The Chapters

The falling star came three nights after that walk of ours. I was sitting up late over my papers—upon the conscience of nations, as it happened—and my wife had long since gone to bed, when the room behind me brightened with a greenish light. Through the window I saw a streak of flame cross the heavens, dropping as it went, with a hissing rush like some vast kettle dragged violently through the air. It passed above the elms between my house and Ottershaw and vanished. I stood up and waited, and perhaps a minute later, though it seemed far longer, there came across the stillness, faint but startlingly plain, a heavy thud, and then a long smash and seething of water.

My watch told me it was twenty minutes past eleven. A meteorite, I decided, fallen somewhere out towards the canal, and fallen, by the sound of it, into water. I confess the thing gave me a pleasant thrill of the uncommon. I went out and stood a little space in the garden. The night seemed to me to have a faint, far flavour of burning in it; but everything lay dark and orderly under the stars, and Mars hung above the chimney-tops exactly where I had pointed him out to my wife three evenings before. So I finished my paragraph, blew out the candle, and went up to bed, very much a man of letters and very little of a prophet.

That, as I take it now, was the first act of the greatest drama in the history of this earth, and I slept through its significance as comfortably as a child.

By breakfast-time the business was in every mouth. The milkman had seen the flash as he was shutting up his chaise; a gardener from the big house brought word that a star had fallen in the night into the flooded clay-pit by the canal, where they used to dig the blue clay, and that half of Ottershaw was out upon the banks, and that Ogilvy had been there since the first light, mud to his knees. Boys were already pelting along the towing-path, and above the hedge-tops, a mile away, stood a column of white steam, softly spreading.

My wife would not hear of staying at home.

“If a star has fallen into a clay-pit it will keep there till luncheon,” I said.

“Stars do not fall every day,” said my wife, and put on her hat; and we went out together into the bright August morning.

It was a lovely walk, with the larks up and the hedges white with dust, and we were not the only people abroad. We overtook a gardener with a barrow, going at a pace his master would never have sanctioned; we met two men from Chertsey, and were themselves overtaken by a knot of boys running shoulder to shoulder like whippets. Before we came in sight of the pit we heard it—a sound as of an enormous kettle, steady and grimly domestic—and then, across the hedgerows, came the smell of hot iron and wet clay.

The pit is a great oval hole, perhaps sixty yards across, with steep banks of blue clay, drowned where the springs had crept in and stayed. The water smoked all over its surface that morning, thin wreaths of it rising everywhere as from a summer pond at dawn, only that this was mid-morning and the wreaths were furiously white. And at the middle of the pit lay the Thing. It was a cylindrical mass as big as a haystack, more than half of it hidden by the water, with its rounded end tilted a little towards the western bank. It was dark and wet, like gun-metal under a coating of mud, and where the streaming clay had fallen away from it a dull red glow came and went, very slowly, like breathing. Along its water-line the surface boiled in strings of beads; every little while some portion of it let off a fresh volume of steam that rolled away north-eastward down the light wind; and high upon the banks, four feet above the present water, hung the wet black mark of the wave the fall had flung out.

A crowd stood upon the western bank, gardeners in their gaiters, a drayman with his horse left unharnessed in the lane, old men with pipes, women with their sleeves rolled, boys held back by common consent at the bramble-line. Everyone talked in a subdued pitch, as people talk in a churchyard, and everyone watched the steam.

I found Ogilvy on the bank itself, plastered to the knees with grey clay, a plumb-line in one hand, his spectacles misted, and his face shining with a delight he made no attempt to govern.

“It has fallen, and it is a meteorite, and it is the finest that has come down in England in the memory of man,” he said, shaking my hand and looking back at the thing even as he did so. “I have sounded it with a fishing-rod and a stone; it rests upon firm clay. It flung the water clean out of the pit—you may see the mark of it on the brambles yonder. Seventy tons, I make it, if it is an inch. Why, it is worth all my telescopes together.”

“Ogilvy,” I said, “I don't dispute the metal. But consider the coincidence. Ten nights of flame upon Mars, and then silence; and now, out of the very quarter of the heavens where Mars stood, a thing falls into a Surrey clay-pit. Ever since that first blaze I have been inclined to think they were casting a great gun over there—Lavelle's flames, and the jets of hydrogen—”

“Mars again!” cried Ogilvy. “You and your gun! My dear sir, listen to sense. A shooting star comes round with the earth's own pace, twenty miles a second or thereabouts; and those that overtake us from behind, as this one did—it came up out of the south-east—strike us with no more than the violence of a runaway cart. That is why you have a hole in a clay-pit and not a ruined county. It is the shooting-star season; we are always meeting swarms of these bodies in August. The greenness of the light is a known thing in meteors. And as for Mars—the chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one, I told you that night at the observatory, and I tell you now the chances against a shot out of Mars dropping into this particular pit are a million to one beyond that again. It is iron and stone, sir—iron and stone, like the Ensisheim one, like the Vienna one—and inside a fortnight you will see it in the Transactions with my name at the foot of the paper. An ordinary meteorite, in a word—the most extraordinary one, but ordinary in its kind.”

“But look at the thing,” I persisted. “I have handled meteorites in museums; I never saw one so round as the mouth of a gun, nor so smooth as a boiler-plate. Look at that end—”

“Fusion,” said Ogilvy, with the calm of a man settling the matter for good. “Fire a lump of clay through a furnace-flame and see what comes down at the far end. Everything rounds and smooths in the fusing. And the mud is on it now; wait till the water is off it and the crust is uncovered, and you will find it pitted and pocked like a cinder, as all the books say. The parish must drain the pit. I have wired to the Times and to Greenwich; by Saturday we will have it dry, with a windlass over it, and every geologist in England down upon us like gulls.”

An old man near us said it was a judgment, and had best be left to the parson; a boy asked what it would fetch a ton; Ogilvy told him it was worth his fingers if he meddled with it. Some lads on the far bank had been throwing clods into the water to hear the splash, and Ogilvy rated them soundly across the pit.

And it was while we stood there that a young fellow—a Chertsey bricklayer's lad, I learned afterwards, who had ridden over on his bicycle—slipped down the shelving spit of bank where the clay lay dry against the metal.

“Don't touch it, sir!” shouted Ogilvy; but with the instinct of his kind the lad had already laid his palm flat upon the shining flank. There came a hiss like fat dropped in a pan, a yell, and a smell of scorched flesh. He sprang back clutching his wrist, and came blundering up the bank with his hand thrust out before him, the palm blanched and pouched up into one great blister, like scalded curd. His mates seized him and bore him off towards the inn to have it soused and bound up, the lad cursing the thing and vowing between his groans that he would have the law of somebody for leaving a thing like that about a public pit.

“The whole mass is hot through, like a stone out of a lime-kiln,” said Ogilvy, with a pedagogue's satisfaction. “The passage through the air heats it, and metal holds its heat as a rick holds warmth. It will be days cooling. Every boy who touches it will lose his skin, and serve him right.”

After that the crowd kept a wider ring, and the talk took a queerer tone. I heard “uncanny” once or twice, and an Irish carter made the sign of the cross quite unconcernedly while he looked.

Just then a great slice of the mud crust slid from the cylinder into the water. There was a heavy splash, a hissing explosion, and a white cloud rolled up the bank and over us, and for a moment we were all blotted out together. There was a stampede in the front row, screams and laughter mingled; and when the steam thinned, the red glow showed broader than before, and now and then the mass gave out a small metallic click, as cooling metal will.

My wife had grown very quiet. She had stood through it all close at my elbow, and I saw her eyes go from the boiling water-line to the steam and back again, and stay there.

“I do not like it,” she said. “That poor lad's hand—and the water boiling—and that light in the mud. It is not a proper thing to be looking at, and I think the crowd is not a proper thing either.”

“It is only hot iron and wet clay, and fools round it,” I said. “There is neither sense nor story in it for you, my dear. Go home, and I will follow you to dinner.”

She hesitated; but old Mace was just then jogging back along the towing-path with his empty cart, and I put her in it as far as the corner by the lock. She gathered her skirt about her and looked back once at the pit, and once at me.

“You will not stay late?” she said.

“I will be home to dinner,” I told her, and Mace clicked his tongue, and the cart went on.

The Chertsey bells were ringing twelve. The crowd had doubled since our coming, and was still growing; people were arriving along the towing-path from Chertsey and Addlestone, two riding men had come over from Weybridge, and a wagonette stood in the lane with its horse steaming as softly as the pit. A photographer with a hand-camera was finding his footing on the bank—one of Markham's men, I saw with a smile, the same Markham who had been so jubilant over his photograph of the planet—and a young reporter, straw-hatted and perspiring, was asking every one in turn whether it was really a star, whether it was really red-hot, and whether it would be worth anything when it cooled. The Ottershaw constable had arrived and was keeping the front edge of the crowd back from the crumbling clay with mild, unceasing firmness; and Ogilvy was everywhere at once, measuring, explaining, arranging for chains and a windlass, and eating his sandwich in two bites between sentences.

I watched my wife out of sight. She stood up in the cart at the turning and waved her hand to me, and I waved mine, and then the cart passed the canal bridge and was gone. I turned back through the thickening people and found a dry footing on the bank between Ogilvy and a carter, and took off my hat, for the noon was very warm. Behind me the crowd was growing every minute; before me the steam went up, softly and steadily, out of the pit into the bright sky. I stayed on, watching it, and never once thought of dinner.

She was awakened by the stopping of the train. The lamp in the roof of the carriage swung slowly, and the rain on the windows had grown thin and fine, so that it lay upon the glass in a mist of gray beads instead of streaming down in slanting lines. There was no station to be seen at first; there was only a platform and one lamp upon it, and the wet boards shining.

"Here we are," said Mrs. Medlock. "We've five miles to drive yet, across th' moor. You'd best wake up and look alive."

Mary had been awake before Mrs. Medlock spoke, but she had not meant to say so. She collected her little black-gloved hands, and her crêpe hat was set straight, and she stepped out upon the platform with her head up. A porter took down the boxes. Beyond the station gate lamps were shining on a carriage, and an old man sat on the box of it; and in the shadow at the edge of the lamplight there stood a tall thin man in a heavy traveling coat with the collar turned up. The light fell upon a long, pale face and upon shoulders which were crooked, one higher than the other, and Mary knew in a moment who it must be, because she had never seen a hunchback and this man was one.

Mrs. Medlock dropped a curtsey as if her knees had suddenly remembered themselves.

"Mr. Craven, sir! I thought—that is, I didn't expect—"

"Is this the child?" he said.

"Yes, sir. Miss Mary Lennox."

He looked at Mary. His eyes were dark and tired, and it was odd how he looked at her and yet did not seem to see her, but to see something else beyond her, in the darkness of the moor. Mary looked up at him because she had never seen a hunchback before, and then was sorry she had looked. She remembered the French fairy story she had thought of in the train, and remembered also that in the train she had been a trifle sorry for him. She was not sorry now. He did not look like the poor hunchback in the story at all.

"Put her in, Medlock," he said; and that was all he said to her at the station.

The carriage was closed and the old man on the box shook up his horses, and Mrs. Medlock sat back with a small flustered sigh.

"Eh, dear!" she said under her breath. "It's a long time since master met a train himself."

Then there was silence, or what was nearly silence, which was the sound of hoofs on a wet road. There was nothing to be seen from the windows. Mary discovered that this was in itself something new. In India there had always been something to see—trees, or faces, or bullocks, or a bazaar crowded and chattering, or a sky full of enormous stars. Here there was only blackness, and now and then the glint of the carriage lamps upon wet stones. Mrs. Medlock made one or two remarks about the weather and received no answers at all, and after that she gave up talking and sat in a rustling heap in her corner.

The carriage slowed and stopped so suddenly that Mary was thrown against the strap.

"Ay, there's summat i' th' road, sir," the old man called down. "It's stood like a stock an' it wunnot shift."

Mr. Craven let down the window. The rain had ceased, and cold air came in that smelled of wet earth and of something Mary had never smelled before, which was heather. An unshaded lantern was lighted on the road. Mrs. Medlock put her head out, and so did Mary, and what the lantern showed was a small rough-haired moor pony standing in the very middle of the road with its mane blown sideways and its head thrown up, regarding the horses with round, indignant eyes.

"It's nobbut a moor pony," said Mrs. Medlock. "They're as wild as rabbits."

Mary did not know how it happened that she was out of the carriage. It seemed afterward that no one had helped her and no one had forbidden her, and that the door had simply been open and she had been out before any one thought of stopping her. "Miss!" said Mrs. Medlock. "You come back here—" But Mary was already standing on the moor.

It was very dark. There was no hedge, no fence, no tree, no light anywhere in the world. The ground went up and away into blackness on one side and fell away into blackness on the other, and over all of it the wind was sweeping in a long tide. The sound of it was like the sound of the sea which she had heard when she crossed from India, except that the sea had sounded far away and this sounded near, and alive, and enormous. The wet heather brushed her black dress. For one minute she stood quite still.

Nobody took her hand, and it did not occur to her to want any one to take it. But she noticed something she had never noticed before, which was that the world was a very big place and that she was a very small thing in it. In India she had never been small. She had been the center of everything, and every one had run when she called. Here the wind was not going to run when she called, and the pony did not care about her, and the blackness went on for miles in every direction whether she liked it or not.

Then Mr. Craven went toward the pony, slowly, with the lantern held low, and something in the way he went made it toss its head and wheel and trot away into the dark, and the old man on the box gave a short chuckle and gathered up the reins.

"Get in," said Mr. Craven to Mary, passing her; and that was all he said to her.

They drove on. She had stood on the moor for one minute only, but she carried something away from it which stayed with her.

After a long time lamps flashed on wet iron, and great gates swung open, and the carriage turned in under trees whose branches met above it and brushed the top of it like hands. Then there was a great black front with a few windows lighted in it, a door opened by a man carrying a candle, and a hall so vast that Mary's footsteps and Mrs. Medlock's seemed to go up into the air and be lost there. There were corridors, and doors standing shut—rows of them, one after another—and Mary felt certain that every one of them was locked.

"This wing's for you an' me," said Mrs. Medlock, trotting before the candle. "An' don't you go wanderin'. I told you on th' train what Mr. Craven is, an' besides you'd lose yourself before you'd gone a hundred yards. Them passages is a labyrinth."

Supper was set in a room where a fire burned, and the man who had opened the door had laid the tray before they came into it. He was an old man with white eyebrows and a face the color of a washed-out brick, and he moved about on noiseless feet.

"Supper's all put, miss," he said. "There's cold mutton, an' there's ham, an' bread an' butter, an' there's a jug o' warm milk at th' hob. Tha'd best eat thy fill while it's warm, for th' nights is cold on th' moor, an' it's a long way to breakfast."

Mary stared at him.

"I cannot understand you," she said. "What is it you say?"

He stopped with his hand on the tray and looked at her in the greatest astonishment, turning at last to Mrs. Medlock.

"She can't mak me out!" he said. "Nay! Is th' lass not English, then?"

"She's English enough," said Mrs. Medlock. "But she's been in India, an' they talk different there. She's never heerd Yorkshire in her life."

The old man considered this, and then bent toward Mary and spoke with extreme distinctness and slowness, as one speaks to the deaf.

"Eat—thy—supper," he said.

"I am English," said Mary, drawing herself up. "I was born in India, but I am English. It is you who talk as if you were not."

The old man's shoulders began to shake, though he made no sound.

"Eh! So I do, happen," he said. "Well, tha'll larn it quick enough, live i' these parts. Goo'-night to thee, miss." And he took up the candle and was gone before Mary could decide whether she had been laughed at or not.

She ate her supper, and she did eat her fill, because she had discovered on the voyage that she was hungrier in England than she had ever been in India, though she would not on any account have said so. Then Mrs. Medlock took her up two more staircases and along a corridor to a room where a fire was burning and where her small trunk already stood at the foot of a great four-post bed with heavy curtains hanging round it like the walls of a tent.

"Your night things is laid out," said Mrs. Medlock. "I'll send up your box to-morrow. Now get into bed an' stay there. An' mind—" she stopped with her hand on the candlestick, and the mind was left hanging in the air unfinished, because at that moment the window rattled in its frame, and then there came a sound which made Mary stand quite still.

It was a long, hollow, rising sound, far away and yet inside the house, somewhere in the ceiling or in the walls or in the corridors beyond, and it rose and swelled and sank again slowly, as if something enormous had drawn breath and let it out. Then it died entirely, and the fire ticked, and that was all.

"What is that?" said Mary.

"It's th' wind," said Mrs. Medlock. "This is an old house, an' there's chimneys in it by th' score, an' when th' wind gets up on th' moor an' begins to hunt, it goes down those chimneys like a pack o' hounds an' moans in every flue from top to bottom. Tha'll hear it many a night. There's nowt else i' th' house. Old houses is like that—they talk to theirsels."

"It does not sound like wind," said Mary.

"It is wind," said Mrs. Medlock shortly. "Get thy sleep. I'm two floors down, an' if tha wants owt ring th' bell an' some one'll hear it. An' don't thee get up an' go wanderin' in th' night, whatever tha does." And she went out, and Mary heard her keys and her jet fringe go away down the corridor until there was no sound of her at all.

Mary undressed slowly and got into the great bed, which was so wide and so high that she seemed to be lost in it. The fire sank lower and lower. She lay looking at the curtains round her, which stirred a little when the window rattled, and she thought of the day—of the station, and the man with the crooked shoulders who had looked past her as if she were not there, and the pony, and the black enormous moor with the wind going over it.

She was not in the least sleepy.

Presently the sound came again. It began far off, in one part of the house, and rose and traveled, or seemed to travel, along the corridor and past her door, and died away on the other side of her room. It was hollow and long and it took its time, and when it was over there was a pause, as if the thing that made it had stopped to listen too. And in the pause there was—though she could not have sworn to it—something else. A soft weight shifting somewhere. A creak far away. Nothing. Then the wind rose outside and she could not tell any more which sounds were which.

Mrs. Medlock had said it was the wind. Mrs. Medlock had said a great many things, and she had a common, highly colored face and a common fine bonnet, and it did not follow that she knew. Every one at Misselthwaite told you something and then went away and shut a door. If it was the wind, it was strange wind; and if it was not the wind, it was something else; and whatever it was, it was in the house, and she was in the house too.

Being told not to get up and wander in the night had never yet, in the whole of her life, made Mary not do a thing. She sat up in the great bed with her black hair straggling and her small sour face turned toward the door, and when the sound came again she did not pull the clothes up to her chin. She listened to it until it died.

"It is not the wind," she said to herself.

And she made up her mind, lying back against the pillow in the dark with her eyes wide open, that she would find out for herself what it was. No one at Misselthwaite was going to tell her anything; the house was full of shut doors, and every one of them said nothing; so she would have to be the one to find out. If the sound came again, she would get up and follow it. She was not at all afraid—or if she was, she did not know it, for she had never in her life been afraid of anything enough to know it by that name. She lay quite still in the dark, waiting for the wind to rise.

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street*,

“*27 May.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“Guess what has happened, and then give it up, for you will never guess. It is all settled! Arthur spoke to his father directly he had my answer, and Lord Godalming was dearer than I can possibly tell you. He took both my hands in his--Mina, he is so like Arthur that I could have cried on the spot--and he said that he had long wished for just such a daughter, and that his house would be the brighter for me in it. So there is nothing to wait for now but the day itself. When I think that only last week I was crying over the two other poor fellows, and to-day I am walking on air, I wonder however I came to deserve it all.

“Arthur is so big and so gentle that I could cry sometimes only to look at him, and sometimes I do, and he believes it is for joy, and perhaps it is. His father has not been at all well this spring--nothing to fret over, dear, only weakness and a want of spirits--so we are not to fix anything grand just yet. The wedding is to wait till the autumn, which suits me beautifully, for my own Mina could not get away from her school before it breaks up, and I would not be married without her for all the world. You are to come to me beforehand and help me choose things and tell me if I am a fool. I shall want a great deal of telling.

“Now I must tell you of last night. Arthur dined with the other two--Mr. Morris had them both to his lodgings, as he said he would--and this morning, when he came to me, he could neither laugh nor speak for earnestness. He says they drank my health three times standing, and that Mr. Morris got up and said I was the noblest heart that God ever made, or words to that effect, and then the two of them pretended to weep into their wine and ended by swearing to be his brothers all their days. Oh, Mina, is it not like a story-book? I have set my heart on one thing: that we four shall always be friends. I told Arthur, and he said, ‘That is exactly what Quincey said last night.’

“And now, dear, all my news is out, so give me yours. Is Jonathan home yet? You wrote on the 9th that he was to return in about a week, and I have had nothing since, which is not at all like you, for you are the best correspondent in the world when there is anything to tell. Do not let the school eat you up altogether. Write by return, and say that he is safe, and that soon I am to have you.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Mr. Morris sent me yesterday a great box of flowers, with no card but a scrap of paper: ‘From one who will keep off the darkness.’ Men are such dears, are they not? But it is Arthur that I love.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--I have a half-hour free before my rounds, and I shall spend it in setting down last night, for the phonograph keeps only what I give it, and I find that I want to keep this. We dined at Quincey Morris’s lodgings: three men, none of us old, each with a wound fresh enough to ache, and a bottle of claret which he had laid by against some great occasion and now pronounced this to be. We began, as he had promised, by mingling our weeps over the wine-cup, and a precious pair of fools we must have looked--Seward and Morris solemnly grieving over their friend’s happiness with faces like mourners at a wedding. Arthur bore it like a man, which is to say that he was not one whit ashamed of his joy, and yet was as tender to us as a nurse. When he had told his tale--and our ears tingled, as his wire promised they would--Quincey filled the glasses to the brim and stood up: ‘The health of the happiest man in all the wide world, who has won the noblest heart that God has made and the best worth winning!’ We drank it standing, and then we swore what men do swear over wine: that our two hearts should be his friends’ friends to the end of the chapter. I am a physician, and I know how wine talks; I believe every word of it notwithstanding.

Here is the strange thing, which I record for my own after-reading: the empty feeling of these two days is gone. Work, I said, was the only cure, and I was right in the general and wrong in the particular, for the true cure was two friends and a bottle, and the wound dressed and brought into the light. I drove down to the asylum after midnight, and before going in I stood a few minutes on the terrace in the dark. I said her name over to myself, once or twice, aloud, as one presses a healing bruise to learn if it still pains. It pains; but it heals also. To-day my appetite, which has been at ebb, came back with my breakfast. *Sine ira et studio*--without anger, and without envy. So to work; and next to Renfield, whose case deserves a better observer than I have lately been.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*29 May.*--Renfield to-day. The gloomy period has passed, and he was tame and even courtly, sitting with his hands on his knees like a man waiting to be presented at Court. I was drawing him out about his flies--he keeps a whole regiment of them in his room, and has begged sugar till I am in doubt whether I feed the flies or the man--when, without any leading from me, he asked, “Master, is Miss Westenra well?”

I confess that I started. I had never spoken that name in his presence; no patient about the house knows of her existence, for it is not a name that comes into the newspapers or the talk of the corridors. I asked him, as coolly as I could, what he knew of Miss Westenra. He smiled his odd smile, and said that he knew she was to be married, and that he was glad of it, for where there is a bride there is life in a house--more life, more life, he said, twice over--and then he looked at me and told me that I wanted it, that I was white about the gills. I pressed him to say how the name had reached him. He would only answer that he heard things; that little lives carry tidings; and then he asked for more sugar and a bigger box.

(*Mem.*--How did he get it? Answer myself: on the night of the 27th I stood on the terrace in the dark and spoke to myself aloud, and though his window is not upon the terrace it has an outlook over the corner of it by the low wall, and the wind sets from the terrace towards the house. A madman has ears like a spy and a memory like a deed of conveyance. Henceforth I will talk to myself only in my own room, with this machine and no other auditor.)

It gave me a strange turn to hear her name in that place. I record the matter calmly, however: it is a trifle, and it shows once more how these disordered minds pick up and treasure what we scatter. Only, I do not quite like the look in his eyes when he said that I wanted life. There is nothing in it, of course; but I shall ask the head-warder whether he has been allowed near the terrace.

*Letter, Heinrich Weiss of Bistritz to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Post-office, Bistritz, Transylvania*,

“*29 May.*

“Honoured Miss,--

“I am the postmaster of this town, and a stranger to you, and I ask your pardon for writing; but I think that when you have read you will forgive me. At the beginning of this month there lodged one night at the Golden Krone an English gentleman, Mr. Jonathan Harker, who was travelling up into the mountains upon the business of his profession. Before he went on, he came to my office and left a sum for the postage, and with it a charge: that if by the 25th of the month no letter of his own should come down to the mail for England, I should write to the lady whose direction he gave me, and say that he had been delayed, and that she was to be of good heart. The mails from the mountains have been late and confused all this season, and the Szgany, who carry much of them, are away with their wagons; no such letter has come. The mail for England goes out upon the Mondays, and to-day is the first after the day he named. Therefore I write, as I was desired.

“His charge to me was in these words, as near as my English can carry them: that the gentleman has been delayed in his affairs among the mountains, the roads being held by the melting of the snows and by the waters; that he is well in health, though weary with much business; and that the lady is not to be anxious, for so soon as the passes are open he will come, and will make the time short by fast travelling. He had me say it twice over, that I might keep it sure.

“Be not uneasy, honoured Miss. In our country the mountains are masters of us all, and clever gentlemen must wait upon them like the rest of us. I was two years in Liverpool as a young man, and I know that with you a train missed by a minute is ruin; but here a week is a day and a day is a week. If any letter should come to my office for you, I shall forward it with the greatest speed.

“Your obedient servant to command,

“HEINRICH WEISS, Postmaster.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*4 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Your letter made me laugh and cry together, which is, I believe, the proper condition for a girl of twenty whose dearest friend is engaged. I am so glad about dear Lord Godalming. And the two others swearing to be Arthur’s brothers! You may set your heart at rest about the four of us, for Jonathan has long said that a man’s friends are the best part of his fortune, and I mean to borrow his opinion and make it mine.

“But I must first tell you of this morning, for it is all my news of Jonathan. Before the post came I had a letter with a foreign seal in a strange hand, and, Lucy, my heart stood still--there is no use in pretending that it did not. It was from the postmaster of Bistritz, the little town in the Carpathians where Jonathan stayed on his way up into the mountains. He writes that Jonathan, before leaving that place, left a charge with him: that if no letter came down to the mail by the 25th of May, he was to write to me and say that Jonathan has been delayed in his affairs among the mountains, that the roads are held by the melting of the snows, that he is well, and that he will follow so soon as the passes open and will make the time short by fast travelling. The good man begs me not to be uneasy, and tells me that in his country the mountains are masters of all, and that a week there is a day.

“I was for ten minutes the greatest coward in Exeter; and then the postscript set me laughing, for the dear old gentleman says he was two years in Liverpool as a young man, and knows the impatience of an English bride. I have thanked him, and I have written to Mr. Hawkins, who will be sure to know how the land lies, if the land wants knowing. So all is well, dear; and yet--am I very foolish if I own that when the house is quiet a little shadow of doubt will creep into the corner of my mind? It is so long since his own hand wrote anything beyond the few hurried lines I told you of. There! I have read his letters all over again twice, and I am myself once more. He is well, he is coming, and I am ashamed of my ten minutes of cowardice.

“Our term ends on the 15th, and after that I am free. I shall go home and make things ready, and when he is once safe at home, and we have had our first week of sitting and looking at each other like a pair of geese, we are to run up to town, and I am to see you in all your glory. Count the days with me, Lucy. It cannot be long now.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“P.S.--When you write, tell me everything, even the foolish things. Especially the foolish things.”

*Telegram from Sister Agatha, of the Hospital of St. Joseph and St. Mary, Budapest, to Miss Mina Murray, Exeter.*

“*5 June.*

“Come at once. Jonathan lies very ill here; he asks continually for you.

“SISTER AGATHA.”

Mr. Shepherd was the first to obey the summons. He waited on Sir Walter at Kellynch Hall before noon of the same day, provided with a scheme of retrenchment drawn out in his smallest hand, and fortified at every line with phrases of the softest apology; for it was not Mr Shepherd's practice to propose the reduction of any thing without first lamenting the necessity which could render it necessary. His plan went no farther, in the first instance, than the stable and the servants' hall, and was offered rather as a beginning than as a remedy. Two of the menservants—the two youngest of the footmen—were to be dispensed with; the saddle-horses were to be given up, and the chaise and four to become for the future a pair; the gardener's establishment was to be curtailed; the cellar was to receive no new wine for a twelvemonth; and nothing new, of carpet, curtain, or chair, was to be ordered within the year.

Sir Walter heard him through with perfect composure, and then replied to him in detail.

"To begin with the footmen. The two youngest, Shepherd! Consider what you are about. A man's footmen are the countenance of his house; the young ones are the only persons in my hall who are looked at, except myself. Send them away, and what remains? A couple of heavy, elderly men, who have been rolling about the passage long enough to give the place a bad air. A baronet's hall supported by a pair of old footmen! The thing would be talked of through the whole county."

"As to the horses, I suppose you would have me travelling post like any attorney. A chaise and four is not an amusement, Shepherd, it is a station in life. I have kept my four horses, and I never yet heard that the world thought the worse of me for it, or the better of any body for advising me to part with them."

"The gardener—with all my heart, if you can tell me how a family is to have fruit without a gardener. The pinery indeed you may dispose of as you please; I never eat grapes; nobody at Kellynch eats grapes; you are welcome to tell the gardener so with my compliments. But an economy of grapes is not worth the name. And the wine and the furniture are the two last things in which a gentleman's house should be suffered to look poor. No, no, Shepherd; the whole together amounts to nothing. It is a prescription which, if it were followed, would disgrace us prodigiously, and leave us just as poor as ever. I am much obliged to you; but I will have nothing to do with it."

He took up the Baronetage as he finished, and turned to his own page, with the air of a man who has dismissed a subject for ever. Mr Shepherd bowed, hoped Sir Walter would look over the paper again at leisure, lamented that he should have been the instrument of any thing so disagreeable, and withdrew from the room, with the countenance of a man who has received his thanks in civility alone, and is too well used to the currency to complain of it.

Lady Russell, whose opinion had been still more earnestly solicited, came at four o'clock from the lodge, and lost no time after the first greetings were over. Her plan was of a different and more searching kind. She had considered the matter, she said, as a friend of the family, in every light in which it could be placed; and she proposed not to shave the edges of their expenses, but to come at once to a part of the substance. One of the two carriages, with the whole of its horses, was to be given up entirely; three of the menservants dismissed; the table reduced to the plain living of a private family in the country; a year's abstinence observed from every species of new purchase; and the spring journey to London omitted altogether.

Sir Walter's answer was shorter even than his answer to Mr Shepherd.

"London! You would have us take root here like so many of my own trees, Lady Russell, and be glad of the visitors who come to look at us. And let me tell you, people who live at home are the most expensive people alive: their own table is always full, every neighbour within six miles finds them out, and I should be eaten up with hospitalities at Kellynch under the notion of saving. No new purchase for a year! You have known me eight-and-twenty years, and you know what is due to me; I am sorry to find you reckoning my comforts at so cheap a rate. Your plan is Mr Shepherd's, with the figures made larger; and both of them come to this—that I am to lose my consequence and keep my debts. That is not economy; that is only being ruined with an additional step of humiliation. I will have nothing to say to it; and I beg that the subject may not be renewed."

Lady Russell said no more then; but she looked at Anne, and her look said more than her plan had done.

Mr Shepherd stayed to dinner; and the party of five sat down to a table at which, could the master of it have been persuaded, the first act of retrenchment might have been performed in the fish. The business was not suffered to intrude at dinner, Sir Walter having too much tenderness for the appetite of his lawyer; but when they were returned to the drawing-room, and the tea was made, he gave way to his feelings.

"I am hardly used, Elizabeth," said he. "I ask for a little advice, like any other man, and nothing is brought me but persecution. My own agent proposes to me to walk about my own grounds without a footman; and Lady Russell would shut me up in Somersetshire for a twelvemonth, to save me from ruin. If this is all that wisdom can do for a man, I wonder at the value set upon it."

Then Anne, who had not yet opened her lips on the business, spoke; and with a steadiness which silenced even her father for a moment.

"If the lesser plans are good for nothing, let us try what a greater will do. Let the journey to town be given up altogether—not shortened, but given up. Let the whole of the stable be given up at once, beyond what the farm requires, and not in detail. Let the menservants be reduced to one, and the table to the plain family dinner. Let there be no new furniture, no new wine, no company that is to cost any thing; let the greenhouse and the pinery be given up without regret. And—if my father can resolve upon it—let his own establishment be included, and his own man. I am convinced that nothing short of a sacrifice in which every one of us partakes can be of real use, or can be really respectable."

"My own man!" cried Sir Walter. "Anne, this is insupportable. A gentleman's valet is not a servant; he is part of his master's existence. What would you have?—that I should go about my own park unshaved?"

"I am for Anne's plan," said Elizabeth.

Every body looked at her; for it was perhaps the first time in her life that she had said so. "If we are to be poor, let us be poor with some grace," she continued, in the tone of a woman conferring a favour. "I am quite tired of half-and-half measures. To turn away a footman, and keep four horses, would only be to publish that we cannot afford ourselves; and that is the one thing in the world I cannot endure. But to give up town entirely—that has something in it that one can speak of without meanness. Town has been nothing to me of late years; I wonder that we go into it at all. Let us stay quietly at Kellynch, and let people say what they please. People who talk have nothing better to do; I have always despised them, and it will be a satisfaction to give them a subject."

Sir Walter was more overpowered by this concurrence than by all that had gone before. Against Lady Russell and Mr Shepherd he had provided himself with answers; for Anne he had contempt ready; but his eldest daughter agreeing with Anne, and agreeing warmly, was a combination for which no preparation had been made. He protested, he appealed, he reminded them both that resolutions were very easy in other people's stables and other people's kitchens; but nothing could be fixed. He grew grave; he acknowledged that there was something in what Anne said, and a great deal in what Elizabeth said; and then spoke of the state of the roads till the tea-things were removed. Of retrenchment, as yet, nothing was concluded, and Sir Walter was as far from a decision as when Mr Shepherd's paper had first been unfolded.

Mr Shepherd had listened throughout with the anxious attention of a man who watches a business approach its crisis; and when he saw the master of Kellynch Hall actually driven to admit that something might be done, he judged the moment too favourable to be lost. Drawing in his chair, he began, with more than his usual hesitation—

"If Sir Walter will allow me—there is a view of the case which has not yet been before him. The house, Sir Walter—a house of this size and consequence is the great article of expense; and if, without any derogation from the honourable considerations which—in short, Sir Walter, if, for a term of years, the house were placed in the hands of a proper person—some gentleman of the very first sort of consequence, who would do every thing of the best, and desire no alteration but for the better—an inmate quite of the family sort—if Kellynch Hall, in a word, were to be allowed to a tenant——"

"Tenant!" cried Sir Walter, in a voice which completed the sentence for him. "Never, Shepherd, never. Do not finish it. The word has not been pronounced in this house since I was master of it, and I will not have it revived now. Let my house!—hand over the rooms of my forefathers to strangers, to be smoked and scratched and spoiled by I do not know whom—while I walk out at my own gates for the world's amusement! And this from you, Shepherd, who have eaten my mutton these twenty years. I have borne a great deal to-day; but this finishes it. Let me hear no more of the matter; and let that word never be pronounced again in my presence. There—that is enough. The subject is closed."

He walked to the window as he ended, and stood some minutes contemplating his own shrubberies with the air of a man wronged. Mr Shepherd bowed, acquiesced, deplored a zeal which had outrun its discretion, and retired for the rest of the evening into the shade of the fireside, where he conversed with Anne on the state of the Uppercross turnpike, and was very entertaining at a small expense.

It was while the tea-things were still going, that the servant brought in a letter which had come over from the Uppercross direction, directed in a hand which Anne knew before it reached her. It was to Anne, and from Mary.

"My dear Anne,

"I am sure I do not know why I write, for nobody here has the smallest compassion for me; but you are the only creature in the world who ever understood my constitution. I have been excessively unwell all the week—a constant nervous headache, and my spirits so low that I cannot bear the sound of a voice. Charles is provokingly well, and plays at cards every evening, as if wives were made of nothing but card-tables. My father-in-law talks of nothing but his crops, and the Great House dinners would poison any body who had been used to Kellynch. Nobody inquires how I do from morning to night; and if I may not complain to you, I must give it up entirely. If you have any regard for me, come to me directly, and stay as long as you can. I want somebody to take care of me who knows what my health really is, and I am certain nobody can do it so well as yourself.

"Yours always affectionately, Mary Musgrove."

"Uppercross is very kind," said Sir Walter, on hearing its purport; and returned to the window.

"Poor Mary! She is always teasing," said Elizabeth; "but you may certainly go if you like, Anne, and I shall be glad to have the house quiet while the alterations are going forward."

Lady Russell said every thing that was kind and sensible. She thought the change would be a real good to poor Mary, whose complaints were, she feared, more the growth of Uppercross leisure than of any constitution, and no bad thing for Anne herself.

Anne had resolved before the letter was half finished. She knew exactly how much of Mary's suffering belonged to the headache, and how much to the card-table; but the distinction made no difference in her practice; the suffering was real to the sufferer, and to be of use where she was wanted, and missed where she was gone, were blessings of a kind which Kellynch had not lately offered her.

Mr Shepherd took his leave early, with a countenance which promised that no part of the evening's business should be suffered to cost his client a moment's uneasiness till the client could afford it. Lady Russell followed; her last look at Anne was a happy one, and her last words an assurance that she would hear from Uppercross soon. Sir Walter and Elizabeth then discussed, for the twentieth time, the comparative demerits of their two advisers, and went up to their rooms convinced.

Anne was alone at last, in the quiet of her own room, and could look the day in the face. Nothing had been settled. Her father had rejected Mr Shepherd's scheme because it was too small, Lady Russell's because it was too large, and her own because it was her own; and of all that had been said, the only permanent result was a single prohibition—that a certain word should never again be spoken before him. That prohibition had convinced Anne more than any thing else in the evening; for she could not but feel that the word which it was necessary to forbid, was exactly the word which it was necessary to consider. Whether Sir Walter would ever be brought to any point at all, was a question she had long ceased to argue; the difficulties of Kellynch might stand for years as they stood to-night, the bills gathering and the Baronetage unchanged, without one offer from any page of it towards their payment.

But her own course was clear. She would go to Uppercross. To-morrow she would write to Mary, and to-morrow she would tell her father; and she had endured too long the fate of being nobody at Kellynch, to hesitate an hour at the chance of being of consequence at Uppercross. With this resolution, the only one formed at Kellynch Hall that day, Anne went to rest; the affairs of the family remaining exactly where they had stood in the morning, and her own mind more settled than it had been at any hour since her mother's death.

The way back was slower than the way out. Madame Ratignolle leaned draggingly upon Robert's arm, confessing to a weariness in every limb; the children went on before with their nurses, straggling across the sand, their voices rising thin and remote, like the talk of birds. The sun was near its height; the camomile smelled hot and sweet along the path; and somewhere among the orange trees a mocking-bird sang in snatches, as though the day were too warm for anything finished.

"Mrs. Pontellier has been telling me about Kentucky," said Madame Ratignolle, after a silence of some minutes. "It seems she was a very singular child."

"She is a very singular woman," returned Robert. "That is the least of it. Do you know what I have been thinking, Adèle? The rest of us were taught everything we know—our swimming, our praying, our behavior—and we have never in our lives got beyond our lessons. Mrs. Pontellier was taught nothing; that I can discover. She is one of the people who learn."

"*Allons donc!*" murmured Madame Ratignolle. "Speak to me of swimming, when I can hardly drag one foot after another!"

"When she has once found the water good," pursued Robert serenely, "she will swim out farther than any of us, and nothing whatever will bring her back until it pleases her."

They came out past the vegetable gardens, and the white house stood before them in the glare. Madame Ratignolle went slowly up the steps, sighing like a woman of seventy; Robert turned back toward the beach, with the children hanging upon him; and Mrs. Pontellier, who had kept by the tent with Raoul and Étienne, came up to the house when the sun stood overhead.

The boat from the mainland came over early in the afternoon and brought up the mail. The quadroon carried a yellow envelope in to Mrs. Pontellier, who lay on the lounge in her room with the blinds half drawn against the glare. The message was from her husband: "Detained in the city; shall not come out on Saturday; let me know what you want. Léonce."

She read it twice, and waited, as one waits for a pain that has been foretold; but the pain did not come. What she was conscious of was not regret and not pleasure, but something of the sensation of an unexpected holiday. Detained in the city—she wondered drowsily what the business might be, and then why she took the trouble to wonder, for the business seemed already very far away. She folded the yellow paper and put it into the drawer of the little table by the lounge, and did not telegraph an answer. There was nothing she wanted.

She waked when the sun was already slanting and the island lay dozing in the heat. The boys were at the other end of the cottage with the quadroon; no one would miss her for an hour. She took the little key which she had carried down that morning through force of habit, and went along the path alone. The wind which had beaten the water into froth since morning had gone down, and the Gulf lay smooth and glittering, with the far sails as motionless as painted things. The bathers were all at their dinners or asleep, and the beach was bare from end to end.

In the compartment she put on her bathing suit and came out into the heat. The sand burned the soles of her feet. She had gone in this summer more than once, waist-deep, breast-deep, and always the water, closing over her, had defeated her at once with a dread she could not reason with and could not name. To-day she waded out slowly, and let the sea come up to her waist, to her shoulders. Her feet left the sand; the dread rose; she stood one instant against it, and then threw herself forward and struck out, as once she had struck out, a little girl, through the tall grass of the Kentucky meadow.

And she was swimming. Her arms went out and drew the water, and the water bore her. She counted—one, two, three, four—until she lost the count; then she stood up breathless and laughed aloud, quite alone on the sea. It was a triumph and a bewilderment together; she felt like some one newly arrived in a strange and delicious country. She tried again, and did better still; and then the bottom deepened all at once, and something cold and very old laid hold upon her heart. She turned and came back with slow strokes, as though she had swum all her life, and stood where the sand was firm under her feet.

She dried herself, dressed, and came out into the sun with the water still heavy in her hair. The sea held something that was hers now; she meant to come back for it when she knew better how. Of what she had done she told no one.

As she went up past the bath-houses, the lady in black sat on the gallery of the neighboring compartment, her book of devotions open on her knees, her eyes upon the water. She looked up as Mrs. Pontellier came abreast of her, and spoke—for the first time since the summer began.

"You have been in the water," she said.

"Yes; a little way. It was smooth," said Edna.

"They say it is treacherous when it is smooth," returned the lady in black, mildly, as one citing an authority she does not altogether believe. "I have not found it so. When it is smooth, it grants what one asks of it."

Edna, having no notion what was ever asked of the sea, made no reply.

"I saw you from here," said the lady in black gently. "You were farther out than you thought."

"I was not far," said Edna.

"No," the other agreed, and closed her book. She sat for a moment looking at the water. "The evening star will stand over the Gulf to-night. Those who have had much sorrow call it the star of the sea. I say my prayer to it when it is to be seen. You will see it very well from your own gallery."

Then she gathered her black skirts about her, bent her head, and went up the path toward the house, and Edna stood looking after her, the salt drying in rings upon her hair.

After dinner the customary little company assembled on Madame Lebrun's front gallery. The Farival twins played one of their duets, to which no one listened; the two young lovers walked arm in arm below, along the edge of the sand; the lady in black sat in the shadow with her book. It was still very warm; the wind had not come back; the sea made a low sound in the dark, like people talking in another room.

Madame Ratignolle, established in the light of the lamp with her needlework, made room for Mrs. Pontellier beside her, and sewed for a while in silence. Then, with her needle poised in the air:

"*Tiens*," she said, "I have something to tell you. Do you know what Robert said of you this morning, going home? He said—but you will laugh—that the rest of us were taught everything we know, our swimming, our praying, our behavior, and have never got beyond our lessons; but that you are one who learns. And that once you have found the water good, you will swim out where nobody can follow you." She laughed, and bit off her thread. "He makes a romance of us all, that boy."

"He talks like a book," said Mrs. Pontellier.

She said nothing more; her eyes were on the darkness beyond the railing, where the sea was. Madame Ratignolle spoke then of a jacket she was making for her husband, and of the children's shoes, and Mrs. Pontellier answered in monosyllables, at random. By and by Madame Ratignolle went home to her own children, and the others went, one by one, until only the moths were left circling about the lamp.

The cottage was still. Raoul and Étienne were asleep in the little room within, their breathing faint through the open door. Mrs. Pontellier sat alone on the gallery. The night was windless; below the steps the sea said over and over its one word; and low over the water hung the evening star—the star of the sea.

The telegram lay folded in the drawer upstairs. Her husband would not come on Saturday; she turned the thought over, and found it neither one thing nor the other. But what returned to her, with the patience of the water itself, was Robert's remark—not as he had made it on the sandy path in the morning, but as Madame Ratignolle had given it to her under the lamp: that she was one who learned; and that once she had found the water good, she would swim out where nobody could follow her.

She sat very still above the dark, and the words went on repeating themselves in her mind, evenly, like the sound of the sea.

We got on our legs together, Mr. Franklin and I, and took the way back through the sandhills towards the house. My old bones might have had something to say about the pace he walked, if the pleasure of his company had not stopped their mouths. He talked as we went—now in English, now in French, now in some third language which I take to have been German—about the heat of the railway carriage, the dust of the roads, and the stupidity of porters; and it went through me, I confess, like a twinge of my old lumbago, to think that this bright young gentleman in the fawn-coloured gloves was the same small boy who had once stood on this identical beach and borrowed seven-and-sixpence of me. Foreign parts had done it. I distrust foreign parts, on principle, and always shall.

But there! I must not run on about gloves and languages, when I had my daughter Penelope's commission lying on my mind. "Ask Mr. Franklin," says she, "about the jugglers." So I asked him.

"Mr. Franklin," said I, "did you fall in with, anywhere on your journey, three dark men, with a couple of drums, and a little English boy among them?"

He pulled up short on the sand. "Why do you ask?"

"Because they were here this morning, sir, on our own terrace, drumming and trick-playing, till I sent them about their business. And there's more of it than that. My girl Penelope followed them, and saw the chief of the three pour ink into the boy's hand, and put him into a kind of trance. And the boy said—mind this, Mr. Franklin—the boy said there was an English gentleman coming to this house to-day, and that the gentleman had got It about him."

"Got It about him," says Mr. Franklin, very low, repeating the words to himself. "Did the boy say at what hour the gentleman would come?"

"That he couldn't say. Close of day, or not close of day."

He stood looking back at the bay, and the sea beyond it, and I saw his face was changed from what it had been. "I don't think it a trick, Betteredge," says he.

"Then it's my opinion, sir, you have been too long among foreigners," I answered. But I protest to you, good reader, he believed every syllable of it; and I make no doubt—I knowing, as an old servant must, what matters are darkly spoken of in our family—I make no doubt what It was that he had in his mind. Not a syllable, however, passed his lips; and not a syllable passed mine either, till my lady's lips spoke the word for us both later in the day, as you shall hear.

"Now," says Mr. Franklin, "I'll tell you why I am here before my time. You looked for me in the evening. Bruff is the man who has sent me in the afternoon." He took a letter from the breast-pocket of his coat. "It was put into my hand in London. I don't know that I ought to show it—only I owed you seven-and-sixpence, Betteredge, and this is the interest."

He held it out to me, and I read it. It ran thus:

"Private.

"Dear Mr. Blake, — I have this morning received information which I do not think it safe to set down more plainly on paper than thus: I am not satisfied about the strangers who have lately taken an interest in your movements, and I doubt their being strangers you would care to know. Lose no time, therefore, in going down to your aunt. Go so as not to be expected. Travel as you please by the way; but arrive at the house hours—mark me, hours—before the time fixed for your coming. Whatever you carry about you of value or of consequence, keep it on your own person till you are inside your aunt's doors. Once inside them, place it under lock and key, in the custody of yourself or of one person only, and let that person be one your aunt would trust with her life. Say nothing of it to any living creature but your aunt. If any one questions you, remember that silence has never yet been cross-examined with success. — Yours ever, BRUFF.

"P. S. — Burn this."

"You observe the postscript," says Mr. Franklin. "I broke it for your benefit."

"Sir," says I, giving him back the letter, "a lawyer's letter is like a picture hung high on a wall. You may stand staring at it all your days, and be none the wiser for the looking."

"Bruff would be flattered," says he. "You observe, Betteredge, he says 'one person only.' And he says the person is to be one your aunt would trust with her life. My aunt would trust you with her life. So here I am, four hours before my time, and here you are."

I say nothing of what I felt. I only remark that a man of my age can ill spare the extra beating of his heart, and that it was worth a doctor's fee.

"And now," says Mr. Franklin, "there is a matter that cannot wait for my luggage. My boxes follow me round by the carrier from Frizinghall to-night. This does not wait for the carrier." He took from his breast-pocket—a small packet, wrapped first in silk and then in oilcloth, and sealed at the seals with a signet I didn't know. About the bigness of a good-sized pocket-book it was, and heavier, for its size, than I could have thought possible. "You will lock that up to-night, with your own hands, in the plate-room. The key stays on your own chain. You are not to open it; you are not to show it; you are not to mention it. Unless it goes missing—and then you are to send for me, and for no one else on earth."

"And what's in it, Mr. Franklin?" says I. For I request any reasonable man to say whether a packet could be pushed into a man's hands in that manner without the man asking what it was.

"You are a reasonable man, Betteredge, so I'll tell you," says he, smiling. "Your ignorance is your protection. If any one robs you of that packet, they rob you of nothing but a sealed parcel you have never seen the inside of. Ask me nothing, keep it safe, and you and I may some day shake hands over the whole business—like—" He stopped himself there. "Well! well! That's enough."

I put it away in my own pocket, and we walked on; and, when we were come to the firs, says Mr. Franklin, "About those three men this morning. Say nothing of them to my aunt."

"Not if she asks me, sir?"

"Not even if she asks me."

I didn't like it; but I agreed to it; and so will you, if ever a young gentleman looks at you as he looked at me.

At the house, Penelope was waiting at the door, before either of us could speak. "Father," says she, "Rosanna's not come in."

"Not come in!" says I. "It's past her tea."

"Nancy went out at four for her turn," says Penelope, "and from the top of the sandhills she saw a little grey cloak away north along the shore, past the North Spit, making for Cobb's Hole. And no Rosanna back since; and she had one of her fainting fits this morning; and she never stays out at night."

"She's where she's welcome, my girl," says I, "and the fish is good in those cottages, if the mutton here is better. She'll come home when her feet are cool." But I thought of her at the edge of the quicksand, pointing down at it with her finger, and I can't honestly say the words came easy to me.

"And did you ask Mr. Franklin?" whispers Penelope.

"I did."

"And what did he say?"

"He believed it, my girl; that's all I'll say."

I dressed Mr. Franklin's room, and saw to his hot water with my own hands, and about seven my lady sent for him. I attended him to the library door, and was kept in the room to take orders about his dinner and his bed; and there, if you please, happened the strangest reception that ever I witnessed in five-and-forty years of service.

My lady rose, and put her two hands on his shoulders, and looked at him. "Franklin, my dear! You are come four hours before—" and then he would have begun—"Aunt, before anything—"

"No," says my lady. "First one thing, which must be said first, or not at all. Mr. Bruff has written to me. I know as much as I wish to know, and no more. Now mark me. Whatever the business is that has brought you to Yorkshire—if it has, at any corner of it, anything to do with the Moonstone, I forbid the subject in this house. You are not to name it to me; you are not to let me hear it from you; neither now, nor while you stay under my roof, nor after. No one belonging to me is to speak of it where I can hear. Do you agree?"

There was a moment's dead silence. I saw Mr. Franklin's eye go round to me for one instant, and I kept my own eyes on the carpet like a well-conducted man.

"I agree, aunt," says he. "It is forbidden. On my word, from this hour." And he kissed her hand.

"Then," says my lady, sitting down again, "we will talk of your journey, of your health, of your father, of Rachel's birthday—and of anything else in this world you please."

I beg you will take notice, good friend, before we go a step farther, of what had passed and what had not passed. Not one word had been said, before me or in my hearing, of what had brought Mr. Franklin to us. The first word spoken on the matter, within doors or out of them, was a word of forbidding—and it was my lady's word. As for me, I bless my stars I had held my tongue about the ink-boy; for my lady would as soon have questioned the chimney as have questioned me, and there we were, all three of us, drinking tea over a secret that nobody would own to.

My lady asked after his journey, and his health, and ordered me to see that his room had the southern aspect. "Rachel is out on the cliff with her sketch-book," says she; "you will see her at dinner." Mr. Franklin's face brightened at that, and I took the opportunity of being wanted elsewhere.

I dined in my own sitting-room, on cold mutton, and I confess the ghost of another dinner—the suet pudding that had been ordered for Rosanna and never eaten—sat down with me at table. At nine the family dined; and what passed at the family table I no more concern myself with than the man in the moon. The noise of young people meeting again after two years' parting came through the door into the hall, and that is all I know, and all I am answerable for.

A little past ten, Mr. Franklin came to me with a candle. "Betteredge, the plate-room, before you sit down." So I took my own keys and went with him as far as the hall. The plate-room is off the end of the hall, with an iron-bound door, and my key has kept it these twenty years. I set the packet on the shelf of the strong press that holds the plate-chest, and my hand stayed on it a moment; for I won't deceive you—I did give it a shake, once, close to my ear. If it said anything to me, it said nothing that I understood. Then I locked the press, and tried the press; locked the door, and tried the door; and the key went back on my chain, and I came away exactly as wise as I went in. What was in it I no more knew than the babe unborn; and what is more, I never asked, from that night to this. I had my guess, like any other man. A guess is not knowledge; and whether my guess was right or wrong is a matter this narrative must settle for itself.

At a quarter to eleven I was in my beehive chair, with my feet up, and my Robinson Crusoe on my knee, and the candle at my elbow; and in comes Penelope on tiptoe.

"Father, are you asleep?"

"No, my girl. What is it?"

"Rosanna's not back."

"How do you know?"

"The boats came in to Cobb's Hole an hour ago, and I saw the light burning at the cottage from the head of the cliff steps. No cloak on the path. Nancy has been down and called, and got no answer but a dog."

"Shall I sit up, father?"

"No. Go to bed. If she is not here by six, I go down myself with the lantern."

Penelope went; and there I sat with my book, and I read, and I read, and never a word of it went into me. It was a still night, with the sea flat as a floor; and every now and then my ears would go off on their own account, listening for a foot on the gravel. I found myself thinking of that girl's finger pointing at the quicksand, and of what she had said about her grave; and then I gave myself a good shaking, and told myself that a girl's fancies and a girl's tempers both go to bed early, generally speaking. But I could not get on with my book for all that. Crusoe has been the friend of my whole life, and never, that I can remember, was he so poor company for me as he was that night.

So I leave things, good friend, till to-morrow. The packet locked away; the key on my chain; my lady's orders obeyed to the letter; the household abed; and, look where I might from the window, no little grey cloak coming home over the hills. Whether you would have slept, if you had been in my place, I can't undertake to say. I know I didn't.

"I know it," I said.

"It's been weeks and weeks," Brett said. "Everything is the same and something has gone wrong with it, and I couldn't tell any one. I couldn't tell you most of all."

"You don't have to tell me."

"I know. That's why I'm telling you."

"Those boys," she said. "They've gone on up to Montmartre to a party. I said I would come and then I didn't want to."

"Why not?"

"You know why." She put her hand over and held my hand, and the cab went on through the dark streets. "Did you dance with her? Your friend."

"They took her up. The tall one danced with her, and then the blond one, and then another one."

"You watched."

"I had a beer at the bar."

"Poor darling." She pressed my hand. "Where are we now?"

"We're going to the Parc Montsouris."

"I don't want a park. Take me to the Closerie des Lilas. There are people there and something to look at. I don't want to sit in a park and be miserable."

"It's open."

I leaned forward and rapped on the glass. "Closerie des Lilas," I said to the driver. "Boulevard du Montparnasse."

The driver put his head round. "The Closerie?"

"Yes."

We swung round and went back down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, past the gates of the Luxembourg with the black tops of the trees showing over the wall, and out into the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The Boulevard was empty and most of the cafés were shuttered, and the lights of the Vavin corner went by, and then there were the trees along the edge of the Closerie with the lamps in among the leaves.

The terrace was nearly empty. One or two tables had men sitting over the last glasses, and a waiter in a white apron was stacking chairs against the wall. We took a table that was still out, and the waiter brought Brett a brandy and soda and me a beer. The terrace smelled of spilled beer and coffee, and the waiter kept looking off down the Boulevard for customers that were not coming.

"I met a man last week," Brett said. "Last Wednesday it was. At a dinner at the Ritz."

"Who was he?"

"A man called Renwick. Gerald Renwick."

"Who's Renwick?"

"English. He's got the most tremendous money. Racehorses at Chantilly and a place in Yorkshire and a steam yacht nobody has ever seen."

"I never heard of him."

"Nobody has. That's how you know the money's real."

"What does he do?"

"Nothing. He told me doing nothing was the only thing worth doing if you had the money to do it properly. He asked me what I did and I said nothing, and he said I was the first woman he had met who did it properly too."

"He sounds like a great man."

"He has a beautiful house. He offered me a car. He said every woman ought to have a car of her own, and I said I could not drive, and he said he would send a man with it to do the driving."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. That's the whole trouble with me, Jake. There isn't anything to say." She looked out at the Boulevard, where a taxi went by with its light on inside. "He asked me down to Deauville for the week-end."

"Are you going?"

"Why do you ask me that?"

"I don't know."

"You know."

"Do I?"

"Yes, you do. Let's not talk about it."

She turned her glass round and round on the marble top of the table. "Why did you tell me about him?" I said.

"Because you asked."

"I didn't ask."

"You wanted to. There's a difference." She put her glass down. "Go back and get your fifty francs. I can't bear it, your losing money on that girl. She's sitting in there now spending it on those young men."

"She hasn't got it yet."

"Then go and get it before she does. I want to see the place again anyway. I liked the music."

We paid and went out and got into the cab and drove back up the Boulevard and up the hill past the Pantheon and down the steep little street. The policeman was still at the door and he smiled at us again. Inside it was as hot as ever, and the accordion had the tune to itself now that the banjo had gone, and the proprietor's bells rang on his ankle. There were only a few couples on the floor and two of the young men had gone. The tall one, Lett, sat at a table with Georgette and the daughter of the house, and the wavy blond one stood at the bar talking to the patronne, and there were beer glasses in front of every one.

"You have returned, Monsieur," the patronne said.

"I'll take my envelope now."

She took it out of the drawer of the zinc bar and gave it to me, and Georgette saw me across the room and said something to Lett, and Lett looked over and looked away again.

"You have come back for your fiancée, Barnes," Lett said.

"I came for my money."

"The one is the other," Lett said.

I went over to the table and put the envelope down in front of Georgette. "It's yours."

She looked at it and did not touch it. "I don't want it now," she said. "I am with my friends."

"Keep it."

"No." She smiled that wonderful smile with her mouth shut. "Who was the girl with the hair of a boy?"

"She's English."

"She is not a boy?"

"No."

"I said to myself, he has picked up a boy," Georgette said. "That's funny."

"She thought you were nice."

"I am nice," Georgette said. "Only nobody pays for it."

The daughter of the house brought a fresh bottle of beer to the table without any one asking for it. Brett came over. "I say," she said. "Is this your friend? Will you dance with me? I can't dance your way at all. You'll have to steer."

Georgette looked at me and then at Brett, and grinned and showed all her bad teeth. "Come on," she said.

They danced. The accordion was playing something slow and Georgette danced very straight, carrying her head level, and Brett kept getting it wrong and laughing, and the young men watched from the bar, and the proprietor beat time with his foot and the bells rang. The blond one said something to Lett and Lett said nothing. When the music stopped Brett came off the floor with her hair down over one eye.

"She's nicer than your friends," Brett said.

"Which friends?"

"The ones with the hair."

"You like them well enough."

"Well enough. Come on, it's late."

I went to the bar and gave the patronne back the envelope. "Give it to her when she goes," I said. "D'accord?"

"C'est entendu, Monsieur," the patronne said.

We went out past the policeman and down the hill. There were no taxis and we walked, and at the bottom of the street we crossed over and came out on the quai. There was a café just opening by the bridge, the chairs still stacked inside, and the patron got a table out on the sidewalk for us and brought coffee and a little pot of milk. The sky over the river was grey and getting greyer, and the barges lay along the quai with their lights burning low, and the water went by smooth and dark, and there was a smell of the river and of wood smoke from the barges. Across the bridge the flower market was setting up in the dark, and a woman was putting out pails of cut flowers along the edge of the stalls.

She put her hand flat on the table and I put mine on it, and we sat that way while the coffee cooled.

"Renwick asked me what I did in Paris," Brett said. "I told him I was miserable in the best company in the world. He thought it was a joke."

"Was it?"

"Ask me something else."

"It's getting light," she said.

"Yes."

"I ought to go."

"Yes."

"I shan't ask you to come with me."

"No."

The patron went back inside. Down the river a man was hosing the deck of a barge, and the sound of the water came over to us. I wanted to go with her more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

We drank the coffee and did not say anything about it at all.

"Where are you staying?" I said.

"The Hôtel de la Louisiane. Rue de la Renaissance."

"There'll be a taxi on the Place Saint-Michel."

We walked up the street to the Place. There was one taxi on the stand and the driver stood beside it folding his newspaper. I told him the Rue de la Renaissance, and Brett got in and leaned back in the corner the way she had before.

"Well," she said. "That was a priceless evening, Jake."

"Ring me up to-morrow."

"To-morrow." She pressed my hand hard. "Good night, darling."

"Good night, Brett."

The taxi went up the Boulevard with its light on inside, and I stood and watched it until it turned, and then I walked back down to the river. Along the quai the light was coming up on the water in patches, and the trees stood grey out of the mist, and the boxes of the booksellers along the parapet were locked, and the river was the color of the sky. A man came along washing the sidewalk in front of the café, and after him the first working people, going down toward the market with their little carts, and then a dray with two horses and the driver half asleep. Across the river the cathedral stood up black, and then it was not black any more.

I stood a while at the bridge and watched the water go by under the arches. It was a long way home and I was glad of it. I turned and walked along the quai, and the day came up grey and cool behind me, and I did not think of anything at all.

The rain, which had suspended operations while Eve talked to Miss Clarkson, resumed them with quiet resolution as she came down into Piccadilly; but for once in her life the weather had no terrors for Eve Halliday. She breasted the storm buoyantly, carrying the umbrella before her like a banner, and at the door of the Drones Club in Dover Street she paused, rallied her forces, and went in.

The porter of the Drones Club was a large, tranquil man. Some twenty years of admitting Drones had left him incapable of surprise. He had received in his day commissions of every sort and kind, and had long since given up expecting them to make sense; but he gave the young lady in the bird-of-Paradise hat the full measure of his attention.

“Could you give this back, please,” said Eve, “to the gentleman who lent it to me this morning? And this note with it.”

“And which gentleman would that be, miss?”

“I don’t know. He dashed out of this door, put the umbrella into my hand, bowed, and shot back again before I could say a word. Tall, thin, an eyeglass, and no conversation at all.”

“Very good, miss,” said the porter, receiving umbrella and note as though they were things he had been expecting all his life.

“It’s all in the note. At least–do you think one ought to sign a thing like that?”

“I couldn’t say, miss.”

“No more could I,” said Eve. And, deciding that in a world where tall strangers handed you umbrellas and vanished the whole point was mystery, she left the note unsigned and went out into the rain, feeling that the day had improved out of all knowledge.

* * * * *

At one o’clock the rain returned with heartiness and vigour, and with it returned the Hon. Walderwick, dashing into the club with his coat-collar up and rain down the back of his neck, to demand his umbrella.

The attendant looked into the cloak-room, then at the porter, and the porter, briefed earlier in the day, looked at the ceiling.

“The umbrella which was lent out this morning, sir, has come back, sir, and there is a note with it, and my instructions are to hand it over only to the gentleman who lent it out.”

“I lent it out! I mean, I didn’t lend it out. It’s mine. It was stolen.”

“Very likely, sir.”

“Who took it?”

“A gentleman with an eyeglass, sir. He inspected the whole rack very particular, like a jeweller.”

The Hon. Walderwick, who had come in solely in order to go out again, and was now in the position of a general whose artillery has been removed on the eve of battle, strode into the smoking-room. At the window, gazing across at the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe with the gravity of a connoisseur, he beheld Psmith; and beside Psmith, leaning against the window-frame, the umbrella.

“Look here,” said the Hon. Walderwick, “that umbrella’s mine.”

Psmith turned, and put up his monocle.

“You interest me,” he said. “In what way yours?”

“I left it in the cloak-room this morning, and your man outside tells me you walked off with it.”

“The evidence,” said Psmith, “is overwhelming. I did. But before you send for the police, let us discuss the matter calmly, as man to man. What would you take for it?”

“Take for it?”

“In money.”

“It’s a nine-and-sixpenny umbrella. I got it at the Stores.”

“Ten pounds.”

“I say, is this a rag?”

“I am never more serious than when buying umbrellas. Ten pounds.”

“You’d give ten pounds for a nine-and-six brolly?”

“The umbrella and I have formed a bond. It is a bargain, and you may tell your heirs so. Ten pounds.”

The Hon. Walderwick gazed at him for a moment as at a man speaking in tongues. Then:

“Have you got it on you?”

Psmith peeled the notes from a substantial roll and counted them out, and the Hon. Walderwick pocketed them with the air of a man in a dream.

“It’s the queerest thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “What on earth did you want with my umbrella?”

“That,” said Psmith gently, “we will not go into.”

“I shall tell this story at dinner for the rest of my life, and no soul will believe the good part.”

“Tell them, at least, that you drove a hard bargain. With what you have received you can purchase twenty-one umbrellas of equal quality and take a taximeter home.”

The Hon. Walderwick went out into the rain a wealthier and a wetter man, and the porter, approaching across the carpet with the umbrella, presented also a folded paper.

“The note that came with it, sir.”

The note ran as follows:

“To the gentleman who lent the umbrella.–Thank you a thousand times. You saved the one hat in London that I really care about, and I shall think kindly of you whenever it rains for the rest of my life. Please do not try to find out who I am, because it is much nicer not knowing, don’t you think?–THE GIRL UNDER THE AWNING.”

Psmith read it twice and put it away. Then he put up his monocle and gazed across the street at the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, which had ceased to be a piece of shop-fitting and had become a shrine.

“Don’t you think?” said Psmith to the umbrella.

* * * * *

English summer weather, having given two performances during the day, reserved its third for a quarter to four; and it was at a quarter to four that Eve, alighting from an omnibus at the bottom of Half Moon Street to walk the rest of the way to her appointment, was caught by the shower at the very door of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, and dived for the second time that day beneath the awning. History, which does not as a rule repeat itself with this sort of exactness, had plainly gone to some trouble in the matter.

Psmith, at the smoking-room window, could scarcely believe his good fortune. The umbrella was below-stairs in the cloak-room, reposing in the custody of the Government; and he went down and out into the rain without it, which was, he reflected, the first time in his life he had done such a thing, and the experience was not unpleasant.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

Eve turned. A tall young man was regarding her with grave friendliness through a monocle.

“I thought so!” she cried. “You’re the man who–”

“No,” said Psmith.

“But–”

“No. I have never in my life lent anybody an umbrella. It is a practice I regard as a form of lunacy.”

Eve stared at him for a moment, and then laughed helplessly.

“Then I must tell you the most extraordinary story.”

“I am all attention.”

“This morning a man dashed out of that club over the way, put an umbrella into my hand, bowed, and vanished without a word. I have been trying all day to make sense of it.”

“Were there any distinguishing features about this man?”

“He was tall and thin, and he wore an eyeglass.”

Psmith shook his head.

“Half the men in London answer to that description, and the other half are trying to. The affair is wrapped in mystery.”

“The infuriating part is that I couldn’t thank him. I took the umbrella back and left a note.”

“He will treasure it.”

“You think he’s the sort of man who treasures notes?”

“I am convinced of it. A man who lends umbrellas to strange girls collects notes. They are his recompense–the good action and the paper about the good action.”

Eve was silent for a moment, thinking her own thoughts about the coincidence of there being two such men in one street; then gave an exclamation.

“I’ve only just realised. I’ve been talking to you all this time, and I don’t even know your–”

“Do not ask my name,” said Psmith.

“But–”

“Names are fatal things. The moment you knew my name you would cease to think of me as a mystery and begin to think of me as somebody in a telephone book. Whereas at present you are a girl who talks to strangers under awnings, and I am a stranger. It is a much better arrangement. And on no account tell me yours. The instant you told me your name I should be under a painful obligation to tell you mine, and mine has disappointed everybody who has heard it.”

Eve laughed again. The shower, having done its worst, was trailing off across Piccadilly, and a grudging sunlight had begun to touch the wet street.

“I must fly,” she said. “I have an interview at five.”

“Concerning what?”

“A job. Looking after a lot of old books somewhere in the country.”

“If they prove difficult,” said Psmith, “tell them what a fine summer it has been. Men of authority cannot resist the weather.”

She went, laughing, and Psmith went upstairs and resumed his position at the window, where for some little time he watched the awning across the street with the thoughtful gravity of a general who has fixed upon a plan of campaign.

* * * * *

Lord Emsworth was staying at a hotel in Brook Street, and there, at five o’clock punctually, Eve presented herself. Mr. Baxter received her in the lounge–a tall young man, pale and dignified, with the manner of one who has never in his life missed an appointment and does not propose to begin.

“Miss Halliday? You are punctual. His lordship, I regret to say, is not. Will you be good enough to wait here? I will fetch him.”

He departed at the pace of a man carrying despatches, and Eve was left in a lounge at the end of which was a little winter-garden of palms and pot-plants. At the bottom of it, stooping over a rose-bush in a pot, she perceived a mild old gentleman, slightly bent, in a shabby tweed coat, smelling one of the blooms with his eyes shut.

“Oh, I say,” said Eve, “could you tell me–I have an appointment with Lord Emsworth. Mr. Baxter has gone to fetch him, but–”

“Eh?” said the old gentleman, looking up. “Emsworth? Yes. Oh, yes, he is about somewhere. He is generally about somewhere.”

“I’m glad he isn’t a dragon, anyway,” said Eve, emboldened by the mild face. “One does hear such things about earls. Do you know if he’s really keen on the library? Because if he isn’t, I’m afraid I shall have to pretend to be.”

“Yes,” said the old gentleman thoughtfully. “Oh, yes. Very keen,” added Lord Emsworth of himself.

“I have found his lordship, Miss Halliday,” said the voice of Mr. Baxter behind her. “Lord Emsworth–Miss Halliday.”

The floor of Eve’s morning opened beneath her feet.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh, I–I didn’t–I asked you–”

“Quite right, quite right,” said Lord Emsworth placidly. “Everybody makes the mistake. I am often taken for the gardener. I have often wished I was the gardener.”

Mr. Baxter received her stammered apologies with the air of a man placing them on file for future reference.

“You have written to his lordship, Miss Halliday, applying for the post of cataloguer of the library at Blandings Castle. You are, I presume, experienced in the handling of books?”

“Well,” said Eve, “I’ve sold them, and dusted them, and read a great many of them–”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Baxter, in the voice of one closing a dossier; and Lord Emsworth, who had been fidgeting for some moments, put up his pince-nez and peered at the rose.

“Do you know anything about roses?” he asked.

“That one has got black spot,” said Eve. “And it’s being watered far too much, and somebody has been snapping the dead blooms off with their fingers instead of cutting them.”

Lord Emsworth lowered the pince-nez and looked at Eve with the tenderness of a mother for a first-born.

“Baxter,” he said, “there is no need whatever to prolong this interview.”

“The formalities, your lordship–”

“A girl who can see black spot at a glance, Baxter, needs no formalities.”

“Very good, your lordship.” Mr. Baxter turned to Eve with the air of a monarch distributing a decoration. “You will receive a letter confirming the arrangement, Miss Halliday. You would come down to Blandings on Saturday next?”

“Oh, rather!” said Eve.

“She will come down on Saturday next,” said Lord Emsworth to the rose.

Which, translated out of the Baxter, meant that Eve had got the job.

* * * * *

Psmith dined that night in the grill-room of the Drones with Mike Jackson as his guest; and it was over the coffee that Mike leaned back with the air of a man about to be generous with information.

“Did you ever get round to that agency of Clarkson’s?” he asked.

“The day filled itself up with other matters. I have rarely known a day fill itself up so completely.”

“Phyl’s been on the telephone,” said Mike. “You know that friend of hers I was telling you about–Eve Halliday.”

“Eve Halliday,” repeated Psmith, putting down his cup.

“Eve Halliday. She’s got the job–cataloguing old Lord Emsworth’s library at Blandings. Phyl was in a fever in case the interview went wrong, but she’s to go down on Saturday, and Phyl’s delighted.”

“Blandings,” said Psmith musingly.

“Yes. It’s in Shropshire. Why? What’s the interest?”

“None. A name I have happened to hear in the air.”

“Odd name to hear in the air,” said Mike. “Well, I must be trotting. Phyl’s keeping something hot. So long.”

“Good night, Comrade Jackson,” said Psmith.

Half an hour later Psmith sat alone in the smoking-room of the Drones Club. The umbrella stood at his side, resting against the arm of his chair with the settled, proprietary air of a thing which had changed hands twice in one day and meant to stop where it was. Across the road the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe was folded for the night and the shop-front was dark; but Psmith was not looking at it. He was looking at the umbrella.

Eve Halliday. She had obeyed his instructions to the letter: her name had not passed her lips. It had been handed to him on a plate, with the coffee, by a man in the fish business. Psmith found the arrangement entirely satisfactory. One of the advantages, he reflected, of declining to ask women their names is that you are then free to learn them from other people.

He put up his monocle and gazed searchingly at the umbrella. It seemed still to answer every test.

He was well pleased with it.

I read the passage through twice, standing there in the grey early light of the library, and I do not think I shall ever forget a word of what it said. Then I put the book back where I had found it and let myself out by the side door. John knew where I was gone, and I did not wait to speak to any one.

It was a few minutes past six. The storm had broken in the small hours and spent itself before daybreak; every tree in the park dripped, the drive lay silvered with wet, and the smell of the soaked borders came up hot and heavy from the ground, for the morning was already close and sultry. It seemed strange beyond believing that the village, whose chimneys I could see beginning to smoke, should be going about its ordinary business, while up at the house lay what I had seen that morning.

Poirot lodged in a trim cottage near the church, sharing it, with another act of Mrs. Inglethorp's bounty, with two or three of the Belgian refugees. I hammered at the door, and it was opened before I had done hammering.

Poirot stood on the threshold, dressed from head to foot, not a hair out of place, the famous moustache waxed and pointed as though for a garden party.

"Hastings!" he cried. "You come from the house. I know it. The dear lady — she is dead."

"You have heard, then! But how — who told you?"

"It was Baily who told me — the chauffeur, no? Coming back from fetching Dr. Wilkins, he stopped at my gate of himself. He had a thought for an old man who owes everything — everything — to her kindness." For a moment his voice failed him altogether. "She was good to me and to mine beyond all reason, that lady. Mon Dieu, what a morning!"

"Then you will come at once?"

"I have been dressed and ready, my friend, since before Baily stopped at my gate," said Poirot quietly. "One moment — the hat."

We walked back almost in silence. Twice he stopped dead in the lane — once to look at the flooded ditch below the church, and once at nothing, so far as I could see, but the wet gravel at a turning of the drive. At the lodge gates he came to a halt.

"Continue, mon ami, and tell them only that I am coming. It is necessary that I arrive — slowly. The eyes, Hastings, should reach a house before the feet."

I hurried on up the drive through the dripping rhododendrons, and came out on the gravel before the porch to find a group at the open door that brought me up short. Alfred Inglethorp stood on the step. He was travel-stained, his boots caked with mud, and his big black beard was rough and wet with the drippings of the trees. Behind him in the hall were John, Mary and Lawrence, and Dorcas stood wringing her hands by the newel of the staircase.

"My mother—" began John, and could not go on.

"I heard it an hour ago, at the inn," said Inglethorp hoarsely. "The landlord told me, and I have been like a man dazed — I walked miles — I could not make myself come near the house. You ask where I was. I walked into the village with Dr. Bauerstein last night, and after I had left him I had an appointment — a man I had to meet at the Stylites Arms on a little matter of business, some affairs of my old firm that wanted untangling. The talk was longer than I meant it to be, and when it was over the storm had come down in earnest. You know how the lane below the church floods. I put up at the inn. I slept there, and I started back the moment it was light. From the time I left this house I never once came near it."

"If you'll pardon me, sir—" Dorcas had come forward, her hands still turning and turning in her apron, "but that part can't be right, sir."

He swung round on her. "Right? What do you mean, Dorcas?"

"I couldn't sleep for the thunder, sir, and my window looks down over the rose garden. When the lightning came it was light as day, and I saw you, sir, crossing the garden to the side door. Twenty-five minutes past eleven it was, for the stable clock went just before. And I heard the latch click after you."

He went white to the lips. "You are mistaken. It was too dark to see anybody."

"The lightning, sir. And you had on the brown coat — the same you have on now, sir, only it wasn't wet through then."

Lawrence drew in his breath with a hiss. Mary looked steadily at the floor. Inglethorp's eyes went from one to another of us, and there came into my mind, I cannot say why, that strangled dying cry on the bed.

"I may have come back," he said at last, and his voice had grown uneasy. "Yes — now you speak of it, it returns to me. I came back for a book — a book I had promised to lend Dr. Bauerstein — and went out again. It was nothing. It can have meant nothing."

"A book," said John slowly.

Inglethorp would have spoken, but John lifted his hand.

"No. This will keep. Later you shall tell us everything there is to tell. Your rooms are locked by the doctors' orders; I will have the blue room made ready for you."

And at that moment Poirot came quietly up the steps, the rain-washed gravel cracking under his neat boots.

"John," I said, "this is my friend M. Poirot, of whom I spoke to you."

John took his hand almost eagerly. "M. Poirot, we shall be glad of your help, if it can be of any use."

"Monsieur, I have no words," said Poirot. "She was kind to me and to all of us who have no country. If in anything I can serve you, command me."

Cynthia had come halfway down the staircase. Her eyes were swollen with weeping, and she clung to the bannisters. Poirot turned to her and made his little bow.

"Mademoiselle Murdoch? I shall ask you one question only, and it is of sleep — of nothing else. At what hour do you suppose you fell asleep last night?"

"I don't know exactly. I was fearfully tired. I went up soon after Mrs. Inglethorp, and I must have been asleep almost directly — nothing ever woke me, not even their breaking the door in, until Mrs. Cavendish was shaking me this morning." She shivered. "It frightens me, sleeping like that and not knowing anything."

"I thank you, mademoiselle," said Poirot. "It is enough."

John led us upstairs. At the door of the right wing he stopped and took out the two keys Dr. Bauerstein had given him.

"The doctors were most particular," he said. "Nothing is to be touched."

"Nothing shall be touched," said Poirot. "One looks — that is all."

At the foot of the stairs Dorcas touched John's arm. "If you please, sir, there's a man below from Tadminster — about — about to-night."

"Excuse me, then, for a few minutes," said John.

"Perfectly, monsieur. We shall be very good," said Poirot. "Hastings — the key, if you please, after him."

The key turned behind us, and we were alone.

The morning sun came flatly through the half-drawn curtains. The overturned table still lay where it had fallen; the glass that had held brandy stood on the washstand, smelling faintly sweet and spiritous; the gas bracket was out now, and the big bed dominated the room. On the dressing-table stood the despatch-case which Mrs. Inglethorp had asked Cynthia to bring her the night before. The hasp of the lock had been forced; it hung crooked on a bent screw.

For a full five minutes Poirot did nothing at all. He stood in the middle of the floor, his egg-shaped head carried a little on one side, his eyes travelling round the walls. Then he crossed to the window; the fastening was shot. He tried the communicating door with Mr. Inglethorp's room; that, too, was bolted on the inside. He glanced for a moment at the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece, and his gaze came back to the grate.

The ashes were not all ash. Among them lay the blackened edges of papers, brittle and hollow. Poirot went down on his knees, produced from his pocket a small case, and from the case a pair of tiny tweezers; and with these he drew out, delicately, a fragment no larger than a postage stamp, charred at all four edges. He held it up to the light and turned it over, once, twice.

"Is there writing on it?" I asked. "I can't see anything—"

"You see all there is to see, mon ami. A little scrap of burnt paper, blank on both its faces."

"Then what do you want with it? Poirot, what was burnt here? Who burnt it?"

He wrapped the fragment in a corner of his handkerchief and it vanished into the small tin box, and the box into his breast pocket.

"Do not ask me, Hastings. Not yet. Ask me to-morrow — ask me next week — but not yet. When the moment comes you shall know all — or, who knows? — nothing at all."

I was impatient, but I knew my Poirot. He continued his survey of the room, unhurried, cat-like, touching nothing, passing over the overturned table and the bed and the despatch-case with a look and no more. The village clock of Styles St. Mary came faintly through the shuttered quiet, striking eleven.

At last he set the little tin box down on the table between us. Through the half-drawn curtains a bar of late-morning sunlight lay across the bare wood, and on it, in the middle, lay the small charred thing he had taken from the grate.

"You find it a nothing, this scrap," said Poirot softly. "Burnt, blank, dumb. And yet it is the one thing in this room that some one was at very great pains should say nothing at all. Remember that, my friend. A thing that is made to say nothing is itself saying a great deal."

"I don't understand you," I said. "What do you mean? What was it once?"

The fragment lay on the bare table between us in the morning light, and I had not the least idea in the world what he meant.

The First National Bank was half a block up Broadway from the Great Western, a gray stone building with bronze doors and a lobby of marble and brass bars, cool as the inside of a safe and about as lively. I put my Continental card under a wicket marked ASSISTANT CASHIER.

The assistant cashier was a small, round-shouldered man of forty or so named Doane, carefully shaved, with the tired eyes of a man whose living is made saying no. He read the card, looked at me over the top of it, and set it down as if it were warm.

"I don't believe I quite understand, sir."

"I'm working on the Willsson murder," I told him. "Yesterday afternoon Donald Willsson wrote a five-thousand-dollar check on this bank. The stub gives the amount and nothing else—no name. Eleven hours later he was shot to death in Hurricane Street. I want to know whether that check has shown up."

"Banking information, sir, is confidential. The affairs of the dead, even more than of the living—" He stopped and fingered the card. "You will appreciate that old Mr. Willsson has been this bank's principal for thirty years."

"That's why nobody in this building is going to remember that I was here," I said. "You can put it the other way if you like: tell it later to a coroner's jury, with your depositors listening."

He didn't like that either, but he liked it less than the first thing. "If you'll be good enough to wait, sir."

He went away through a gate in the bars and was gone ten minutes. He came back with two ledgers and a stiff face.

"The check has not been presented at any of our windows," he said, keeping his voice down among the marble. "It has not been certified—certifications are entered the day they are made, sir, and there is no entry—and it has not come back through the clearing house. In brief, the check has not come home."

"And Donald Willsson himself? He left his office a little before three yesterday and was gone about twenty minutes—long enough for the bank and back."

"I made inquiry." Doane moistened his lips. "He was not here. Not yesterday afternoon and not yesterday morning. None of the tellers saw him at all on the day he wrote the check."

"So he went out and somewhere in twenty minutes handed that piece of paper to somebody, and that somebody hasn't tried to turn it into money yet."

"There has been no order to stop payment. Nor notice of death filed with us. On proper indorsement the check would be paid this afternoon." He leaned closer to the wicket. "Between ourselves, sir—the police have not been near us about Mr. Donald's accounts. Not once. Is that not curious?"

"It's either very funny or very sensible," I said. "Thanks."

He walked me to the bronze doors and said, with the first thing that had looked like a personal opinion on him: "I hope you find them. Mr. Donald used to come in with his father when he was a boy. He was a very fine young man."

Out on Broadway I gave it a think. The check had gone somewhere in twenty minutes, and nobody had tried to make it into money. Either the holder didn't need money, or the holder was afraid of what cashing it would say, or the holder couldn't cash it. And Noonan's men hadn't thought of the bank at all, or had thought of it and gone away satisfied, which in Poisonville would not be strange.

At the hotel, half past four, the desk telephoned up.

"A lady to see you, sir. Wouldn't leave her name. Says you know her."

"Send her up."

I hadn't asked her and hadn't sent for her. In Poisonville that made her the first original thing of the day.

Mrs. Donald Willsson came in on the first knock. She had put mourning on since morning—black suit, small black hat, a veil turned back from her face—and her gloved hands did not know what to do with themselves. The accent was still in her voice, a little thinner than the rest of it, mostly in the vowels. She looked as if she had not slept much and had decided nobody was going to find it out.

"You are the man my husband telephoned to San Francisco," she said, sitting down on the edge of a chair as if it were a dentist's.

"Yes."

"He did not tell me. I have looked among his papers, there is nothing—What work did he want of you?"

"He didn't say."

"You are a detective. You find things." Her hands twisted each other. "Then find—No. First tell me what you think of me. Mr. Elihu thinks I killed my husband. You have seen him. You have told him about—about my shoe."

"The old man and I didn't hit it off," I said. "He was free with the word hussy, and I was in the way of it."

"He hates me. He has hated me since Paris." She said it flatly, like a fact she had paid for. "But you. What do you think?"

"I think you left your house at ten-twenty and came back at eleven-five, and he was shot at ten-forty, and your slipper had blood on it. That's what I think."

She sat very still for a moment. Then the words came out of her all together, like water out of a tipped glass.

"At twenty past ten the telephone rang and I took it myself. A man's voice, very soft, very quick. He said: 'Your husband has been hurt. Come to Hurricane Street. Come alone. Come quickly.' And he rang off. I was a fool, but I went. I found—there was so much—" She stopped, breathed, went on. "I knelt by him. There was blood. Then a door opened somewhere and I was afraid and I ran to the car. When I was home I told the maid he would not be in tonight, because I did not know what else to say. I was not thinking. I was not anything. Yes. The blood on my slipper was my husband's."

"The people in that block saw two people bending over him. A man and a woman."

"They saw—I was alone." Her chin came up as she said it, which did not improve it.

"That line's worth six lines in the Herald," I told her. "Your husband had a date with me at ten. Instead of keeping it he was in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, where you went because a soft voice told you to."

She looked out the window at the roofs. "He promised to be home early. There were things—we were to have talked." Her mouth was bitter. "We did not do much talking, my husband and I. He kept everything. Even from me."

"Who told you I was here?"

"Miss Lewis was good enough to telephone me that a man from a detective agency had been at the office asking questions."

"You know your husband drew a five-thousand-dollar check a little before three yesterday?"

"I know nothing of Donald's money affairs," she said, too quickly for it to mean nothing.

"One more. Max Thaler went into your house this morning."

I watched her take that. The color went out of her face and left it an even, careful white.

"Max Thaler," she repeated. "I was not at home. I am not much at home now."

"But you know him."

"Yes." Nothing else.

"Kind to you when you first came to this country, that sort of thing?"

She stood up. "That is my affair, monsieur. I came to ask you—will you find who did this thing? I will pay you."

"The agency's been paid."

"Then do it for—for Donald. Or do it because whoever killed him will kill again if nobody—" She got her gloves straightened out one finger at a time. "You will not speak of the slipper. Not yet. To the police."

"I'll speak when it suits me. Chief Noonan and I will meet soon enough anyway, and I'd just as soon it wasn't over you."

She thanked me with her eyes down and went out carefully, carrying her feet as if the slippers were still wet. Through the window I saw the Buick coupé take her away.

At eight o'clock a bellhop knocked and handed me an envelope. "Fellow at the corner gave it to a kid, the kid brought it in. It's for the gentleman from Frisco."

The envelope was heavy good paper with my hotel and nothing else on it. Inside was a half-sheet printed in block letters, every letter made separately, like a schoolmaster's idea of a hold-up note, in blue-black ink:

THE FIRST NATIONAL IS NOT A HEALTHY PLACE FOR A STRANGER TO SPEND CURIOSITY. A CHECK THAT HAS NOT COME HOME HAS NOT BEEN MISSED. FIVE THOUSAND REASONS TO TAKE TOMORROW MORNING'S TRAIN EAST.

No signature. There didn't have to be. I had asked my question at the First National at two o'clock; at eight the answer came back by messenger boy, telling me to drop the check and go home. Only one man in town combined that much interest with that much caution. The note was Whisper Thaler's as plainly as if he had breathed it into my ear—and he hadn't come near the place himself, which was Whisper all over. I gave the bellhop a dime, asked what the kid looked like, was told he looked like a kid, and put the half-sheet in my pocket.

At nine I went down to the telegraph counter in the lobby and filled out one of the hotel's Western Union blanks. It ran:

OLD MAN, CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY, SAN FRANCISCO CAL =

DONALD WILLSSON MURDERED NIGHT OF MY ARRIVAL STOP SHOT SIX TIMES THIRTY-TWO CALIBRE IN ELEVEN-HUNDRED BLOCK HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY PM STOP NO ARRESTS =

WIDOW OUT OF HOUSE TEN TWENTY TO ELEVEN FIVE THAT NIGHT CAME BACK WITH WHAT LOOKED LIKE BLOOD ON SLIPPER STOP CLAIMS ANONYMOUS TELEPHONE CALL SENT HER TO THE BODY AND THAT SHE WAS ALONE =

DECEASED DREW FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK ON FIRST NATIONAL AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH NO PAYEE ON STUB STOP LEFT OFFICE TWENTY MINUTES SHORTLY AFTER BUT DID NOT ENTER BANK STOP BANK REPORTS CHECK NEVER PRESENTED NEVER CERTIFIED NEVER CLEARED NO STOP ORDER =

ELIHU WILLSSON HOSTILE INSISTS WIDOW GUILTY OFFERS NOTHING =

THALER VISITED DECEASED'S HOUSE NEXT MORNING AND TONIGHT SENT ME NOTE TELLING ME DROP THE CHECK AND GO HOME =

STAYING ON BOTH PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ANGLES STOP WIRE EVERYTHING FILES HAVE ON THALER YARD PETE THE FINN AND CHIEF OF POLICE NOONAN STOP ADDRESS GREAT WESTERN HOTEL PERSONVILLE =

CONTINENTAL OPERATIVE

The clerk sniffed at the length of it, counted my words twice, and took it away to the wire.

Upstairs I put the light out and sat by the opened window. A Broadway car clanged somewhere off to the east. Nobody had shot at me all day, which in Poisonville was something like progress.

A five-thousand-dollar check, drawn, signed, delivered to somebody inside of twenty minutes, and it had never come home. Noonan hadn't looked for it. Whisper didn't want me to look for it, which was as good as a receipt saying it was worth looking for. Out of all the somebodies in Poisonville, one of them was holding it, or had burned it in a stove the night of the murder, and that somebody knew more about Donald Willsson than anybody I had talked to yet.

I sat there alone with the check and the dark and the street noises until half past ten, and got nowhere. The Old Man's answer wouldn't be in until morning. Neither, probably, would the check. Somewhere in the black around one of those houses down there on Laurel Avenue it was waiting for daylight too, and its holder knew I was in town.