The Chapters

I did not say anything. The cab went down the steep street and turned into the Rue des Écoles and went along it fast, and turned again and started up the Boulevard Saint-Michel. There was no one about. The cafés were shut in that quarter and the iron shutters were down over the shops. Brett lay back in the corner with her eyes closed. When we passed under a street-lamp the light came in across her face and then it was gone and it was dark again in the cab.

“Well,” I said. “What is it?”

“It isn’t anything. I wanted to sit down somewhere. Let me sit.”

“You’re sitting.”

“Don’t, Jake.” She opened her eyes. “Don’t be a beast about it. I was perfectly all right until I saw you standing in that door.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

We went up the Boulevard past the Luxembourg with the trees going by black against the sky and the cab rattling on the paving. She put out her hand and found mine and held it and did not say anything. I did not say anything either. At the top of the hill the Closerie was still lighted, with a few people on the terrace under the trees, and then we were past it and it was dark again and quieter, and the cab rolled on down toward the Parc Montsouris.

“Why do you go about with that lot?” I said.

“Because it’s safe. I told you.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I told you as well as I ever tell anybody.” She let go of my hand and sat up and put the window down, and the air came in. It was warm and smelled of the trees and the dust. “That’s better. God, it was hot in that place.”

“It was hot.”

“You dance well, Jake. I’d forgotten that.”

“I dance all right.”

“Yes. You do.”

“It’s a fine night.”

“Isn’t it? It’s a lovely night.”

None of it was what either of us meant. I wanted her so badly that it hurt to sit beside her, and I sat there with my hands on my knees and looked out at the street.

She leaned over in the dark and looked at me, close, and then she sat back in her own corner.

“No,” she said. “That’s no good. That’s no good at all. Give me a cigarette.”

I gave her one and lit it, and in the light of the match her face was very white and her mouth was set, and then the match was out.

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“Tell him to go to the Select. I can’t go driving about in the dark like this all night. I want lights, and people, and a drink I can see in front of me.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He grunted and swung the cab around in the empty road and we went back.

The Select was crowded. The terrace ran out under the awning to the edge of the sidewalk and every table was taken, and the waiters went in and out between the tables with the trays held up over their heads. Several people we knew were there. One of them stood up and waved and called something, and Brett waved back and went straight past him and in through the door, and I followed her. Inside it was quieter and the air was thick with smoke. She sat on a stool at the end of the bar farthest from the door, and I sat beside her, and the barman came down to us.

“Brandy and soda,” Brett said. “And whatever he’s having.”

“*Fine à l’eau*.”

“You drink that stuff like water.”

“It isn’t bad.”

She drank off half the brandy and soda and set the glass down and looked at herself in the mirror behind the bottles, and pushed her hair back with the flat of her hand.

“I look like the devil.”

“You look fine.”

“I look like the devil and you know it perfectly well.” She turned around on the stool so that her back was to the mirror. “I say, do you know a Count Mippipopolous?”

“No. I never heard of him.”

“Nor has anybody. You would have if there were anything to hear. He turned up at a party last week, God knows whose, and stood in a corner all evening with a bottle of champagne under each arm and never said a word, and then he took me out to supper. He’s a count of something. Somewhere. He’s got money.”

“How much money?”

“Pots. Oceans of it. I don’t know. He’s never said and I’ve never asked. He’s very sweet about it. He wants to take me down to Cannes in a motor-car the size of a house.”

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Why shouldn’t I?”

“No reason.”

“He’s all right, you know. He’s seen things. He knows what it’s all about. I could tell that straight off, standing there in his corner.”

“Then that’s fine.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“How should I say it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t say it at all.” She finished the brandy and soda and pushed the glass across the bar to the barman. “Another, please. What are you going to do, Jake?”

“Sit here.”

“I mean about your fifty francs.”

“Lose them. You said I would.”

“Do you always do what I say?”

“Not always.”

“Let’s go and get them.”

“What for?”

“Because I want to do something. Because I don’t want to sit here and be looked at by that chap by the door, and I don’t want to go up to Montmartre and find that lot, and I don’t want to go home. Come on, Jake. It isn’t far.”

“You wouldn’t walk across the street.”

“We’ll take a taxi, of course. Pay the man.”

The taxi went back along the boulevard the way we had come, and down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and along the Rue des Écoles and up the hill, and there was the Bal with the light coming out of the door and the accordion still going inside. Brett stayed in the cab.

“I’m not going in. I’ve been in. Go and get your money and don’t be long.”

“Will you be here?”

“Where else would I be?”

The policeman was still sitting by the door. He looked at me and this time he did not smile. Inside there were fewer people. Braddocks and his party were gone, and the long table where they had sat was cleared, and the young men with the wavy hair were gone too. Some people from the quarter had come in, a few couples, and they were dancing with their heads together, seriously, the way people dance who have to get up in the morning. The proprietor was still up on his stool with the bells going on his ankle. Georgette was sitting at the end of a bench by the wall with her hat off and a glass of beer in front of her, talking with the daughter of the house. She saw me come in.

“*Tiens*,” she said. “The fiancé.”

“Hello, Georgette.”

“You came back.”

“I came back.”

“Your friends are gone. All of them.” She pulled the hat along the bench and turned it over in her hands. “The ones with the hair went to Montmartre. They asked me to come. They said there would be a party.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“They dance. They talk. That’s all they do, those. I have to eat to-morrow also.” She drank some of the beer. “The tall one who speaks French, the woman, she came and asked me again if I loved Paris. I told her I adored Paris. Then they all went.”

I went over to the bar. The patronne was there behind the zinc with her arms folded.

“The envelope, Madame.”

She took it out from under the counter and gave it to me. It had not been opened. “She did not ask,” the patronne said. “She did not go out with any one. She sat.”

“Thank you.”

I tore the envelope open and took out the note and went back and put it on the table beside Georgette’s glass.

“For the taxi.”

She looked at it and did not touch it. “That’s a long taxi.”

“Take it.”

She picked it up and folded it small and put it in her bag and shut the bag.

“You’re a good type,” she said. “It’s a shame.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

“Good night, Jacob.” She grinned and I saw the teeth, and then she shut her mouth and put her hat on and was pretty again. “Flamand.”

Outside Brett was in the corner of the cab with her eyes shut. She opened them when the door slammed.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes.”

“Well? Let’s see it, then.”

“I gave it to her.”

“Then what in God’s name did we come for?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at me and then she began to laugh, and then she stopped laughing.

“Oh, Jake,” she said. “You are a fool. Tell him to go on.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Somewhere we can eat. I’m starved, and I don’t want to go home.”

I told him Les Halles. It was late enough for the markets, and when we came down across the river the carts were already in, the big two-wheeled ones with the big horses, and the streets around the pavilions were blocked with them, and the pavements were piled with crates and cabbages, and the porters went by under the arc-lights with the baskets on their heads. We got out and walked. There is a place in the Rue Coquillière where you can get onion soup at any hour of the night, and it is full of market people in their blue smocks and people in evening clothes who have come on from somewhere else, and nobody looks at anybody. We sat at a table by the window and had the soup with the cheese baked over it and a bottle of white wine, and Brett ate all of hers and broke the bread into the bowl.

“That’s better. I was empty. I hadn’t had a thing since noon.”

“You ought to eat.”

“I know it.” She wiped her mouth. “You’d have made somebody a lovely husband, Jake.”

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Don’t.”

“You said it.”

“I know I said it. I’m always saying things.”

She lit a cigarette and looked out of the window. Outside the carts were going by, and a man came past with a whole sheep over his shoulder wrapped in a cloth. The light in the window had changed. It was not the arc-light now, it was gray, and it came in flat along the street and showed the dirt on the glass and the ash on the cloth between us.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly five.”

“God. It’s getting light. I can’t stand it getting light. Put me in a taxi, Jake.”

I paid and we went out. It was cool now, and the sky over the market was gray and going white at the edges, and the iron roofs of the pavilions stood up black against it. The sparrows had started in the trees. There was a rank across the square by the church, and one cab was there with the driver asleep against the wheel. I woke him and opened the door and Brett got in.

“Tell him the hotel.”

I told him.

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll ring you up. To-morrow. To-day. Whatever it is by now.”

“All right.”

She put her hand out of the window and I took it and she held on hard, the way she had at the zinc bar, and then she let it go and sat back in the corner, and the cab pulled away. I watched it go around the church and out of sight. Then I stood there for a minute, and then I started to walk.

I went down through the market, past the carts and the men unloading, and out on to the quai. The river was gray and very smooth and there was a mist lying on it that the sun had not got to yet. A barge was coming up under the Pont Neuf, low in the water, with a man standing at the tiller and smoke going straight up from the stovepipe and a dog on the deck. I crossed the bridge and went along the quai on the other side. The bookstalls were still locked, with their green lids down. Ahead of me a street-cleaner was working with his broom, and the water was running in the gutter, and the stones were wet and clean where he had been. As I walked the towers of Notre-Dame came up out of the mist across the river, and the sun got on them, and the mist began to go. It was going to be a fine day. I walked along under the trees by the river with my hands in my pockets and tried not to think about anything, and it was a long way home, and I was in no hurry to get there.

Lady Russell had not been consulted without being prepared to advise. She was a woman of sound rather than quick understanding, of strict integrity, and of a warmth of heart which her respect for rank could colour but never corrupt; and having gone over every figure of Sir Walter’s affairs with as much anxiety as if the debts had been her own, she came to Kellynch Hall on the morning appointed with a paper of estimates in her pocket-book, and a resolution of being, for once, more useful than agreeable. Mr Shepherd arrived from the town within a quarter of an hour of her; a civil, cautious lawyer, who had never been known to say a disagreeable thing to a gentleman whose affairs he managed, and who would infinitely have preferred that every thing unwelcome should be proposed by Lady Russell, and every thing acceptable by himself.

They were received in the library, Sir Walter in his own chair between the fire-place and the great looking-glass, Elizabeth beside him, and Anne, as usual, at a little distance with her work, near enough to hear every thing and not so near as to be expected to say any thing. Mr Shepherd, being asked what he had to offer, bowed, opened his papers, and begged leave to refer in the first instance to Lady Russell, whose judgement he should be very sorry to anticipate.

Lady Russell had accordingly the honour of beginning, and she began with all the delicacy that thirty years’ knowledge of her hearer could supply. The evil was great, it was growing, and it must be met; and she had drawn up a scheme which, if adhered to for seven years, would set every thing right. It was to her a moderate scheme. Two of the men-servants and the second coachman were to be dispensed with; the four horses of the travelling-chaise were to be sold, and a pair only kept; the table, without ceasing to be a gentleman’s table, was to be spread less often and less splendidly; there was to be no journey to London the ensuing spring, nor the spring after; and no room was to be new furnished for three years. The charities she had left untouched; and she laid her paper on the table with the modest confidence of a woman who has consulted her friend’s dignity almost as carefully as her friend’s interest.

Sir Walter had listened with an expression of increasing suffering, and at the end could contain himself no longer. Not go to London! Sell Elizabeth’s chaise-horses, and be drawn about the county by a pair, like a parson! Dismiss men who had been in his service since before his poor wife’s death, and let it be told in every kitchen in Somersetshire that Sir Walter Elliot could not keep his people! He had lived as his father had lived; and if that was to be called extravagance, he must be allowed to think the age very much altered for the worse. Lady Russell’s plan he could not hear of. It was no plan at all. It was a plan for ceasing to be Sir Walter Elliot, without the trouble of dying.

Lady Russell coloured, but was silent; she had expected as much. Mr Shepherd was now called upon, and had the mortification of finding that her failure left him nothing to shelter behind. His plan, however, was ready, and was of a gentler outline and a more ingenious construction than hers. He did not propose to touch the household at all. Sir Walter should see no change in his hall, his stables, or his table; but he should put the management of his income entirely into Mr Shepherd’s hands; a fixed yearly sum should be paid over to him quarterly; the residue should go, under Mr Shepherd’s own eye, to the tradespeople and the mortgagees; and Mr Shepherd would engage to keep the principal creditors quiet until the estate had redeemed itself. He thought ten years would do it, particularly if the home farm and the water-meadows on the Uppercross side were let to a substantial man.

Sir Walter heard him to the end, and then turned upon him a look which Mr Shepherd afterwards declared had gone through him. An allowance! Sir Walter Elliot to receive his own money in quarterly doles from his own attorney, like a boy at school! To be kept quiet by his tradespeople! To turn his home farm over to a substantial man! He begged Mr Shepherd’s pardon, but he had rather the debts stood as they were. Nothing, he had always found, was so easily borne as owing money, and nothing so intolerable as other people’s schemes for paying it.

There was a silence. Mr Shepherd folded his papers; Lady Russell looked at the carpet; Elizabeth, with heightened colour, looked at nothing; and it was in this silence, to the astonishment of everybody present, and most of all of herself, that Anne spoke.

She had not meant to speak. She had thought a great deal on the subject; she had found in neither plan what she wanted; and when the second had failed as the first had failed, the sense of what was really at stake got the better of her habitual silence. She said, in a voice at first not quite steady, that the fault of both plans seemed to her to lie in their being too little; that a retrenchment which was to last seven or ten years, and be felt every day of them, would be more galling to her father than a severe one which should be over in four; and that if the thing were to be done at all, it had better be done thoroughly. She would give up London entirely; dismiss every servant not required for the decent care of the house; keep one carriage and one pair; shut up the state rooms, and live in the smaller ones, as her mother had done in the first years of her marriage; neither give nor accept dinners; and sell whatever could with propriety be sold. So they might clear every thing in four years, and at the end of them owe nothing to anybody, and hold up their heads in every house in the county as people who had paid what they owed. She spoke of what was due to the tradespeople before she spoke of what was due to the consequence of the family; and this, in that room, was a novelty which might of itself have accounted for the general astonishment.

Sir Walter turned towards her as if the work-table had spoken. Lady Russell, who agreed with every word and had not dared to say the half of it, was too much divided between pleasure and alarm to say any thing now. Mr Shepherd looked at Sir Walter. And then Elizabeth—Elizabeth, who had not addressed six words to Anne that morning, and on whose support Anne had not counted since she was fourteen—Elizabeth said, decidedly, that she thought Anne was in the right.

The surprise was general and complete. Sir Walter looked at his eldest daughter with something very like dismay, and Lady Russell with something very like respect; Anne alone, after the first moment, was less gratified than she would have expected to be, for Elizabeth’s reasons, which she presently gave, were not Anne’s. Elizabeth could not bear a half-measure. To keep a pair of horses instead of four, and give three dinners in a winter instead of ten, was to publish their difficulties to every family within twenty miles, and invite the whole country to count their servants; whereas if the house were shut up entirely, and they saw nobody, it might be given out as a matter of choice. They were in mourning as it was. Nobody need be told why the Elliots of Kellynch chose to live retired, and nobody would venture to ask. Besides, she was tired of being schemed for; if the family were to reform, she had rather it reformed itself than be reformed from Mr Shepherd’s office; and she said this with a glance which included Lady Russell, and which Lady Russell perfectly understood.

It availed nothing. Sir Walter, who had been shaken by one daughter, was only roused by two. Shut up Kellynch! live in the small parlour like a widow in a lodging! refuse every dinner in the neighbourhood and give none, and let it be said that Sir Walter Elliot had gone out of the world at fifty-four to save the wages of a footman! He would not hear of it from Anne, and he was astonished to hear it from Elizabeth. The whole of it—Lady Russell’s paper, Mr Shepherd’s paper, and Anne’s speech—was a great deal of unnecessary alarm about a state of things which every gentleman in England had been in, and which would come right of itself if people would but leave it alone.

Mr Shepherd, who knew tolerably well how such things came right of themselves, ventured, with the most deferential hesitation, upon one word more. If the difficulty were that no manner of living at Kellynch upon a reduced scale could be reconciled with Sir Walter’s feelings—and he entirely entered into Sir Walter’s feelings—there was, perhaps, one other course, which he mentioned only that he might have the satisfaction of having mentioned every thing. There were gentlemen of fortune who would give an extraordinary rent for such a house as Kellynch, and take the best care of it; and if Sir Walter could bring himself, for a few years only, to receive a suitable tenant—

He got no farther. Sir Walter rose from his chair. He would thank Mr Shepherd, he said, with a coldness which the looking-glass behind him repeated with great exactness, never to make use of that word in his presence again. A tenant! at Kellynch! He had not supposed that any man who had eaten his dinners could have said it; and he desired, since Mr Shepherd had said it, that it might be understood to have been said once for all. Mr Shepherd bowed very low, said that he was extremely sorry, and had the good sense to be sorry in silence.

The conference was over. Nothing had been decided, nor was likely to be; the evil stood at the end of the morning exactly where it had stood at the beginning, with the addition of three rejected plans and one forbidden word. Sir Walter withdrew to his dressing-room, to recover from the fatigue of being advised; Mr Shepherd rode back to the town; and Lady Russell, walking with Anne to her carriage, pressed her hand, and told her that she had spoken like her mother’s daughter, and that they must not despair. Anne found the first of these comforts a good deal more substantial than the second.

The afternoon brought an interruption of another kind. A servant from Uppercross rode over, before the family had sat down to dinner, with a letter for Miss Anne Elliot; and as Elizabeth desired to know what Mary could have to say that required a man and a horse to bring it, Anne read it aloud.

“My dear Anne,

“I write to you from the sofa, for I am really too unwell to sit up, and have been these three days, though nobody at Uppercross thinks any thing of it. I have such a pain in my side as I never had in my life, and a sore throat besides, and Mr Robinson only says I am to keep quiet, which is exactly what I cannot do, with the children in the house and nobody to mind them but Jemima, who is of no more use than a stick. Charles is gone to Taunton till Friday, and Mrs Musgrove sends over to know how I do, but she does not come herself. You must come to me. I do not ask it as a favour, for after three years I think I may ask it as a right. Elizabeth never wants you, and my father will not miss you, and I shall be quite ill if you do not come. If you can be ready to-morrow, the carriage shall be sent for you in the morning; and if not, write, for I am not equal to being disappointed.

“Yours affectionately,

“M. M.”

Elizabeth heard it to the end, and said that Anne had better go. She could not conceive what Mary meant by three years and a right; but Anne was certainly of no use at Kellynch, and might be of some at Uppercross. Sir Walter observed that Mary was always ill when Charles was from home; that the pain in her side was, he did not doubt, the side she had been lying on; but that he saw no objection to Anne’s going, for the house would be a little quieter, and Mary would at least be obliged, which was more than Anne was likely to make anybody at home.

Anne said that she would go. It was said, as most of what she said was said, without being much attended to; but she meant it more than any thing she had said that day.

The evening closed as the day had begun. Sir Walter had the Baronetage open before him in the library, and read it with all the tranquillity of a man who has refused three plans of economy before dinner and feels himself the better for it; Elizabeth turned over a book of fashions and did not speak; and Anne, having stayed as long as she was expected to stay, and rather longer, went up to her own room, and stood for some time at the window, watching the shadow of the house lengthen across the lawn. It had been the first time in her life that she had said, before her father and sister and in company, the whole of what she thought; and it had answered exactly as she might have foreseen. Elizabeth’s support had been a surprise which meant nothing; the tradesmen’s bills lay where they had lain; and the word which Mr Shepherd had spoken and Sir Walter had forbidden hung, she suspected, the heavier over the house for being forbidden. Nothing was settled, nothing was nearer being settled, and she did not see how any thing ever could be, while the only two people who had the power of settling it could not bear to hear the matter named.

But Mary’s letter lay upon her table, and Mary’s letter was a summons. It was something, at very nearly seven-and-twenty, and after thirteen years of being nobody at Kellynch, to be wanted anywhere, even peevishly, even as a right; and Anne, who had never in her life been able to refuse a claim of that kind, did not wish to refuse this one. She would go to Uppercross in the morning. She should be of use there; she should be three miles from the looking-glass and the Baronetage; and she should leave behind her a question which was precisely as far from an answer as when the sun had risen upon it. By the time the candles were brought, she had written to Mary that the carriage might come.

Having lost sight of the girl, Mr. Franklin lost the thought of her along with her, as young men will, and turned round on me with a question which I had been on the point of putting to him. Being the elder by something near half a century, I put mine first.

“How do you come to be here, sir, four good hours before your time? My lady looked for you by the evening train, and the carriage was to have gone to meet you.”

“So somebody else looked for me by the evening train, Betteredge, if I am not much mistaken,” says Mr. Franklin; “and that is exactly why I didn’t come by it.” He felt in the breast of the fawn-coloured coat, and brought out a letter, and put it into my hand. “Read that,” he says. “Then tell me whether I have done right, and I’ll believe you before I believe myself.”

Getting my spectacles out of my waistcoat pocket, and getting them on my nose, and getting a letter the right way up in a sea-breeze, is another of those jobs which take an old man longer on the slope of a beach than they take a young one anywhere. Mr. Franklin bore it patiently, and picked at the sand with his glove. The letter was from Mr. Bruff, my lady’s lawyer in London—the same gentleman, you will please to remember, who is one of the two that have set me at this writing—and it ran as follows:

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

“My dear Franklin,—A word of caution, which I would rather give you and be laughed at for, than keep to myself and be sorry for afterwards. Within an hour of your leaving this office to-day, a person whom my clerk describes as a foreigner of dark complexion, respectably dressed, and speaking very fair English, called here and inquired, with great civility, on what day and by what train Mr. Franklin Blake proposed to travel into Yorkshire. My clerk, very properly, told him nothing, and he went away. I have since learnt that a similar inquiry was made at your hotel this afternoon, where I fear they were less discreet than we were. I attach no more weight to this than it deserves. But I am an old man, and a cautious one; and if I stood in your shoes I should not travel by the train you named to me, nor let the article you know of pass out of my own keeping for one moment, until it lies under lock and key in Lady Verinder’s house. You may show this to Betteredge, whose head is as sound as any I know, and who will keep it to himself.—Yours faithfully, Bruff.”

I read it twice, the second time for the compliment; and I looked up from it to find Mr. Franklin watching me.

“I took the first train this morning instead of the last,” he said, “and a fly from the station instead of the carriage, and I asked a plump young woman at the kitchen door where you were. She said, ‘At the sands, fetching Rosanna, and much good may it do him.’ So here I am. Well? Have I done right?”

“You have done right, sir,” I said; “and, what’s more, you have done right twice over, in coming to me. Now hear what I have got to tell you on my side.”

And I told him Penelope’s story of the three Indians, and the little English boy, and the ink in the palm of his hand, exactly as my daughter told it to me, and as you have got it already in its proper place. I had my mind made up to make him laugh at it. I did not make him laugh. He heard me through with the smile going out of his face by degrees; and when I came to the words the boy had spoken, he stopped me, and made me say them again.

“‘He has got It about him,’” says Mr. Franklin, very quiet. “And the man asked whether I should come at the close of day; and the boy couldn’t tell him. Betteredge, that boy knew more than Mr. Bruff’s clerk, and the man who put the words in his mouth knew more than the hotel.” He pulled the rose out of his button-hole, and looked at it as if it had done him an injury, and threw it away on the sand. “‘It,’” he says, “means the Moonstone.”

“The what, sir?”

He looked at me sharply. “You have heard the name?”

I had heard it; once, years before, and only once, in a whisper, and coupled with the name of the Colonel—my lady’s brother, of whom you shall hear in another place, and not from me to-day. I said as much.

“Then you know as much as I mean to tell you to-night,” says Mr. Franklin. “I have a promise to keep first, and I can’t keep it on a beach.”

“Have you got It about you, sir?” I asked, being naturally curious, and being (as I have owned already) no wiser than my betters.

“That is the one question I won’t answer,” says he. “Don’t ask it again, there’s a good fellow.”

Upon which he took out of an inner pocket—not the pocket the letter had come from—a small packet, wrapped in white paper, and tied with a string, and sealed over the string in three places with red wax. It would have gone into the hollow of my hand, and did go there; for he put it into my hand himself.

“Your plate-room, Betteredge,” he said, “is the only place in my aunt’s house that I have any memory of with a lock and a key and a man I would trust behind them. Put this on the shelf with the spoons to-night. Don’t open it, don’t weigh it, don’t hold it up to the light. To-morrow I shall know better what to do; and till then you know nothing—which is the pleasantest state, they tell me, for a man to be in.”

I put the packet away in my breeches pocket, and buttoned the flap over it. If you ask me whether I felt it, as a man will feel a thing before he puts it away, I answer that I did, and that I learned by it exactly what you would learn yourself by feeling a sealed packet with your finger and thumb—which is nothing. I set that down to my credit, and I ask you to remember it.

“And now,” says Mr. Franklin, bright again all in a moment, in his foreign fashion, “the seven-and-sixpence.” And he counted it into my other hand in silver, with a shilling over, which he called the interest for fourteen years, and which I put by for Penelope. I mention this, not because it bears on the Diamond, but because it bears on Mr. Franklin; and it is as well that you should know early what sort of young gentleman you have got to deal with.

We went back through the sandhills and the plantation of firs, Mr. Franklin talking of Germany and France and Italy all in a breath, and I with my hand on the flap of my pocket, and my mind, if the truth must be told, going off the Moonstone and coming back to Rosanna Spearman, and going off Rosanna and coming back to the Moonstone, like a dog between two doors. Here was a strange thing to have happened, and here was another strange thing on the top of it; and the two of them, on one afternoon, and on an empty stomach (for I had not dined either), were more than an old man’s head could hold comfortably at once.

Our plate-room opens out of the passage by my own sitting-room, and has an oak door on it as old as the house, and a lock on the door that the late Sir John put there himself, and the key of the lock on a bunch which never leaves my pocket by day nor my pillow by night. I took Mr. Franklin in with me, so that he might see with his own eyes what he was trusting to. I put the packet on the middle shelf, between the tea-urn and the christening cups, where it looked, I must say, a very small thing to have brought a gentleman two hundred miles by the wrong train. I turned the key twice on it. Mr. Franklin nodded, and went upstairs to wash the railway off him; and I sat down in my own room to think, which is the next best thing, at my age, to sitting down to sleep.

I had got no further than the first stage of thinking—which is to say, I had got my eyes shut—when Penelope came in.

“Father,” says she, “Rosanna’s not come back.”

I told her Rosanna had left me on the sands a full hour ago, and had had time to walk to the house twice over.

“She never came near the house,” says Penelope. “Joseph met her on the cliff road, going the other way—going to Cobb’s Hole; and she said she was going to see her friend there, and would be back before the doors were locked. She had been crying, Joseph says; and she hadn’t asked anybody’s leave; and Nancy has been wanting to know, all through dinner, whether that is what my lady calls a fair chance for the rest of us.” Penelope stopped, and looked at me with her mother’s look—which is the look of a woman who sees you know something, and means to have it out of you before bed-time. “What made her go off like that, father?”

“Her poor head, my dear,” I said—which was true, as far as it went; and I sent Penelope about her business.

But it was not like Rosanna. In four months in the house she had never once gone off without leave; and to go off with a gentleman’s eyes on her, and the colour up in her face like that, was less like her still. I made up my mind to have a word with her when she came in—a kind one—and I own I listened, more than once that afternoon, for her step in the passage.

My lady came home a little after five, and came home alone. I had better explain that, or you will want to know where Miss Rachel was. The friends they had lunched with had a house full of young people, and a dance that evening, and Miss Rachel had been pressed to stay till the morning; and my lady, having her nephew to receive, had left her there and driven back by herself. Mr. Franklin, when I told him of it on the stairs, looked (I thought) a little blank, and said, “To-morrow, then,” and went down to the library with his face put right again before he got to the bottom of the flight.

I was in the library myself, at the sideboard, with the Madeira and the glasses, when my lady came in and gave him both her hands. There is no need to describe that. You have all had somebody glad to see you, I hope, and can supply it for yourselves. What I have to describe came after it, and came quickly.

Mr. Franklin had a way, which he never lost, of going straight at a thing he had been told to keep off. He had not been three minutes in the room, and had not let go of my lady’s hands, when he said:

“Aunt, before I have been an hour in the house, there is something I must say to you. It concerns my uncle Herncastle—”

“Stop there, Franklin.”

My lady said it quite gently; but she took her hands away. I had seen her look so once before, when Sir John was alive, and I never wished to see it again.

“I will have one thing understood between us,” she said, “and then we need never speak of it more. Your uncle’s name is not to be mentioned under my roof. Not by you, not by me, not by any one who eats at my table or sleeps under my slates. I have my reasons. They are good reasons, and they are my own, and I don’t mean to give them to you or to anybody. If he has sent you to me with a message, I don’t wish to hear it. If he has sent you with anything else, I don’t wish to see it. Will you promise me?”

Mr. Franklin stood silent for what I should call a long minute. I saw his foreign training and his English blood have it out together in his face, and I honestly could not have told you which would win. Then he took my lady’s hand again, and bent over it in his outlandish way, and said:

“I promise, aunt. Under this roof, not a word.”

“Then you are as welcome here,” says my lady, “as if you were my own son.” And she kissed him, and I filled the glasses; and that was the whole of it.

He dined with my lady alone; and, the cloth being drawn and my lady gone up to her room, he found me out in the passage by the plate-room door, where I was (I don’t deny it) looking at the lock.

“You saw how I am placed, Betteredge?” says he.

I said I had seen it.

“I came two hundred miles to say a thing to my aunt,” says Mr. Franklin, “and the thing is stopped in my throat by a promise I couldn’t refuse. Very well. I am not going to say it, and I am not going to break my word by saying it to you instead. But the promise only ties my tongue; it doesn’t tie yours, and it doesn’t tie that lock. Keep the packet where it is, and keep the key where it is, and to-morrow I’ll walk it out on the moor. I have never yet found a difficulty that would stand up to a long walk and a cigar.”

He went off to the smoking-room with that, and I heard him laughing to himself on the way, as if the difficulty amused him. It did not amuse me. But then I was not five-and-twenty, and had not been educated abroad.

The house was shut up at ten, as usual—all but the door of the servants’ hall, which I left on the latch, with a candle in the window, on my own responsibility, for Rosanna. I had my beehive chair brought in out of the court, and set in my own room, with the door open to the passage; and I sat down in it, with the bunch of keys in one pocket and Mr. Bruff’s letter (which Mr. Franklin had left with me) in the other, and Robinson Crusoe on my knee.

I have found, for going on fifty years, that when a thing is on my mind, the book knows it. I opened it where it opened of its own accord, and there was the place: “That the fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself, when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burthen of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about.” Which was a comfort, so far as the plate-room went, and so far as three men with drums, who had not shown their faces again all day, and a boy who couldn’t tell whether a gentleman would arrive at the close of it. I read the passage twice, and lit my pipe on the strength of it.

It was less of a comfort in another quarter. The wind had gone round to the sea since sunset, and the sound of it came up through the plantation into the passage—the long smooth heave of it over the bank, and then the silence, and then the heave again. I thought of the brown face of the sand shivering at the turn of the tide, and of what the girl had said she saw under it, and of the colour in her cheeks when the young gentleman came out on us from the sandhills; and I thought, being an old man and sleepy, that the three of them fitted together somehow, and could not for my life have told you how.

The clock in the hall struck eleven. The candle stood in the servants’ hall window. And Rosanna Spearman was not yet home.

What I read there did nothing to reassure me. The book was an old one, and it spoke with the dry caution of its kind, but there was a sentence in it which I read twice over, and which I have not forgotten to this day: “The body is bent backwards in the form of an arch, resting upon the head and the heels; the spasms are provoked, or renewed, by the slightest external stimulus.” I shut the book with a snap, thrust it back upon its shelf, and let myself out by the garden door.

The storm had broken in the night—I had heard it dimly through my sleep—and the morning was fresh and cool after the sultriness of the day before. The drive was strewn with torn leaves, and every laurel dripped. It seemed to me indecent that the world should look so clean.

I took the short cut through the park and across the fields, and did the greater part of the way at a run. The Belgians had been put into a square, plain little house at the farther end of the village, called Leastways Cottage. The door stood open, and a stout woman in a black shawl was scrubbing the step. She looked up at me without surprise, and jerked her head towards the stairs.

Poirot was in the small sitting-room on the first floor. I had expected to find him in bed, or at the least in a dressing-gown, and I was a little taken aback. He was fully dressed, and dressed with the exactitude of a man who has never in his life come down to breakfast with a hair out of place; his boots shone, his moustaches had plainly already received their morning attention, and he was standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, looking down into the street.

“Poirot,” I began breathlessly, “I have come to ask you——”

“I know why you have come, mon ami,” said Poirot, without turning his head. “Mrs. Inglethorp is dead.”

I stopped short.

“You have heard?”

“Since half an hour.” He turned then, and I saw that his face was very grave. “It was Dr. Bauerstein who told me. He passed beneath this window on his way to his lodging, as I stood here—I rise early, Hastings; it is the habit of the old—and he looked up and saw me, and stopped, and told me. He was very kind. He knew, I think, that I should wish to know.”

“I had no idea you were acquainted with Bauerstein.”

“Mrs. Inglethorp made us acquainted. He has been most amiable to our little colony—he is a man who interests himself in a great many things.” Poirot paused. “He told me also that the two doctors have refused their certificate, and that there is to be a post-mortem. That is so?”

“Yes. Poirot, it was poison. I am certain of it. I have just been reading——” and out it all came: the book, the arching of the body, the head and the heels, the whole hideous business; and I ended by naming the drug, with, I am afraid, a certain triumph.

He heard me to the end without a word, except that once his eyebrows went up a little.

“You go fast, my friend,” he said at last. “It may be that you go right. But the doctors are before you on that road, and they have the knife and the test-tube, and you have only a book. Leave it to them. What I need, and need at once, is this: that those two rooms shall be touched by nobody. Nobody, you understand? Not the good Dorcas with her duster, not the family with their grief. The keys—who has them?”

“John Cavendish. Bauerstein locked both doors and gave them to him.”

“Good. Then go back, and see that they remain where they are. I will follow you within the hour.”

“Within the hour! But, Poirot——”

“One does not run to a house of death, Hastings. It is not seemly, and it is not useful. Also, I have not yet drunk my chocolate.” He laid a hand for an instant upon my arm, and his voice altered. “She was good to me and to mine when we had nothing. You may say to Monsieur Cavendish, if he asks you, that Hercule Poirot is at his service. Now go.”

I went. I had the odd sensation, as I hurried back along the wet road, of having been dismissed, kindly but decidedly, like a schoolboy; and I am not sure that I liked it.

It was a little after seven when I came up the drive again, and the first person I saw ahead of me was Alfred Inglethorp.

He was walking towards the house with his usual long, deliberate stride, swinging his stick, and I noticed that his trousers were splashed with mud almost to the knee. He must have heard my step on the gravel, for he turned, and lifted his hat to me with the elaborate courtesy which always made me long to hit him.

“You are abroad early, Mr. Hastings. A beautiful morning, after the storm.”

I could not answer him. It seemed to me impossible that he did not know, and equally impossible that he should stand there talking of the weather if he did. My face must have told him something, for he checked, and took off his pince-nez.

“Is anything the matter?”

“You had better come in,” I said. “John is in the dining-room.”

John was standing before the empty grate. He looked up as we came in, and I saw his face set.

“Inglethorp,” he said, “my mother died at five o’clock this morning.”

There was a silence. Alfred Inglethorp stood quite still. Then he said, “Emily—dead?” and put out his hand behind him, and found a chair, and sat down in it, and covered his face. It was a natural enough gesture. I have seen men receive news of that kind since, and they have done much the same. And yet—I set it down because it is the truth, and not because I am proud of it—I caught myself watching the hands, and wondering what the face behind them was doing.

“You were not here,” said John, in the same level voice.

“No. No—God forgive me—I was not.” He raised his head. “I walked down to the village with Bauerstein, as you know. We sat talking—he had some paper of his own to show me—and the storm came on while I was with him, so I waited until it slackened. It must have been past midnight when I started back. When I reached the front door I felt in my pocket for the latch-key, and it was not there. I must have left it lying on the hall table after all. I did not care to rouse the house at that hour——” he made a small, helpless movement—“Emily so disliked it. So I went back to the village and knocked up the people at the inn, and they found me a bed. I came away the moment I woke. If I had had the least idea——”

“Dorcas,” said John.

I had not observed that Dorcas was in the room. She had come in with the tray for a breakfast that nobody was going to eat, and she stood now with it held before her, her face grey and set.

“Sir?”

“Was the latch-key on the hall table last night?”

“No, sir. I looked particular when I went round at half-past ten, the way I always do, and it wasn’t on the table nor on its hook neither. I took it Mr. Inglethorp had it with him, sir, him having said he would.”

Nobody spoke. Alfred Inglethorp replaced his pince-nez with great care.

“Then I must have dropped it on the road,” he said quietly. “It is quite possible. I was walking fast, in the rain.” He rose. “John, I should like to go up to her.”

“The rooms are locked,” said John. “The doctors thought it best for the present. There is to be a post-mortem to-night.”

“A post-mortem!” For the first time the man’s voice rose. “But why? On what grounds——”

“You had better ask Dr. Bauerstein,” said John, and turned back to the grate.

Alfred Inglethorp looked from one of us to the other, and went out. I heard his step go slowly up the stairs, and a door close.

Poirot came up the drive on the stroke of eight, walking, as he had promised, and not running; and I confess that the sight of that small, precise figure in its dark overcoat, picking its way round the puddles on the gravel, did more to steady me than anything else that morning.

John received him in the hall. Whatever his private misgivings, he was too much of a gentleman to let them show, and he gave Poirot his hand and the two keys together.

“Hastings has told you how things stand. I don’t pretend to be sure that——but you are welcome to do what you can. What do you want?”

“Very little, monsieur. To see the two rooms, and that Hastings should come with me when I do. And first, if it is permitted, to say one word to Mademoiselle Cynthia.”

Cynthia was sent for. She came down slowly, still in her dressing-gown, with her hair loose about her shoulders, and I was shocked by her looks. The heavy flush of the night had gone and left her white; her eyes were swollen, and she kept a hand upon the banister as though she needed it. Poirot bowed to her, and drew forward a chair, and waited until she had sat down in it. Then he said, quite gently, and as if it were the most ordinary question in the world:

“Mademoiselle, is it your habit to sleep as soundly as you slept last night?”

Cynthia stared at him.

“No,” she said. “Never. I am the lightest sleeper in the house—I wake if a door bangs. But last night——” she put her hand up to her forehead—“last night Mary could hardly wake me at all. She shook me and shook me. I could hear her calling from a long way off, and I couldn’t get up to her. And my head is like lead still.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “That is all.”

He asked her nothing further, and she went slowly back up the stairs.

I had supposed that we should follow her at once. But Poirot, it appeared, had his own order of proceeding, and it was not mine. He spent the better part of two hours below—in the kitchen with Dorcas and Annie, in the boudoir, and, for a long while, alone in the hall—and I was not asked to accompany him. It was well past eleven before he came to me, holding up the keys, and said, “Now, Hastings, we go up.”

The key turned stiffly. Poirot pushed the door open, and when we were both inside he shut it behind us and locked it again. Then he stood for a moment quite still, taking in the room, before he crossed to the bed and bowed his head to what lay upon it beneath the sheet. When he turned round he was a different man.

“Touch nothing. Stand there, by the door, and show me with your hand—only with your hand—where each of you was last night.”

I did so, as well as I could. He listened, nodding, his eyes going where my finger went, and when I had finished he began to move about the room in his neat, unhurried way, like a cat in a strange house.

The room was much as we had left it, but daylight made it worse. The little table by the bed lay on its side where the last convulsion had flung it. Beside it lay a reading-lamp, two or three books, a box of matches, and the wreck of a coffee-cup—the cup was not so much broken as ground into the carpet, so that scarcely a fragment bigger than a shilling remained. There was a dark stain in the pile.

“The coffee!” I cried. “Poirot, she took it up untasted, I saw her myself——”

“Hush,” said Poirot, going down on his knees. “We say nothing yet, Hastings. We look.”

He looked for a long time. Then he rose, dusting his knees, and went across to the writing-table by the window, where the small purple despatch-case which Cynthia had carried up the night before stood among the papers. He did not open it. He bent, and looked at the lock, and said “Tiens!” very softly to himself, and passed on.

At the fireplace he stooped over the ashes in the grate, and I remembered Lawrence’s face and the direction of his eyes, and told him of it. He said only “Yes?” and straightened, and stood looking at the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece. Then, to my astonishment, he began to set them straight—a china shepherdess a quarter of an inch to the left, a spill-vase turned a little to face the room. It was, I knew, an infirmity of his; he could not endure an object out of its place; but I thought it a strange moment to indulge it, and I fancy some of this showed in my face, for he shrugged, and let them be.

He went next to the door of Alfred Inglethorp’s room, hanging drunkenly upon its splintered frame, and examined without comment the socket of the bolt; then to the door upon the corridor, which I had unbolted myself. And last of all he came to the third door, the door into Cynthia’s room, which nobody had opened, and which, according to Dorcas, nobody had opened in years.

He was a long time over that door. He looked at the handle. He looked at the bolt, which was shot home. He took a small lens from his waistcoat pocket, and looked at the bolt again, at the place where it entered the socket in the frame; and then, delicately, with the tips of his finger and thumb, he drew something out from between the bolt and the wood, and held it up to the light.

“Come here, Hastings. What is that?”

I looked. It lay across the ball of his thumb: a shred of some dark green stuff, a few threads only, frayed at both ends.

“A bit of cloth,” I said. “Green cloth. It was caught in the bolt?”

“It was caught in the bolt.”

“But what does it mean?”

“That,” said Poirot, “I do not tell you.”

“Poirot!”

“No, my friend.” He had taken a small envelope from his pocket-book, and was laying the threads inside it with as much care as if they had been a pinch of gold-dust. “I have a little idea—very little—and it is possible that it is wrong, and it is not agreeable to Hercule Poirot to be wrong before witnesses. When it is bigger, you shall have it. Not before.”

He laid the open envelope on the corner of the writing-table, with the green shred lying upon it, and stood on one side of it, and I on the other. The clock upon the mantelpiece, which nobody had thought to stop, pointed to twenty minutes to twelve. Behind us the sheet lay smooth and still over the bed, and the broken cup glittered in the carpet, and the summer light came in as though nothing had happened.

“Consider, Hastings,” said Poirot softly. “Three doors, and every one of them fastened upon this side. The doctors will say so at the inquest, and they will be perfectly right.” He touched the tiny scrap with the tip of one finger. “And yet, of all that is in this room, that little thing is the only one which is where it is by accident.”

I did not understand him in the least, and I said so.

But Poirot had turned again to the threads of green upon the envelope, and did not seem to hear.

Robert had at first no attention to spare for his companion’s complaints; his mind was still upon the morning’s chase. It had taken him the better part of two hours to discover the two women, and he was inclined to feel the injury.

“You gave me a great deal of trouble, the two of you,” he said. “I looked for you at the house, and at your cottage, and down by the wharf, and my mother sent me to the bath-houses only when she saw I had exhausted every other possibility.”

“It was not my plan,” said Madame Ratignolle, shifting her weight more heavily upon his arm. “It was Mrs. Pontellier’s. I only wanted to sit quietly with my needlework.”

“I might have guessed as much.”

They went on a little in silence. The path was hot, and the camomile gave up a dry, bitter smell under the sun. Madame Ratignolle spoke of the cramp, and of the glare, and of how she should never again be persuaded to walk so far at such an hour; and Robert said “Yes, Madame,” and “Certainly, Madame,” and looked back once or twice over his shoulder toward the beach.

“Have you noticed, Madame,” he said presently, “that Mrs. Pontellier never does anything while one is looking at her?”

Adèle laughed and asked what he meant.

“I mean what I say. I have been a month teaching her to swim, and she will not swim so long as there is a hand within reach of her. She tore up her sketch of you the moment I looked over her shoulder. I believe if the whole island went off to the Chênière for a day and left her alone, she would learn to swim before noon and paint like a master before dinner; and when we came back she would be sitting on the gallery with her hands in her lap, looking as if she had done nothing at all.”

“You are a great philosopher,” said Madame Ratignolle, “for a young man who has spent his morning hunting all over the island for two women who only wanted a little peace.” And she laughed again, without malice, and begged him to walk slower.

Edna stayed on at the beach with the children until the sun stood high and the nurse-maids grew mutinous. Then she gathered up the boys and walked back with them, one on either side of her, letting them talk. She did not think of the conversation on the gallery of the bath-house, nor of Robert, nor of anything in particular. She carried the morning about with her as one carries a warmth in the hands.

Dinner was set out in the cottage, and the boys were fed and made to lie down. The telegram came while she was still at table. A boy from the house brought it, running, with the air of one who bears great news, and stood waiting in the doorway to see what she would do with it.

It was from her husband. He was detained in the city; he would not be able to come out on Saturday; he would write. Léonce Pontellier was a man who did things properly even at so much a word, and he had found room to hope that the children were well.

Edna read it twice. The second time she read it looking for something, she could not have said what—some little pang of disappointment which it seemed to her ought to have been there, and which she was quite ready to feel. It did not come. What came instead was a curious enlargement, as if a room she had been sitting in had grown suddenly bigger, and she did not yet know what to do with the space. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket, and told the boy there was no answer.

The afternoon fell heavy and still over Grand Isle, as it did every day at that hour. Madame Lebrun’s house dozed with its blinds drawn. On the Ratignolle gallery a hammock swung empty. The quadroon sat on the step of the Pontellier cottage with her head against the post, and the boys slept in the dim room behind her, sprawled across the bed with the sheet kicked off.

Edna took the big straw hat from its peg and went down alone to the beach.

She had not told herself that she meant to bathe. She had thought only that the cottage was close and that she should like to be near the water, and she had brought her key, as she had brought it in the morning, through force of habit. But the wind had gone down entirely, and the Gulf lay flat and bright as a sheet of metal, without a ripple in it, and there was not a living soul in the water. The children’s tent was empty. The lovers had gone. Only the lady in black was at her post on the gallery of the neighboring bath-house, with her book open on her knee and her beads in her fingers, and she did not look up.

Edna went into her bath-room and came out in her bathing dress, and stood a moment on the step.

“The wind has fallen, Madame,” said a voice beside her.

She turned. The lady in black was regarding her over the top of her book. In all the weeks of the summer Edna had never heard her speak; she had come to think of her as one thinks of a piece of the landscape, a thing that keeps its place and asks nothing. The voice was low and quite ordinary, with a faint Creole accent.

“It is very quiet at this hour,” said the lady in black. “Even the young people are asleep.” She considered Edna a moment longer with small, patient eyes. “You will go in alone?”

“I think so,” said Edna.

The lady in black inclined her head, as though the matter were between Edna and some one else, and her eyes went back to the page. Her lips resumed their motion.

The water was warm as milk in the shallows. Edna waded out until it reached her waist, then her breast, and stood there, as she had stood twenty times that summer, with the old ungovernable dread waiting somewhere below the surface of her mind. There was no hand near her. She had always supposed that this was what she feared. Now she found, standing quite still with the water lifting a little against her, that it was rather the hand which had frightened her—the sense of being watched for, waited for, of a failure prepared for and half expected.

She threw out her arms and struck the water as one strikes at tall grass.

For an instant nothing happened; and then the bottom went away from under her feet and did not come back, and she was not sinking. She made another stroke, and another. It was only a few—she could not afterward have said how many—and the water closed over her mouth once and she came up gasping and laughing, and her feet found the sand again. But she had done it. She had gone out over the water and it had held her.

She stood with the Gulf running off her hair and looked back at the shore. The bath-houses were very small and white. The lady in black had not raised her head.

Edna did not go out again. She had a superstition, obscure and quite unreasoned, that the thing could not be done twice in one day, and that if she tried it she would lose it. She came in slowly and dressed, and walked back along the hot path to the cottage. When the quadroon roused herself and asked whether Madame had been in the water, Edna said that she had. She said nothing more. She did not know herself why she said nothing more; it seemed to her that she was carrying something in both hands, and that if she opened her mouth she would drop it.

At dusk Madame Ratignolle came across to the Pontellier cottage in a white wrapper, her stiffness forgotten, to sit for an hour and to learn whether it was true about the telegram, for the boy from the house had told every one. She was sorry, so sorry, for Edna; a whole week more alone, *pauvre chérie!* She herself could not have borne it. And then, because she could keep nothing to herself, she fell to laughing over what Robert had said on the walk home.

“He says you never do anything while any one is looking at you. That is his great discovery. He says you would learn to swim and paint like an old master if we all went off to the Chênière for a day and left you to yourself—and that you would be sitting on the gallery when we came back, with your hands in your lap, looking as if nothing had happened. Is it not absurd? He is a philosopher, that boy. I told him so.”

Edna laughed too. It came a little late, and Adèle, who was watching a moth about the lamp, did not notice.

“What nonsense,” Edna said. “I have been trying to swim all summer, before everybody.”

She asked after the little girl’s teeth; and Adèle, who could be diverted from any subject by that one, talked of the teeth until it was time to go home.

The children slept. Their breathing came out to her through the open door, a little uneven, a little loud, as it always was when the day had been hot. The quadroon had gone to her own quarters. Along the row of cottages the lights went out one by one, and from the direction of the house some one was playing a few bars of a waltz upon the piano, and stopping, and beginning again.

Edna sat on the gallery in the dark with her hands in her lap.

It was perfectly true that she had done nothing before any one could see it. She turned the words over as she had turned the telegram, looking for what they held. She did not know whether Robert had spoken them in reproach, or in idle amusement, or in some other spirit which she did not care yet to name. She knew only that he had said them of her before she had done the thing, and that she had gone straight down to the empty beach and done it, as though the saying had been a door left open. It frightened her a little to have been so well understood.

Her arms remembered the water. She could feel, if she shut her eyes, the moment when the sand had let go of her feet.

Toward midnight the moon came up over the Gulf and laid its road across the water; and she sat looking at the road for a long while, and did not go in.

It is one of the drawbacks of a well-conducted club that practically everything in it belongs to somebody, and that the somebody is liable at any moment to come and want it. Psmith, having returned to the smoking-room and resumed his seat in the window, had been drying gently for perhaps a quarter of an hour, watching the sun come out over Thorpe & Briscoe’s and reflecting that the world, take it for all in all, was not such a bad place, when the door opened with some violence and the Hon. Hugo Walderwick came in.

The Hon. Hugo was a stout young man with a pink face, and the pinkness was at the moment well above the seasonal average. He wore a hat, but carried no umbrella, and it was plain that the omission rankled.

“Look here, Smith,” he said, “what’s all this about my umbrella?”

Psmith surveyed him amiably through his monocle.

“Ah, Comrade Walderwick. I was hoping we should meet. Sit down. Take a cigarette. You are looking flushed.”

“Never mind how I’m looking. Bates says you went to the cloak-room and took my umbrella out of the rack and walked off with it.”

“Bates is a man of unimpeachable veracity. I did.”

“Well, where is it?”

“That,” said Psmith, “is a question I am not at the moment able to answer with any precision. I could give you its position as at ten-forty-five, but since then it has been on the move. Somewhere out there, Comrade Walderwick, in the great hurrying world, it is doing its work, and doing it well.”

“Doing its work! It’s my umbrella. Dash it, I had to come here from Curzon Street in a cab because I couldn’t find the beastly thing. What did you want to go and take my umbrella for?”

Psmith raised a hand.

“I would rather not go into that. There are matters which a man does not discuss even with his closest friends, among whom I hope I may count you. Let us approach the thing from another angle--the sane, businesslike, commercial angle. What did that umbrella cost you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Everything. What did it cost?”

“Thirty-five bob, if you want to know. But that isn’t the--”

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

The Hon. Hugo, who had opened his mouth to continue, left it open.

“Five pounds? For a thirty-five-bob umbrella?”

“It is a good umbrella. I examined it closely before selecting it. There is a firmness about its ribs and a quiet distinction about its handle which you do not find in one umbrella in a hundred. I will not insult it by offering less. Call it seven.”

“Seven? Look here, Smith, are you tight?”

“Ten, then,” said Psmith. “I refuse to haggle.”

“But, dash it, you’re haggling with yourself. I haven’t said a word.”

“You are trying, by a pretence of indifference, to force the price up. It is an old trick, and I do not blame you for it, but I warn you that ten is my limit.” He produced a note-case and extracted from it two five-pound notes, which he pressed into the Hon. Hugo’s unresisting hand. “There. The transaction is completed. The umbrella is now mine, and if it should ever return to these premises, as I have every hope that it will, Bates has instructions to place it in my rack and not in yours. I trust that is clear.”

“But I haven’t got the umbrella!” said Hugo, clinging to the one point in the affair which seemed to him solid.

“Nor have I. That is the beauty of the thing. We are both in exactly the same position, except that you have ten pounds and I have the goodwill. I think you have done rather well out of it.”

The Hon. Hugo looked at the notes. Then he looked at Psmith. Then, being a young man of simple mind who had learned early in life that there is no profit in trying to follow the workings of Psmith’s, he looked at the notes again, said “Well, I’m dashed!” and went out to buy another umbrella.

It was not, however, in Psmith’s nature to sit for long in a window when there was work to be done, and on this particular morning there was a great deal of it; for it was on this morning that he had planned to place himself in the hands of Miss Ada Clarkson and see what a bureau which advertised Promptitude, Courtesy, and Intelligence could do for a young man of parts who had lately severed his connection with the fish trade. He collected his hat and set out on foot for Shaftesbury Avenue.

Of that interview it is not necessary to say much. Miss Clarkson was prompt, courteous, and intelligent, and Psmith was all three and something over; but the only situations she was able to offer him were those of tutor to a small boy in Surrey who was, she admitted, difficult, and of secretary and companion to a gentleman in Hertfordshire who wished to breed Angora rabbits on a large scale, and Psmith, having considered both with care, was compelled to decline them. He came out into Shaftesbury Avenue still at liberty, lunched, and spent the afternoon with his tailor.

* * * * *

Eve, meanwhile, had come out of Miss Clarkson’s into a world which had stopped raining and had, with the shamelessness of the English climate, begun to look as though it never had. The umbrella which had covered her so nobly was now merely a problem. It belonged to a young man, and the young man belonged to a club in Dover Street; and to Dover Street she went.

At the door of the club she paused. Institutions of this kind are not built to welcome the visits of young women, and the hall-porter, a large man named Bates, came out of his glass box with the air of one prepared to repel boarders. But his manner softened when he saw the hat, and softened still further when he saw the umbrella.

“Ah, yes, miss,” he said, when she had explained. “Very tall gentleman with an eyeglass. That’d be Mr.--”

“No,” said Eve quickly. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know his name.”

Bates, who had been in club service for twenty-five years and had long ceased to be surprised by anything, said “Very good, miss,” and waited.

“He didn’t tell me his,” said Eve, feeling that some explanation was due, “so I don’t see why I should know it. He is out, I suppose?”

“Went out about ten minutes ago, miss.”

“Then may I leave a note? If you could let me have a sheet of paper . . .”

Bates provided paper, and Eve, leaning on the ledge of the glass box, wrote rapidly. The note ran:

“Thank you very much for the umbrella. It behaved beautifully, and not a drop got on my hat, which is what matters. As you went away before I could say anything, I have not been able to thank you properly; and as you did not tell me your name, I am not going to tell you mine. You began it.

“The Girl Under the Awning.”

She folded this, and Bates placed it, with the umbrella, where it could not fail to catch the eye of the gentleman in question; and Eve went out into the sunshine feeling that the thing had been rounded off very neatly and that the affair of the umbrella was now closed. In which she was wrong.

* * * * *

Lord Emsworth’s secretary, in a letter which was a model of clearness, had directed her to present herself at the Senior Conservative Club at half-past three, and at twenty-five minutes past three Eve, having lunched frugally in a tea-shop off the Strand, was mounting its steps. The Senior Conservative is not, like the establishment in Dover Street, a place where young men lounge in windows. It is a solemn, spacious building, and it received Eve as a cathedral might receive a stray butterfly--politely, but with reserve. She was shown into a small room set apart for the reception of visitors of the wrong sex, containing a table, two chairs, and a steel engraving of the Duke of Wellington, and there she waited. Half-past three came and went. So did a quarter to four. At ten minutes past four the door opened and a long, thin, mild-looking man of about sixty, with a black cord trailing over one shoulder and the air of having been suddenly and rather painfully awakened, came in and stood blinking at her.

“God bless my soul!” he said. “You’re Miss Halliday?”

Eve said she was.

“My dear young lady, I am extremely sorry. Extremely sorry. I had entirely forgotten . . . that is to say, I was detained. There is a man in the King’s Road, Chelsea, who has the most remarkable collection of . . . but you would not be interested in that. Sit down. Sit down. Now, where the deuce . . .”

He had begun to pat himself in a vague, anxious way, and Eve, perceiving a pair of pince-nez hanging by their cord at the back of his collar, where they had apparently swung round in the course of the afternoon, drew his attention to them. He fished them up, put them on, and seemed to see her for the first time. What he saw appeared to depress him.

“Now, Miss Halliday,” said Lord Emsworth, seating himself and fixing her with a look of great earnestness, “I think it only fair to tell you at once, before we go any further, that my son Frederick has no money.”

Eve blinked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“None whatever. Nothing a year, paid quarterly, and I have no intention of increasing it. I say this not unkindly, my dear, but because I feel you should know. You are a very charming girl--very charming--and I should not like you to be under any misapprehension. Frederick talked of you all the way up in the train yesterday. Nothing but Miss Halliday from Market Blandings to Paddington. And when they told me downstairs that a Miss Halliday was waiting to see me, I said to myself, ‘Ha! Now we shall have it.’ The boy has been trying to get engaged to somebody ever since he came down from Oxford, and I do beg of you, as a sensible girl, which I am sure you are, to consider very carefully before you take a step which--”

“But I’m not going to marry Freddie!” cried Eve.

Lord Emsworth stopped dead.

“You’re not?”

“Of course I’m not. I’ve refused him at least six times.”

“He may have mentioned it,” said Lord Emsworth. “I was not listening very closely. Then what, my dear, are you here for?”

“I came about cataloguing your library. Mr. Baxter wrote to me. You were to interview me.”

“The library! Of course. Baxter did say something. Baxter is always saying something.” Lord Emsworth’s face, which had been clouded, cleared like a sky after rain. “You are not going to marry Frederick?”

“Certainly not.”

“You are quite sure?”

“Quite.”

“Then come down as soon as you like, my dear,” said Lord Emsworth warmly. “Come down at once. Baxter will arrange everything. It is a large library--a very large library--and it has never been catalogued, and I am sure you will do it admirably. A girl with the sense to refuse Frederick six times can do anything. God bless my soul, what a relief! I had the whole speech ready. Now tell me, do you take any interest in roses?”

And it was on roses, and on roses alone, that the remainder of the interview turned. Not one question was asked about her qualifications, her experience, or her acquaintance with the works of any author living or dead; and Eve came out on to the steps at half-past four engaged to catalogue a library about which she had been told nothing, and full of information about the Hybrid Tea which she had not wanted. She felt a little dazed, but on the whole pleased. It is not everyone who is given a post for declining to marry the son of the house.

* * * * *

It was as she reached Piccadilly that the English summer, which had been behaving for some hours with an ostentatious propriety, remembered its reputation and abruptly began to rain again. The first drops fell as Eve was passing the window of a hatter’s, and she was under its awning before the second had reached the pavement; for a woman who loves hats does not stand in the wet in the best of them for the sake of appearances. And there, for the second time that day, she found herself gazing out at a drenched and streaming London with no visible means of getting through it.

She had been there perhaps a minute when a tall young man came along the pavement from the direction of the Circus with the unhurried stride of one who regards rain as a passing weakness of Nature’s and is prepared to overlook it, glanced at the awning, appeared to reconsider, and stepped beneath it. He removed his hat, shook the water from it, replaced it, and stood looking out at the road with a grave and thoughtful eye. In this eye was a monocle.

Eve looked at him. He was hatted now, and had been hatless then; he was dry now, or nearly, and had been getting rapidly wetter then; but she had not the smallest doubt.

“Excuse me,” she said.

The young man turned and looked down at her with courteous inquiry.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” said Eve. “You lent me your umbrella this morning. In Dover Street.”

“I think not,” said the young man. “In Dover Street? This morning?” He considered the suggestion gravely and shook his head. “No. I have lent no umbrellas. It is not a thing I do.”

“But it was you. I saw you. You were standing just as you are now, only without a hat, and you put the umbrella into my hand without a word and ran across the road into a club.”

“A striking story,” said the young man, “and one, if I may say so, which does great credit to whoever it was. There are not many men in London who would do a thing like that--do it, I mean, as it should be done, without a lot of preliminary chatter. But it was not I.” He paused. “I have one of those faces. It is a face that is very widely distributed. I am constantly being taken for other men, and once, at Ascot, for a bishop.”

“You have a monocle,” said Eve.

“Many of our best men have. It proves nothing.”

Eve looked at him, and he looked at the rain, and between them there fell a silence in which she felt a strong desire to laugh and an almost equally strong one to hit him.

“Very well,” she said. “Then you don’t know him?”

“I cannot say that I do.”

“Then if you should happen to meet him--you move about London a good deal, I expect--”

“In wide circles.”

“--you might tell him that his umbrella is back at his club, with the porter. And there’s a note with it.”

“I shall make a point of it. Umbrella, porter, note. Anything further?”

“You might tell him,” said Eve, “that I said thank you. And that I think he is a very odd young man.”

“I will convey the message,” said the young man, “though I think ‘odd’ is a harsh word. ‘Unusual,’ I should have said. But it is not my affair.” He looked at the sky, which had begun, with the fickleness of its kind, to clear. “And now, if you will excuse me, I think I can get through. Good afternoon.”

He raised his hat and walked off into what was now scarcely more than a drizzle; and Eve, peering after him, observed that he went not eastward, whence he had come, but westward, and that at the corner of Dover Street he turned up it.

“Well!” said Eve.

Why Psmith, who was not as a rule a man to hide his light under a bushel--who, indeed, generally preferred to have it out where people could see it--should have chosen on this occasion to disown an action which did him nothing but credit, it is not easy to say, and possibly he could not have said himself. It may be that he felt a good deed which had already cost him ten pounds was entitled to a little mystery to set it off. It may be that he had merely wished to see what she would say. Psmith had whims, and it was his habit to indulge them.

* * * * *

The evening sun was slanting across the front of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe when Psmith, having dined early, settled himself once more in the smoking-room window. Bates had handed him on his arrival the umbrella and the note, and he had read the note twice on the stairs and was now reading it a third time, with the umbrella across his knees, when the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, resplendent in the evening dress of one who dines out, put his head round the door.

“Hullo,” he said. “So it came back.”

“It came back,” said Psmith.

“Bates told me. Ten quid,” said Hugo, in the tone of one who has brooded on a subject through several hours and still finds it beyond him, “for a thirty-five-bob umbrella, and it comes back the same day. I don’t understand you, Smith. I don’t suppose I ever shall. What was she like?”

“To whom do you refer?”

“The girl who brought it. Bates says a girl brought it. I say,” said Hugo, struck by an idea, “she wasn’t a girl in a whacking great hat with a black feather hanging down over one shoulder, was she? Because if she was, I passed her on the steps this morning, coming out as I was going in with my new one, and I know her. That’s Eve Halliday.”

Psmith lowered the note.

“Eve Halliday?” he said.

“Yes. Freddie Threepwood introduced me to her at some dance or other last month. Old Emsworth’s younger son, you know. Freddie’s potty about her. Proposed to her about six times, I believe, and she turns him down every time. Can’t think why he keeps at it. Nice girl, though. Well, I must be pushing. I’m dining with an aunt.” He paused at the door. “I say, Smith, what did you want with my umbrella?”

“Good-night, Comrade Walderwick,” said Psmith.

The door closed. The smoking-room was empty. Across the road the last of the sunlight had slid off Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, and the awning had been furled for the night, so that there was nothing whatever in the window to look at; but Psmith went on looking at it for some time, the umbrella across his knees and the note in his hand.

“Eve Halliday,” said Psmith.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey Morris at his rooms, Art making the third. I set it down because I promised myself on the 25th to trace accurately whatever bore upon the empty feeling and its cure, and because I find this morning that the feeling is less, and should like to know why.

Quincey had kept to the letter of his invitation. There was a fire in the grate, though the night was warm enough for the open window, and the lamps were turned low, so that we sat, as he said, in the light we were used to. Art came in late and flushed from the train, and it was plain at once that he did not know how to begin. A man who has won cannot easily look in the faces of two men who have lost, and Art has too much honesty to pretend that he had not been told. Quincey saved him the trouble. He filled the three glasses himself, stood up, and said:--

“Art, you’re the happiest man in the world, and Jack and I are the two next, because we know it. There’s no going round that, so we’ll go straight through it. Here’s to her.”

We drank it standing. Then Art sat down and gave us his messages, and the promise that our ears should tingle was well kept. She had told him everything, as it seems a woman ought; she had told him of the silk hat, and of a certain lancet, and Art was merciless with both. She had told him, too, of the kiss she gave Quincey; and Art said he had answered her that he would have thought less of her if she had kept it back, and less of Quincey if he had not asked for it. Quincey took this with the colour coming into his face and nothing at all in his voice. “Art,” he said, “if you were any other man alive I’d take that for a quarrel. As it is, I guess I’ll take it for a compliment.” Her message to me was that I was to hold her to what she had said about a friend, and that she wanted the friend soon and often. I am to dine in Chatham Street when the house can spare me. I said I would go, and I shall.

We talked late. Quincey told the landing at the Marquesas over again, and Art told the true version of it, and I found that I could laugh, and did. It is worth a note, as a clinical fact, that laughter of this kind is a real physic; I have prescribed it in the wards without believing in it, and I take back my unbelief. The last health was Quincey’s, and he made it short. “To the road,” he said. “It’s a long one, and there’s three of us on it, and that’s better than one.”

I came home by the last train. It is past midnight now; the house is asleep, and I have the window open, for the night is close, and am talking to a machine about Miss Westenra. *Verb. sap.* Work to-morrow. Last night was only an anodyne.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra*.

“*1 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Number Three! I have read the postscript oftener than all the rest of the letter, and I am not going to scold you for keeping him till the end, because I think I should have done the same. Oh, my dear, I am so glad. Give him my love, if that is a proper thing to send to a man one has never seen; and if it is not, give it him all the same, and say it came from Jonathan and me together, for I know Jonathan would send it if he were here. As for the other two, they must be good men, and you are not to fret over them. A girl cannot marry three, as you say, and it would be a poor sort of world in which she could.

“I have no news of my own, and that is my news. I told you Jonathan would be home in about a week, and that was three weeks ago; and the only thing that has come since is a line to Mr. Hawkins to say that the business was longer than was thought, and that he should be kept about a month. Mr. Hawkins sent it on to me very kindly, and says it is always so with foreign business, and that I am not to trouble. So I do not trouble, or I try not to; but I have written three times to the inn at Bistritz, where Jonathan said letters would find him, and nothing has come back, and I catch myself counting the days as if they were sums. It is very stupid. I keep up my shorthand every evening, and I shall write this letter out in it afterwards for practice; Jonathan will laugh when I show him, and I shall not mind. The girls are as troublesome as they always are before the holidays. When you go to the sea I mean to come to you, if I can be spared, and then we will talk of everything.

“Write soon, and write all about him.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*5 June.*--Renfield to-day, and the oddest thing that has happened in this house since I came into it.

He has begun to keep flies. He has a box of them at his window, which he feeds with sugar, and he will not tell me why, but he looks at the box as a miser looks at his drawer. I had been the better part of an hour with him and had got, I thought, a little nearer; he answers readily upon everything but the one point, and upon that he shuts like a trap. I had risen to go and had my hand upon the door, when he said behind me, without any change in his voice, as a man asks the time:--

“Doctor, does Miss Westenra know that you talk to yourself at night?”

I do not think I was ever in my life so completely taken aback. I turned, and I suppose my face showed it, for he smiled; not the smile I know in him, which is a thing of the lips only, but something friendly and a little sorry. I asked him, as steadily as I could, what he meant. He said that he had asked a civil question, and that if I did not choose to answer it he would not press me--“as you pressed me, Doctor, on the twenty-fifth.” Then he turned to his flies, and I could get nothing more from him.

I have been an hour over it since. No one in the house knows her name. Art has not been here; the attendants do not go into Chatham Street. Then I remembered. On the night of the 24th I came back late and spoke into this machine for the best part of an hour, and I did not spare her name; and on the night of the 26th, as I have it on my own record, I sat with the window open and did the same. Renfield’s room is under this one. The nights were close; his window was open too. He heard, and he has kept it, as he keeps his flies. The thing is simple enough, and there is nothing in it but a warm night and my own want of caution; and yet I find that I do not like it. A man’s diary should be his own.

*Mem.*, the phonograph to go into the inner room, and the window to be shut when I use it. *Mem.* also: I have run through both cylinders, and there is more upon them than I thought.

He said, as I went out at last, “I hope she is well, Doctor. I should like her to be well.” I told him that she was. I set it down because I do not know why it should have stayed with me, and a thing that stays is worth recording.

*Letter, Johann Eberhardt, Hotel Golden Krone, Bistritz, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*8 June.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“I ask pardon that I write to you, who do not know me, and that my English is not good, for I have it only from the travellers; but I think it is right that I write, and my wife, who is a good woman, would not let me rest until I had done it.

“The English Herr, Mr. Jonathan Harker, was in my house from the 3 May in the evening until the 4 May at three o’clock, when he went from us by the diligence for the Bukovina; and he was well, and very civil, and pleased with all. He said to me that his business in the mountains would be some weeks, and that letters should wait for him here, because he would come back by Bistritz to go home. When he went he gave me a letter for the post to your name, and I put the name in my book, as I do with the gentlemen, so that if there is something one knows where to write.

“Now it is five weeks. The Herr is not come back to Bistritz, and no word is come from him, and there are here three letters for him which I think are yours, for the hand is the same on all three and it is a lady’s hand. I have asked of the drivers of the diligence, and they know nothing; but they would not know, for they go over the Pass and do not stop. I do not think this is a thing to fear. The gentlemen who go into that country for business are often kept longer than they say; it is far, and the roads are bad in the spring, and from there the letters do not go well, or they do not go at all. So I think that the Herr is delayed, and I write to say it, that you shall not think your letters are lost, or that he has them and does not answer. They are here in my drawer, with the key. If you wish it I send them back to you; if not I keep them, and when the Herr comes I put them in his hand the first thing, and tell him that he write to you the same day.

“My wife says I am to tell you that she remembers the Herr in her prayers, and that you are not to fear, because he is young and strong and has a good face. I say the same.

“I am, honoured Miss, with much respect,

“Your servant,

“JOHANN EBERHARDT.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra*.

“*18 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“The letter I put in with this came to me this morning, and you are to read it and tell me truly what you think of it, and not what you think will comfort me; though you may put that at the end if you like, for I shall want it. Send it back by return, dear; I would not lose it for anything. I have been three times over it, in longhand and in shorthand, and could say it by heart.

“Now, Lucy, what am I to think? I have been trying to be sensible all day, and all the time I have been seeing that drawer with my three letters lying in it. It is a strange thing to be told by a stranger, so kindly, that one’s letters are safe. He means it for comfort, and it is comfort, and yet it is not. I went to Mr. Hawkins after school, and he was very good to me. He has heard nothing either since the letter in May, but he says it is just what he expected; that a conveyance to a foreign client is a thing of a hundred delays, that Jonathan is careful and would not leave a thing half done, and that the post in those parts is not to be counted on. He read the landlord’s letter over his spectacles and said, ‘A very honest man, my dear, and an observant one; he has told you all there is to tell, and it is nothing to fear;’ and then he made me eat my tea. I have written to Herr Eberhardt to keep the letters, and to thank his wife.

“So there it is. I am not going to be one of those women who make a fuss and are ashamed of it afterwards. I have made up my mind that Jonathan is delayed, as the good man says, and that when he comes there will be a reason for it which we shall all laugh at. Only, Lucy, I have begun my journal in earnest now; not the exercise-book kind, but the other. I put down every day exactly what I know and exactly what I hear, and the date of everything, as a lady journalist would; and I think I understand now why they do it. It is so as to be sure afterwards.

“Tell me about Arthur, and about your plans for the sea. I want to hear of happy things.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray*.

“*17, Chatham Street,*

“*21 June.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Here is your letter back. I have read it, and Arthur has read it, and mamma, and we all three say the same thing, so you shall have it three times over: *delayed*. That is all it means, and that is all it is. Arthur says the law is slow in England and slower everywhere else, and that a man who lets a client keep him for the sake of doing a thing properly is exactly the man one would want. Mamma says the innkeeper’s wife is a dear and wants to send her something, and I have said she may. I think I like Frau Eberhardt better than most of the people I know. She remembers him in her prayers, and so do I, every night, and I am not ashamed to write it.

“Dr. Seward dined here on Tuesday. He was quite himself, or nearly; only he looks at one now as if he were trying *not* to read one’s face, which is worse. But he was very kind, and he and Arthur are the greatest friends, and he told mamma that Mr. Morris goes home to Texas for the autumn and means to be back for the wedding. There, I have written the word.

“We go to the sea in the last week of July, and you are to come to us in August, and I will not hear of your being ‘spared.’ You are to be spared, and I shall write to your head-mistress myself if need be. By then he will be home, brown as a sailor and with a bag full of foreign presents, and you shall bring him too, and we will all sit on the sand and be happy.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.”

*Telegram from Sister Agatha, Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, Buda-Pesth, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*10 July.*

“Mr. Harker lies here many days of a brain fever. Asks for you always. Come.

“SISTER AGATHA.”

Then, some nights after that walk, came the night of the first falling star.

I saw it, which not many people can say, for it was late and the countryside was abed. I have mentioned the papers upon which I was engaged at the time, and it was my habit, for the nights were hot, to write late with the window of my study open upon the garden and the lamp turned low against the moths. I had laid down my pen, I remember, to consider some point about the growth of tolerance in the coming century, and was looking out at nothing in particular, at the black mass of the pines and the paler sky above them, when the whole of that sky turned for an instant green. A line of fire went across it from the west, very high and very swift and quite steady, and it threw the shadow of the window-bars sharp across my paper; and after it came a thin hissing, like a wet finger drawn along a hot stove, that seemed to reach me from every quarter at once. Then the darkness came back thicker than before. A long while after, as it seemed, though it can scarcely have been more than a minute, there came a dull heavy sound, less a noise than a jar, that set the lamp-glass ringing and brought my wife to the door in her dressing-gown to ask what I had knocked over.

I told her it was a meteor, a very fine one, and that I must remember to tell Ogilvy of it in the morning. I did not connect it with the lights we had watched from his observatory; I want to make that clear, because it has been said since that we in that neighbourhood were slow. We were no slower than anyone else. The flames upon Mars belonged to the telescope and to the scientific journals; a shooting star belonged to any summer night. I noted the time in the margin of my manuscript—it wanted a few minutes of one—and went up to bed, and slept, I believe, uncommonly well.

It was the boy who brought the milk who told us, at breakfast, where it had come down. Something had fallen in the night upon the common beyond Ottershaw, in the old pit by the Chertsey road; the heather was burnt for a great way round, and Mr. Ogilvy the astronomer gentleman was there already with two of the sand-diggers, and had sent into Chertsey for a rope. My wife, who had heard me talk of nothing but Mars for a fortnight and who had begun, I think, to suspect me of some elaborate joke, said she would come and see this wonder for herself. So instead of the bicycle I took her arm, and we went out along the road together in the freshness of the morning.

I ought to say something of that pit, since so much was to happen about it. The sand-diggers had worked it for a generation, until one winter they struck a spring in the floor of it, after which they let it be; and it had become a pool of brown water the colour of tea, fringed with reeds and bulrushes, in which the children of Ottershaw were forbidden to bathe and did. It lay a little back from the Chertsey road, screened by a belt of Scotch firs, and one came upon it suddenly.

We came upon it that morning by the smell first. It was a smell like the yard behind a smithy, of hot iron and sulphur and wet ashes, and it met us on the road a good quarter of a mile away. Then above the firs we saw a column of white vapour going up very straight into the still air and spreading out at the top like a tree, and then the firs themselves, and I saw that those on the side towards the pit were scorched brown as if by a forest fire, and that the heather beyond them was black. Sand had been flung out over the black heather in a great fan, and lay in ridges and ripples like the sand of a beach when the tide has gone down.

Then we stood on the rim, and looked, and for a little while neither of us said anything at all.

The Thing lay tilted in the pit, its lower end deep in the pool and the upper end raised towards the road at an angle, so that it seemed to have struck slanting and ploughed its way down. Of what was under the water we could see nothing, for the water was boiling. I do not mean that it was hot; I mean that it boiled, like a pot, in great slow bubbles that burst and threw up gouts of brown scum, and the steam came off it in a sheet and drifted over the reeds and went up into that white column above the firs. What showed above the water was a huge rounded end, blunt, dun-coloured, and caked over with a thick scaly incrustation that had run in places and hung down in fused ridges, like the crust upon a loaf. It was perhaps thirty yards across. I have seen the gasometers at Chertsey, and it was of that order of magnitude; it was a size for buildings and not for stones. And it was round. It was so evenly and so exactly round, under its crust, that I found myself looking for the joints.

“Well,” said Ogilvy behind me, “you saw it? You timed it? Good man.”

He was on the rim above the road-side end, in his shirt-sleeves, without a hat, with the two sand-diggers and a coil of new rope, and his face was very red, for he had been there since before two. He had seen the fall from the observatory grounds, he said, and had walked straight over. He had a notebook in his hand and had been making measurements, so far as measurements could be made of a thing that could not be approached within ten yards for the heat.

“What do you make of it?” I said.

“A meteorite,” said Ogilvy. “The largest that has ever fallen in this country. In Europe, I should think. There is nothing in the museum a hundredth part the size of it. Iron, by the look of that crust—a siderite, and if it is not the finest siderite in the world I will eat this rope.”

“It is very regular,” I said.

“They come all shapes. There are things in the collection like loaves, like bullets, like a ham. Regularity is nothing.”

“There were ten flames upon Mars,” I said. “You saw them.”

He turned on me then. I have thought since that he must have been expecting it, and had his answer ready; certainly he gave it with some warmth.

“And what of that? Do you know what you are suggesting? I have had a man from the Chertsey paper here already, with his hat on the back of his head, asking me whether it was the planet Mars. If Ottershaw once gets it into its head that Mars is shooting at Ottershaw, I shall never hear the end of it, and nor will you. Volcanic ejecta cannot cross forty millions of miles of space, my dear fellow, and if they could, they would not arrive by appointment in Surrey. The chances are a million to one, as I told you, and this is the one. It is a large stone. It is a very remarkable stone. It is a stone.”

“I suggest nothing,” I said. “I remark upon the shape.”

“Then remark upon it to yourself.”

I have often wondered since whether Ogilvy believed his own arguments that morning. He was a man who distrusted the newspapers a great deal more than he distrusted anything in the heavens, and my own suspicion, if I am honest, was hardly a suspicion at all. It was a shape, and an odd feeling, and no more; and he was a professional and I was not. I let it drop. My wife, who had listened to all this with her hand on my arm, asked him whether it was safe to stand where we stood, and he laughed and said that it was a good deal safer than the Chertsey road, which had bicycles on it.

From the pit there came now and then a sharp crack, like a flint splitting in a fire, and once a long grinding note, like a heavy door moving upon rusted hinges, that ran round the rim of the pit and made her fingers tighten. Ogilvy did not so much as turn his head.

“Contraction,” he said. “It is cooling. Metal does that. It will make noises like that for days.”

By nine o’clock there were perhaps a dozen of us; by ten there were fifty. They came along the Chertsey road on foot and on bicycles, and stood on the rim in the sun, and stared, and made the remarks people do make. A wagonette full of people from Addlestone stopped in the road, and the horses would not go near the smell and had to be led back. There were women from the cottages at Ottershaw with babies, and a butcher’s boy who had left his cart in the road with the meat in it, and two or three young men in flannels who I think were from the boat-houses at Chertsey. Someone had brought a dog, and the dog sat down at a great distance and howled until it was taken away. The sand-diggers, finding themselves persons of importance, told the story of their morning to each fresh arrival, and the story grew. Ogilvy, with his rope that he could not use and his notebook that he could not fill, went round and round the rim like a man looking for a way into a house.

It was a little before eleven that the accident happened, and I set it down because it was the first hurt that the Thing did to anyone, and because it might have warned us and did not.

There was a young fellow there, a groom from one of the houses along the Chertsey road, a big fair lad with a loud laugh, who had been saying for an hour that it was all a lot of talk about a burnt stone, and that he had handled hotter horseshoes. The water at the near edge of the pool, where the reeds were, was no more than warm; children were paddling in it. He took off his boots and stockings, amid a good deal of encouragement, and waded in, and the water came up to his thighs and steamed about him, and he went on until he could lay his hand flat upon the crust, just above the water-line, where it looked dull and dead and grey as the scale upon a cold horseshoe. I saw his face as he did it. He was grinning back at his friends over his shoulder.

The scream he gave I can hear now. He fell back into the water with a great splash and floundered and came up and stood there holding his wrist and roaring, and the young men in flannels went in after him and got him out. The palm of his hand was white and glazed, like a candle, and when Ogilvy took a handkerchief to it the skin came away. My wife had gone the colour of paper; I do not think she had seen a bad burn before. Ogilvy bound the hand with two handkerchiefs and a good deal of language, and said to the lad and to all of us that he had told us, that he had told us all, that a stone which had come through the atmosphere at forty miles a second did not cool in ten hours whatever it looked like. They put the groom into the butcher’s cart and drove him off to the doctor at Chertsey, and he went, I remember, still roaring, and the crowd drew back from the rim of the pit by three or four yards.

It did not go away. That was the curious thing. So far from thinning it, the accident thickened it. By noon there must have been two hundred people on the common, and more coming along the road with every minute, and a man had set up a barrow with ginger-beer by the firs.

The sun stood high by then, and the heat of the day had joined itself to the heat of the pit, and the smell was very bad. My wife had said nothing for some time. I looked at her and saw that she was tired and sick, and that she was staying for my sake and not for the Thing’s, and I told her that she had better go home.

She would not, at first. She wanted me to come with her, and she asked what possible good I could be, standing on a sandbank in the sun beside a lump of iron. I said that Ogilvy would want help with his measurements when the water went off the boil, which was not true, and that there was nothing whatever to be afraid of, which I believed, and that I would follow her within the hour. I think it was the last that persuaded her. She let me take her back to the road, and kissed me at the gap in the firs, and told me not to be a fool, and went.

I watched her go up the sandy road between the trees, a white figure walking in and out of the shadows, until at the bend by the milestone she turned and waved, and I waved back, and she was gone. Then I went back through the scorched firs to the rim of the pit and to the crowd, and to the Thing lying in its steam.

It was, I suppose, a little after noon. The larks were singing high over the black heather, and the ginger-beer man was doing a brisk trade, and the water hissed and hissed about the cylinder, as a kettle hisses that has been forgotten upon the hob.

The First National Bank was a gray stone box on Broadway with four more pillars in front of it than it needed. I got there at a quarter to three, in time to be the last customer before the guard locked the doors. The paying teller's cage had a card in it that said Mr. Albury. Mr. Albury was a young man with a smooth pink face, a sandy mustache that hadn't come to much, and hair oiled back so flat it could have been painted on. He looked like a fellow who had been told he had a future and believed it.

I showed him my card and told him what I wanted.

He looked at the card, looked at me, and started to say, "You'd better see Mr.⁠—" then changed his mind. He took another look at the card and asked:

"About Mr. Willsson?"

"About a check Donald Willsson wrote yesterday afternoon, a little before three. Five thousand dollars, drawn on this bank. I want to know if it has been through."

"Just a minute."

He went to the back of the cage, pulled a long card out of a drawer full of long cards, ran a finger down it, and came back shaking his head.

"Nothing for five thousand. Nothing at all yesterday, and nothing today. The last item on Mr. Willsson's account is a check to the Herald's paper supplier, and that was last week."

"He didn't have it certified?"

"If he had, it would have come to me. Certification goes through this window. It didn't." He hesitated, then gave me the rest of it. "He wasn't in the bank yesterday at all, that I know of."

"Would you know?"

"Everybody in here would know. He was Mr. Elihu's son. When he came in the whole floor knew it."

"Could it have been cashed somewhere else and not got here yet?"

"It could have been deposited in another bank. Then it would come to us through the clearing house, and that would be tomorrow morning at the earliest. But it hasn't been presented here, and it hasn't been certified, and nobody has telephoned to ask if it's good." He took a breath and let his curiosity out. "Who was it made out to?"

"That's what I came here to find out."

His face pinked up some more. I gave him the name of my hotel and asked him to phone me if a check for that amount came through, or if anybody came asking about one. He said he would. He said it in a way that meant he would like very much to know why. I didn't tell him. He was still looking after me when the guard turned the key in the door behind me.

The Great Western's clerk handed me my key and a look with it.

"There's a lady in the writing room," he said. "She's been waiting since half past two."

The writing room was a narrow place off the lobby with two desks, some stationery nobody used, and a rubber plant. Mrs. Donald Willsson sat with her back to the plant. She was in black from her small hat to her small shoes, and the black made her blonder and thinner than she had seemed the night before. Her face had no color in it that she hadn't put there. Her gray eyes were steady enough.

She didn't get up. She said:

"You are the detective."

It wasn't a question. I said I was, sat down at the other desk, and turned the chair around so I could see her.

"My husband's father telephoned me this morning," she said. Her accent was slight, and she made her words carefully, as if each one had been paid for. "He told me a great many things about myself. He said he had them from a detective my husband had brought from San Francisco. He said this detective had seen blood on my shoe."

"There was blood on your shoe."

"Yes." She looked at her gloved hands and then back at me. "My husband's."

"Suppose you tell me about it."

"That is why I have come. I would rather you had it from me than from him, or from the police, or from what you can imagine. I know what you can imagine. I can imagine it too."

She told it flatly, without any tears in it.

The telephone call she had taken while I sat in her living room had been from a woman. The woman had not given a name. She had said that if Mrs. Willsson wanted to know where her husband spent his evenings, she could find him at a house in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street. She had given the number of the house. She had said that he was there now. Then she had hung up.

"I went," Mrs. Willsson said. "You saw me go. I am not ashamed of it. I drove there and stopped the car at the corner and put out the lights and sat. I do not know how long. Not very long. Then he came out of the house⁠—out of the door and down the steps and along the pavement, walking quickly, with his head down. He did not see the car. He was not fifty feet from me when the shots came. There were flashes from across the street, from the dark between two houses. He fell. I ran to him. I knelt on the pavement beside him. There was⁠—it was already all around him. He was dead. I did not need to be told that. Then a man was there."

"Where did he come from?"

"I do not know. I did not see him come. He was on the other side of my husband, bending over him, with his hands on him. He said, 'Get away from here. Get away.' Very low. I was frightened. I got up and ran to the car and drove home. I did not think about my shoe until I saw you looking at it."

"What did the man look like?"

"A hat. A dark coat. Not a large man. That is all. It was very dark."

"His hands on your husband. Going through his pockets?"

"I do not know. Perhaps. I was not thinking of his pockets."

"Did you look in them?"

Her eyes got a shade harder.

"No."

"Why didn't you tell the police?"

"Because I am a foreigner," she said, "and my husband's father hates me, and I had been in the street where he was killed, with his blood on me. I am not a fool. In this town I do not think a jury would need to be very clever."

That was reasonable enough. I asked her:

"What did the police give you a list of? He'd have had things in his pockets."

"His watch, his keys, his cigarette case, his pen, a handkerchief, his card case, his wallet with some money in it⁠—sixty dollars, I think. Nothing else."

"No papers? No check?"

"No. Why a check?"

"He wrote one yesterday afternoon for five thousand dollars. Nobody knows who to. It hasn't been cashed. It wasn't on him, if that list is straight, and it wasn't in the house, if you're straight."

She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said slowly:

"Then that is what Mr. Thaler wanted."

"I saw Thaler go into your house this morning."

"He came a little after nine. He said he was a friend of my husband's. I did not know my husband had such friends, but I did not know anything about my husband's friends. He asked me whether my husband had given me any papers to keep. He asked whether my husband had had anything with him last night that I had taken. He was very polite. I said no to everything, and he said he was sorry to have troubled me, and he went away. Who is he?"

"A gambler. He runs the gambling here, or a share of it. He's got a bad throat and a worse name."

"He did not seem so."

"They don't, the good ones."

She stood up then, smoothing her gloves.

"I have told you the truth," she said. "You may do what you like with it. I think you will find that I am the only one who is telling it, in this town."

I said maybe, and watched her go out through the lobby with the clerk's eyes following her and mine following his.

Her story fitted the newspaper's facts as snugly as it fitted her shoe. That didn't make it true. It made it a good story, and good stories were what people brought me for a living. It squared with the phone call the Lewis girl had heard, too. A woman had called Willsson at his office and he had said he could be there at ten but would have to hurry away. He had meant to hurry away to his house, where I was waiting. He had made it as far as the sidewalk.

I ate dinner in the hotel dining room, went up to my room, got my coat and shoes off, and had the Evening Herald spread on the bed when somebody knocked. It was a boy of fifteen or sixteen with a cap and a cold. He held out an envelope.

"Who's it from?"

"Fella give me a half a dollar to bring it up." He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. "Fella in a poolroom on King Street."

I gave him a quarter and shut the door on him. The envelope was a cheap one with my name on it in a round schoolroom hand. The sheet inside was in the same hand, written by somebody who had taken it down from somebody else's talking:

Whisper says he went to see Mrs. Willsson this morning on business of his own and it is not any of yours. He says he did not shoot Willsson and does not know who did. He says he does not care who finds out but he does not want you or anybody else walking up and down Hurricane Street looking for it. If it is the check you are after he says come and see him and he will talk to you about the check.

No signature. It didn't need one.

I read the last sentence three times.

Thaler had known about the check before I did. I had found the stub at noon. Albury had told me at a quarter to three that nobody had come near the bank about it. Thaler had been asking the widow about papers a little after nine that morning. Somebody had told him there was a check, and the only people who could have known it were the man who had written it, who was dead, and the one it had been written to, who wasn't saying.

Unless the widow was lying. Unless the bank was. Unless Thaler didn't know anything and was fishing with the note to find out whether I did. I set those in a row and didn't like any of them better than the others.

I put my shoes and coat back on and walked down to the Western Union office on Broadway. The night clerk gave me a pad and a pencil and went back to his magazine. I wrote:

Donald Willsson shot dead ten forty night of my arrival before I could see him. Six shots from alley thirty two calibre no arrests none expected. Father Elihu Willsson has owned city forty years and now shares it with three or four men who own him. Old man says widow did it and will not talk about anything else. Widow came to me uninvited and told story which fits all facts and can be checked on none. Local gambler Thaler called on widow this morning and sends me advice by messenger tonight. Willsson drew five thousand dollar check afternoon he died. Bank says never presented or certified. Payee unknown. Check not on body not in house. Thaler wants it. So do I. Willssons check to us covers my time here. Unless you say otherwise I am spending it here. Great Western Hotel.

I signed it, paid for it, and walked back.

The Stutz was not in front of the hotel. Nobody was in the lobby but the clerk, who looked at me as if he had something to say and then decided he hadn't. I went up, locked the door, and lay down on the bed with the light off and the window open on Personville's noises.

I had a dead man who had told nobody anything, an old man who had told me only that he wanted me gone, a widow who had told me a great deal and could prove none of it, and a gambler who sent me his conversation by boy. And I had a check for five thousand dollars, drawn a little before three on the afternoon of the day he died, that had not gone to the bank, had not stayed in the dead man's pocket, had not been found in his house, and had not stopped a man like Thaler from wanting it.

Somewhere in Personville somebody had a piece of paper worth five thousand dollars, or the price of a killing, or nothing at all, depending on who they were and how badly they wanted to go on living. I went to sleep trying to decide which, and wasn't much good at it.

It was Mrs. Medlock who woke her, and she did it by taking her by the shoulder and giving it a shake which was not unkind but was not gentle either.

"Come, wake up," she said. "You've slept the daylight out, and the rain with it. We're stopping, and there's a long drive before us yet."

Mary sat up and blinked at the lamp in the roof of the carriage. It had grown dark while she slept, and the window which had streamed with rain was only black now, with the lamp swimming in it. The train groaned and stood still. Mrs. Medlock was settling her bonnet, and the purple velvet flowers trembled with importance.

"Thwaite Station," she said. "Keep close to me and don't dawdle."

They got down on to a little wet platform with one lamp on it. Beyond the lamp there was nothing at all--not a house, not a light--only blackness and a wind which came out of the dark and pushed at Mary's black hat as if it wanted to look under it. Mrs. Medlock looked along the platform for the footman, and then she stopped so suddenly that Mary, who was keeping as far behind her as she dared, nearly walked into her.

There was a man standing under the lamp. He was tall, and he wore a long dark coat with the collar turned up, and he stood with his shoulders drawn up in a queer high way, so that one of them seemed higher than the other and his head was set forward between them. His hair was black, streaked with white. He was looking at the wet boards at his feet.

Mrs. Medlock made a sound as if something had gone down the wrong way, and then she dropped a curtsey--the first Mary had ever seen her make.

"Sir!" she said. "I'm sure I never--I made certain it would be John with the carriage--"

"Is this the child?" said the man.

He did not wait to be told. He looked at Mary once, quickly, as one looks at a parcel to make sure it is the right one, and Mary looked back at him, because no one had ever taught her not to stare. His face was not ugly. It was thin and dark, with deep lines in it, and it looked as if it had been shut up for a long time, like the rooms Mrs. Medlock had talked about. Then he turned away.

"The carriage is outside," he said, and walked off down the platform without looking back.

Mrs. Medlock caught Mary's hand and hurried after him, and as she went she bent down and spoke out of the side of her mouth.

"That's your uncle," she said. "That's Mr. Craven himself. I never knew him do such a thing--never. Mind you hold your tongue."

Mary had known who it was the moment she saw the high shoulder. So this was the hunchback, and he was not in the least like Riquet à la Houppe, who had talked a great deal. This one looked as if he did not talk at all. She did not think he was horrid, as Basil had said. She thought he looked cold and tired and as if he wished he were at home, which was exactly what she felt herself, and it made her cross to feel anything at all like him.

The carriage was a closed one with two lamps, and a footman stood holding the door. Mr. Craven got in first and sat down in the far corner with his coat drawn round him. Mrs. Medlock put Mary in after him and got in herself and sat bolt upright, as stiff as a poker, for it was plain she had never ridden inside with her master before. The door shut, the footman jumped up behind, and they rolled away into the dark.

Nobody spoke.

Mary sat with her hands folded and looked at the corner. She could see nothing of her uncle but a darker darkness, and once the glint of an eye when the light from a cottage window slid across the carriage. There was a village, and a church with a dim lamp in its porch, and then the road began to climb and the lights dropped behind, and after that there was nothing outside the windows at all.

She would have liked to ask what a moor was, but she was not going to ask anything in front of him. So she pressed her face to the glass. The carriage lamps showed a strip of wet road and, on either side of it, low dark bushes that leaned all one way; beyond them there was only black, and it went on and on. Something was making a sound out there--a low, rushing, rising sound, which came from everywhere at once.

"That's the moor," Mrs. Medlock said in a whisper, because of the corner. "Miles and miles of it, and nothing on it but heather and sheep and the wind. Wuthering, they call that."

Mary did not know what wuthering meant either, but she was not going to ask that in a whisper.

They had been climbing for a long time when the carriage lurched, slowed, and stopped.

"Summat i' t' road, sir!" the footman shouted, and Mary heard him jump down and heard his boots go past the wheels.

Mr. Craven leaned forward and let down the window on his side, and the wind came in like a live thing and blew Mrs. Medlock's bonnet flowers flat. He said nothing. He only looked out.

Mary looked at the door on her own side. She had been sitting still since London, and she was tired of sitting still, and she was tired of the silence, which was worse than Mrs. Medlock's talking. Nobody had told her she might not get out. Nobody, in all her life, had told her she might not do anything. So she turned the handle, and the door swung open, and she got down.

She had meant to stand in the road. But the step was high and the road was narrow, and her foot went beyond the edge of it and sank into something wet and springy that crackled, and there she was, standing on the moor in the dark.

The wind took hold of her. It came at her out of the whole of the blackness, and it smelt of rain and of something sharp and wild which she had never smelt before, and it made the low bushes all round her hiss and whisper as if they were talking about her. She could see nothing. There were the two carriage lamps behind her, and far ahead the footman's lantern bobbing by a young tree the wind had thrown across the road, and that was all. There were no walls anywhere. There was no bungalow, no compound, no veranda. There was only the dark, going up and up, with the rushing sound in it like the sea she had heard from the ship, and Mary standing in the middle of it, very small.

She did not like it. She stood quite still and told herself so. And yet it was not like the nursery in the bungalow, where the silence had been so heavy because every one had died or run away. Nothing here had died. Nothing was hiding. It was only enormous, and it did not care whether she was there or not, which was a thing Mary understood perfectly and did not mind.

"Mary Lennox!" cried Mrs. Medlock from the carriage, in a voice which had forgotten to whisper. "Come back in this minute, or you'll be blown to Thwaite and catch your death after!"

And out of the dark corner Mr. Craven's low voice said, "Get in."

It was not loud, and it was not angry. It was only the voice of a man who had never had to say anything twice. Mary got in. The footman shouted "Reet, sir!" from the road; the tree was dragged aside; and they went on.

They went on for so long that Mary began to think the moor had no end, and then all at once there were trees, and the wind stopped shouting and went to sighing in the branches overhead, and a gate stood open, and at the end of a long drive there was a great mass of blackness with a few windows dimly lighted, low down, like eyes half shut.

An old man opened the door. He was thin and dry and bald, with a lantern in his hand, and Mary knew that this must be Pitcher. Mr. Craven went past him into the house without a word, and Pitcher did not seem to expect one. He shut the door on the wind, and the hall closed round them, all dark oak and shadows, with a fire at the far end that was too small for it.

"You'll take her to her rooms, Mrs. Medlock," Pitcher said. "He doesn't want to see her."

"He's seen her," said Mrs. Medlock, rather sharply for her. "He fetched her himself."

"That's the master's business," said Pitcher, and went away with his lantern.

Mrs. Medlock took Mary up a broad staircase and along a passage, and along another, and past a great many shut doors, until Mary was sure she could never find her way back. At the end of the last passage there was a large room with a fire burning in it, and a four-post bed with heavy hangings, and walls hung with old tapestry on which there was a forest, and people in queer clothes with dogs and hawks, all faded to the color of dust.

"This is where you're to live," said Mrs. Medlock. "You're not to go wandering. The girl that's to wait on you doesn't come till morning, so John's bringing your supper, and you'll take what's brought and be thankful."

So the supper was not brought by a girl at all. It was brought by the footman from the carriage--a big, raw-boned young man with a round red face and hair the color of hay. He set the tray down by the fire and stood back from it as if it might bite him.

"Theer," he said. "Tha's to eat that afore it's cowd, Mrs. Medlock says. It's nobbut bread an' milk an' a bit o' chicken, but it'll stay thee. Tha's to ring if tha wants owt, an' Ah've putten th' hot bottle i' th' bed."

Mary looked at him. She had understood the word "bed," and she thought she had understood "chicken."

"I cannot understand what you say," she said. "I don't know what you are talking about."

The young man was not offended. He grinned all over his red face.

"Nay," he said. "Tha's not t' first. It's nobbut Yorkshire. Tha'll come to it. Tha'll be talkin' it thysel' afore th' summer's out."

"I shall not," said Mary, who had not understood that either, but was sure she did not like it; and he laughed and went away.

She ate her bread and milk because she was hungry. She had never before been hungry enough to eat what she was given without complaining of it, and she noticed this about herself and was surprised. Then Mrs. Medlock came back and undressed her, as if she were undressing a doll she did not think much of, and put her into the big bed, and turned the lamp down until there was only the fire.

It was then, in the quiet after the wind, that Mary heard the sound.

It came from far away in the house--from somewhere overhead and beyond, along passages she had not been through. It was a sound as if some one were walking slowly along a bare floor: several steps, and a pause, and several steps more. And then a door shut. It did not slam. It shut carefully, the way a door is shut by some one who does not wish to be heard shutting it, and after that there was nothing.

Mary sat straight up among the pillows.

"What was that?" she said.

Mrs. Medlock had her hand on the lamp. She did not turn round, and she answered so quickly that the words seemed to have been waiting ready.

"It's the wind," she said. "It gets into the passages in the old part, and half the doors don't fit. You'll hear it wuthering round the house all night. Lie down and go to sleep."

She took her candle and went out, and the door closed, and her heavy footsteps went away down the passage and round the corner and were gone.

Mary lay down. But she did not go to sleep.

She lay watching the red of the fire on the hangings, and listened. Outside, the wind was wuthering, sure enough. It went round the house and shook the windows and rushed away over the moor and came back. Mary had heard wind before, in India, when the rains broke, and she had seen what it did to doors. It flung them open. It banged them shut with a crash that made the servants scream. It did not walk along a floor with pauses between the steps, and it did not shut a door softly, as if it were being careful.

She lay very still and thought about that with her lips pinched together.

Nobody would tell her. Nobody in this house was going to tell her anything, any more than anybody ever had. Mrs. Medlock would say it was the wind, and Pitcher would say it was the master's business, and the red-faced young man would say something she could not understand, and her uncle would say nothing at all.

Very well. She would not ask any of them again. She would find out for herself.

The fire sank to a red glow and the room grew dark, and Mistress Mary lay awake in the middle of the great bed with her eyes open, listening, and waiting for the sound to come again.