The Chapters

“About what?” I asked.

“Oh, everything. Don’t be stupid.” She opened her eyes and looked at the back of the driver’s head through the little window. “Tell him the Vert-Galant. I want to sit by the water.”

“At this hour?”

“Yes. Tell him, Jake.”

I leaned forward and gave him the word. He turned his head and looked at me, and then he shrugged and swung the cab round at the next corner. We went along the Quai, past the bookstalls with their green boxes shut and padlocked, and the lamps of the cab made a yellow ring on the cobbles. Then we were on the Pont Neuf and the river was under us, black and quick, with the lights of the bridge laid out in it. The driver stopped where the island comes down to its point under the trees.

Brett got out first. We went down a flight of worn stone steps to a strip of ground at the tip of the island. There was no one there. The river went by fast against the stone, and the trees were dark over us, and the sound of the water was all there was. Brett sat on the low wall with her knees drawn up under her skirt, the way a boy sits, and I sat down beside her.

“Well,” I said. “Here we are.”

“Isn’t it lovely? Nobody ever comes down here.”

“We came down.”

“We don’t count.” She laughed and put her chin on her knees. “I met a man last week, Jake. At the Ritz bar. On Tuesday, I think it was. Or Wednesday. You’d like him. Everybody likes him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Hector Vane.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Of course you haven’t. He doesn’t read the *Herald*.”

“What does he read?”

“The market reports. He reads them out at breakfast and says he’s a simple man.” She laughed again. “He’s from Pittsburgh by way of Lima. He has steel works and a motor-boat at Cannes and a wife in Pittsburgh who doesn’t count. And he has money, Jake. You can’t imagine how much. He carries it in a flat tin box in his inside pocket, as though it might get away from him.”

“He sounds very fine.”

“He’s most frightfully kind. He wants to take me to Biarritz in his car at the end of the month.”

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know. Would you like me to?”

“It’s nothing to me.”

“No. Of course it isn’t.”

A barge came down out of the dark under the bridge with one lamp at its bow and no sound from it at all. We watched it go through the arch and out of sight on the other side.

“He’s a fool,” Brett said. “But he’s a kind fool, and I am so damned tired of the other sort.”

“What other sort?”

“You know what other sort.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“I’m not being like anything.”

I was in love with her, and I wanted to hit Hector Vane, whom I had never seen and who kept his money in a tin box, and I was not going to say so.

“Don’t look like that, Jake,” Brett said.

“I’m not looking like anything.”

“You always look like something. It’s one of the things I like about you.” She put her hand on my arm and left it there. I did not move. The water was loud at the point and the lights of the bridge shook in it, and after a while she took her hand away and stood up and shook out her skirt.

“Take me home,” she said. “I’m tired, darling. I’m so tired of being everything to everybody.”

We went up the steps. The driver was asleep with his head against the window and his cap pushed down over his eyes. I woke him and gave him the address Brett gave me, a hotel in a street off the Rue de Rivoli, and she got into the cab and sat back in the corner with her eyes shut, the way she had done before.

I stood at the curb with my hand on the door.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, without opening her eyes.

“No.”

“No. I suppose you’d better not.” She opened them then and looked at me in the light of the street lamp, and she had the look she gets when she has decided something and will not say what. “Go and get your money back, Jake.”

“All right.”

“Good night, my dear.”

I shut the door. The cab pulled away from the curb and went off along the quai and round the corner, and its lamps went with it, and then there was nothing in the street but the wet pavement and the smell of the river.

There was one cab asleep at the rank across the way. I took it. The streets were empty and the driver went fast up the Boulevard Saint-Germain and we were at the bal in a few minutes. I had not expected to be sorry to get there, but I was.

The dancing was over. The accordion was on the floor beside the high stool and the proprietor sat with his eyes shut and his string of bells loose around his ankle. The policeman was still by the door. He looked at me the way he had before, but he did not smile this time. The proprietor’s wife was back of the zinc, stacking glasses.

“Monsieur has come back for his envelope,” she said.

“Yes.”

She went along behind the bar and came back with it and held it up, as though she had been keeping it for a long time and wanted me to see that she had.

“It is still sealed,” she said. “Monsieur did not tell me what was in it.”

“Fifty francs.”

“That is a lot of money for a bal.”

I took it and put it in my pocket without opening it. Then I saw Georgette.

She was sitting alone at a table near the wall with her hat on the bench beside her and a glass of beer in front of her. Her hair had come down on one side. The tall dark one, Lett, was not there, nor any of the others, and she was looking into the glass as though she had never seen one before. I went over and sat down across from her.

“Look who it is,” Georgette said. “The fiancé.”

“Are you still here?”

“Where would I go? You left me in the sweat box.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you? Where is your friend, the one with the hair?”

“She’s gone home.”

“With you?”

“No. Alone.”

“Hm.” She drank some of the beer and made a face at it. “They were all very polite, your friends. Each one of them danced with me once. Then they went off to Montmartre and left me the bill.”

I did not say anything to that. She looked at me for a while with her head on one side, and her mouth closed so the bad teeth did not show.

“You are not a bad type, Jacob,” she said. “For an American.”

I took the envelope out of my pocket and tore it open. I took out the fifty-franc note and put it on the table between us.

“What is this?”

“For a taxi.”

“I came here in a taxi?” She laughed then, properly, with her head back. “I walk everywhere. But thank you.” She folded the note small and put it in her bag, and the clasp clicked shut. “Bonne nuit, Américain.”

“Good night, Mademoiselle Hobin.”

She laughed again. “Good night, Monsieur the fiancé.”

I went out past the policeman, who nodded to me now as if we had come to some arrangement, and I walked down the steep street toward the river.

It was getting light. The sky over the roofs of the Left Bank had gone the colour of dishwater and then a pale green at the edge, and the chestnut trees along the quai stood black against it. The bookstalls were still shut. A man in a blue smock was hosing down the gutter in front of a café, and the water ran off across the cobbles toward the drain. Two men were fishing from the parapet below the Pont de la Tournelle with their lines in the brown water, and neither of them looked up when I passed.

I thought about Brett in the cab going up the Rue de Rivoli with her eyes shut. I thought of the man with the tin box, who would be asleep now in a big bed somewhere, with his money locked up and his breakfast market reports laid out for him in the morning. I thought that she would wake up in the afternoon and be sorry for an hour, and then not be sorry at all, and that there was nothing I could do about any of it, and that I had known that since before we ever left the Napolitain.

Notre-Dame came up grey out of the mist on the island as I walked. The light came over the roofs behind it and touched the top of the towers first, and then the water, which was going out fast and high under the bridges. I kept along the quai with my hands in my pockets and nothing in them now but the empty envelope, which I had not thrown away. It was morning. I walked on toward home along the river and did not hurry.

I was sitting up late that night over my papers, with the lamp turned low and the window open to the warm air, when I saw the thing fall. I had been glancing at the sky more often than was wise since the business of the red planet began, and I had grown used to the notion of a light in the heavens that had no business to be there. But this was no steady point of light. It was a streak, pale and swift and very brief, that drew itself across the upper dark from the direction of the Common and was gone before I could well say what I had seen. Then, low down above the black line of the trees, there came a flicker of greenish fire, like the flash of a distant lightning that made no sound.

I went out into the garden and stood a long while, looking towards the place where it had gone down. The air was very still. Somewhere beyond the railway a dog barked twice and was silent. I thought little of it, except that it had been a fine shooting star. Presently I went in, and my wife, who had woken to hear the door, asked me sleepily whether it had been a meteor. I said I thought it had. She said Ogilvy would be sure to know, and I believe we were both asleep again within the quarter hour.

It was my wife who would not let the matter rest. She had been down to the Chertsey road before breakfast, and came back with her hat half pinned and her cheeks flushed, saying that a carter had seen the thing drop into the sand-pits beyond the Common and that the water there was steaming like a kettle. I laughed at her, for carters have a gift for turning the commonplace into the marvellous; but she was in earnest, and I saw that I should have no peace until I had looked for myself. So, with my breakfast scarcely tasted, I took my hat and went with her.

It was a bright, warm morning, with a faint haze lying low over the fields and the sun already hard upon the hedges. The road was busier than I had ever known it on a weekday. Labourers went by with their dinner-cans, a pair of boys ran ahead of us shouting that they had seen it, and a cart rattled past with two men upon it talking loudly of a comet. Beyond the last cottages the Common opened out, rough with gorse and bracken and scored with the paths of the sand-diggers, and in the hollows the old pits lay full of water from the spring rains, grey and still under the haze.

We found the place by the smell before we saw it. There was a close, metallic odour upon the air, like the breath of a forge, and a faint hissing that rose and fell. The gorse had been scorched brown in a rough ring around the largest of the pits, and the grass between the bushes was black and flattened. Then, at the edge of the water, I saw the object itself.

It lay half-sunk in the pit, so that the water came up to a line about a third of the way along it. It was a great cylinder, or so it seemed to me then, its visible end rounded like the crown of a hat, and its surface had the dull, pitted grey of old iron, scarred with long seams and blistered here and there as though it had been in a furnace. Out of the water above the line rose a thin white vapour, lazily curling, and where the vapour thinned the wet metal glistened. The whole thing gave out a faint and irregular ticking, like a clock wound too tightly and slowly unwinding, or like a stove cooling after a long day. I could not see that anything in it moved. I stood at the edge of the sand and looked at it for some time before I could bring myself to think of it as a thing at all, rather than a fault in the landscape.

Ogilvy was there before us. He was standing on a spoil-heap a little way off with his notebook open and a pencil in his hand, and he waved to me with an eagerness that was almost boyish. He came down to meet us, talking as he came.

“Here is your meteorite!” he said. “I told you last night, did I not, that we should have something from the sky before long. Look at the shape of it. Look at the way it has bored into the sand. That is the velocity, you know. It came down at a tremendous pace, and the air heated it as it passed through, and the outer skin has run and cooled in these ridges. It is perfectly natural. Nothing could be more natural.”

“It is very large for a stone,” I said.

“Iron, I should think, or a mass of nickel and iron. There are specimens in the museums at South Kensington that would make your hair stand on end.” He stooped and peered at the seams near the water. “Do you see how the plates meet? That is cooling. It contracts as it sets, and the metal goes into these little cracks. Listen to it. That is the same sound.”

“And the light?” I asked. “The flame Lavelle wired about, and the ten nights of it? You told me yourself it was an outbreak upon the planet, that the gas had been squirted towards us. Surely this is part of the same business.”

He was silent a moment, and then he shook his head with the air of a man who has been asked a question he has already answered to himself. “It is the same business in the sense that these things come from the same sky,” he said. “But those flames were volcanic, or something of the kind upon the surface of Mars. What fell into this pit is a stone. Stones do not send messages.”

“I did not say that they did.”

“No, but you were going to.” He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “Come, my dear fellow, be reasonable. The chances against anything manlike on Mars are a million to one, and the chances that a lump of iron should fall out of the sky on to our own common are, I grant you, a good deal better than that. Let us be scientific about it.”

My wife had not spoken. She had walked a little way along the edge of the pit, and now she stood very still, looking at the cylinder with a face I could not read. “It is warm,” she said at last. “I can feel it from here.”

I thought she meant the air, and I said so. But she only shook her head.

By then the Common was filling. The boys who had shouted on the road had brought their fathers, and the carter had brought half of Ottershaw, and there were people coming up from Chertsey too, some in their Sunday coats, most in their shirtsleeves, with the abundant curiosity of those who have heard that something has happened and have not yet been told what it is. A policeman came down the Chertsey road at a trot, sweating, and was met with a good deal of cheerful advice. The crowd spread along the bank of the pit in a loose half-circle, the children crept forward through the bracken to be nearer, and somebody began to joke about what the saucepan would be wanted for.

It was a young fellow from the brickworks who touched it. I think he meant nothing but to settle the question. He had been standing near the water with his mates, daring one another, and when the policeman turned to shout at the children he slipped down the bank, put out his hand, and laid his palm flat against the grey flank of the cylinder just above the water line.

He snatched it back with a yell that brought every head round. For a moment he stood holding his hand against his chest, staring at the palm, and then he began to swear in a high, astonished voice. I saw the skin of it, red and already blistering, and I smelt the scorched flesh over the hot iron. Two of his mates pulled him back up the bank, someone ran for water, and the crowd, which had been so cheerful a minute before, fell suddenly quiet and drew back a step from the edge of the pit.

“It’s hot,” the boy said, wonderingly, to nobody. “Lord, it’s hot as a kiln.”

Ogilvy had gone pale. He looked at the cylinder, then at his notebook, then at the boy’s hand, and I saw him begin to reckon something in his head and not like the answer. “It is cooling,” he said, rather loudly, as if the crowd had asked him. “It has come a very long way, through a great deal of heat, and it will take a good while to cool. There is nothing in that to be alarmed at. Keep back from the water, all of you. The steam is only steam.”

Nobody argued with him. Nobody, indeed, moved very far away, for the thing had a fascination that the boy’s burn had only sharpened. I saw an old man in a corduroy coat crouch at the edge of the sand and stare at the seams as though he expected them to open for him. A woman with a baby on her hip asked, in a whisper that carried across the whole pit, whether it was alive. Ogilvy said it was not, and she did not seem convinced.

My wife came to my side and took my arm. Her fingers were cold, although the morning was warm.

“We should go home,” she said.

“Presently,” I said. “I want to see whether it moves when the sun is higher.”

“Whether it moves?” She looked at me sharply. “You do not really think it will?”

“I think nothing at all. I am a man who has been up half the night and wishes to know what he saw.” I patted her hand. “Ogilvy will be here for hours yet, and he will tell us everything we need to know.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and I think she saw more in my face than I had intended. Then she looked at the crowd, which was thickening now along the rim of the pit, and at the boy from the brickworks sitting on the bank with his hand wrapped in somebody’s handkerchief, and at the thin white thread of steam going up into the blue.

“Come home by noon, then,” she said. “And promise me you will not put your hand on it.”

I promised, and she smiled, though not very warmly, and turned away up the path towards the road. I watched her go between the bracken and the gorse until she was lost among the cottages, and then I turned back to the pit.

The sun had climbed high over the Common, and the haze had lifted off the water. The crowd had doubled since I came down the bank, and those at the back were pushing forward to see over the heads in front. Ogilvy was still scribbling in his notebook. The ticking went on, slow and regular, and the steam rose and was drawn away on the faint breeze. I found I was counting the ticks, as one counts the strokes of a clock in a sickroom, and I had reached a hundred and something before I noticed what I was doing and stopped.

I stayed where I was. I told myself it was curiosity, and that there was nothing in it but the natural interest of a man who had seen a star fall. But I think, looking back, that something in me had already begun to listen.

Edna did not hear what passed between them on the walk back. She followed at a little distance with the children, who had quarrelled over a broken shell and were being brought to order, by turns, with threats and with coaxing. Ahead of her the two figures moved slowly along the sandy path: Madame Ratignolle leaning heavily upon the arm that was offered her, her gauze veil thrown back from her face; and Robert, bending his head close to hers, as a man does when he means to be heard and not overheard. Once Madame Ratignolle laughed, a low and indulgent sound that drifted back across the camomile. Once she shook her head.

At the gate she withdrew her hand and went up the steps of her cottage without turning round. Robert did not follow her, nor did he come on to the Pontelliers’ gallery. He lifted his hat from the road and went off in the direction of the hotel, whistling under his breath, and Edna watched the white of his coat grow small among the trees until it was lost altogether.

The telegram came a little before noon. It had been carried over from the hotel by one of Klein’s boys, who stood barefoot upon the steps with his cap crushed in his hand while Edna tore the envelope open. She read it in the doorway, with the sun striking white upon the paper.

*Business detains me in town. Shall not come out Saturday. Léonce.*

She read it a second time, folded it along its creases, and put it away in the pocket of her skirt. She searched herself for disappointment and did not find it. What she felt was rather a loosening, as though some slight constraint had been lifted without her being asked to lift it; and she was a little ashamed of the feeling, and did not try to account for it. She gave the boy a coin. He thanked her in French and ran off down the path, and the soft slap of his feet upon the sand went on for a long time after he was out of sight.

The afternoon was very hot. The children slept behind drawn blinds, Raoul with one fat arm flung above his head, and the cottage had the drowsy stillness of a place where everyone has gone to sleep except the flies. Edna did not sleep. She sat by the window with a book open upon her knees, and when she had turned the same page three times she let the book fall shut.

Adèle came over about three o’clock, refreshed, she said, and with her roll of needlework tucked under one arm. She took the wicker chair nearest the window, drew out her needle, and for a little while said nothing of consequence, remarking only upon the heat, and the bronze the sun was giving the children’s legs, and the excellent sense of Madame Lebrun in keeping the blinds down. Then she set a stitch, looked up, and laid her work in her lap.

“I have something to tell you, *ma chère*,” she said, “and I am going to tell it because I cannot keep it; and you would be vexed with me afterward if I did.”

“Then tell it,” said Edna.

“It was Robert, this morning, on the way home. He had been very quiet until we reached the gate, and then he said—” Madame Ratignolle hesitated, and the color deepened in her cheeks, though whether from the heat or from the telling it would have been hard to say. “He said, ‘Mrs. Pontellier does not know how beautiful she is; and I think that is the most dangerous thing in the world, for the man who finds it out.’”

Adèle laughed, a soft, pleased laugh, and took up her needle again. “Is it not foolish? Men say such things to amuse themselves. Only I thought you ought to know how very foolish he is.”

Edna felt the heat rise into her face. She laughed too, but the sound seemed thin to her own ears, and she bent her head over the book in her lap as though she were searching for a word in it. “Robert always has something to say,” she murmured.

“Always,” agreed Madame Ratignolle serenely. “Only this time it was about you.”

When she had gone, with her fan swinging from its long ribbon and her needlework secured again in the depths of her pocket, Edna went to the glass and looked at herself for a long time. She saw a woman of twenty-eight with a flush across her cheekbones and her yellow-brown hair coming loose at the temples. She had never thought of herself as beautiful. She had thought of herself, when she thought at all, as something that moved about in the world and was looked at, in the way one looks at the sea without considering whether the sea is beautiful. It seemed strange to her that a man had been studying the matter.

She pushed the hair back and pinned it hard. Then she went to the peg outside the door, took down the big straw hat, and stood for a moment with it in her hands. The sun had begun to slant westward, and the light lay long and yellow across the gallery floor. She did not wake the children. She told the nurse, in a voice she kept carefully even, that she would be down at the beach for an hour, and she did not say what she meant to do there. She had brought her key through force of habit, as she had that morning, and she carried it now in her closed hand.

The beach was almost empty. The lady in black sat on the gallery of a bath-house a little way along, her prayer-book open upon her knees, and she did not look up when Edna passed. Edna let herself into her compartment, changed into the dark-blue bathing suit she had worn since June, and went down to the water.

It was warm at the edge, where the small waves broke, and cooler a few steps out, so that she caught her breath and then laughed at herself for catching it. She waded on until the sand dropped away and the water rose about her shoulders, lifting her, nudging at her as if it would turn her over and see what she was made of. Then she remembered the meadow: the little girl with her arms beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. She let herself go.

She threw her arms out. She kicked, awkwardly, swallowed a mouthful of salt, went under, came up spluttering, and kicked again. The sea held her. It did not seem to lift her so much as to consent to be pushed against, and each stroke she made went a little way ahead of her and stayed there. She made four strokes, then five, then six, her face now out of the water and now in it; and then she was breathless and turned, and the shore was there where she had left it, with the bath-house and the long yellow line of the sand.

She stood in the water with the waves going past her and laughed aloud, a bare, delighted sound with no one to hear it but the gulls. She would not tell anyone. There was no one to tell, she reflected, and she found, rather to her surprise, that she did not want to tell anyone. It seemed to belong to her and to the sea alone, like the meadow, and she meant to keep it.

When she came out of the water, shivering and flushed with the cold of it, the lady in black had risen from her bench and stood at the edge of the gallery. She was a woman of perhaps fifty, in a black stuff gown that had been brushed so often the nap was gone from it, and she regarded Edna over the top of her book with a grave and steady attention.

“You should not go so far out alone, madame,” she said. “The water is deceptive here at this hour, when the tide begins to turn.”

“I was not far,” said Edna. “I was only swimming a little.”

The lady in black considered her a moment longer. “It is easy to go farther than one intends,” she said. Then she sat down again and opened her book.

Edna dressed quickly and walked home along the sandy path with her hair dripping down her neck. The camomile had closed its yellow heads against the evening. Beyond the orange trees the sky was going pale and gold, and the sea behind her had changed from blue to a soft gray.

The children were fed and bathed and put to bed. Edna went in to them once in the dusk and stood a moment beside the little cots, and then she came away again without a word.

Later, when the house had gone quiet and the lamp in the room behind her had been turned low, she sat alone on the gallery in her wrapper with her feet drawn up beneath her. The sea made its long, unhurried sound beyond the dunes. Somewhere along the row a door closed, and a woman laughed softly and was answered by a man’s voice, and then all was still again. Edna did not look toward the hotel. She sat with her face to the dark, and the words came back to her as the sea came, steadily and without haste, in the low voice in which Adèle had repeated them: that she did not know how beautiful she was. She turned them over as one turns a shell found upon the sand, listening to hear what it might say of her; and she did not yet know whether it was true.

The train had stopped, and it was the stopping that woke her. Mary sat up and rubbed her eyes with the back of one thin black-gloved hand, and for a moment she could not remember where she was. Then she saw Mrs. Medlock's purple velvet flowers bobbing in the opposite corner as their owner gathered up her umbrella and bag, and it all came back to her: the rain, the long journey, and the moor that lay somewhere ahead of them in the dark.

"Thwaite," said Mrs. Medlock, buttoning her black mantle. "Look sharp. There's a long drive yet, and I'll not have the carriage kept waiting for you."

The rain had stopped, or nearly stopped. When the door was opened a cold air came in, smelling of wet stone and of something sharp and bitter that Mary had never smelled before. It made her shiver in her black frock. There was a platform with one lamp burning at the end of it, and a few people hurrying along it with their collars turned up. Beyond the lamp she could see nothing at all. The dark lay over everything, very wide and very quiet, as though it had been poured out and left to settle.

Mary climbed down behind Mrs. Medlock, holding tightly to the rail, and stood on the wet boards while a porter swung her small trunk down after her. Then she saw him.

He was standing a little apart from the others, near the lamp, as if he had no wish to be jostled. He was not a tall man. He wore a long dark overcoat and a soft hat pulled low, and when he turned his head Mary saw that one of his shoulders sat higher than the other and that the coat hung on him in a way which suggested a crooked back underneath, exactly as Mrs. Medlock had said. His face was thin and pale, and his eyes, under the brim of his hat, were very dark and very steady. They looked at Mary for what seemed a long time. She did not intend to be looked at without looking back, so she lifted her chin and looked back.

*Mr. Archibald Craven,* she thought. It must be.

"Mrs. Medlock," he said. His voice was low and dry, and it sounded as though it had not been much used lately.

"Mr. Craven, sir." Mrs. Medlock bobbed. "Here she is, sir. Not so large as I expected, but she came through the voyage right enough."

He did not answer that. He looked at Mary again.

"You are Captain Lennox's child."

"Yes," said Mary. "My name is Mary Lennox."

"Yes," he said. He looked at her a moment longer, then turned his head toward the dark. "The carriage is ready. Medlock will see to you."

That was all. He did not offer his hand, nor ask whether she had been comfortable on the train, nor smile. Mary had made up her mind in the carriage that she did not care in the least how he behaved, and she found that she was rather glad of his silence, because it saved her the trouble of pretending to be anything at all.

A groom was holding a tall black horse at the far end of the platform. Mr. Craven went to it without a backward glance, and in a moment he was up in the saddle and gone into the dark. Mary heard the hooves on the road, growing fainter, until the wind took them away.

The carriage was closed and smelled of damp straw and old leather. Mrs. Medlock settled herself in one corner with her umbrella across her knees, and Mary took the other, and the horses were started. For a long time there was nothing to see. The lamps made a small yellow room of the carriage, and beyond its windows was a darkness so complete that Mary, pressing her face to the glass, could not tell whether her eyes were open. Now and then a pale gleam showed on either side of the road, which might have been a wall or might have been loose stones. The road climbed. She could tell it by the way the horses leaned into their collars, and by the way the wind came against the carriage in long pushes, first from one side and then from the other, as if it were searching for a way in.

Once, far out in the blackness, a cry went up. It was long and thin and wild, and it rose and broke and fell away again, and Mary sat up straight with her heart beating rather fast.

"Curlew," said Mrs. Medlock, without opening her eyes. "Tha'll hear 'em all night on the moor. Sit still."

Mary did not sit still. She sat as still as she could, which was not the same thing, and she kept her eyes on the glass.

Then the carriage stopped so suddenly that Mrs. Medlock's bonnet nearly slid over her face. There were shouts from the box, and the stamp of hooves, and the sound of something heavy shifting on the road ahead.

"What's amiss?" called Mrs. Medlock, pushing up her bonnet with both hands.

"Summat's i' t' road, missus!" the coachman shouted back. "Sheep, Ah reckon. There's a whole lot on 'em. Can't get by without we wait."

Mary already had her hand on the door. Mrs. Medlock caught at her sleeve.

"Sit thee down! Tha'll not go out in this!"

But Mary had the door open and was down on the road before anyone could stop her. The ground was soft under her boots, and the wind struck her full in the face and pulled at her hat so that she had to hold it on with one hand. Ahead, in the light of the carriage lamps, there was a crowd of white shapes pressing and bleating together, their eyes flashing green as they turned their heads. The coachman was walking among them, waving his arms and calling out in his broad voice, and beyond the lamplight the road was simply lost, as if it had been rubbed out.

Mary stepped away from the carriage. She went to the edge of the road and then, because nobody was watching her now, she stepped off it altogether, onto the grass, which gave under her feet and was wet through her stockings at once. She took three steps, then four, away from the light. She turned round. The carriage lamps looked very small, two yellow eyes set in a huge black shape, and the sheep had become no more than a murmuring of pale backs. Nothing else was anywhere. There was no house, no tree, no hedge, no fence, no sign of any living thing except the wind itself, which came rushing over the empty ground from a great distance, with nothing to stop it. The air was full of the smell of wet earth and that bitter sharpness, and the sky above was so large and so black that Mary felt for a moment as though she were standing at the bottom of the sea.

She was not frightened. She thought about that afterward and was quite sure of it. She was only very much aware of how small she was, and how little it seemed to matter to anyone whether she was standing there or not.

"Come back this minute!"

Mrs. Medlock was coming across the grass toward her at a considerable pace, her skirts gathered in one fist and her bonnet bent double by the wind. She seized Mary by the arm with a hand like a clamp and hauled her back toward the road.

"Eh, what a child! Standing out on the moor in the dark, and the sheep all over the road, and you with your feet soaked through! Get in with you."

Mary was pushed into the carriage and the door slammed behind her. A moment later the sheep had parted like water, the coachman was up on the box calling to the horses, and the carriage lurched forward and went on up the long climb.

They came to Misselthwaite Manor very late. Mary knew it only because Mrs. Medlock said so, and because the house, when at last it rose out of the dark, was a long low shape against a sky that was a shade less black than the land. There were only a few windows lit. The carriage came round a sweep of gravel and stopped before a door, which was opened by a man holding a lantern, and then there was a hall with a fire burning in it and a great many shadows, and a staircase, and corridors which went on and on and turned, so that Mary lost count of them and gave up trying.

Mrs. Medlock brought her to a room at last. It had a fire, not very large, and a bed with dark hangings which looked to Mary like a small house all of its own. There was a table with a white cloth, and a window with its curtains drawn.

"Now you'll have your supper," said Mrs. Medlock, "and then you'll go to bed. Master's not to be disturbed, and you'll keep to these rooms. There's no call to go wandering."

She went out, and in a few minutes the door opened again and a young man came in with a tray. He was broad and red-faced, with sandy hair standing up at the back, and he set the tray down on the table with a clatter that made the cups jump.

"Here tha art, then," he said. "Ah've browt thi supper. It's nobbut broth an' bread an' a bit o' cold mutton, but it's hot, so get it down thee while it's warm, lass."

Mary looked at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"Ah said it's nobbut broth an' bread—"

"I do not understand you," said Mary. "I cannot understand a word of what you are saying. You talk in such a queer way. It is nearly like another language. Why do you not speak properly?"

The young man stared at her. He had the look of a person who has been told that his own tongue is foreign, and does not know whether to be offended or amused. He scratched the back of his head.

"Eh, well," he said at last, slowly. "Ah reckon Ah'm speakin' as Ah allus speak."

"Then I shall not understand it," said Mary. "You must say it again more slowly."

He said it again, very slowly, as if she were either a foreigner or simple, and it was no better. Mary decided to eat her supper instead of arguing, which was a thing she did not often decide. The broth was thick and very hot and tasted of something she could not name, and she found, rather to her annoyance, that she was extremely hungry. She ate all the bread and most of the mutton and drank the milk, and she did not look up while she ate, so she did not see the young man watching her from the door with an expression that was almost friendly. When she had finished he took up the tray without a word and went out, and the door closed quietly behind him.

Mrs. Medlock came back to see her into bed. She unbuttoned Mary's frock with quick, impatient fingers and dragged a nightgown over her head, and she made a remark about the state of the stockings which Mary did not care to hear. Then she took up the candle.

"Now, into bed with you, and no more nonsense."

Mary got in. The sheets were cold, and then they were not, and she lay with her black hair spread over the pillow and watched the candle flame lean and steady. Mrs. Medlock went to the door, paused with her hand on the latch, and then came back to look at the fire, which was almost out. She poked at it, and it gave up a little light and a little heat, and then she turned round with the candle again.

It was then that Mary heard the sound.

It came from somewhere beyond the wall, very faint, so that at first she thought it was only the wind moving against the window. But the wind did not stop and start. This did. There was a soft, dragging scrape, as though something heavy were being pulled slowly across a bare floor, and then a short dull thump, and then nothing at all. Mary lay quite still and listened with her whole body. The silence went on so long that she began to think she had imagined it. Then it came again: the scrape, the thump, and after it a sound that might have been a footstep, very light, going quickly away down some passage she could not see.

Mary sat up.

"What is that noise?"

Mrs. Medlock looked at her over the candle, and her red face did not change in the least.

"It's nowt but the wind."

"It is not the wind," said Mary. "It sounds like somebody moving things about. It sounds like a door."

"Wind in a house this age does all manner of things," said Mrs. Medlock. "Six hundred year old, this place is, and there's draughts in every passage that'll whistle and bang and knock about as if there was a body in every room. You'll hear it all night if you listen. Lie down and go to sleep."

"But—"

"Lie down," said Mrs. Medlock, in the voice of a woman who would stand no nonsense from young ones, and she went out and shut the door.

Mary lay down. The room was dark now, except for a thin line of light under the door, which went out as Mrs. Medlock's footsteps went away along the passage. The fire was a dull red glow, and then it was only a faint warmth in the air. The wind pushed at the window and went away again. Mary lay on her back with her eyes open and her hands folded on the sheet, as she had folded them in the railway carriage, and she waited.

For a long time there was nothing. Then, very faint and far off, the scrape came once more, and the thump after it, and then the light footstep going away.

Mary did not sleep. She did not want to. She listened until she was sure of the direction the sound came from, and then she lay still in the dark and made up her mind. Mrs. Medlock had said it was the wind, and Mrs. Medlock had said it in a way which meant she did not believe it herself. Nobody in this house would tell her anything. Nobody at Misselthwaite seemed to think it was worth the trouble.

She would find out for herself what it was.

Lady Russell called the next morning with a plan. She had sat up a considerable part of the night composing it, and had gone through the household accounts with a patience she would not have thought necessary for any other family's affairs. By dint of much arithmetic she had arrived at a scheme which she could not doubt would recommend itself to a man of sense. She found Sir Walter in the library, the Baronetage open upon the table before him as usual, and Elizabeth at his elbow, composing a list of the families who were to receive cards before the autumn.

"My dear Sir Walter," said Lady Russell, when the first civilities had been got through, "I have thought a great deal of your situation since we last spoke, and I have thought of it with the most sincere concern."

Sir Walter inclined his head, and waited to learn what sort of concern could require so much preface.

"You are aware that the expenses of this house are very great, and that the present income cannot support them without a continual strain. I would propose, therefore, that the establishment be reduced, but only for a year or two, until the debts are cleared. Two of the men might be discharged, and the number of women lessened. One of the carriages might be sold, and the horses kept only for the saddle and the chaise. Let the drawing-room stand as it is, and let the London journey be put off for a season; and I really believe, my dear Sir Walter, that it might all be done without the smallest appearance of diminished consequence to the world."

Sir Walter heard her with an air of polite astonishment, which grew in proportion as she proceeded, until at last he could bear it no longer and rose from his chair, as though the words had got into his coat.

"My dear Lady Russell, you cannot be serious. Discharge two of my men? Sell a carriage, and go about the county in a chaise, like a country apothecary's wife? The county would know of it before the week was out, and conclude, not that Sir Walter Elliot was prudent, but that Sir Walter Elliot was ruined. No. The thing is not to be thought of. I am obliged to you for your kind intentions, which I have no doubt are excellent, but I will not be made a spectacle of economy for the amusement of Somersetshire."

Lady Russell said that she had hardly expected the plan to be liked at first, and only wished it to have a fair hearing. Sir Walter assured her that it had had one, and had been found wanting in nothing but good sense. Elizabeth said nothing. She turned over a card, and wrote upon it the name of a family she had not yet decided to invite, as if to show that the subject was closed.

Lady Russell took her leave soon after, more sorry than offended, and not entirely persuaded that she had been understood at all.

Mr Shepherd came at three o'clock, by appointment, having ridden over from the market town in the heat of the afternoon. He had a paper in his hand and the tidy confidence of a man who has added up a column and found the sum correct; but he had also the look, which Sir Walter had long found so disagreeable, of one who expected to be disappointed in his audience. He was shown into the drawing-room, where Sir Walter had settled himself with Elizabeth, and where Anne sat at the window with her work, and was, as usual, a little less observed than the furniture.

"I have been over the rent-roll, Sir Walter, and over the outgoings, with some care," said Mr Shepherd, unfolding his paper upon his knee. "And I am persuaded that the difficulty lies less in the house than in the management of the estate. The woods are in poor condition, but they would sell well, and the timber—"

"The timber is not to be sold," said Sir Walter.

"No, sir. Then I would submit that the outdoor establishment might be reduced. The gardeners, the stables, the hothouse, which I understand costs a great deal to keep warm for the sake of a few pineapples—"

"The hothouse is not to be touched," said Sir Walter. "Nor the gardeners."

"As you please, Sir Walter. It was only a suggestion."

"Then you had better make no more of it."

Mr Shepherd looked at his paper, and then at the carpet, and seemed to feel that it was not for him to observe that the sum was still the same, whatever figures were struck out of it. A silence followed, in which Sir Walter discovered that he had nothing further to say to his agent, and Elizabeth discovered that she had nothing to add to her father. It was then that Anne, who had not spoken, found herself speaking.

"Might I venture a thought, sir?"

Sir Walter turned round with the slow surprise of a man who has heard the furniture address him. "Anne? You have an opinion upon the subject?"

"I have been thinking of it," said Anne, colouring a little, "and it seems to me that neither Lady Russell's plan nor Mr Shepherd's goes far enough. If one carriage is to be sold, why not both? We might keep none at all, and hire one on the few occasions when we must go out to dinner. The household might be reduced to a manservant, a cook, and two maids, and the rooms we do not use kept shut. We should buy no new clothes and no new furniture, and go to London for no season. The horses might be sold at once, instead of being kept another year to eat their heads off at the expense of the estate. It would be a great change, and I do not pretend it would be pleasant. But I think the debts might be cleared in little more than half the time either of the other plans would require, and with the least possible sale of land."

Sir Walter looked at his daughter as if she had proposed that he take up a trade. "Dismiss the whole of my household? I am to live like a farmer, with a single cook and a girl in the kitchen? Really, Anne, I did not know you had so keen an appetite for disgrace."

"I think Anne is right," said Elizabeth.

Everyone looked at her. It was not in Elizabeth's nature to approve of any economy which touched her own comforts, and there had been, a moment before, no sign that she had been attending to the conversation at all. But she had been reckoning, in the course of that silence, and had found that the stricter plan would fall chiefly upon the servants and the stables, and not upon the mistress of Kellynch Hall; that if it failed, it would be Anne's failure; and that if it succeeded, the credit would be hers for having supported it. She now continued in the cool, decided tone she used for the arrangement of a dinner table.

"If the thing must be done, it had better be done thoroughly. Lady Russell's scheme would only put off the difficulty, and Mr Shepherd's would never satisfy the creditors. Anne's would be disagreeable, but it would be done. A thing done entire is done with some dignity, sir; a thing done by halves is done with apology."

"Elizabeth, you cannot mean it."

"I can mean it perfectly, sir."

"Then you are both mad," said Sir Walter, "and I shall not have my household scattered at the first alarm of a few bills."

Mr Shepherd, who had waited for a pause, and who was too conscientious to leave a matter unfinished, now cleared his throat. "There is one resource, Sir Walter, which I have hesitated to mention, though it is perhaps the only one which would answer entirely. If the house were let, for a term of years, to a tenant of good family and substance, the rent would discharge the debts within a very few years, and in the meantime you might take a smaller residence, and—"

"Tenant!" Sir Walter's colour rose. "Mr Shepherd, I must beg that you never pronounce that word in my hearing again. A tenant at Kellynch Hall! Strangers to walk through the rooms in which my family have sat for two centuries, to pull up the gardens my grandfather laid out, and to let themselves into the library, which is not to be entered by anyone but myself. No, sir. I will hear no more of tenants, and I will thank you not to bring the word into this house again."

Mr Shepherd begged his pardon, and said he had mentioned the matter only as a point of record, and would mention it no further. Sir Walter said that he was obliged to him, and rang for wine, as though the word had left a stain upon the table.

They had scarcely recovered their composure when the letter-bag was brought up from the village. Among the letters for Sir Walter was one addressed to Elizabeth, in a hand which Anne knew at once to be Mary's. Elizabeth broke the seal with the air of a woman who expects to be troubled and is prepared to be bored by it, and read a few lines to herself before she began to read aloud.

"'My dear Elizabeth, I write in great distress. I have had a sore throat these five days, and have been obliged to keep my room, and the little boy is teething and cross from morning until night, and the nursemaid can do nothing with him. Charles is out from breakfast until dark after the partridges, and when he comes home he talks of nothing but his dogs. I am left quite alone with my nerves, and I cannot think what I have done to deserve such neglect. If Anne could be spared from Kellynch, I should be very glad of her company for a few weeks. She is the only one of you who has any real feeling for my situation, and I am sure she would come directly if she were asked.'"

Elizabeth folded the letter with a small movement of the lips which might have been contempt or might have been pity. "Mary is never well when there is nothing to attend her."

"Mary has always had a want of constitution," said Sir Walter, "which her marriage has done nothing to mend. But I do not see why Anne should be sent for to hold her hand."

"She asks for Anne, however," said Anne quietly.

"Of course she does," said Elizabeth. "Anne is the one who is always sent for, because she is the one who can be spared."

Sir Walter, who had already returned to his wine and his own concerns, gave a short nod. "You may go, Anne, if it gives you any satisfaction. But do not let Mary keep you past the month. I shall not care to dine alone with your sister."

Anne made no reply. She was thinking of the morning, of Lady Russell's plan set aside with a wave of the hand, of Mr Shepherd's paper folded and put away, of her own plan praised by Elizabeth for a quarter of an hour and then forgotten, and of the word that must not be spoken in that room again. It was a day in which a great many things had been proposed, and not one of them had been done. The debts were exactly as large at dinner as they had been at breakfast.

She knew her sister's complaints of old. She knew that Mary's illnesses kept pace with the company she was not receiving, and grew most severe when the Musgroves were all out of doors and the house at Uppercross was dull. But she knew, too, that Mary had no one there to speak to, and that Charles would not be home before dark, and that a sore throat which is borne alone is a heavier thing than one which is borne in company. Her father would not miss her. Elizabeth would hardly notice she was gone. For once, Anne thought, it might be of some use to be the one who could be spared.

When the evening came on, warm and still, and the candles had been carried in and the Baronetage closed and laid aside, Anne sat for a long while at the open window of the drawing-room, listening to the rooks settle in the elms and watching the light go off the lawn. She could hear her father's voice in the next room, reading out the names of his acquaintance to Elizabeth, and her sister's soft, unhurried answers. She had resolved, somewhere between the letter and the wine, that she would go to Uppercross in the morning, whatever Kellynch might do without her, and that she would write to Mary before the post went out, so that her sister might know the hour of her coming.

How the debts of Kellynch Hall were to be paid, she could not tell. Lady Russell had no answer to it, Mr Shepherd had only the word he was forbidden to use, and Sir Walter had none at all. The question had been raised in the library and the drawing-room, and set down again in both; and when Anne rose at last from the window and went to find her pen, it remained exactly where it had been since breakfast, entirely unsettled.

Mr. Franklin, who had no notion of how an old man ought to be got up off a slope of loose sand, took me by both hands and hauled me to my feet like a bucket out of a well. Then, without giving me time to get my breath, he marched me off through the sandhills with his arm locked in mine. I looked back once. There was nothing to see but the brown face of the quicksand heaving under the turn of the tide, and the sea rolling in over it with its usual air of having nothing to do with anybody. Of the girl there was no sign at all. She had gone her own way among the hills, and I had no more business going after her than I had going after the moon.

“Now, Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, squeezing my arm against his side, “you are going to ask me why I have come four hours before my time. Don’t deny it. The question is sticking out of you like a fish-bone out of a pie.”

“I was not going to ask it, sir,” I said. This was a lie, and he knew it, for he laughed the way he always laughed when he had caught a servant out in something. It was a habit of his from the nursery, and I never could cure him of it.

“Then I shall tell you without being asked, which is the way I prefer to do things. Feel in my breast pocket, my dear old fellow. The left side. Take out what you find there, and read it, and then tell me whether I was wrong to get into the train at six this morning with my portmanteau half packed.”

I felt in his breast pocket, which was a deal more comfortable for me than it would have been for him, and drew out a letter folded small and creased across the middle, as if it had been unfolded and folded again a good many times on the journey. The direction was in a close, careful hand, and the postmark was London. I fetched my spectacles out of my waistcoat, where they live when they are not wanted, and I read the thing through twice, and then a third time. It is my principle never to take the sense of a letter from the first reading, any more than I would take a man’s word on the strength of his first smile.

Here is what it said. I have copied it out fair, and I defy any man to tell me it is not exact:

“Dear Blake,—I write in haste, and I would much rather have said this across a table, but you were gone north before I could catch you, and so it must go by the post. Three days ago a man called at my chambers asking very particularly after the family of Herncastle, and after a certain Eastern stone which you once described to me over a bottle of claret. I think you will remember it. He would not give his name. He had the look of a foreigner, a great deal of money in his pocket, and a patience about him that I did not like at all. I told him nothing, which was the truth, for I know nothing. But I would advise you to keep your eyes open and your tongue shut while you are under that roof, and not to let the matter be talked of there, if you can help it. I shall be at the club until Saturday, and you may find me there if you want me.

Yours in haste, Thomas Cardew.”

Now, I am not a clever man, and I never pretended to be one. But I know a letter that is meant to frighten, and this was one of them; only it was clever enough to frighten nobody who could be seen to be frightened. A letter ought to say what it means and then stop, like a good servant standing at a door. This one stood in the doorway and went on talking.

“Well?” says Mr. Franklin, when I had finished the third reading and was folding it up again with more care than it deserved.

“Well, sir,” I said, “it seems to me that Mr. Cardew has a great deal of patience, and not much else to do.”

He laughed again, but not so heartily. “Cardew is a cautious fellow. He thinks every man with a foreign accent is after something. I dare say he is right about the accent. I’m not so sure about the rest.” He took the letter back from me, looked at it, and put it away again, with a little frown between his eyes that did not suit his face at all. “I came down because I did not care to sit in London waiting for something to happen to me. I would rather it happened in Yorkshire, where I know where the doors are.”

I considered this, and said nothing, which is a thing I have always found more useful than most remarks. As for the seven-and-sixpence, you will want to know about that, I dare say. It was a wager, made when Mr. Franklin was a boy of nine and I was a man of thirty-odd, on whether a flat stone could be made to skip across the ornamental water seven times. He swore it could be done. I swore it could not, and I was right. He has never paid me the whole of it, and I have never asked him for the rest, which I think is the proper arrangement between an old servant and a young master.

We came out of the plantation by the back way, and he had got as far as the stable-yard gate before he remembered the other thing.

“Betteredge, I want a favour of you, and I want it before anybody else in the house has a notion that I am here.” He put his hand inside his coat again and brought out a small packet, done up in oiled silk and sealed at the edges with wax, with his own seal pressed into the wax at each corner. It was no bigger than a snuff-box. He held it out to me as carelessly as a man might hand over his gloves. “Lock this up for me tonight in the plate-room. Not in my room, and not in my trunk, and not in anybody’s way. You have a plate-room with a proper lock?”

“I have the best lock in Yorkshire, sir,” I said, a little offended. “And the only key to it hangs at my own waist, along with the key of the wine-cellar, which I have carried since the late Sir John’s time, and which I am sorry to say has been tried since by a worse class of man than you.”

He laughed at that, and I took the packet from him. It was not heavy, and it was not light. I weighed it in my palm without meaning any harm, the way I would weigh a parcel from the carrier to see whether the grocer had cheated us, and then I put it in my breast pocket, where I felt it all the way across the yard. Whatever it was, it was none of my business, and I want that understood, for it is the honest truth. I have been asked since, by more persons than I care to count, what I thought was in that packet. I can only say what I said then: I never in my life wanted to know what a gentleman keeps in his pocket. It is generally his tailor’s bill.

“Give me your word you will not open it,” says Mr. Franklin, “and that you will not ask me what it is, until I ask you for it back.”

“You have it, sir,” I said. “And I never asked a gentleman’s business in my life, unless he made me.”

I locked the packet in the plate-room that afternoon, with my own hands and nobody by but the silver. I wrote in my book of keys the date and the hour, and the words “one packet, sealed, Mr. Blake’s,” and I signed it. Then I shut the door, turned the key, and tried the handle twice over, which is the one thing I learnt from my lady’s late husband’s man of business, a great believer in a lock that has been doubted.

Penelope was waiting for me at the foot of the back stairs, with her apron in both hands and a face I did not like.

“Father, Rosanna hasn’t come in,” she says.

“She will come in,” I said, “when she is hungry. Which is not yet, by the look of her, for she had no dinner at all.”

“She has not come through the plantation, and she has not come round by the cliff road either, and I have been to the gate twice to look.” Penelope pulled her apron tighter. “The carter’s boy came up from Cobb’s Hole just now with the milk, and he says he saw her going down the cliff path toward the village, with her bonnet on and her grey cloak round her, walking like a person who does not know where she is going. He called out to her, and she never turned her head. She has gone on to Cobb’s Hole, father, to her friend there. That is where she has gone.”

I have been in service long enough to know that a girl who goes to her friend’s house without leave is not a thing to be made a crime of over a dinner. But it was not right, either, for a woman who had been taking her meals in our servants’ hall for four months to go off on her own to a village nobody in our house had any business in. I said as much to Penelope, and I said I would send a message down to Cobb’s Hole when I could spare a boy.

Mr. Franklin, who had come up behind me in the passage, heard the whole of it. He only laughed and said, “Poor girl. She is off to her friend, I suppose. Let her go. She’ll come back when she is hungry, Betteredge, as you say, and then you may give her the lecture you have been saving up.” He said it as easily as a man tells a dog to lie down. I thought no more about it than he did at the time. We thought a great deal more about it afterwards, I can tell you.

Penelope had a message from her own young lady as well, which she delivered in the flat voice she keeps for messages. Miss Rachel had come home from the lunch with a headache, and would be down at dinner if her head allowed it. I did not see Miss Rachel that afternoon, and I will not pretend to see her now. She had her own room and her own affairs, and a headache is a headache whatever the cause.

My lady was waiting for Mr. Franklin by the drawing-room window, where the light falls best on the people she has a mind to look at. She is a small woman, with a great deal of will in her and a voice so soft that you have to lean in to hear it, which is why I have always been sorry for anyone who had to contradict her. She held out both hands to him and said he looked as if he had been up since five and had been in the sea. Mr. Franklin said he had been on the sands, which was the truth, and that he had come early because he could not keep away, which was not the whole truth. I could tell that from the back of his neck.

I had come in with the tea, as I was bound to do. I put the tray down on the little table by the door, and was just turning to go out again, when my lady said, “Betteredge, you may stay a moment.” Which I did, of course, her ladyship having never once in forty years asked me to stay in a room and then been sorry for it.

“Franklin,” says she, very gently, “before we talk of anything else, there is one thing I must say to you, and I want you to hear it at once. The Moonstone is not to be spoken of under this roof. Not at dinner, not in the garden, not in the smoking-room, not in any corner of this house while you are in it. I have had enough of that stone and its name in my family. You may think what you please about it in your own room. But you will not speak of it here.”

I looked at the carpet, which is what a steward does when he has heard something he ought not to have heard, and wishes it understood that he is still a steward and not a party to anything.

“You have my word, aunt,” says Mr. Franklin. “Not a syllable of it. Not in this house.” He said it cheerfully enough, and kissed her hand, and she let him. But when he turned round to look for his cup, I saw the frown come back between his eyes and go away again, and I knew by the look of him that the promise was going to be harder to keep than he had made it sound.

My lady turned to me, saw the tea-tray still in its place, and told me I might go. I went. I said nothing of what I had heard, because it was not my business, and because a steward who repeats what he hears through a drawing-room door is a steward who will one day hear his own name spoken through one.

Dinner came and went. Mr. Franklin ate well, talked a great deal, and did not once mention the stone, which I thought very creditable in a young man brought up abroad, where I am told they have no notion of keeping their mouths shut. Miss Rachel did not come down. She sent word by Penelope that her head was no better and that she would keep to her room until morning. Nobody in the house was surprised, and nobody, to my knowledge, was sorry, except the cook, who had made a pudding for her.

Rosanna’s place at the servants’ table stood empty all through the meal. Nancy kept looking at the empty chair, and then at me, and then at her plate. Once she said, very low, that she supposed she had been too sharp with the girl, and I told her she had been exactly sharp enough, which is the most any servant ever gets from me, and more than most.

By ten o’clock the house was quiet. I took my lantern and went out by the back gate and looked down the lane towards the sea. There was nothing to be seen but the dark, and nothing to be heard but the tide, which was coming in again over the quicksand and covering it in silence, as it does. I stood there longer than I needed to. Then I came in, locked the back gate, went along to the plate-room, tried its door, and found it fast. The packet was in there, where I had put it, and my book of keys was in my pocket to prove it. Good. One thing in the house was in its proper place.

Then I went to my own sitting-room, lit my lamp, settled myself in my beehive chair with my feet up on the fender, and took down *Robinson Crusoe* from its shelf, where it has lived these thirty years and is the only book I have never lent to anybody. You will remember, if you have read it, the place where Crusoe comes upon a single footprint in the sand, and goes white to the lips with the fright of it, and thinks every savage in the world must be on the island at once. I have always held that a sensible man is the one who gets frightened over a footprint and does not pretend he has not seen it. I opened the book at the place and read the same page three times over, and I could not have told you one word of it.

The clock in the hall had struck eleven. Penelope had put her head round my door to say good night, and had not mentioned the girl, which was her way of saying more than she meant. Rosanna Spearman was not back. Her bed in the maids’ room was made, her grey cloak was not on its peg, and the one thing I was certain of, sitting in my beehive chair with Crusoe open on my knee and the packet locked away below me, was that she had not come home.

*Letter, Lajos Varga to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Klausenburg, 28 May.*

“Dear Madam,--

“I write at the request of Mr. Jonathan Harker, who left with me in April a paper naming you as the person to whom any news of him should be sent. I am a notary in this town, and his employers in London have asked me to assist with certain papers concerning a house he was to inspect for them. You will forgive a stranger for troubling you.

“On the evening of the 24th a coachman came to my office with a note. It was not, so far as I could judge, in Mr. Harker's hand, and it was signed only with a single letter that I could not read. It said that Mr. Harker's business at the house of his client would keep him some days beyond the date he had named, and that his luggage and papers would follow. I asked where the gentleman was. The man said only that he was well and busy, touched his hat, and was gone before I could put a second question.

“I have since made what enquiries I can. The inn at Bistritz where Mr. Harker lodged has not seen him since he went up into the mountains, and the post-office has had nothing from him at all. I do not say there is cause for alarm. Men of business are often delayed, and I have no doubt he will write to you himself before long. But you were named to me, and I thought you had better know what I know.

“I have the honour to remain, Madam, your obedient servant,

“LAJOS VARGA.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*2 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Your letter came yesterday, and I have read it so often that the pages have gone soft at the folds. You scold me for not telling you about the gallery, and then you tell me everything, which is exactly what I wanted and what I did not dare to hope for. Three in one day! You wicked, happy girl. I laughed until I had to put the letter down, and then I cried a little, which I am sure you will understand.

“I will keep your secret, of course, though I think you have been very hard on yourself about Dr. Seward. He is clever and steady, and a man who takes a hurt as he has taken this one will turn it into work, which is the best thing a man can do with a hurt. As for Mr. Morris, you were kinder to him than he will ever know. I have guessed the name of the third, of course. You have written “Arthur” on nearly every page for weeks, and you did not need to say it at all.

“And now I have something to tell you, which I have not told anyone but Mr. Hawkins. Last week I had a letter from a notary at Klausenburg, a Mr. Varga. I have read it so often that I could repeat it to you word for word. Jonathan is delayed. He is not ill, and nothing is wrong, except that he has not come home when he said he would, and a note has come on his behalf in a hand that is not his, saying his luggage and papers will follow. Mr. Varga has been kind, and very careful, and has taken the trouble to make enquiries of his own, for which I am grateful. He says he has no cause for alarm. I am trying to believe him.

“I wrote to Mr. Hawkins at once. He has very sensibly promised to write to Klausenburg himself, and I have been trying to be sensible also, though it is harder than I thought. Jonathan told me in his last letter that he would be back in a week. That was in the middle of May. I tell myself that a man with business to finish in a foreign country cannot always leave when he likes, and that I am foolish to be frightened by a coachman's note.

“I have started the journal we talked of. I find it difficult to write in it when I am frightened, so I have been writing in shorthand, which keeps the words at a little distance. Jonathan would laugh at me. He says a diary is only a way of making the day sit still long enough to be looked at. Today I should like the day to move on as quickly as possible.

“Do write as soon as you can, dear, and tell me all about your mother, and the wedding you will have, which I am already planning in my head, with bridesmaids in white and you in the middle looking like a picture. Give my love to Arthur, if you think it proper, and tell him I shall expect him to be very good to you.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“P.S.--Please do not show this to anyone, not even your mother. I should not like to be the cause of a fuss before there is anything to fuss about.”

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

(*Kept in phonograph*)

*27 May.*--Routine round this morning, and nothing in it to note except the one thing I shall have to note at length, because I cannot make it sit still in my head.

R. M. Renfield was at the window when I came in, his back to the room, his hands busy with something on the sill. He had been catching flies again, and the attendant had not taken the matter in hand. I let it go. I am no longer sure a few flies do harm to a man who keeps so orderly a habit in every other respect.

He turned round before I had spoken and said, without any preface whatever, “Is Miss Westenra well, Doctor?”

I confess I was so startled that I stopped in the middle of my sentence. I had not mentioned the lady to him, and I am quite certain I have never spoken her name within these walls. She has never been here. He had her name perfectly, and gave the “Miss” its proper weight, as a man does who has been listening to a conversation rather than hearing it.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“I hear things, sir. The men talk when they think I am not attending.” He considered. “They say she is to be married.”

“Who says so?”

“It is a common sort of talk, sir. It goes about. Is it true?”

I told him it was no business of his, and that patients are not supposed to enquire into the private affairs of their physicians' acquaintances. He took this very quietly, nodding as though I had given a sensible answer to a sensible question. Then he said, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather: “A good thing for her, sir, to be wed to someone who is fond of her. A bad thing to be wed to someone who only wants her to be quiet. You know the difference, Doctor, I expect.”

I did not answer him. I went on with my round, and I set the matter down here because I think it matters, though I cannot yet say how. I find I was disturbed, and more than I ought to have been, by the question. I have been turning it over since, like a stone in the pocket, to see whether it has changed its shape.

It is not the first time I have been struck by the strangeness of his memory. He keeps many things he has no business keeping. But I have never known him to take up a name with such exactness, nor to ask after anyone's health unless he wanted something from them, or from me on their account. He has asked nothing of me in regard to Miss Westenra. He asked only whether she was well.

I shall ask Holmwood, when I see him, whether Renfield could have come by her name through him. I dread to think how it will sound. I shall do it all the same, because the alternative is to go on wondering.

Last night I dined at Quincey Morris's rooms with Holmwood, as Quincey had asked us. I shall not set down what was said. It deserves more than a phonograph, and I expect to hear his version before long, which will be the better one.

*Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Miss Lucy Westenra.*

“*27 May.*

“Dear Miss Lucy,--

“I guess this is a queer thing for me to be writing, after what passed between us a few days back, and you'll forgive me if I come at it crooked. Art asked me to put it on paper for you, since he said he'd make a hash of it and I'd make a clean job. He was right about that, and I hope I'm right about the rest.

“We had our camp-fire last night, the three of us, in my rooms. Jack Seward came, and he looked like a man who had been up all night with a sick horse and was too proud to say so. Art came in with his hat on the back of his head and his face like a boy's on the first day of holidays. I've never seen him so easy in his skin. I don't believe he'd sat still ten minutes together since the spring.

“I had the cook send up the best we had, and we went through it course by course, with a yarn to every dish. Jack tried to keep his face straight through the soup, and I'll say for him he managed it until the fish, when Art told the one about the Mexican and the mule. Jack could not hold it any longer and laughed till he had to take off his spectacles. I was glad of that. It did him good.

“Then, when the cloth was drawn, Art stood up and put down his glass, and said he had a message for us that would make both our ears tingle, as he'd put it in his telegram. And then he said it. You had told him yes. He said it plain, the way he says everything, and then he sat down again and looked at his glass as if he expected it to bite him.

“I'll tell you the truth, Miss Lucy, since you always had it from me. I'd done my grieving the afternoon I walked out of your room, and I meant every word I said to you. So when I got up, I didn't feel like a man with a broken heart at all. I felt like a fellow who'd been beaten fair by the best man for the job, and who was glad to be standing in the same room as him. I went round the table and gave Art my hand, and then I gave him a hug, which he didn't expect and nor did I. Jack got up too. He shook Art's hand and said something very low that I didn't catch, except for your name and the word “happy.” I saw him swallow twice. Then he sat down, drank his wine, and said nothing else for an hour, which for Jack is a sermon.

“We drank the toast standing. I gave it: to the happiest man in the wide world, who has won the best girl God ever made. Art couldn't say a word after that, so he just nodded and drank, and that was the end of the speeches.

“He wanted you to know he'd have written himself, but he said he hadn't the words that were fit for anybody but you to read, and he wasn't going to hunt for them on paper. He asked me to tell you he is the luckiest man alive. I told him that was only true until the next man proposed to you. He laughed at that. You'll see he's not as dull as he looks.

“Miss Lucy, I'm not going to be a stranger, nor a sulk, nor the last man to dance with you at the wedding if I can help it. I said I'd be a friend, and I meant it, and I generally keep my word. My very best wishes go to you both.

“Your servant, and your friend,

“QUINCEY P. MORRIS.”

*Telegram, Lajos Varga to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*5 June.*

“HARKER'S TRUNKS AND PAPERS DELIVERED TODAY BY CARTERS STOP HE IS NOT WITH THEM STOP VARGA”

The village was still asleep when I drove down the hill. The sky above the limes had turned the colour of weak tea, and not a blind was up in the street, except at the forge, where a boy was leading out a horse with the look of someone who had been told to hurry and had not been told why. I took the corner too fast and nearly ran down a cat.

Poirot's lodging stood at the end of the row, a neat little house with a strip of garden, given to the Belgian refugees by Mrs. Inglethorp's charity. I had hardly lifted my hand to knock before the door opened. Poirot was already dressed, to the last point of his moustaches, and he sat by the window with a cup of coffee at his elbow. He looked, if anything, rather pleased with himself.

“Ah, Hastings! Come in. You will take a cup of coffee? No? Then sit, I beg of you, and do not look so tragic. It is a sad thing, certainly, but you need not look as though the sky has fallen.”

I stared at him. “Poirot, how on earth—”

“You have come about Madame Inglethorp.”

“But who told you? We only knew it ourselves a quarter of an hour ago. I’ve not been out of the house since—”

He raised one hand, as a conjuror does when he wishes the audience to admire the empty sleeve. “Dr. Wilkins. He stopped his motor at my gate not twenty minutes since, on his way home. He came, he said, as a friend, so that I should not hear it first from the village. He was very kind, and very excited, and he could not wait to tell me the whole of it.” Poirot’s moustaches lifted at one corner. “A doctor who has a death to certify is always a little pleased with himself, is it not so? It gives him importance. Particularly when the lady is rich.”

“And what did he say?”

“That it was the heart. That Nature rebelled.” He shrugged. “Dr. Wilkins is very certain of Nature. He said a great deal more, mostly about the post-mortem, and the inquest, which he is so anxious to avoid and so anxious to attend. He also said that Dr. Bauerstein was very quiet, and that he kept his eyes upon everybody. That, my friend, I did not need Dr. Wilkins to tell me.”

I was a little mortified. I had come racing down the hill with my great news, and it was I who had been forestalled. “Then you’ll come at once?”

“Presently. Go, Hastings. Take the motor back to the house and tell them I am coming. But I do not come yet.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because a man who goes to look at a room where a woman has died must first have his breakfast and put on his boots. And because the household will be full of talk, and I prefer that they talk for a little while before I ask them any questions. Talk is a very generous thing, Hastings. It tells you much more when nobody is listening for it.”

There was no arguing with him when he took that tone, so I went.

I had come within sight of the lodge gates when I saw a figure coming up the drive on foot. It was Alfred Inglethorp. He walked with his head down and his coat over one arm, his black beard a little ragged, and his boots were thick with the white dust of the Tadminster road. When he heard the motor, he looked up sharply and stopped in the middle of the drive, as though he had walked into a wall.

I pulled up beside him and jumped out.

“Hastings! What is it? The house is all lights and nobody will tell me anything. The servants are in hysterics.”

I told him as plainly as I could. He heard me out without a word. His face did not change so much as I had expected; then it did, all at once, and he put one hand on the door of the car to steady himself.

“Emily,” he said. “My God. Emily.” Then he strode past me up the steps, and I followed him.

In the dining-room, John and Lawrence were standing by the sideboard. Mary had come down, and was sitting very still in a chair by the window, her hands clasped in her lap. Dorcas hovered in the doorway with her apron pressed to her mouth. Alfred stood in the centre of the room and told his story as though he had rehearsed it in the dust of the road.

“I walked Bauerstein down to the village as far as the crossroads,” he said. “He was going on to the station. I had a notion to walk on myself. I had business in town that could not wait, and I thought if I went to Tadminster I might catch the last train to London. I missed it by five minutes. The line was dark, and the station-master had gone to bed. So I found a room at the inn at Tadminster, and I was up and away again as soon as it was light.”

“Business in town at that hour?” said Lawrence, not quite under his breath.

Alfred turned on him. “Business of my own, Lawrence, if you don’t mind. It was no concern of anyone’s here.”

“And the storm?” asked John. “Did you get caught in it?”

“I did. It came on to pour as I passed the Dower House, and I was soaked to the skin before I reached Tadminster. I had to sit by the fire at the inn while my things dried. I could scarcely see my hand in front of me on the road.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Dorcas from the doorway, in a small clear voice that made us all turn, “but it never rained here.”

Alfred looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Not a drop, sir. Not last night. I was up at my window before five, to see to the blinds, and the path was dry as a bone, and the dust was lying on the laurel leaves. There was no thunder neither. It was that close and still, you could hardly breathe.”

“You are mistaken, Dorcas,” said Alfred, not unkindly. “It rained heavily on the Tadminster road. I assure you of it.”

“Well, sir,” said Dorcas, and, having said her piece, she reddened and retired behind the door.

I remembered the evening myself, the heavy air, the storm that had been promised over the hills and never came. It was a small thing, and I had no notion whether it mattered. But I noticed that nobody in the room looked at Alfred for a moment, and then everybody did, and then they all looked away at once.

Poirot arrived a little after eight, upon a bicycle which had plainly been built for a much taller man. He dismounted with great dignity, leaned the machine against the steps, and bowed to Mary, who did not seem to see him. Then he turned to John.

“Monsieur Cavendish, I am so sorry. I know this is a dreadful morning. I ask only to see the room, and to be let alone in it for a little while. You have the keys?”

John took them from his pocket, and I saw that they were the two Bauerstein had given him. “Yes. Come up.”

We went up the stairs in a little procession, and along the gallery to the right wing. The door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room had been broken in, and the splintered frame still hung crookedly on its hinges. John unlocked the connecting door from the room that had been Alfred’s, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, the other.

Inside, everything was as we had left it. The gas was still turned low, the ashes in the grate were quite cold, and the row of prim ornaments stood on the mantelpiece, looking as harmless as ever. The little table beside the bed lay on its side, a jug and a tumbler spilled across the carpet, and a dark stain had spread into the pile near the foot of the bed. A pale spatter of tallow ran across the carpet near the grate, where Lawrence’s candle had sputtered in the night.

Poirot stood in the doorway for a full minute without moving. Then he took out a small lens and began, very slowly, to go round the room, not touching anything at all. He examined the window, which was fastened on the inside, and the bolts of the corridor door, which were drawn. He examined the bed, and the pillows, and the bedclothes, which were thrown back in a tangle. He looked for a long time at the tallow on the carpet, and then he got down on his knees beside the overturned table and stayed there.

“Hastings,” he said, without looking round, “you will come and kneel by me, if you please, and you will not breathe on the carpet.”

I did as I was told. The carpet smelled faintly of camphor and of the spilled water. Poirot moved his lens across the pile in small careful arcs, and then he stopped, and bent lower, and put out two fingers.

He lifted something from the carpet beside the table leg, where the edge of the rug had been turned back. He held it between finger and thumb, and then, with the air of a man performing a small and delicate operation, he drew a fold of paper from his pocket and laid the object inside it. Before he folded the paper again, he turned his hand so that I could see.

It was tiny, no bigger than a grain of rice, and it caught the light from the window like a fleck of frost.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Ah.”

“Poirot, you can’t simply—”

“Not yet, my friend.”

“But what is it?”

He folded the paper with great neatness, slid it into a small envelope, sealed the flap, and wrote something upon it in pencil. Then he put the envelope inside his waistcoat and patted it, as a man might pat a letter he does not wish to lose.

“You are very annoyed with me,” he observed. “It is a good sign. It means I have not yet made you believe anything.”

He got up, with a little grunt of effort, and dusted his knees. Then he looked at the door, which had been left ajar, and I saw Cynthia Murdoch standing in the gallery outside. She wore a dressing-gown of blue wool, and her hair was still down her back. Her face was very pale, and she held the banister as though she were not quite sure of the floor.

Poirot went to her at once, and took off his hat. “Mademoiselle, forgive me for troubling you at such a time. I ask you only one thing. Last night, did you sleep well?”

She looked surprised, and for a moment I thought she might not answer. Then she gave a short, unhappy laugh.

“Sleep? I slept like a log, Monsieur Poirot. Mary had to shake me half out of bed, and even then I didn’t know where I was. I’m rather ashamed of it, really. I ought to have heard something.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle. That is all.”

She hesitated, then nodded and went back along the gallery, and I heard a door close softly at the far end of the corridor.

John came up behind us, looking drawn and tired. “Have you finished?”

“Not quite,” said Poirot. “I should be very grateful if you would let Hastings and me stay here for a little while, with the door locked. I wish to sit quietly and think. It is a thing I do best with no one watching me.”

John glanced at the bed, and then at the broken frame of the door, and then, very slowly, he nodded. “Lock it when you go, then. Don’t let the servants in.”

He pulled the door to, and I heard the key turn. For a time we sat in silence. Below us, the house went about its business in hushed and awkward fashion: a tray set down in the hall, a voice raised and quickly lowered, the sound of a door opening and closing again. Once, a motor drew up on the gravel and went away again. The sunlight had grown stronger on the carpet, and the room had begun to warm.

Poirot sat on the edge of a small chair with his hands folded upon his knees. The little envelope lay on the table between us, where he had placed it, with its pencilled writing turned towards me, and neither of us touched it.

By the clock on the mantelpiece it was nearly a quarter to twelve.

“Poirot,” I said at last, “you must tell me something. You cannot sit there with that thing in your pocket and say nothing at all.”

“I say nothing, mon ami, because I have not yet finished.” He turned the envelope a little on the table, gazing at it as a man might gaze at a letter from someone he has long expected. “Dr. Wilkins tells the whole village that Nature rebelled. I have begun to think that Nature was very obliging. She rebelled at exactly the hour that somebody required her to.”

I did not understand him, and said so. He only smiled, and tucked the envelope away inside his waistcoat, as carefully as if it had been a love-letter.

Eve had been brought up by a father who held that anything borrowed must go back to its owner by the shortest route available, and she could not go about her business with an umbrella of unknown origin under her arm and a clear conscience at the same time. The thing had been put into her hands without explanation. It would have been mean to keep it, and absurd to go round London asking every tall young man with a monocle whether he had lately been lending umbrellas.

A policeman at the corner of Piccadilly informed her that the gloomy building opposite was the Drones Club, and added, in the tone of one speaking from experience, that it was no place for a lady. Eve thanked him and crossed the road. She had no intention of going in. She meant to hand the umbrella to whoever sat in the hall and let the Drones settle its own affairs.

The hall porter, a man of stately build and the expression of one who has seen everything and disapproved of most of it, received the umbrella through the grille of his lodge with the air of a man signing for a parcel he suspected of being explosive.

“It belongs to one of your members,” Eve explained. “I found it this morning outside a coal merchant’s in Dover Street. I think it was lent to me by mistake. Would you see that it goes back to the right person?”

“Quite so, madam.”

He produced from a drawer a ledger ruled in columns, and turned it towards her with the air of a man presenting an ultimatum. “Name, if you please, madam. For property returned. Regulations.”

Eve wrote “E. Halliday” in the appropriate column. Then, from her handbag, she tore a leaf from her pocket-book and wrote on it, with more care than the occasion seemed to call for:

*To the Owner of this Umbrella. It was lent to me in a shower outside Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe’s by a gentleman who appeared to have a great many umbrellas and much better manners than most of his kind. It is returned with warmest thanks.--The Lady Under the Awning.*

She folded the note, tucked it into the handle, and went away down the steps with the feeling that she had done something both correct and faintly reckless.

* * * * *

The Honourable Mr. Walderwick came into the club a little after two o’clock and was handed his umbrella by the porter, note and all. He read the note in the hall. He read it again in the smoking-room, whither he had gone in search of a sympathetic ear, and his indignation was not diminished by the discovery that the only occupant of the room was Psmith.

Psmith was reclining in a deep chair by the window with the easy grace of a man who has nothing on his conscience and a good lunch inside him. He looked up with courteous interest.

“Good afternoon, Walderwick.”

“Psmith,” said Mr. Walderwick, “what is all this?”

“All what?”

“This.” Mr. Walderwick waved the umbrella and the note together. “Some infernal female has borrowed my umbrella, apparently, and returned it with a letter about my manners. Who the devil is the Lady Under the Awning?”

A languid voice spoke from behind an evening paper on the sofa. “Ask Psmith. He was gaping out of that window at Thorpe & Briscoe’s for about half an hour this morning. Like a hen at a thunderstorm, I thought.”

Mr. Walderwick turned upon Psmith a face that had gone a deep and wrathful pink. “Did you take my umbrella out of the cloak-room this morning?”

Psmith rose slowly to his feet. He looked at the umbrella, then at the note, then at Mr. Walderwick, with an expression of grave and courteous detachment, as of a judge who has been presented with a case that ought properly to have come before a different court. He said nothing whatever.

“Well?” said Mr. Walderwick.

“Walderwick,” said Psmith at length, “I will give you fifty pounds for that umbrella.”

Mr. Walderwick stared. “What?”

“Fifty pounds. By cheque, if you prefer it. I can write one at once.”

“Fifty pounds? For that?”

“For that.”

Mr. Walderwick, whose financial position had been under a cloud since the Lincolnshire meeting, and who had been meditating a visit to a pawnbroker that very evening, looked at the umbrella. It had cost him, he remembered, something under two pounds. He looked at Psmith, whose monocle was steady and whose face was as untroubled as a Sunday morning in a cathedral close.

“Are you mad?”

“Possibly,” said Psmith. “Do you accept?”

Mr. Walderwick accepted. Psmith went to the writing-table by the window, wrote the cheque with a fountain-pen of considerable elegance, blotted it with care, and handed it over. Mr. Walderwick, who had expected to be asked for an explanation and had prepared several cutting replies for the purpose, found himself with nothing to say and a cheque in his hand.

“But look here, Psmith, what on earth--”

“No explanation is required, Walderwick,” said Psmith. “Between men of the world, none is ever necessary.”

He took the umbrella from the table, tucked it under his arm, and strolled out of the smoking-room with the air of a man who has made a sound investment.

* * * * *

The rain came on again at half-past three, in the sudden, cheerful manner which the English summer reserves for occasions when a person has no umbrella. Psmith, who had walked as far as Piccadilly in order to think about nothing in particular, was therefore not surprised to observe, at the corner by the bookshop, a girl in a black crêpe frock standing undecided at the kerb with her face turned to the sky. Nor was he surprised to recognise the hat. He would have recognised that hat through a fog.

He raised his own hat with the proper gravity.

“It appears to be raining,” he said.

“It does,” said Eve, and turned round, and her eyes went from his face to the umbrella and back again. “Oh!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re the man from the club. The monocle. You put this into my hands this morning and walked off into the Drones like a conjuror.”

“Did I?” said Psmith, with interest. “It is an odd thing to have done.”

“Then you did do it.”

“I did not say so. I merely said it was an odd thing to have done.”

Eve laughed. It was the first time since breakfast that anybody had made her laugh with any real conviction, and she found it agreeable. “Where did you get that umbrella, then?”

“I acquired it this afternoon, in the course of a business transaction. I am assured its history is entirely free from the sensational.”

“I left a note.”

“So I understand. I have no doubt it was read with interest.”

“Then will you tell the gentleman who lent it to me that I’m most grateful?”

“I will convey your gratitude,” said Psmith, “to the appropriate quarter.”

“And who is the appropriate quarter?”

“I think we have not been introduced,” said Psmith. “It would be most irregular to remedy the omission in the middle of Piccadilly, without a chaperon.”

“I’ve got an interview at the Carlton in ten minutes,” said Eve, “and I’m getting wet.”

“Then permit me.”

He raised the umbrella over her with a flourish, and they proceeded westward along Piccadilly together, Psmith holding the handle at a height which, though admirable for the lady, obliged him to stoop slightly, like a man ducking under a low bough. Eve found this very funny. Psmith appeared to find it entirely natural. He talked about the weather, which he described as a thing of great character and no principle, and about the Carlton, which he said was a hotel where a great many people went to be disappointed over lunch. When they reached the entrance he held the umbrella with the same grave care until she was safely under the portico.

“I still haven’t thanked you properly,” she said.

“Then don’t.”

“You are the most exasperating man I have ever met.”

“I have been told so by experts,” said Psmith, and bowed. “Good luck with your interview, madam. I trust your interviewer is as easily pleased as the owner of the umbrella.”

He turned and walked away into the rain, the umbrella held firmly over his own head, and Eve, looking after him, realised that she still did not know his name and that he had given no sign whatever of wishing to find out hers.

* * * * *

Mr. Baxter, secretary to the Earl of Emsworth, received her in a sitting-room on the second floor, at a table covered with papers, in the manner of a man who had been kept waiting by the human race for most of his life and had long since given up expecting an apology. He had a list of questions. He worked through them one at a time, ticking each with a small, precise mark, and he did not smile.

Eve answered as well as she could. She had read a good deal, she said, in a haphazard way. She knew the Dewey system existed, which was more than most people could claim. She had some Latin and a little French, and had once spent a wet fortnight in Cornwall making an index to a book on bee-keeping for a bookseller who had subsequently failed.

“Lord Emsworth’s library,” said Mr. Baxter, consulting a sheet, “contains some eleven thousand volumes, many of them in a state of disorder which I may describe as lamentable.”

“Eleven thousand? Poor things.”

Mr. Baxter made a note. “I understand your name was suggested to me by Mr. Threepwood.”

“Yes. He was very kind about it.”

Something moved in Mr. Baxter’s face, faintly, like a fish turning under a stone. “Mr. Threepwood’s recommendations are not always--” He stopped, and ticked something. “Kindly sign here, Miss Halliday. It is merely a formality.”

He pushed across a printed form and an inkstand. Eve bent forward to sign, and the bird of paradise, which had been behaving with increasing independence since the morning, slid from her shoulder, swung through a long and graceful curve, and dipped its tip neatly into the inkpot. It rose again, streaming. Eve sat back. Mr. Baxter rose with her, reaching out a hand that came too late, and the feather, shaken, descended in a long black stripe across the clause of the form headed “Salary.”

“Oh, I’m so dreadfully sorry!”

Mr. Baxter, who had seen the disaster coming and had not been able to prevent it, said nothing for a moment. Then he picked up the form, examined it, and set it down again with the care of a man handling a relic from a fire.

“Miss Halliday,” he said at last, “your qualifications are entirely satisfactory. Your Latin is adequate, your knowledge of classification is sound, and your references, I am bound to say, are of a kind I have seldom seen so favourably worded. Your appearance is another matter.”

“You mean the hat?”

“I mean the hat. It is a hazard. I cannot in conscience recommend a cataloguer who carries an inkwell about with her into a library.”

“It’s the only hat I possess that has any pretensions,” said Eve, with some dignity, “and it was given me in a more prosperous season.”

Mr. Baxter looked at her for a long moment over the top of his sheet. Then he turned to the ruined form and made a small, resigned mark upon it.

“His lordship,” he said, “is not, I believe, particular about hats. I shall lay your application before him this evening. I see no reason why you should not be engaged, subject to his approval. You will hear from me. I must ask you to keep your feathers away from the books. Good afternoon, Miss Halliday.”

Eve went down the stairs and out into Haymarket with the wet feather curling on her shoulder like a question mark. She was laughing again. It occurred to her, somewhere about Trafalgar Square, that the day had been a good deal less dismal than it had looked at breakfast, and that the world, which had lately appeared to have no use for her whatever, might possibly after all have one or two small uses still.

* * * * *

It was past seven when Psmith returned to the Drones. The hall porter looked up from his lodge with the same expression of stately disapproval he had worn that morning, and Psmith, pausing at the grille, put the question in the tone of a man making an idle enquiry about the weather.

“Porter. A young lady left an umbrella here this morning.”

“Yes, sir. Miss Halliday, sir.” The porter drew the ledger towards him with a finger. “Entered in the book, sir, as the regulations require.”

“Halliday,” said Psmith.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, porter. That will be all.”

He went up the stairs to the smoking-room with the umbrella under his arm and sat down in the chair by the window. Outside, the evening had come down over Dover Street, and the frontage of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe lay in the dusk, its awning furled, offering nothing whatever to attract the fascinated gaze of the passer-by. Psmith looked at it for some time with every appearance of contentment. It was his considered opinion that it had been a satisfactory day.

“Eve Halliday,” he said softly, to the umbrella.

He was not aware, until the words had left him, that he had said them aloud.

The First National Bank had its name cut a yard high across a gray stone front on Broadway. Inside it was marble and brass grilles and voices pitched low, and it smelled of floor wax and other people's money. I had eaten a sandwich standing at a lunch counter, so I had time to spare before the clock over the grilles said three.

A guard in a blue uniform looked at my hat, then at my face, and sent me along the rail to a desk where a young man was counting bills with his lips moving. He had sandy hair parted in the middle, steel-rimmed glasses, and a careful, colorless face. A brass plate on the desk said W. SAYRE, ASST. CASHIER. He finished his count before he looked up.

I gave him one of my cards and told him what I wanted.

"Donald Willsson's account," he said. "It's been in the papers."

"So has a good deal of nonsense. I'd like to know whether a check for five thousand dollars, drawn on that account, has been presented here."

He pushed his glasses up with a knuckle and studied me the way bank clerks study everybody. Then he said, "I'll look," and went through a door behind the grille. He was gone five minutes. When he came back he had a ledger under one arm, and he opened it on the desk at a page he had already marked with a slip of paper.

"Mr. Willsson's account is in good order," he said. "There has been no check of his for five thousand dollars presented at this counter, nor through the clearing house, nor from any other bank with his indorsement on it. Nothing of that size has been drawn on the account since the first of the month."

"Has anybody asked you to certify a check for him?"

"No. There's no record of certification of any kind."

"Was Willsson in here yesterday?"

"No." He was sure of that. "I was at this desk from nine until the doors closed. Mr. Willsson didn't come into the bank yesterday afternoon. Nor, so far as I know, at any time since he opened the account. He did his business by mail, or through his secretary."

"Five thousand dollars is a lot to carry around in a pocket."

"It's a lot to carry around anywhere." He closed the ledger and left his hand on the cover. "We don't see many sums that size over this counter. Most of them go through the directors' offices, or through Mr. Elihu Willsson's lawyers."

It was the first time anyone in the bank had put the old man in the room. Walter Sayre didn't seem to mind, but he looked at the ledger rather than at me while he said it.

"Suppose a man was handed a check like that," I said. "Would he come in here to make sure it was good?"

"If he had any sense he would. He'd bring it here and have it certified. Then the money is set aside on the spot, and nobody can take it back." He thought about it. "That's what I'd do, if I didn't know the man who wrote it."

"And if somebody had done that, you'd know?"

"I'd know. It would have come past this desk, or the cashier's, or the certification window. It hasn't come past any of them."

"Has anyone else asked about the Willsson account today?"

He hesitated just long enough for it to mean something. "A man telephoned about eleven. He wouldn't give his name. He wanted to know whether Mr. Willsson's checks were being honored this week. I told him they were."

"Did you tell him about the five thousand?"

"I told him what I've told you." The glasses came up again. "Are you going to mention my name to Mr. Elihu Willsson?"

"Not from me. What did the man sound like?"

"Like a man on the telephone." He considered it. "Quiet. He didn't waste words."

I thanked him and went out into the sun.

So the check had been written in a locked desk a little before three, by a man who had not gone near the bank with it. It hadn't been cashed. It hadn't been certified. The stub had no name on it, and a check made out to nobody in particular is one that somebody means to fill in later. I had seen that before. It is a comfortable way of paying for something you don't want to be seen buying.

The clerk at the Great Western took my key off the board when I came in. He didn't hand it over. He tilted his head toward the lobby.

"Lady's been waiting for you," he said. "Forty minutes, maybe. She said you'd know who she is."

She sat in a leather chair by a potted palm, dressed in black, with a small black hat and a veil pushed up off her face. Her gloves were in her lap. Without the frightened look she'd had in the house on Mountain Boulevard she seemed even younger than I'd thought, and nothing about her was careless. She didn't get up when I crossed the lobby.

"You are the detective," she said. There was the faint French in her vowels that I had noticed the night before.

"That's right."

"My father-in-law says you are a liar, and a fool, and a man who will sell his mouth to anyone with money. I have come to see which of these is true."

"Could be all three, depending on the day." I sat down in the chair across from her. "Who told you where I was staying?"

"My father-in-law. He tells everybody everything when he is angry." She turned her gloves over. "You came to my house. You asked me questions while I waited for a telephone. Then you went away, and my husband did not come home. I have answered nothing to anyone. So I will answer you now, so that you will stop."

"You don't have to."

"I went out because I was told to go out. The person who told me is not your business, and I will not say the name." Her voice did not rise at all. "I did not kill my husband, Mr. Detective."

"Nobody said you did."

"You looked at my shoe."

"I looked at your shoe," I agreed. "I didn't tell you what I thought it was."

She stared at me a moment. Then she looked down at her own feet, at the plain black pumps that had replaced the green slippers.

"It is not important what you think. What is important is what he was doing." She waited, and when I said nothing she went on. "My husband had five thousand dollars yesterday. He told me so at luncheon. He said he was going to buy something he should have bought a long time ago, and then he would be finished with this town and with his father's friends. I asked what he was buying. He said it was a debt, owed to someone who had waited long enough. He would not tell me the name."

"Did he say when he would pay it?"

"Yesterday." Her mouth made a small hard line. "I think that is the last thing he did."

"Has anybody told you the money was paid?"

She shook her head. "Nobody tells me anything. My father-in-law says it is my fault. The newspaper says it is the fault of the people who do not want the town cleaned. The police say nothing at all." She drew a breath. "Find the money. Then you will know who killed him."

"That's one way to go about it."

"It is the only way that interests me." She stood and drew the veil down. "You will tell me what you find."

"I'll tell the Continental."

"That is not the same thing."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

She looked at me a moment longer, as if she had expected more, and then she went out through the revolving door. The doorman touched his cap to her. She did not look back.

I had been at the desk perhaps a minute when the clerk called me back. He had an envelope in his hand, a plain white one with my name on it in pencil, spelled right. That was more than the Herald had managed.

"A kid brought it," he said. "Said a man on the corner gave him a quarter to bring it in and not say who gave it to him. Said he didn't look at the man. I don't think the kid looked at much of anything."

I went to the front window. Across Broadway a delivery truck stood at the curb, and a black Ford with a dented fender, and the place where the Stutz had stood the night before was empty. I looked anyway. Nobody sat in the cars I could see, and nobody on the sidewalk was watching the hotel with any particular interest.

I opened the envelope by the window. Inside was a half sheet of the hotel's paper, folded once, and on it, in neat square pencil writing with no signature:

"Mr. Thaler hopes you found the First National pleasant. He says it is a quiet bank, and the clerks there keep good hours. He suggests you spend the rest of the afternoon in your room, where it is safe, and go back to San Francisco when you have rested. He signs nothing and asks you not to take this as a threat. It is only advice."

I read it twice. It was not signed, and it didn't need to be. Whisper had not come within a block of the hotel. He hadn't needed to. He had sent his advice by a boy who had been paid a quarter not to look at anybody, and he had let me know, in the politest way a man can, that he knew which bank I had been in and what time I'd left it. Somebody had been to the First National that morning asking about checks with no particular name in them. It was not hard to guess who.

I ignored the second half of the advice and went out to send a wire.

The telegraph office was on Broadway, a few doors down from the bank. The operator was a bald man in a green eyeshade who counted my words on his fingers and had the decency not to look surprised by any of them. The wire went out at a quarter past five:

CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO ATTENTION OLD MAN STOP WILLSSON SHOT FOUR TIMES HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT DEAD ON ARRIVAL OF POLICE STOP HE WAS TO SEE ME AT HOUSE AT TEN AND DID NOT COME STOP WIFE LEFT HOUSE TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE WITH WHAT MAY BE BLOOD ON HER SHOE STOP FATHER ELIHU SAYS SHE DID IT AND LITTLE ELSE STOP WILLSSON WROTE CHECK FIVE THOUSAND BEFORE LEAVING OFFICE YESTERDAY AFTERNOON PAYEE UNKNOWN STOP FIRST NATIONAL SAYS NEVER PRESENTED NEVER CERTIFIED WILLSSON NEVER CAME NEAR COUNTER STOP WIFE SAYS HE CALLED IT A DEBT TO BE PAID STOP THALER SENT NOTE THIS AFTERNOON SHOWING HE KNOWS MY MOVEMENTS STOP HAVE NOT SEEN CHECK STOP WANT INSTRUCTIONS WHETHER TO STAY STOP SEND FUNDS CARE GREAT WESTERN HOTEL STOP OP

The bald man counted it twice and charged me for both. I paid him and walked back to the hotel with the streetlights coming on along Broadway and the sky going the color of old brass over the hills.

My room had one window, which looked over the roofs toward the mine. At night you could see the smelter stacks glowing faintly against the dark, and the sound of the ore cars came up from somewhere below, steady as a pulse. I didn't turn on the lamp. I took off my shoes, lay down on the bed with my coat still on, and put my hands behind my head.

The police had said nothing about a check in the dead man's pockets, and the Herald had said nothing about anything except four bullets. If the check had been on him, somebody had taken it before the uniforms arrived, or it had never been on him at all. It had not been in his desk. It had not been cashed. Donald Willsson had written five thousand dollars in ink, torn it from the book, and gone out with it for twenty minutes, long enough to get to a bank and back, though he hadn't gone to the bank. Then he had gone to Hurricane Street, and by ten-forty he was lying on the sidewalk with four holes in him, and the check was nowhere anyone would admit to.

A man had telephoned the First National that morning to ask about Willsson's checks, and wouldn't give his name. A boy had carried a note to the Great Western for a quarter. A woman in black had come to the hotel to tell me her husband had meant to pay a debt and had not said to whom. Each of them knew a piece of it. None of them had said the whole thing, and none of them, I was fairly sure, was going to.

Somewhere below me the stacks went on glowing, and the ore cars went on rolling. Five thousand dollars had been written out in a locked desk on a weekday afternoon, and by night it had gone somewhere no bank had heard of. Somebody in Personville knew where. I lay there in the dark and tried to think who, and the question stayed where it was.

It had gone somewhere. Nobody had told me where, and I was beginning to think nobody meant to.