly considered, would carry the whole debt in a course of years, if Sir Walter could be brought to live upon something less than the whole of it in the meantime; and she then read what she had set down. The carriage-horses were more than were wanted for a gentleman and two ladies, who had no such number of engagements. The household might spare a third of its servants without any want of comfort, and the gardens without any want of order. The journey to London might be omitted for the two next springs. The interest should be regularly paid, and every creditor assured of a fixed sum yearly, which would satisfy the tradespeople, and might be enlarged as their circumstances mended.

Sir Walter heard her as a man might hear his own will read aloud, and find it unaccountably to his disadvantage.

“Omit London!” said he, when she had done. “Lady Russell, you cannot be serious. It is not a question of pleasure. A man in my situation has duties in town, which are not to be neglected because a few persons in Somersetshire have been so ill-bred as to send in their accounts. And the horses! I have not been seen in any conveyance that was not properly horsed since I first had the disposal of one, and I could not begin now. The thing is not possible. I am very sensible of your kindness, but I must beg leave to say, that nothing of the kind can be entered into.”

Lady Russell folded her paper with the air of a woman who had expected something, though not quite so much, and who did not mean to be offended.

Mr Shepherd then cleared his throat. His own suggestions, he said, were of a more moderate cast, and he begged they might not be named in the same breath with Lady Russell's superior judgement; they were only such as had occurred to him in the course of a very long acquaintance with Sir Walter's affairs. A little pruning of the housekeeping; a gentle inquiry into the rents as the farms fell in; a postponement of the improvements Sir Walter had in view about the shrubbery; and a good deal of patience, which he had reason to think would, in the course of time, bring every thing round.

“Pruning!” said Sir Walter. “Patience! Mr Shepherd, I had looked for something from a man of business which my own footman could not have told me. As to the farms, I will not have it said that Sir Walter Elliot screws his people; and if you mean the timber, not a stick shall be touched while I live. No, sir; I do not find any thing in this to the purpose.”

Elizabeth said that she thought so too.

There was a silence. Lady Russell looked at her gloves, and Mr Shepherd at his shoes, and Sir Walter, having disposed of two plans in a quarter of an hour, looked at the window, as a man who had done a good deal and might reasonably expect to be left in peace. It was in this pause that Anne, who had never in her life put herself forward in a room, and who could not have said afterwards how she came to do it, laid down her work and spoke.

“I beg your pardon,” said she, in a voice which had not been much used in that library, “but I have been looking at Lady Russell's figures, which she was so good as to shew me, and it seems to me that she has been too kind to us. A third of the servants does not go far. If the debt is what Mr Shepherd states it to be, I believe it might be cleared in seven years, if for that time we were to live upon half our income, and put the other half to the creditors; and I do not think that any thing less will really do it. It would be necessary to part with the horses, as Lady Russell says, and to give up London for a good deal longer than two springs, and to go without many things which we have been accustomed to think necessary. But at the end there would be nothing owing; and I cannot think that the credit of the family is safe while the bills are unpaid. It seems to me that it can be redeemed in no other way than by paying them.”

Sir Walter stared at her as if one of the chairs had spoken. Lady Russell looked at her with a very singular expression, in which pleasure and dismay were about equally divided; for she had thought her own scheme quite severe enough for the strength of the patient, and it was mortifying to be outdone by a god-daughter, in a matter of principle, at the very moment when she had been rejected for want of it.

“I think Anne is perfectly right,” said Elizabeth.

Every one looked at her. It was so unprecedented a circumstance, that for some moments nobody could think of any thing to say. Elizabeth had never before been known to take her sister's part, or to be of any opinion which was not either her father's or her own; and it might have been supposed that she had mistaken the speaker. Whether she had really, in the course of the last month, contemplated the total of the debt with a horror which Lady Russell's moderation had done nothing to relieve; or whether, being used to think herself a person of great consequence, she found something agreeable to her taste in the idea of a great sacrifice, undertaken with spirit and soon over; or whether she reflected that the sooner such a thing were done, the sooner it might be forgotten, and she be at leisure to be solicited by baronet-blood, was a question upon which those who knew her best could not decide, and she gave no assistance to their conjectures.

“If a thing must be done, Papa,” said she, “it is folly to do it by halves. I had rather have the whole over in a few years, than be pinched for ever and nothing paid. I have no notion of retrenching a little. If we are to be poor, let us be poor at once, and have done with it.”

“Elizabeth!” cried Sir Walter. “I am astonished. I did not look for this from you.” He recovered himself by degrees. It was very natural that Anne, who had little idea of what was due to a family, should talk of living upon half; but that Elizabeth, who had so much, should be led away by her, he could only ascribe to the goodness of her heart, which he must be allowed to say was exceeded only by her want of consideration. Half their income! It would be to live like persons who had no rank at all. He refused it entirely; he begged that the subject might be dropped for that morning; and he was sure that Lady Russell, who understood what was due to a man of his family, would be so good as to say no more.

Lady Russell said nothing, and was, perhaps, the only person in the room who could have said nothing with any dignity. It was Mr Shepherd who spoke. He had long since discovered that Sir Walter would consent to any thing in the world sooner than a saving; and he had reflected, during the last five minutes, that a man so very hard to be saved might yet be brought to consider a course which involved no saving at all.

“If I might venture, Sir Walter,” said he, “when so many measures have been considered, and none found agreeable, there is one which I have hesitated hitherto to name, though it has often been in my mind. It would spare you every retrenchment; it would, I think, even improve your income; and it would give every creditor his satisfaction at the cost of scarcely any inconvenience. There is at this time a great demand for houses of the first character. Kellynch Hall, in the hands of a careful, a respectable tenant——”

“Tenant!” Sir Walter rose from his chair. “Mr Shepherd, I have heard you with the patience due to a long connection. I will not hear that word a second time. Kellynch Hall is not a lodging. Let it never be spoken again in my presence, by any person, on any occasion, or I shall consider myself insulted.”

Mr Shepherd bowed very low, and protested that he had spoken merely in the abstract, and had no notion of giving offence, and would be particularly careful never to say it again. Lady Russell had been about to speak; she did not; she looked at her paper. Sir Walter walked to the window, and admired his own grounds for exactly the time which a man requires to recover his composure. When he turned round, it was to say that he was engaged to walk, and he went out accordingly, leaving the Baronetage, as it seemed, to keep the field.

Mr Shepherd took his leave soon afterwards, with a great many civil speeches. Lady Russell stayed to press Anne's hand in the hall, and to say, in a low voice, that she had surprised her, and that she did not know whether she was more proud of what she had said or afraid of what it might cost her. She would think it all over, she said, and see them again; and she walked home to the village with her paper in her reticule, very much occupied.

The remainder of the day was passed at the Hall very much as if nothing had happened, which was, indeed, the object of the persons concerned in it. Sir Walter came in from his walk, and looked at himself in the pier-glass. Elizabeth was in the drawing-room, not in the best of tempers, and she gave Anne no thanks, and no explanation. It was about five o'clock, and the family were assembling, when a servant from Uppercross brought a letter, which was put into Anne's hand.

“Uppercross, Tuesday.

“My dear Anne,

“I am sorry to say I have been very unwell all this week, and am now so bad that I can hardly hold a pen. I have had a headache ever since Sunday, and a pain in my side, and the apothecary, who I think a very ignorant young man, will not say what is the matter with me. Charles, who is always so hard-hearted about illness, went out shooting on Monday just as if nothing were the matter, and is not to be depended on for coming home before dinner. The children are so noisy that I am not equal to them; and his mother and sisters have called only twice, and stayed a very short time. I am sure nobody was ever so neglected as I am. It would be a great kindness if you would come to me directly. I do not ask it for pleasure, for I know how little there is to be had here, but there is nothing so soothing to me as your company when I am ill, and you can have nothing to do at the Hall. Pray do not let Elizabeth say you cannot be spared, for I am sure you can. Send word by the bearer.

“Yours affectionately, “Mary M.

“I am a little better since I began this letter, but I dare say it will all come back.”

Anne read it twice, and it was then read aloud, at the request of Sir Walter, who wished to know what Mary could possibly have to say. He declared that he had never known Mary otherwise than well, except when she had something to gain by it, and that she had, on the whole, as good a constitution as any of the family. Elizabeth said that she never could understand why Mary was always ill just when the Hall was busiest, and that she supposed Anne would go. Sir Walter observed that he saw no reason why she should not; she could hardly be of less use at Uppercross than at home; and it was settled, before the letter had been laid down, that Anne might be spared. The Uppercross carriage would be sent for her, since it appeared, as Elizabeth remarked with some feeling, that nobody at Kellynch could be expected to spare a horse.

In the evening, when the family had dined, and the subject of the morning had been quite put by, Anne went up to her own room, and sat down by the window.

It was a fine still evening. The park lay in the last light, and the church tower of Kellynch stood up beyond the trees, and somewhere near it, in the village, Lady Russell was sitting over her figures. Anne had not much to think of that was agreeable. She had spoken, and had, as far as she could tell, done nothing; her father had rejected every scheme in turn, and would, she saw very plainly, reject every scheme that might follow; and Elizabeth's support, which she had no experience to interpret, she felt more inclined to distrust than to rely on. It had been the first time in many years that she had offered any opinion in that house, and, upon the whole, she was not sure that it had been wise. But she could not repent it, since there had been nothing else to be said.

Of Mary's letter she thought with more composure. She knew very well the value of Mary's illnesses, and did not believe that her sister was in any danger; but she had been asked for, which was not a thing that happened to her often, and there was some relief, just now, in the thought of being of use where she was wanted, and out of a house in which nothing could be done. It was not a very great reason, but it was enough. She would go to Uppercross in the morning; she would call at the Lodge on her way, and tell Lady Russell what she had said, and why. Having so decided, she rose, and took two gowns out of the wardrobe, and laid them on the bed.

Below her, in the library, the candles were being lighted over the papers which nobody had touched since the morning; and the sum which Sir Walter Elliot owed was exactly what it had been at breakfast.

It took Mr. Franklin and my stick between them to get me on my legs again. Getting up off a beach, as I have told you, grows longer with every year a man has to his back. When I was fairly set up and dusted, the first thing this young gentleman did was to put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pay me my seven-and-sixpence. It was a crown-piece and a half-crown, counted into my palm with a gravity that would have done credit to the Bank of England. I had lent him the money twelve years since, when he was a boy in jackets and wanted a pocket-knife with more blades to it than his father thought wholesome. I had forgotten all about it. He had not. That was a piece of his foreign education, I suppose. The English boy who pays his debts at all is generally content to pay them at leisure.

“And now, sir,” says I, when I had put the money safe, “how comes it that you are here four hours before your time? There is no fire lit in your room. There isn’t a sheet on your bed that has had its proper airing. And my lady and Miss Rachel are out at lunch, and won’t be home before five.”

“Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, “I have been in a hurry since seven o’clock this morning, and I shall go on being in one until I have got rid of something I have about me. I’ll explain as we walk. Samuel told me at the house that you had gone to the sands, and I came after you. Which is the way back?”

It was an odd form of words, considering what my daughter had told me not an hour before, and I felt the back of my neck go cold. At my age I put that down to the firs. But I have owned already that I am an old man who cannot carry two ideas at once. I made up my mind to put Penelope’s question to Mr. Franklin after he had had his lunch, and not before.

I took him back the short way, through the plantation. Halfway, where the firs shut out the sea and the daylight together, he pulled up short and took a letter out of his breast-pocket.

“This is what has brought me down before my time,” says he. “Read it, and don’t ask me for more than it says, because I haven’t got more. It was waiting for me at my lodgings last night when I came in from dinner.”

I put on my spectacles. It was good thick lawyer’s paper, written in a small, upright, uncompromising hand. I knew it at once for the hand of Mr. Bruff. He is the same Mr. Bruff who has since been at Mr. Franklin’s elbow, as I may say, in the getting up of this statement, and you will make his acquaintance in his proper place. The letter ran thus:

“Gray’s Inn Place, Wednesday evening, 24th May, 1848.

“DEAR MR. FRANKLIN BLAKE,—Since you left my chambers this afternoon, a circumstance has come to my knowledge which makes it undesirable that the parcel entrusted to you should remain in your hands one hour longer than is necessary. I will not commit the circumstance to paper. You shall have it from me by word of mouth when we next meet.

“I must therefore ask you to give up the afternoon train which you named to me, and to travel down by the first train tomorrow morning. On your arrival, place the parcel in some secure spot under Lady Verinder’s roof, and let it be under lock and key before you sit down to your dinner. You mentioned Mr. Betteredge, the steward, as a person who may be relied on. I can suggest nobody better. Do not open the parcel yourself, and do not tell Mr. Betteredge, or any other person in the house, what it contains. Lady Verinder shall be informed by me, in my own time and in my own way.

“Be so good as to let me have a line by return of post, that I may know it has reached its destination.—Faithfully yours,

“MATTHEW BRUFF.”

I read this twice, the second time chiefly, I am ashamed to say, for the sake of my own name in it. I have been trusted in my time with the plate, the cellar keys, and my lady’s good opinion. But to be picked out by name, in a London lawyer’s letter, as a person who might be relied on, went down with me like a glass of the old Madeira. It was some little while before I remembered the rest of it, and turned the paper over to see whether the circumstance had been put on the back. The back was blank.

“That’s Bruff all over,” says Mr. Franklin. “Thirty years in the law, and he has never yet put down a reason that could be read out afterwards in a court. All I know, Betteredge, is that I have a parcel, that it is to be locked up, and that you are the man to lock it. What the circumstance is I have no more notion than you. I only know that Bruff doesn’t frighten easily, and that I took the first train this morning and drove the last four miles like a madman.”

I asked, as a matter of housekeeping, whether it was anything that went off, the plate-room being next door to the kitchen chimney.

“It will not go off,” says Mr. Franklin. “Bruff would hardly have sent me by railway with it if it would.”

He put his hand inside the beautiful fawn-coloured coat, which I had noticed on the sands sat a little stiffly across the chest for so slim a young gentleman. He brought out a small flat packet done up in brown paper, tied with tape, and sealed over the knots in three places with black wax. There was not a word of writing on it. It would have lain easily in the palm of my hand.

“There,” says he. “Now it’s yours until I ask for it again.”

I took it with more respect than I should have shown to a leg of mutton. I did not ask what was in it, and I did not feel it over for a thin place in the paper. I don’t say this to be praised, for my curiosity is as good as another man’s. But being told not to ask, in writing, by a lawyer, seems to take the pleasure out of it.

We went in by the back court, where my beehive chair stood empty in the sun with my hat on the seat, keeping my place for me. Then we went along the stone passage to the plate-room. This is a closet between the housekeeper’s room and my own, with an iron-lined door, a Chubb lock, and the family silver in an oak chest lined with green baize. The key hangs on my watch-chain, and has hung there since I was made steward. Mr. Franklin would not so much as say he was hungry until he had seen the packet laid at the bottom of the chest, under the baize, and the lid put down, and the door locked, and the key back on my chain. He said, in his joking way, that I had better give him the key. I told him it had hung where it was for a good many years, and would be buried along with me, and that he would please to find some other key to be anxious about. He laughed and said I was a man after Mr. Bruff’s own heart. I sat him down at my own table to write his line to Mr. Bruff, and sent it off by Samuel to catch the post-bag. Then I handed him over to the dining-room and the cold beef.

I had Penelope’s jugglers on the tip of my tongue the whole time. But a man who has been on his legs since seven, on a bun and a railway sandwich, is better asked a question after dinner than before, and so I let him go.

I had hardly shut the dining-room door behind him when Penelope pounced on me in the passage.

“Father,” says she, “where’s Rosanna? You went to fetch her, and you’ve come back without her. Nancy’s been up and down the house crying out that she’ll report her to my lady.”

“Rosanna’s at the sands,” says I, “and I left her there getting over a crying fit. She’ll be in directly.”

“She won’t,” says Penelope. “The lobster-boy from Cobb’s Hole was at the kitchen door not ten minutes since. He met her on the shore road, walking as if the tide was after her, and she’s gone on to Cobb’s Hole. It’s the fisherman’s daughter she’s gone to see, the lame girl. And that’s a mile past the house, and two miles past her dinner.”

Here you have the friend I promised you, of whom more anon. You must forgive me if the anon runs on a little longer, for I have no room for her this side of the tea-things. I told Penelope what I had seen on the sands, and how Rosanna had gone red as a rose at the sight of Mr. Franklin, and run off without her curtsey. “Did she?” says Penelope, in a tone which I did not stop to examine. Then she said she would keep the girl’s dinner hot, and I told her that was well thought of, and we let it stand there.

My lady’s carriage drove up a few minutes before five. Miss Rachel, who came home with a headache from the heat and the long drive, was taken upstairs by Penelope directly. So you will have to wait, as Mr. Franklin had to wait, for the sight of her. I promise you that she is worth the waiting.

My lady received our young gentleman in the drawing-room. I opened the door for him myself, being anxious that a family meeting of so much importance should not be spoilt by a footman. And I will own that I was in no hurry to shut it again when I had done. I am not a man who listens at doors. I listen at doors that are open, and I make a point of finding something on the tea-table that wants arranging.

“Franklin!” says my lady, holding out both hands. “Four hours before your time, and looking as well as if you had come a hundred miles less.”

“The railway was kinder than the time-table, aunt,” says Mr. Franklin. He said not a word about Mr. Bruff, or the letter, and I said nothing either, having been bound to secrecy by my own vanity if by nothing else. She kissed him, for his mother’s sake, and he kissed her hand, for his own. Then he grew serious all of a sudden, as he could when he pleased, and said:

“Aunt Julia, before anything else, there is something I feel I ought to say. It concerns my uncle Herncastle—”

She stopped him with a look. I have seen my lady use it about twice in fifty years, once upon a curate and once upon the Bishop’s chaplain.

“No, Franklin,” she said. “Not a word. I will say this once, and I hope it need never be said again. My brother’s name is not to be spoken in this house, by you, by me, by Rachel, or by any servant under this roof. Not his name, nor his doings, nor anything that is his. What lies between him and me I have my own reasons for keeping buried, and I would rather lay this on you at the door than have it broken at the table. It is a hard thing to ask of a guest on his first evening. Will you promise me?”

“You have my word, aunt,” says Mr. Franklin. “His name shan’t cross my lips under your roof.”

There was a pause before he said it, of about the length of a good sneeze. His hand went half-way to his breast, where the parcel had been, and dropped again. I set it down to a young man’s embarrassment at being stopped short. It was a long while before I knew better.

“Thank you, my dear,” says my lady. “Then we understand each other, and we may talk of anything else in the world. Betteredge, we will have tea.”

I have no more to say of the dinner than that Samuel waited, and reported to me that the conversation ran upon Germany, the price of horses, and the singular behaviour of the Italian cooks. Not a syllable of the Colonel, from soup to cheese.

By ten o’clock the house was quiet. I went my rounds with Samuel, and I tried the plate-room door with my own hand, which I had never before done in fifty years on a night that had no particular reason in it. It was fast. I felt the key lie against my waistcoat on my chain, and was pleased with it. I have not told you, I find, what became of Penelope’s jugglers. I put them to Mr. Franklin that night, and what he made of them you have had from me already. How he came to make it shall be given in its order, for this chapter has run to a fine length, and I have my chair to think of.

Rosanna had not come in. Nancy told me so from the kitchen, in the voice of a girl who has said “I told you so” to a scullery, a cat and a dresser, and is ready to say it to the head of the servants. I told my lady, as in duty bound. She said she hoped the girl was not ill, and that I was to sit up for her, which I had meant to do. I had the back door left on the latch, and I took my pipe and my *Robinson Crusoe* out to the back court. The light was hanging on in the west over the stable roof, and the kitchen window gave me enough besides.

I opened the book at random, as I have done in every trouble these fifty years, and I lit upon the footprint in the sand. “I stood like one thunder-struck,” says Crusoe, “or as if I had seen an apparition.” I shut the book upon my thumb. I don’t say the passage had any business with me. But I had a packet locked up that I knew nothing about, and a lady who would not have a name spoken, and three hours ago I had been sitting on a beach beside a girl who thought her grave was waiting for her. Sit up with me a little longer, good friend, while the light goes.

Eleven struck. From where I sat, I could see the path out of the plantation, empty in the dusk. Behind me the back door stood on the latch, and the kitchen fire was banked, and Rosanna Spearman’s supper had gone cold on the hob. Somewhere beyond the firs, I knew, the tide was turning, and the sand was beginning to shiver. But there was no Rosanna.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--I take to the horn earlier than I meant, having woken with a head that will not be argued with. But I wish to set down last night while I can trust my memory of it, and I have a notion that some years hence I shall be glad to have it accurately.

Morris had done his best to turn his rooms into a camp. He had lit a fire, though the night was warm, saying that a camp-fire which does not make a man sweat is only a lamp. There was a saddle on the sofa and a lariat coiled over the mantelpiece, and beside the decanters lay a knife the length of my forearm, with which he carved the cold beef and silenced all objections. I had prepared a speech in the cab. It was dignified and brief, and I had no occasion to make it. Quincey does not permit speeches until the whisky has been round once.

Holmwood came last, flushed, and looking ten years younger than when I saw him before. There was something shamefaced about him, as of a man who knows that he has been given more than his share and is trying to carry it lightly. I watched him as I would a patient--the hand, the eye, the set of the mouth--and was ashamed of the habit before I had done indulging it. (*Mem.*, a physician who cannot leave his trade at the door is a poor guest and a worse friend.)

When the cloth was drawn Morris stood up, very straight, with his glass in his hand.

“Boys, I’ll say this once and then we’ll go on eating. There’s a little girl in Chatham Street who has more sand in her than any man in this room, and she has picked the best of us, which shows her judgment. Art, you go and be worth it. Jack, you and I will stand by and see that he is.”

We drank it standing. I found that I could, which surprised me. I have observed that a man will bear a good deal more than he expects if it is expected of him in company.

Then Arthur gave us his messages, which we had been promised. It appears that Lucy has told him everything, and that he has been carrying two errands about with him since yesterday and dreading the delivery. To me, that I am to be the first friend to sleep under their roof when they have one, and that I am on no account to bring my lancet. I laughed. I had not expected to laugh, and I laughed longer than the joke deserved, and Arthur, who is a good fellow, laughed with me and let me. To Morris, that the seven young women with the lamps are not to be so easily disposed of, that a lamp is trimmed for him at the far end of the long road, and that he is not to suppose he walks it alone.

Quincey took it very quietly. He looked into his glass for some time, as into something a long way down. Then he said that it was about the finest thing that had ever been said to a man in his line of business, and began, without a pause, a long and preposterous story of a mule on the shore of Titicaca. I understood that this was a kindness to us all. Holmwood, who had heard it before, prompted him in the wrong places.

I have looked, as I should in a patient, for envy in myself, and I find less than I feared. What I find is a great and rather dull gratitude that she is to be happy, and a kind of emptiness where I had planned a future; and I note that the two are perfectly compatible, which the poets never seem to allow. At the end we swore, on Quincey’s knife--a proceeding which I am sure he had meditated all day--that she should never want for a friend while any of us has a hand to give. It was theatrical, and I meant every word of it. We broke up at one. Art and Quincey were singing on the stairs, very badly, and I have some fear for the landlady.

*Later.*--Made my round at ten, with what was left of my head. R. M. Renfield was sitting on the edge of his bed with his note-book open on his knee, as he will sit for hours, adding figures in columns and ruling a line beneath each like a clerk closing a ledger. I gave him good-morning and asked after his night, and he did not look up. Then, in the mild voice of a man enquiring after a neighbour’s health, and without any preface whatever:--

“Is Miss Westenra well, Doctor? I hope she has not been distressed by anything.”

I do not think I have been so startled since I took my degree. I had never, to my knowledge, spoken that lady’s name within these walls, nor written it where he could see. I asked him, more sharply than is my rule, where he had heard it.

He considered the question with entire seriousness, his pencil in the air.

“I don’t know that I heard it, Doctor. I think that you said it. You walk in the garden under my window at night, and you have a carrying voice when you are unhappy. The night before last you said ‘Lucy,’ and then you said ‘Miss Westenra,’ like a man correcting his sum. I was awake. I am generally awake.”

That was all the explanation he would give, and I am afraid it is a sufficient one. I remember the walk; I remember nothing that I said. (*Mem.*, patients hear everything and forget nothing; talk less in the garden, and further from the windows.) Yet I do not like it. I have been used to reading him, and I do not like to find how well I have been read in return. He went back to his figures. The column upon which he was engaged had a large total at its foot, which he ringed twice with the pencil. What it is that he is counting I could not see, and he did not offer to tell me.

*Letter, Herr Josef Kessler to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz,*

“*Transylvania, 28 May.*

“Honoured Madam,--

“I beg that you will pardon the liberty of a stranger who writes to you, and pardon also the English, for which I have only a dictionary and the memory of two summers with English travellers. I am the landlord of the house where Mr. Jonathan Harker, whom I understand to be your betrothed, passed a night before he went up into the mountains. At his departure he gave me your direction, and begged that if his return should be later than he had said I would send word to you, that you should not be anxious, because the posts in this country are bad, and in the spring they are worse.

“I write now because it is so. Three days ago there came down from the pass a man who brought word to me, and the word is that Mr. Harker is in good health; that the business upon which he went is longer than was thought; and that he will be kept in the mountains some weeks yet. The person with whom he has his business desires that his friends be told so, and that they have no uneasiness. I do not know more, and I would not say what I do not know.

“I can add only that this year the snow lies very late upon the passes, and I have known a letter to be three weeks upon a road that a horse can ride in two days. Mr. Harker was well served in my house, and left it with the good wishes of all in it. If it is any comfort to you, Madam, that a stranger thinks of you at this distance, I beg you will believe that it is so.

“I have the honour to be, Madam,

“Your obedient servant,

“JOSEF KESSLER.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray*.

“*17, Chatham Street*,

“*29 May*.

“My dearest Mina,--

“You will have had my last by now, and know that number Three is Arthur, and that I have been walking about for five days like a person who has swallowed the sun. Mamma cried, and said she had known it from the second time he called, and when I asked why nobody had told *me* she said that I had not enquired. There is to be nothing said until his people are told properly, so you are to know, and Jonathan, and *no one else*.

“I must tell you about the dinner. Arthur went to it in a cab, looking, mamma said, like a man going to be tried for a very pleasant crime, and came here at noon next day in a hat that was not his own and would not say whose. I made him tell me all, and he did, except the part about the knife, which I have not yet got out of him. I cried again, Mina; I seem to do nothing now but cry, and be perfectly happy in between. Dr. Seward has sent flowers, with a note so kind that I cannot answer it, and Mr. Morris has sent a pair of the tiniest slippers you ever saw, all silver thread, from Mexico or somewhere, with a card that says ‘To regulate the fixin’s.--Q. P. M.’ I laughed till I had to sit down, and then I cried again.

“Is Jonathan at home yet? You said a week, and it must be quite three. Tell him he is to come and be looked at by us the very moment he has been to see you. Kiss him for me, if it is not improper.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*6 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have read all your letters, and the part about the slippers four times, and I am so glad for you that I have been ashamed to write, because what I have to tell is not so glad, and I will not spoil your happiness with it. But we promised when we were children to tell each other everything, and I keep my promises.

“Jonathan is not at home, and will not be for some weeks. I have it from a stranger, the landlord of the hotel at Bistritz where he slept, who wrote to me in the funniest, most careful English, with every word set down as though it might break. He says that Jonathan is in good health, that the business which took him is longer than was thought, and that I am not to be anxious, because the snow lies late upon the passes and the posts are bad. I have looked at the atlas. The map is nearly all mountains, and the mountains are nearly all without roads, or without any that the atlas cares to name.

“So I am not anxious, or at least I have decided not to be, which I find is very nearly the same thing if one is firm about it. He said a week, and it is now nearly four; but Jonathan was never in his life late through carelessness, and if he is late it is because he has been thorough, which is the very quality Mr. Hawkins values in him. I do not say that I did not cry. I did, on the night the letter came, for exactly a quarter of an hour by the school clock; and then I washed my face and copied the whole letter out in shorthand, twice, to keep my hands from shaking, and to see how the landlord’s English would look in it. It looks quite grand. Isn’t that ridiculous? But I mean to be a proper wife to a man of business, and a proper wife does not go to pieces because the post is slow.

“I sent the letter to Mr. Hawkins, as it seemed to me that he ought to know, and that he must know more than I do, since Jonathan writes to him of business, and to me only of the things that do not matter, which are of course the only things that do. The clerk says he is in London until the middle of the month and will have it forwarded. I shall not trouble him again until he has had time to answer.

“Now, as to you. I am jealous and delighted, and I have decided to be both. Tell Arthur that he is to deserve you, and that if he fails I know where Mr. Morris lives. Tell Dr. Seward, if you write, that I honour him, that no woman was ever refused more kindly, and that the lancet was only nerves. I cannot say what I think of Mr. Morris without a sheet of his own; but I like a man who can take it standing up.

“Do not write to me about Jonathan, dear. Write about the slippers. Tell me if they fit.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Telegram from Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*20 June.*

“Good news of Jonathan. Business nearly done; he starts homeward within days. Be easy. HAWKINS.”

The First National Bank was a gray stone building with a column for every hundred thousand dollars of its capital and a bronze grille over every window a burglar might have been expected to like. I got there at twenty past two, which left me forty minutes before the doors were locked.

A girl at a railed desk took my card through a mahogany door and came back to say that Mr. Pruitt would see me. Mr. Pruitt turned out to be an assistant cashier, a plump man of fifty with a pink scalp showing through the pale hair he combed across it. His rimless eyeglasses came off to look at my card and went on again to look at me. He didn't offer to shake hands. He offered a chair.

“Donald Willsson wrote a check for five thousand dollars yesterday afternoon, a little before three,” I said. “I want to know if it's come in.”

He cleared his throat and said he was afraid the bank could not discuss a depositor's account with—

“He's dead,” I said. “I'm not asking for his balance. I'm asking whether one piece of paper has been through your hands. If you want to be difficult I can bring in somebody from the police. I wouldn't like the one I'd get, and I've an idea you wouldn't either.”

Mr. Pruitt considered that with his mouth pursed, said, “One moment,” and went out. He was gone twelve minutes by my watch. When he came back he had a sheet of figures in his hand, and he read from it as if he thought it might change if he looked away.

“No check for that amount, drawn by Mr. Donald Willsson, has been presented at this bank, either over the counter or through the clearing house. It has not been certified. Our certifying teller was at his window all of yesterday afternoon and again this morning, and he has certified nothing for Mr. Willsson.”

“Was Willsson himself in the bank yesterday?”

“Not to my knowledge. I asked. Nobody saw him.”

“Do you know who it was made out to?”

“We couldn't know that until it comes in.”

“Any stop-payment on it?”

“None has been ordered.”

“Money there to meet it?”

He said with some dignity that the account was in a position to meet it.

“And if it does come in?”

“In view of what has happened, I should think we would hold it until we had heard from the family. Mr. Elihu Willsson is the president of this bank, you understand.” He said it the way another man might have mentioned that the bank had a roof.

“Sure. Then it's all in the family. Do me a favor and telephone the Great Western Hotel before you speak to him.”

“I couldn't promise that.”

“I know,” I said, and left him polishing his glasses.

On the bank steps I stood in the sun and did some arithmetic. Willsson had been out of his office twenty minutes with a check in his pocket. The bank was five minutes away, and he hadn't gone there. So somewhere within ten minutes of the Herald building he had put five thousand dollars into somebody's hand, and that somebody hadn't been in any hurry to turn it into cash. Or hadn't dared. Or had had no time left to do it in. Five thousand dollars is more than most people leave lying around for a day and a half.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on the twenty minutes. I asked at the cigar stand and the elevators and the two lunch counters near the Herald, and at a hardware store and a barber shop, whether anyone had seen Donald Willsson go out or come back a little before three. Two people had. One said he'd gone up toward Main Street. The other said he'd gone down toward the railroad tracks. Neither of them had seen him stop. I bought a cigar I didn't want from the man who'd said Main Street and went to get something to eat.

It was after eight when I got back to the Great Western. I had my shoes off and my coat over the back of the chair, and I was looking at the wall and thinking of nothing much, when the telephone rang. The clerk downstairs said Mrs. Willsson was there to see me. I told him to send her up and put my shoes on.

She was in black from hat to shoes. I looked at the shoes. They were plain black pumps. She saw me looking and didn't say anything about it. Her face under the small hat was very white and very carefully powdered, and her eyes were bluer than I remembered, or the black made them look so. She came in three steps, stopped, and let me shut the door behind her.

“You are the man my husband sent for.”

“Yes.”

“You have told his father that I killed him.”

“I told him you went out at twenty past ten and came back at five past eleven with something on your slipper. What he made of that was his own idea.”

“He telephoned me at four o'clock this afternoon.” She didn't sit down. “I do not know all the words he used. I know enough of them.”

“He's got a vocabulary.”

She didn't smile. I moved a chair out from the table and she sat on the front edge of it with her gloved hands together in her lap. I offered her a cigarette. She shook her head, then changed her mind and took it. Her fingers weren't quite steady around the match.

“Where did you go last night?” I asked.

“I drove.”

“Where?”

“I do not think I will tell you tonight.”

“Then what did you come for?”

“To see what kind of man you are.” She looked at me with her chin up. “My husband trusted you enough to send for you. I would like to know if he was right.”

“Depends on what he was trusting me with. He didn't say. He said he'd tell me at ten.”

“He told me nothing either.” Her voice stayed low, and the accent thickened a little when she hurried. “This last week he was—different. He would not eat. He sat in the library with the door shut. When I asked, he said it was the newspaper and that I should not trouble myself.” She turned the cigarette over and looked at the end of it. “I think he was afraid. Not for himself. I do not know for whom.”

“Max Thaler called on you this morning.”

The cigarette stopped turning. “You have watched my house?”

“I was on my way to it. He got there first.”

“He came to say he was sorry.” She said it slowly. “He said that he had not known my husband, but that it was a bad thing to happen in a city, and that he was sorry.”

“What else did he say?”

“He does not say very much. He speaks so low that one must lean to hear him.”

“That's how he got the name.”

“He said that if I needed anything—anything—I was to send word. I told him I needed nothing.” Her mouth tightened. “He looked at my shoes when he went out. Everyone looks at my shoes now.”

I let that ride and asked:

“Did your husband say anything to you about a check? Five thousand dollars?”

“No.”

She said it a shade too quickly, or maybe I was reading a lot into a shade. She didn't ask whom the check had been made out to, and that would have been the natural question. What she did ask was:

“Where is it?”

“That's what I'd like to know.”

She looked at the wall behind me and thought about that. I waited. After a while she stood up, pulled her gloves tight across the backs of her hands, and went to the door.

“You will not tell the police about the shoe.”

“I haven't so far.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“It's what I'm answering.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then went out and closed the door, quietly, as if there were somebody sleeping in the next room. I opened the window and let some of the perfume out. She had been in the room twenty minutes and I knew exactly as much about her as I had before, except that she was afraid of something and it wasn't me.

I was hunting for the bottle I'd bought that afternoon when somebody knocked. It was a bellhop with a sleepy face and an envelope. He said a man had left it at the desk around six and the day clerk had forgotten to pass it on. I gave him a quarter and he went away without asking who had given him the message to deliver, which probably showed sense.

The envelope was cheap and unsealed. Inside was a sheet of hotel-lobby stationery folded once, and on it, in a small neat back-slanted hand:

*Saw you with Bill Quint last night. Bill is all right but he only knows one side of things. I hear you paid a call on the old man this morning too. A man who wants to know his way around this town ought to hear all sides. Come and see me, any time up to two in the morning. The Cliff Club, Ferris Street, ask for me at the door. M. T.*

I read it twice. It was polite and it was friendly, and it told me that Max Thaler knew where I had been the night before, where I had been that morning, and where I was sleeping now. He might have known the last from having a Stutz parked outside. He couldn't have known the middle one from anything except somebody in Elihu Willsson's house telephoning somebody. I put the note in my pocket. I wasn't ready to talk to Thaler. I wanted to know what I was going to say before I said it, and just then I didn't.

I sat at the table with hotel stationery and a pencil and spent half an hour on a wire that ought to have taken ten minutes, because every time I read it over I found something I could cut or something I couldn't yet say. The final version ran to eighty-odd words. I copied it out clean and took it down the street to the Western Union office, where a clerk with a green eyeshade counted the words twice and made me pay for them in silver.

It read:

CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO. DONALD WILLSSON WHO SENT FOR ME SHOT DEAD HERE LAST NIGHT BEFORE I COULD SEE HIM. DONT KNOW WHAT WORK HE WANTED DONE. FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS THIS TOWN INCLUDING PAPERS AND BANK AND IS ABUSIVE BUT UNHELPFUL. HE SAYS WIDOW KILLED HIM. MAY BE POLITICAL AS DONALD WAS RUNNING NEWSPAPER CLEANUP CAMPAIGN AGAINST GANG THAT CONTROLS POLICE. DONALD DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK DAY OF DEATH NOT YET PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED. AM SHORT OF CLIENT BUT PROPOSE STAYING TO FIND OUT WHO KILLED HIM UNLESS YOU SAY NO. ADDRESS GREAT WESTERN HOTEL.

I walked back through streets that had gone dark and quiet early, except for the lit windows of the poolrooms and the cigar stores. It was the sort of quiet you get in a town where people had found it healthier not to notice things.

The room was as I had left it. The window was still open and the perfume was gone. I took my shoes off again, sat on the bed with the bottle and a tooth glass, and lit a cigarette.

A man walks out of his office with a check for five thousand dollars, says yes to a voice on a telephone, dictates a letter to a paper mill, and by ten-forty is lying on a sidewalk with four holes in him and no check in the bank. It was in somebody's pocket, or in a safe, or in a stove, or it had been torn up and thrown in the gutter. It was the only piece of paper in Poisonville that had cost five thousand dollars and hadn't been cashed. I couldn't see why anybody would want it that badly, and I couldn't see why anybody would want it and not cash it.

The bottle went down an inch at a time. Down the hall somebody was snoring. Somewhere south of the hotel a car went by too fast, and I listened to it until it was gone, and the check was still where it had been when I sat down.