The Chapters

Lady Russell came early the next morning, before the family had quite finished their breakfast, and with her she brought a paper written in her own small, neat hand. She had been up the greater part of the night, she confessed, considering the matter, and had arrived at a plan which she believed might be carried into effect without any sacrifice that Sir Walter could not reasonably make. She laid it before him in the library, where he had retired with the newspaper, and Anne, who had come down in search of a book, was persuaded to remain and hear it read.

It was a sensible plan. Lady Russell proposed that the stables should be reduced to the carriage horses alone, that the saddle horses should be sold, and that the household should be brought down to such a number as might be maintained without the aid of Mr Shepherd's frequent and alarming letters. She proposed also that the family should spend the next winter quietly at Kellynch, that the London journey should be deferred until the affairs of the estate were in better order, and that a part of the house, the east wing, which was seldom used and very expensive to heat, should be shut up until it was wanted. There was nothing in it that was not reasonable, and Anne, listening, thought it the most considerate paper she had ever heard read aloud.

Sir Walter heard it with his hand upon the newspaper and his eyes upon the ceiling.

“My dear Lady Russell,” said he, when she had finished, “you are very obliging, and I am sure you mean every kindness. But you must allow me to observe that a baronet who shuts up his own rooms, and sends away his horses, and sits all winter in the country with his three daughters and a cook, is a subject for the newspapers, and not a very flattering one. I cannot think it would answer. The county would talk of nothing else.”

“The county would talk for a week,” said Lady Russell mildly, “and then it would forget us.”

“The county does not forget, ma’am. That is its chief defect.”

Lady Russell said no more, but folded her paper and returned it to her reticule with a composure which Anne admired, and which her father certainly did not perceive to be a rebuke.

Mr Shepherd came at noon, having been sent for, and was shewn into the same library with his own papers under his arm. He was a civil, careful man, who had managed the Kellynch property for the better part of twenty years, and he had no wish to offend a gentleman whose good opinion he valued, nor any wish to be made to feel that his figures had been unwelcome. He laid them out upon the table with great deliberation. There were the sums owing to the tradespeople of Kellynch and of the market town, and the sums owing in London, which were larger than Sir Walter had supposed; there were the interest payments upon the mortgage, which had been made upon the estate some years before; and there was a column of small debts, which Mr Shepherd, in a tone of gentle apology, begged leave to call a source of some anxiety.

“You have been very exact, Shepherd,” said Sir Walter, “and I dare say very accurate. But what is it you propose?”

Mr Shepherd proposed a good deal. He proposed that the rents of the home farms should be raised, that the timber on the upper land should be felled and sold, that the subscriptions to the county charities should be withdrawn, that the gardener’s boy should be discharged, and that Sir Walter should consider, very seriously, whether it might not be prudent to dispose of a small outlying farm which lay at some distance from the house and produced very little.

Sir Walter's colour rose a little at the mention of the farm. “Sell land, Shepherd? You know my sentiments on that head. I will not sell an acre of the Kellynch estate. I would sooner dine on bread and water in the servants’ hall than see the name of Elliot upon a deed of sale.”

“I did not say sell, Sir Walter,” said Mr Shepherd, who had said it. “I only ventured to mention it among other matters.”

“Then pray do not mention it again. The estate descends whole, as I received it. Your other suggestions are all very well, but a man in my position cannot be seen to save his money by cutting down his own timber and turning off his gardener. I should be the laughing-stock of every drawing-room in Bath.”

“Bath, Sir Walter?” said Elizabeth, who had entered without anyone remarking it, and who looked upon the word with suspicion. “Nobody has proposed Bath.”

“Nobody has proposed anything at all,” said her father, “which is exactly the difficulty.”

Mr Shepherd, perceiving that his figures had been received in the same spirit as Lady Russell's paper, gathered them together again, and was persuaded, with some warmth, to remain to dinner. Sir Walter was pleased to be gracious to him, and Elizabeth, who was never so well pleased as when she could have her father's company to herself, took pains to appear amiable to their guest; so the table was laid for five, and the cook was told to make it a good dinner.

It was at this dinner, when the covers had been removed and the servants had withdrawn, that Anne, who had been silent through the soup and the fish and the first course of the meat, found herself unable to remain so any longer. She had been thinking, all the afternoon, of the long column of debts; of the tradespeople who had been waiting for their money while Sir Walter’s new carriage was being varnished; of the servants who must each have wondered, in the kitchen, whether they should be paid at Michaelmas. She had been thinking, too, of the speeches that had been made, and of the things that had been left unsaid; and when she spoke, she spoke with a steadiness which surprised herself.

“Might I suggest something, father?”

Sir Walter looked up with the air of a man who suspects a liberty. “Suggest what, Anne?”

“Only that Lady Russell's plan and Mr Shepherd's both seem to me to stop short of what is needed. They would reduce our expenses, but not so far as the debts require. If the sum owing is to be paid within a reasonable time, I think we must go further.”

“Further than Lady Russell?” said Elizabeth, looking at her sister with a little sharpness.

“I think so, yes. I would give up the London season entirely, not merely defer it. I would keep only the carriage horses and the two grooms who attend them, and sell the rest of the stable. I would discharge all the men-servants except the butler and one footman, and let the women go as their places fall vacant. We need not shut up the east wing, which can hardly be let to anyone, but we might live altogether in the west side and leave the rest of the house cold. We would dine plainly, and receive no company who expected otherwise, and we would make a regular payment to each creditor, however small, every quarter, so that none of them need write to Mr Shepherd in alarm. It would be a hard year, but I think it would be a year after which we could hold our heads up again.”

There was a silence. Mr Shepherd looked into his glass as though he had seen something in it of interest. Sir Walter put down his knife and laughed, not very loudly, and said that Anne had evidently been reading the Cheshire parish registers and had mistaken them for a treatise on economy.

Anne flushed, but did not retract. Elizabeth, to the surprise of everyone at the table, and not least of herself, spoke next.

“I think Anne is right,” said she. “That is to say, I think her plan is the only one that has been made which does not pretend. Lady Russell's would keep us in the country, which is what we have always done. Mr Shepherd's would keep us at Kellynch with a good deal of timber gone and a good deal of gossip about it. Anne's would cost us something, and we should be obliged to bear it, which is perhaps what we have not yet been willing to do.”

Her father stared at her. Anne could not have been more astonished had the Baronetage itself begun to speak. It was not that Elizabeth had ever been a warm friend to economy; it was that she had always held that whatever was necessary to be done must, by some means, be done without her being seen to do it.

“Elizabeth, my dear,” said Sir Walter at last, “you cannot mean to dismiss the footmen.”

“I did not say the footmen, sir. I said the women, as their places fall vacant, and the men except one. And I said the horses, which I dare say you would not miss so very much.”

“I should miss the horses very much indeed.”

“Then perhaps we might consider which of the horses,” said Elizabeth, with a patience that was new to Anne, “and not whether any of them must go.”

Mr Shepherd, who had been waiting with the air of a man who knows his moment is coming, now cleared his throat. He had heard, in the course of the evening, a great deal of talk of cutting and selling and dismissing, and he thought it might be time to offer a remedy which would cost nothing to anybody's pride.

“If I might be permitted one further observation, Sir Walter, which is not strictly a matter of economy at all—”

“Pray go on, Shepherd.”

“It has occurred to me that the house itself might be made to answer. Kellynch Hall is a very handsome property, and there are persons of substance in the county, or lately come into it, who would be glad of such a house for a term of years. A tenant of good means, who would keep up the grounds and take the house as it stands, with the furniture—”

“Tenant!” said Sir Walter, and the word fell upon the table like a dropped glass. He did not raise his voice, but his face had gone very white about the mouth. “Mr Shepherd, I must beg you never to use that word in my presence again. I will not have strangers sleeping in my bedchambers, nor my family's portraits carried out of the drawing-room to be hung in some attorney's parlour in Taunton. I did not expect such a suggestion from you, and I shall not hear it repeated.”

Mr Shepherd, who had been agent to the Elliots for a generation, bowed his head and begged pardon, and said nothing more of tenants. Elizabeth, who had for once been on the point of agreeing with him, looked at her plate. Anne thought, though she could not have been certain, that her sister's lips had tightened in a manner that was not wholly disapproving of her father, but of the wretched necessity which had made the word necessary at all.

The cloth was cleared without further conversation. Sir Walter took up the Baronetage, opened it at the familiar page, and then, after a moment's consideration, closed it again. Mr Shepherd took his leave soon after, promising to send round a fair copy of the accounts by the end of the week. Elizabeth retired to the drawing-room with a pair of gloves to mend, and did not speak again.

It was nearly eight o'clock when the post was brought up. There was a letter for Anne, directed in a hand she knew at once, though it was rather more careless than usual, as if the writer had been obliged to write in haste or in ill temper. She carried it to the window, where the last of the light lay over the lawns, and broke the seal.

It was from Mary, at Uppercross. It was, as Anne had half expected, a letter of complaint. Mary had been very unwell; she had been unable to leave her room for two days together; she could not bear the noise of the children, nor the attentions of the Musgroves, who were all very kind and never listened to a word she said. Charles was out with his friends from morning until night, and she was quite alone with nobody to advise her and nobody to nurse her but the housekeeper, who was not at all to be trusted with the medicines. She begged Anne would come to her directly. Nobody else, she wrote, would be of the least use, and Anne was the only one of the family who had ever shewn the slightest feeling for her. She hoped Papa would not object; she was sure he could spare her for a few weeks, and it could not possibly signify, since Anne was of no consequence in any case.

Anne read the letter twice, and then folded it and laid it on the window seat, and sat for some time with her hands in her lap, looking out at the dark shapes of the elms.

The evening was very still. From the drawing-room she could hear the small sound of her sister's needle, and now and then the turning of a page, and once her father's voice, raised in some complaint to nobody in particular about the candles. Nothing was settled. The debts were all still there, in Mr Shepherd's column and in Sir Walter's imagination; the horses were still in the stables, the east wing still heated, the rooms still full of the furniture which nobody would consent to sell. Her own plan lay in the air, unadopted and unmade, and she could not tell whether it would be remembered in a week, or in a month, or ever again.

But she had resolved upon one thing. She would go to Mary. Whatever became of the Kellynch estate, and whatever her father and sister might decide about the horses and the footmen and the word that must not be spoken, Anne could at least do what was asked of her, and what nobody else in the family seemed willing to do. She rose, took up the letter, and went quietly to the door, pausing a moment with her hand upon it, before she went down to tell them.

When she opened her eyes again the train had stopped, and the window that had been gray with rain was black. For a moment she did not know where she was. Then she remembered, and sat up with her hat crooked and her hands still folded in her lap, as if they had been put there and forgotten.

"Now then," said Mrs. Medlock, who was already tying the strings of her bonnet. "Wake up. We're at Thwaite, and there's no time to sit like a stone image."

Mary did not answer. She got up and stood by the carriage door while a porter came along the platform with a lantern. The lantern swung and made long yellow shadows across the wet boards. When the door was opened the air that came in was cold, and it smelt of wet earth and coal-smoke and something green and bitter which she supposed must be the moor, though she had no way of knowing it.

There was a man standing at the far end of the platform, a little apart from the others. He was not doing anything. He wore a long dark coat buttoned up to the throat and a hat pulled low, and he stood very still, as if he had been set there to wait and had made up his mind to wait for as long as it took. When the porter's lantern passed him, Mary saw that he was thin, and that his shoulders were not level. One was higher than the other, and the back beneath the coat bent forward, so that he seemed to be stooping even while he stood upright. She thought at once of Basil, and of the French story about the princess, and she found that she did not want to look at him any more than she could help.

Mrs. Medlock went up to him. "Mr. Craven, sir," she said, and her voice was not nearly so brisk as it had been in London. "This is the child."

He turned his head. In the lantern light his face was pale and rather long, with dark eyes that looked at Mary once, quickly, and then went back to the wet boards as if they had seen enough. He did not smile. He did not put out his hand.

"Yes," he said. "Take her to the carriage."

That was all. Mary was rather glad of it, for she had made up her mind that he would say something disagreeable, and it was a relief to find that he did not trouble to say anything at all.

The carriage was large and old and smelt of damp straw and leather. There was a rug in it so heavy that Mary could hardly lift the corner of it, and Mrs. Medlock tucked it round her knees with a good deal of impatience, as though it were Mary's fault that it was so heavy. Mr. Craven sat opposite them with his back to the horses. He did not look out of the window, nor did he look at either of them. He sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor of the carriage, and once, when the lamp swayed, he moved his head a little, as though the light had troubled him.

They drove for a long time. Mary watched the window, but there was nothing to see except blackness. Now and then a light showed far off across the land, and Mrs. Medlock said it was a farm and that there would be no more lights until they got home. Once there was a flash of white that was a stream running beside the road, and then the dark closed over it again. The wheels made a steady sound on stones and then a softer sound on mud. The rain had stopped, but the wind had got up, and it came against the side of the carriage with a noise like somebody leaning on it.

Mary thought it was the loneliest place she had ever been in. She had been in a bungalow where everyone had died, and that had been lonely, but there had been the sound of the servants' quarters and the smell of cooking and people shouting, even when they were shouting about death. Here there was nothing but the wind and the wheels and the horses' breathing, and nobody spoke at all.

Then the carriage stopped with a jerk that threw Mary forward against the rug.

There were voices outside, and a horse snorted and stamped. The driver called out something she could not catch, and Mrs. Medlock leaned toward the window and put her head out.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Summat i' t' road, missus," came the answer. "Cart's gone ower on its side, or summat. Horses winna go past it."

Mrs. Medlock drew her head in with a sound of disgust and began to fuss with her mantle. Mr. Craven had already opened his own door and got down. He did not say anything to anyone. He simply went out into the dark, and Mary heard his uneven footsteps going forward along the road, and the driver's voice rising and falling as the two of them spoke together in low tones.

Nobody was looking at her. Mrs. Medlock had her back half turned and was scolding the driver's boy, and the men were up at the horses' heads. Mary put her hand on the handle of the door and pushed it open, and before anyone could stop her she had climbed down by herself onto the road.

The ground was soft under her black boots, and she stepped off the road onto a strip of grass, and then onto something that was not grass at all. It was springy and wet and it gave under her feet, and when she bent down she could feel a tangle of stiff little stems against her fingers. She stood up again and looked about her.

There was nothing. That was the first thing she thought. The land went away on every side of her, flat and then rising, and it was all one dark, without a tree or a hedge or a wall to break it. The wind came across it in long steady pushes, and she could hear it running through the stiff stems with a faint hissing sound, as if the whole moor were breathing. Above her the clouds had broken, and between them there were stars, more stars than she had ever seen even at the hill station where her father had once taken her for a holiday. They were very cold and very far off, and they did not seem to care in the least whether she was there or not.

Mary stood quite still and looked up at them. She did not think about her mother or her father, or the bungalow, or the men who had carried the bodies out in the night. She thought only that the sky was very large, and that she had never been so small in her life, and that she did not in the least mind.

"Miss!" Mrs. Medlock's voice came sharp and cross out of the dark. "Miss Mary! Where are you? Get back into this carriage this minute, or you'll catch your death!"

Mary turned round. The carriage lamps were yellow smudges a little way off, and she could see the shape of the horses and a dark figure moving between them. She went back slowly, picking her way across the wet grass, and climbed up again without help. Her boots were soaked through and her skirts were wet to the knee.

Mr. Craven was standing at the horses' heads with one hand on the bridle. He turned when she came near, and looked at her for a moment in the lamplight. She waited for him to say something about it, to scold her, or to ask her why she had done such a thing. He said nothing. After a moment he turned back to the horses, and the cart was dragged aside, and they went on.

They reached Misselthwaite very late. Mary saw only a great dark shape rising against the sky, with a few lighted windows scattered over it like sparks that had not caught, and then she was being hurried across a stone hall that echoed under her boots, up a staircase, and along a passage that seemed to go on forever. Mrs. Medlock carried the candle and kept up a continual low grumbling about the hour and the damp and the state of the child's boots. Mr. Craven had gone another way, and Mary did not see him again.

The room they put her in was not large, and it had a fire that somebody had lit that afternoon and that was now only a red glow among the ashes. There was a bed with heavy hangings and a chair with a worn cushion, and a window with the curtains drawn. Mary did not go near the window. She sat down on the edge of the chair and waited.

Presently there was a knock, and a manservant came in with a tray. He was a broad, elderly man with a red face and large, careful hands, and he set the tray down on the table as though it were something that might break. There was a bowl of hot broth, some bread and butter, a cold slice of mutton, and a jug of milk.

"Ah've browt thi supper," he said, and gave a short nod toward the tray. "Tha'd best eat it while it's het. It's a rare cold neet for t' time o' year, an' thi bed'll tak' a while to warm."

Mary looked up at him. She had understood the first words, and she had understood that he meant supper; but the rest came to her in a rush of strange sounds, and she could not tell where one word ended and the next began.

"I don't understand you," she said. "What did you say?"

The man looked surprised, and then, rather slowly, he repeated it, a little louder and with more care, as though she were deaf. "Ah said, tha'd best eat it while it's het. Bed'll be warm directly."

"I cannot understand what you say," Mary told him. Her voice was stiff and cold, as it always was when she was made to feel foolish, and she did not try to make it otherwise. "You speak in a very queer way. I have never heard anybody talk like that."

The man's face went redder, but he only nodded. "Aye," he said, not unkindly. "Happen tha'll learn it."

Mrs. Medlock came in behind him just then and gave a short laugh. "Eh, she's from India," she said. "She doesn't know our talk, and she's not going to learn it in a hurry, by the look of her. Get along with you, Ben, and fetch some more coals."

Mary ate the broth because she was hungry, though she would not have admitted it to anyone. It was very hot and tasted of salt and something she did not know, and it made her feel a little warmer. When she had finished, Mrs. Medlock came and took the tray away, and then began to undress her with rough, quick hands, grumbling all the while about the state of her stockings. Mary let her do it. She was too tired to argue, and besides, there seemed to be no point. The bed was cold and the sheets smelt of lavender and damp, and when she was in it she lay still and stared up at the dark shape of the hangings.

Mrs. Medlock took up the candle and stood at the foot of the bed.

"Now you go to sleep," she said. "You'll be better in the morning when you've had a proper night's rest. And don't go wandering about the house, mind. I've told you that."

She had almost reached the door when Mary heard it.

It was not loud. It seemed to come from a long way off, from somewhere beyond the walls of the room or above it, and it was thin and uneven, rising and falling in a way that was not like the wind at all. It stopped. Then it began again, and this time it was closer, or seemed to be, a faint, muffled sound that might have been something being dragged along a passage, or a door being tried very softly, over and over, by someone who did not want to be heard.

Mary sat up in bed.

"What is that?"

Mrs. Medlock turned round in the doorway. For a moment her red face seemed to close up, the way a shop shuts its shutters at the end of the day. Then she gave a short laugh.

"That? Why, it's the wind," she said. "It gets into these old houses, and it goes moaning up the chimneys and round the corners. You'll hear it all night long, and you'll get used to it. Lie down now."

She shut the door behind her. Her footsteps went away along the passage, quick and heavy, and then there was only the fire settling in the grate and the faint hiss of the wind outside.

Mary lay down again. She pulled the cold sheet up to her chin and stared into the dark. The sound did not come again for a long time, and when it did it was no louder than before; but she lay listening to it with her eyes wide open, and she was quite certain that it was not the wind. Mrs. Medlock had said it so quickly, and had looked so odd while she said it, that Mary knew she had not been telling the truth.

Well, then, Mary thought, I shall find out for myself.

I will not pretend, now that I have got to Mr. Franklin's arrival, that I took much notice of anything but the young gentleman himself. He was in the highest spirits, and he kept a hold of my arm the whole way up through the sandhills, as if he were afraid I might sit down again and go to sleep in the marram grass. I was not sorry to be held up. My legs had grown stiff in the beehive chair, and the sand is a treacherous thing for a man of my years, whether it is shivering or not.

"You are wondering why I am four hours before my time," says Mr. Franklin, when we had got clear of the hills and could see the chimneys of the house over the dark firs.

"I am wondering, sir," I said, "whether my lady knows you are come."

"She does not. That is precisely the point." He began to feel in the breast of his fawn-coloured coat, and brought out a letter folded small, with a London postmark on the cover and a good deal of creasing, as if it had been read more often than was comfortable. "I had meant to come down by the late train tomorrow, Betteredge, and to pass a quiet night in town first. Then this came to my rooms, and I altered my plans in the time it takes to swear at a cab-driver. Read it. I would rather you read it than have me tell it to you, because I am not sure I should tell it in the right order."

Now, I am not a man who reads other people's letters, as a rule. But when a gentleman puts a letter into your hand in the open air, with his own eyes watching you over it, it would be rude to pretend you had not been asked. I put on my spectacles, which I had been carrying in my waistcoat pocket with a great deal of sand in the case, and I read it standing still on the path, with the wind blowing the paper about.

It ran thus, in a small and careful hand:

*"Dear Mr. Blake,*

*I write in some haste, and in a manner I should not care to be quoted in a court of law, because I think you ought to hear of a matter touching the Diamond from someone who is not a stranger to it, before you hear of it from the newspapers or from anyone who has an interest in making it sound worse than it is. A person called on me this morning, on a errand which I will not put in writing. I have declined to be concerned in it, and I have advised that person to go no further. But I do not like the look of the affair, and I do not like being the only man in London who knows of it. Come up to me, if you can, or go down to Yorkshire and keep your own counsel there, which I think is the wiser course of the two. Do not on any account speak of the thing to anyone who is not already in your confidence, and above all do not speak of it in a house where you cannot be overheard.*

*Yours faithfully,*

*F. Bruff"*

I took off my spectacles and gave the letter back. "Mr. Bruff," I said, "is not a man who writes in haste, sir, unless the house is on fire."

"Bruff is never in haste," says Mr. Franklin. "That is what makes this so extraordinary. He wrote it at half past nine this morning, and it was in my rooms before eleven. I have been sitting over it ever since, and I have come to the conclusion that I am being made a fool of by someone, or that I am being frightened by someone, and I cannot decide which is worse." He folded the paper again, very carefully, with the creases in the right places, and put it away. "I am not going to take it up the drive and spoil my aunt's afternoon with it. But I thought it best you should know, because you will be the one who has to put up with me in the house while I make up my mind."

"It's not for me to say what your aunt's afternoon can bear, sir," I said. "But I have never yet known my lady to be spoiled by a bit of news, so long as it came from a gentleman in a good coat."

He laughed at that, and gave me another squeeze on the arm, and told me again that I was the dearest old fellow in England. I have had a good many compliments in my life, and most of them came with a bill attached. This one did not, and I still count it among the best.

Before we came to the house, he took a small packet from his waistcoat pocket and held it out to me. It was no bigger than a pair of gloves folded together. It was wrapped in brown paper and sealed at every edge with red wax, and the seal was pressed with a plain device which I did not know, and which I did not take the trouble to look at twice, being a man who understands that a seal is there to be respected and not interpreted.

"I want you to lock this up for me tonight," says Mr. Franklin. "In the plate-room, if you please, with the family silver. It is not valuable, in the ordinary sense. But it is not to be opened by anyone, and it is not to go out of the house until I ask for it myself. Will you do that for me, Betteredge?"

"Sir," I said, "I will lock up the Archbishop of York in the plate-room if you ask it, and give him no supper."

"Then you will not ask me what is in it?"

"No, sir," I said. "I am an old servant. I know better than to ask a gentleman what he keeps in his pockets, especially when it has been sealed by himself in front of me in the open air."

He looked at me with a sort of gratitude that I did not altogether understand, and put the packet into my hand. It weighed next to nothing. I put it into the inside pocket of my own coat, next to my pocket-book, where I could feel it bumping against my ribs every step of the way up the back drive.

We went in by the garden door. My lady was in the morning-room, with her letters and her spectacles and her cup of tea gone cold beside her, and she rose up out of her chair with both hands held out before Mr. Franklin was fairly through the door. I will not describe that meeting, for it is not my business, and I was obliged to go out again with the bags before it was half over. But I will say that she looked at her nephew as if she had got back something she had mislaid, and that Mr. Franklin, for once in his life, was quiet and let himself be looked at.

When I came back into the room with the tea-tray, which I had sent for on my own responsibility, my lady had sat down again and was speaking to him with her hand upon his sleeve.

"You are not to bring it up, Franklin," she was saying. "I have said so to Rachel, and I say it to you. Whatever you have come down here to talk about, the Moonstone is not to be mentioned under this roof. Not at dinner, not in the drawing-room, not in the garden. I have had enough of that wretched stone in this house to last me the rest of my life. Will you promise me that?"

Mr. Franklin looked at her for a moment, and then looked at the tray, and then looked at me, as if he thought I might have something to say about it. I had nothing to say, and I kept my face in its usual condition, which is the face of a man who has not heard a word that is not about the tea.

"I promise you, aunt," says he. "The Moonstone shall not be mentioned under your roof."

"Thank you," says my lady, and she let go of his sleeve, and took up her cup, and found it cold, and made a face at it. "Betteredge, you may take that away and bring me another. And you may tell Penelope that Mr. Franklin's room is to be aired, though I dare say she has done it already."

I took the tray away, and I went down the back stairs with my heart at my boots and the packet knocking against my ribs, and I thought to myself that I had been in service for more than fifty years and had never once been asked to keep a secret for a family without the family taking the trouble, at the end of it, to tell me what the secret was. Here was a new thing in my experience. I did not like it, and I did not know what to do with it, so I did the only sensible thing a man can do with a secret, which is to carry it to the plate-room and lock it up.

The plate-room is a stone cell at the end of the passage behind the butler's pantry, with a grated window that looks out upon the yard, and a door of good oak with a lock that has been made to keep out the most determined thief in Yorkshire. Inside are the shelves, with the family silver laid out in green baize, and the big plate-chest with its three keys, and a smell of polish and cold stone that I have always found comforting. I went in with my lantern, which I had lit against the coming dusk, and I found the place where the Verinder silver ends and the spare cutlery begins, and I put the packet into the corner of the lowest shelf, behind a tureen that nobody has used since the late Sir John's time. I wrapped it round with a bit of green baize, so that it should not be seen by any chance by any careless housemaid with a duster. Then I locked the door, and tried it twice, and wrote in my own book, against the date, that the plate-room had been secured at six o'clock by myself, and that nothing had been put in or taken out but a sealed packet which was not to be touched.

I put the book away in my pocket with the pocket-book, and I stood for a moment in the passage with my hand against the cold oak, feeling a fool, as I have said before I am ready to feel whenever a gentleman asks me to do him a service without explanation. It was not until I had got back to the foot of the back stairs that I ran into Penelope.

She was coming down with an armful of clean linen, and she stopped on the bottom step when she saw me, and her face had that look on it which I have known since she was a child in pinafores, when she has been crying in a corner and has come out to pretend that she has not.

"Father," says she, "where is Rosanna?"

"Where she ought to be, I hope," I said. "Is she not in the house?"

"She is not. Nancy has been up and down the back passage twice, and she says the second housemaid's bed has not been slept in, and her bonnet is gone off its peg." Penelope shifted the linen to the other arm. "I went out to the back gate, when Nancy said it, and there was a boy from Cobb's Hole sitting on the wall with a bit of fishing line in his hands. He says he saw Rosanna on the sands a little after one, going along the top of the bank, and that she was going on to the village. He says she asked him if the Widow Hirst was at home, and he said she was, and Rosanna went off that way without waiting for an answer."

"Cobb's Hole," I said. "She has been there before, I know, to see her friend. But she has never gone there at this hour without leave, to my knowledge."

"No, Father," says Penelope, and then she was silent for a little, and looked at the linen in her arms as if it had offended her. "She was crying again this morning, before she went out. I saw her. She would not tell me what for."

"Did she say anything to you about Mr. Franklin?"

Penelope looked up at me sharply. "Mr. Franklin? No. Why should she?"

"No reason at all," I said, which was a lie, for I was thinking of the colour that came up in the girl's face on the sands, and the way she had gone off among the hills without her curtsey. But it was not a lie that I could justify to my own daughter, so I said nothing more of it, and Penelope went off up the stairs with her linen and left me standing in the passage with my book in one pocket and my fears in the other.

I do not wish to make myself out wiser than I was that evening, and I will say plainly that I thought very little of Rosanna Spearman's absence beyond the trouble it would give the housekeeping. A girl who has had a fainting-fit in the morning and a fit of crying at noon, and who goes off to see her one friend in the village, is not an uncommon sight in a house full of women. I supposed she had lost her head a little, as the poor will do when they have been given something too good for them to keep, and that she would come walking up the back drive at dusk with her eyes red and her bonnet crooked and beg my pardon for the trouble. I resolved to be stern with her, in the proper manner, and then to be kind, which is the proper order of things with a young woman in a melancholy frame of mind.

Dinner was served at seven, in the dining-room, with my lady at the head of the table and Mr. Franklin at her right, and the candles lit against the grey coming up off the sea. I waited on them myself, with Nancy's help, for there was no other man to do it. Mr. Franklin talked of Paris, and of the opera, and of a German professor whom he had met at a dinner in London and who had held forth for two hours on the subject of the English appetite for roast beef. My lady laughed at him, which she had not done in a month, I believe. Nobody spoke of the Moonstone. Nobody spoke of anything that could be called the matter in hand. My lady's eyes went to the door every time it opened, and every time it was only Nancy with the dishes, and every time she looked away again with a little tightening of the mouth that I did not like to see.

Rosanna's chair stood empty at the end of the servants' table, in the hall, where I went to look at half past eight. Nobody had sat in it. Nancy said it was no business of hers, and went on eating her supper with the same appetite she had had at noon, which I took as a sign that the poor girl's absence had not yet been properly considered by anybody in the house.

It was late when I came back to my own sitting-room, and the lamp was lit and turned low, and the fire was burning down to a red heap in the grate. I sat down in my beehive chair, which had been waiting for me all day, with the faithful creak of its old wicker, and I took up my copy of *Robinson Crusoe* from the table, and opened it at the page where I had left off in the morning, when the island was still a long way off and the goats had not yet come to the cave. I read a page. I read it again, for I had lost the sense of it. I looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece, which said a quarter to eleven, and then at the window, where the sea was making its long dull noise beyond the firs, and I saw nothing in the dark but my own face reflected faintly in the glass.

The packet was locked away in the plate-room, behind the old tureen, wrapped in its green baize, and I had the key on its string round my neck, where I could feel it cold against my chest. Mr. Franklin was asleep upstairs, or at least lying still in his bed, for I had seen a light under his door when I passed. My lady had gone up at ten with her candle and her face set hard. Penelope was in her room, with the door shut and no sound from it.

And Rosanna Spearman was not back in the house.

I got up out of my chair, at last, and went to the back door and opened it, and stood for a while on the step with the lantern in my hand, looking out at the black line of the plantation where the path went down to the sands. There was no light there, and no sound of footsteps on the gravel. Only the sea, and the wind coming up off it, and somewhere beyond the dunes, a long way off, the sound of a dog barking in Cobb's Hole.

I shut the door, and went back to my chair, and sat down in it, and did not open my book again.

I did not see it fall. I saw only the thing that came before it, a streak of pale green light that drew a short line across the dark above the Chertsey road and was gone before I could say anything about it. My wife was beside me in the garden, and she gave a little cry and caught my arm. "A falling star," she said. "Make a wish." I said I had seen a great many of them and had never yet known one to answer, and she laughed at me and went in. I stayed out a while longer, looking at the place where it had been, and then I followed her to bed.

Had I known what that light was, I would not have gone to bed at all. But I did not know, and it seems to me now that nothing I could have done with my knowledge would have altered anything. The thing was already on the ground, and the ground was already beneath it.

In the morning the whole neighbourhood had heard of it. The baker's boy brought the news to our door before the milk, and by the time I had shaved there were three different accounts of where the thing had come down. One said it was on Horsell Common, another that it had fallen into the gravel pit beyond the Ottershaw road, and a third, from a lady who had been woken by the shock, that it had struck the river itself and sent up a column of water as high as a church spire. Only the last was clearly wrong, for the water in the pit had been perfectly still when I walked past it the evening before, and the lady had been dreaming, as she confessed to me afterwards with some embarrassment.

Ogilvy came over before I had finished my breakfast. He had not been to bed, and his hair stood up at the back as though he had been running his hands through it all night. "You must come," he said. "You must come at once. It has come down in the pit beyond the Chertsey road, and it is nothing like anything I have ever read about. Bring your wife if you like. There will be a crowd by noon and it will be better to be early."

My wife was already at the door with her hat in her hand. She had heard every word, and I think she had made up her mind before he finished speaking. I did not argue, for I knew it would be useless, and besides I was curious myself.

The road was thick with people by the time we reached the bend, carts and gigs and men on foot, boys running ahead and shouting, a policeman from Chertsey trying with little success to keep the way clear for a van. The sun was not yet high, but already it had the warmth of a summer morning that had promised to be a hot one. Beyond the hedge the ground fell away into the pit, and there, at its edge, half sunk in the grey water, lay the thing.

I had expected a stone. I had expected something rough and black, pitted like a cinder, something a man might pick up in one hand. It was not that at all. It was a great cylinder, very nearly the length of a railway carriage and perhaps as broad as one, lying with its end tilted up out of the water, and its surface was not rock but metal, smooth and dull and blistered in places as though it had been painted and then scorched. The water about it was hissing. A thin white steam rose from the place where the metal met the pit, and drifted off across the surface in long slow coils, and the reeds on the bank were limp and brown for a yard around it, as though a fire had been through them.

Round the top of the cylinder, where it lifted clear of the water, ran a faint seam, a dark line that went all the way round in a perfect circle. I looked at that line for a long time. It was too regular for any work of Nature I had ever seen, and I said so.

"It is a meteorite," said Ogilvy at once. He had been standing with his hands in his pockets, rocking gently on his heels, and he did not look at me when he spoke. "A mass of iron and nickel, or something very like it. It came in at a tremendous speed, and the air heated it on the way down, and the outside was melted. Now it is cooling. You can hear it cooling if you listen, there, do you hear that ticking? That is the metal contracting. Quite natural."

"The seam," I said.

"Is a flaw in the casting. Or a line of cleavage. Meteorites have them."

"It is perfectly round."

"So are a great many things, if you give them a turn on a lathe." He did look at me then, and he had the air of a man who had argued the point with himself since four in the morning and had grown tired of losing it. "My dear fellow, you cannot have it both ways. Either it is a natural body, which is the simplest explanation and the only one the facts will support, or you must suppose that somebody has put it here. And who would do that, and why, and with what?"

I had no answer to that, and I said so, and he seemed mollified. But I was not satisfied, and I do not think he was either, though he would have died rather than admit it. There was something in the shape of the thing, in the regularity of the seam, in the way the steam came off it not evenly but in little rhythmic puffs, that did not sit easily with the story of a fallen stone. I remembered the flash I had watched from the observatory, the streamer of gas that had come out towards us like the breath from a gun, and I remembered Ogilvy himself laughing at the notion of signals, and I found that I could not quite meet his eye.

My wife had said nothing. She had stood a little behind me all this while, holding my arm, and now she spoke quietly. "It looks like something that has been made," she said. "I do not mean by whom. Only that it looks made."

Before I could answer, there was a shout from the bank. A young labourer in a fustian jacket had pushed his way through to the very edge of the pit, and he was leaning out over the water with a look of pure bravado on his face, the sort of look a man wears when he has been laughed at and means to show he is not afraid. The men round him were egging him on. He reached out and laid his palm flat against the metal, just below the seam.

He did not hold it there for more than a second. The yell he gave was not the yell of a man who has been startled; it was the cry of a man who has been struck. He snatched his hand back and clutched it to his chest, and the crowd gave a great collective gasp and fell back from the bank as though the thing had lunged at them. The labourer was swearing and weeping together. When he showed his hand, the palm was already reddening, and in the middle of it a blister was rising white and wet.

"It is hot," somebody said unnecessarily, and somebody else laughed, a little high and uneasy, and then the laughter died out altogether.

Ogilvy pushed through, took the man by the wrist, and examined the hand with the professional gravity of a doctor. "A burn," he said. "A nasty one, but a burn only. The metal has retained the heat of its passage, that is all. Put cold water on it, and somebody fetch a doctor from Chertsey." Then, turning to the crowd, he raised his voice a little. "You will all please keep back from the edge. The thing is not safe to touch until it has cooled, and we do not yet know how long that will take."

Nobody argued with him, and the crowd did as it was told, but I noticed that nobody went home either. If anything, more people were coming. The word had spread along the road from Ottershaw and across the fields from Chertsey, and the carts kept arriving, with their drivers standing up on the boards to see over the hedge. A clergyman in a black coat came with a notebook. Two men from the gasworks came with a rope. A photographer from the town set up his tripod on the far bank and began fussing with his plates, and I heard someone say that a reporter from London had been seen at the station.

The sun climbed. The steam from the water thickened and then thinned again, and the smell of it was faintly metallic, like the smell of a struck match or of a kettle left to boil dry. The ticking went on, slow and regular, and I found myself counting it without wishing to, the way one counts the strokes of a clock in a sickroom. Every now and then there was a small sharp sound from the cylinder, a crack or a settling, and the crowd would start and murmur and then settle again. Once I thought I saw the seam itself move, a hair's breadth, though when I looked again there was nothing to see. I told myself it was the heat-shimmer on the water, and I think that was the truth.

By half past eleven the crowd was so dense along the bank that the policeman had given up any pretence of keeping the road clear. I saw my wife's face, pale under the brim of her hat, and I saw that she had been standing in the same spot for nearly three hours, and that she was tired and frightened and would not say so.

"You must go home," I said.

"And you?"

"I shall stay a little longer. Ogilvy will want a witness, and I should like to see what it does when it cools."

"You said that before. You said it at breakfast." She looked past me at the thing in the pit, and her mouth tightened. "It is not a stone, Nils. You know it is not."

I did not answer, because I could not think of anything that would not frighten her more, and because I did not entirely know whether I believed her. Instead I took her hand and said that I would be home before dark, that she should lie down when she reached the house, and that I would send word by the first boy I saw. It was a poor sort of speech, and she knew it, but she let me say it. At last she nodded, and turned, and began to make her way back along the road through the carts and the people, going carefully, keeping close to the hedge.

At the bend she stopped and looked back, and I raised my hand, and she raised hers. Then the crowd closed in between us and I could no longer see her.

It was noon by the church clock at Chertsey, which I could just hear across the fields. The ticking went on in the pit. Somewhere behind me a man was shouting for more rope, and the clergyman was reading aloud from his notebook to a circle of listeners, and the steam was rising off the grey water in its slow white coils. I stood where I was, at the edge of the crowd, with my back to the road and my face to the thing that had fallen, and I waited for it to finish cooling.

The First National Bank took up half a block on Broadway, gray stone with brass grilles and a clock over the door that was five minutes slow. I got there at a quarter to four, when the tellers were counting out and nobody was paying much attention to customers.

I asked for the man who handled Willsson's account. A paying teller sent me to a glass cubicle at the back, where an assistant cashier named Walter Crouch sat behind a desk with nothing on it but a blotter and a pen tray. He was a thin man with pale careful eyes and a celluloid collar. He stood up when I gave him my card and sat down again when I told him what I wanted.

"Mr. Willsson's account is in order," he said. "I can tell you that much without consulting anyone."

"I'm not interested in the balance. A five-thousand-dollar check was drawn on it yesterday afternoon. Have you seen it?"

He looked at the blotter. "Yesterday's date?"

"Yes."

"Signed by Mr. Willsson?"

"Yes."

He opened a drawer, took out a file of slips, and ran his thumb down them with the patience of a man who had been doing that sort of thing for years. Then he shut the drawer.

"No."

"Not presented?"

"Not at this window or any other in the building. It hasn't come through the clearing house either. I looked before you came in." He folded his hands on the blotter. "We have had no request to certify it, and I'd have known about one. A certification goes on the ledger as a hold against the account. There's no hold."

"Could it have been cashed at another bank?"

"Anything is possible. But a check drawn on this bank comes back to this bank sooner or later, through the clearing house, in the ordinary way. Usually sooner. This one hasn't come back."

"Is it made out to anybody?"

"I couldn't say. I haven't seen it."

"The stub doesn't name anybody either."

Crouch's pale eyes rested on me for a moment without expression. "Then if it was made payable to cash or to bearer, it would have been paid at any window in town without a question. That's the trouble with those. Nobody asks. Somebody would have had to think it worth the trouble of taking it to a bank, and so far nobody has."

"Who else can sign on that account?"

"Mr. Willsson signed his own checks. His father has a general power of attorney, though I don't believe he's ever used it on this account." He lifted one hand an inch off the blotter and let it fall. "I'm sorry I can't tell you more."

"You've told me plenty. Thanks."

"Mr. Willsson was a pleasant man to do business with," Crouch said, standing up. "I hope you find whoever did this."

I said I hoped so too, and went out into Broadway.

When I got back to the Great Western the clerk had an envelope waiting. He held it across the desk between two fingers, as if it might be warm.

"A boy left it about an hour ago," he said. "Brown cap. He was out the door before I could ask him anything."

The envelope had my name typed on the front, nothing else. Inside was a plain white card, also typed:

*Mr. Thaler's compliments. He wonders whether you would prefer the morning train or the afternoon one. Either is good for San Francisco. He hopes you will not find the choice inconvenient.*

There was no signature. The e in *prefer* was a little high, as if the typewriter's type-arm had been bent. I read the card twice, put it in my pocket, and went up to my room.

I sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette and thought about Max Thaler, who was a small neat man in three shades of brown and who had gone into Donald Willsson's house the night before, the night the man was shot. Thaler had not sent a boy with a card to a man he thought had nothing to do with anything. He had sent it because I was a nuisance, and because he wanted me to know he knew where I slept. He had not sent it because he was frightened of me. A man who was frightened would have sent a bullet, or nothing.

When the cigarette was out I put on my hat and went to the Western Union office two doors from the bank.

The operator was a sallow boy with ink on his cuffs. I wrote the message out on one of his blanks, read it over, took out a word that wasn't needed, and put it back in because it was needed after all. It came to this:

OLD MAN CONTINENTAL SAN FRANCISCO

WILLSSON SHOT SIX TIMES HURRICANE STREET TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT DEAD ON ARRIVAL STOP NO ONE SAW SHOOTER OR WOMAN WHO BENT OVER BODY STOP WIDOW WENT OUT TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE WITH BLOOD ON SHOE STOP FATHER SAYS SHE DID IT AND SAYS SON WAS USED AGAINST GANG STOP FATHER REFUSES ANYTHING ELSE STOP FIVE THOUSAND CHECK DRAWN TWO FORTY FIVE NO PAYEE NOT PRESENTED NOT CERTIFIED FIRST NATIONAL STOP WOMAN PHONED WILLSSON BEFORE HE LEFT OFFICE STOP THALER SENT WARNING TO HOTEL STOP AM STAYING GREAT WESTERN STOP WANT INSTRUCTIONS STOP OP

The operator counted it, named a price, and I paid him. He stamped the blank and dropped it in a wire basket and went back to his sheet of ink.

I stood on the step outside for a minute and watched the street lights come up along Broadway. The wire would be in San Francisco by morning. The Old Man would read it at his desk with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he would say something sour about small-town newspapers and small-town money, and then he would start asking questions I couldn't answer yet.

I walked back to the hotel for supper. It was a bad supper. Afterward I went up to my room and read the afternoon paper, which had nothing new about Donald Willsson except a longer editorial, and at ten minutes past nine somebody knocked.

It was not the clerk. The clerk knocks like a man who expects to be paid for his trouble. This knock was short and even.

I opened the door. Mrs. Willsson stood in the corridor in a dark coat buttoned to the throat, with a small black hat and a veil pushed back from her face. Her face was very pale. Her eyes were not. She looked past me into the room, then at me.

"You are the detective," she said. The accent was there, slight and careful.

"I'm the detective."

"May I come in?"

"You didn't ask the clerk to announce you."

"No." She came in anyway. I shut the door behind her. She did not sit down. She stood in the middle of the carpet with her gloved hands together and looked at the window, the chair, the bed, and the wire-marked lamp, as if she were pricing them.

"You went to my father-in-law," she said.

"I did."

"He is telling everyone that I killed my husband."

"He told me that."

"It is not true." She said it quietly, without any heat, the way a person says a thing she has already said to herself many times. "I did not kill Donald. I loved him, whatever my father-in-law thinks I felt."

"Where were you between twenty past ten and five past eleven?"

Her mouth tightened. "I went out to do something. I did it. I came back."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only answer I am giving you." She lifted her chin. "I am not in your employment. You have no right to ask me where I went."

"Your husband hired me. That gives me a right to ask about his death."

"My husband hired you to do what?"

"I don't know yet. He didn't say."

She looked at me for a long moment. Something in her face moved and then settled again, like a door that had been pushed and then held.

"Then I will be plain," she said. "Go back to San Francisco. Tonight, or in the morning. There is nothing here for you, and the people who would like you to stay are not people you would enjoy meeting." She took a small purse from under her arm and opened it, and I thought for a moment she was going to count out money. She didn't. She closed it again. "I can make it worth your while. More than the agency would pay you for a week of standing in a hotel corridor."

"Is that what the phone call was about?"

Her hand stopped on the clasp of the purse. "What phone call?"

"The one your husband took at two o'clock yesterday, when he told somebody he'd be there at ten but had to hurry away."

She didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, very evenly:

"I do not know who telephoned him. I am not in the habit of listening to my husband's telephone calls."

"Did he tell you about the money?"

"What money?"

"He wrote a check for five thousand dollars before he went out yesterday afternoon. It hasn't been presented at any bank in Personville."

She looked at me as if I had said something in a language she didn't read well. "Donald did not tell me about money. He never told me about money. That was the trouble between us, if you want to know. He told everyone everything except the things that mattered."

"That's a sad way to put it."

"It is an accurate way." She put the purse back under her arm. "I have said what I came to say. Will you go?"

"I'll think about it."

"Do not think too long, Mr. Operative." She opened the door herself. In the corridor light she looked smaller than she had in the house on Mountain Boulevard, and older, and very careful with her feet. She hesitated on the threshold. "My husband was not a good man to be married to. But he was not a bad one either. Remember that, if you are going to write it in your report."

Then she went down the corridor without looking back, and I heard the stairs take her weight, one step at a time.

I shut the door and locked it and stood with my back against it for a while. The room was very quiet. Out on Broadway a motor horn sounded twice and stopped.

I took off my coat and hung it over the back of the chair and sat down by the window. The lamp was off. The street below was bright in patches and dark in between, and a Stutz touring car was not parked outside the hotel, which I noticed and didn't enjoy noticing.

Five thousand dollars had left Donald Willsson's checkbook at a quarter to three, in a hand that was still his, and had never come back to the bank. Nobody had cashed it. Nobody had certified it. Nobody had been seen carrying it in the street. Somewhere in Personville it was folded in a wallet, or burning in a stove, or lying in a locked drawer like the one in the dead man's office, waiting for someone to decide what it was worth.

A woman had telephoned him at two o'clock. A woman had gone out of the house at twenty past ten with blood on her shoe, and come back white and told me her husband would not be home. A small neat man had typed a card about trains.

I sat there until the street lights went off one by one, and the question stayed where I had left it: who had been waiting for that check to come back, and who had decided it never would.

The children came back from the bath-house with sand in their shoes and their hair full of wind, and Mrs. Pontellier led them up the path without hurrying. Robert had gone on ahead with Madame Ratignolle, who leaned upon his arm and talked in a low voice about the heat, the nurse-maids, and the little Ratignolle who had been stung by a wasp the week before. Edna could see them against the white glare of the road, her friend's ruffles fluttering and Robert's head bent toward her, attentive and grave.

At the gate of the Lebrun cottages Madame Ratignolle released his arm and turned to wave her fan at the children, who were not looking at her. Robert stood a moment in the road. Then he came back to where Edna waited, and he took off his hat to her with a little flourish, as he always did when he wished to appear careless.

"Madame Ratignolle is going to lie down," he said. "The walk was too long for her. I told her it was the sun. She said it was the sand."

"She is always right about her own body," returned Edna. "I hope she will be better after a rest."

"She will be better, but she will not be cured. Nothing cures Adèle except her own children and her own cushions." He laughed, and then he looked at Edna with the expression she had come to know, half teasing, half something else. "You did not wait for me on the beach. I thought you had gone to swim."

"I did not wish to swim."

"No. You only wished to be somewhere that nobody could follow you to."

She did not answer him. She gathered up the little boy who had come to lean against her skirt, and she walked on toward the house, and Robert let her go.

It was nearly noon when the telegram came. A barefoot boy from Madame Lebrun's kitchen brought it up to the gallery and stood waiting while she tore open the envelope, as if he expected a reply to be written there and then. Edna read it twice.

*Cannot come out Saturday. Business will detain me in town. Kiss the boys for me. Léonce.*

She folded the yellow paper into a square and then into a smaller square, and she sent the boy away with a coin. Her husband's absence was not a new thing; she had been through many weekends alone at Grand Isle while he played billiards at Klein's and wrote her long letters about the price of cotton. But this time she felt something she could not name at once. It was not grief, and it was not quite relief. It was more like the feeling of a door opening somewhere in a house where she had thought every door was shut.

She put the telegram into the drawer of the little table, and she did not tell the children. They would have asked a great many questions about the train and whether papa would bring them sweets.

The afternoon was hot and still, and the sea lay flat and shining under the sun. Edna dressed in the bath-house without calling anyone, and when she came out in her plain blue bathing gown the beach was nearly empty. The lady in black was on her porch again, the same small book open upon her knee, her lips moving as she read. She did not look up when Edna passed, and Edna did not look at her.

The water was warm near the shore, and it came in soft, lazy waves that lifted her feet from the sand and set them down again. Edna waded out until it reached her waist, and then she stood still and let it press against her, cool and yielding, and she thought of the meadow in Kentucky and the grass beating against her arms.

She had never learned to swim. Her father had called it a pastime for negroes and fishermen, and later Léonce had laughed and said that a wife of his had no need to risk her life in the surf. She had accepted this as she accepted most things, without argument. But now she bent forward and struck out with her arms, awkwardly at first, her head going under and coming up again with a rush of salt in her nose. She kicked wildly, sputtered, and tried again. The third time she felt the water hold her. For a moment, for three or four strokes, she was not standing at all but moving, lifted and carried, and the sea went on around her as if it had been waiting for her to come.

She stopped, gasping, and laughed aloud at nothing. Then she looked around, half afraid that someone had seen. No one had. Far off, two children were digging in the sand, and the sails had not moved.

When she came out of the water and stood dripping on the sand, the lady in black had risen from her chair and was standing at the edge of her gallery, watching.

"You swim very well for one who has only just begun, madame," she said. Her voice was thin and precise, with the accent of some other country. "But be careful. There is a current beyond the sandbar, and it runs toward the Pass. It has taken better swimmers than you."

"Thank you," said Edna. She was startled, and she felt a flush rise in her cheeks, though she could not have said why. "I will be careful."

The lady nodded once, without smiling, and sat down again, and turned a page of her book. Edna wrapped herself in her towel and went to the bath-house, and she did not mention the swim to anyone, not even to herself, in words.

Adèle came over in the early evening, when the light had turned yellow and the children were eating their supper on the steps. She had recovered her color and her good humor, and she wore a fresh white gown with a rose at the breast. She sat down in the wicker chair beside Edna's, arranged her skirts, and took out her needlework, though it was too dim now to see the stitches.

"Robert has been talking about you," she said, in the tone of one who has been saving a piece of news for the most pleasant moment.

"Has he?" Edna kept her eyes on the children.

"He said that you are changing this summer. He said that you are becoming like the sea, that you are not the same woman who came down from the city in June. He said he does not know where you will go next, and that he is half afraid to follow." Adèle laughed softly. "Then he said he would not follow you anyway, because you would only walk out into the water and not look back. *Mon Dieu*, what a thing for a man to say! He was quite serious, Edna. I have never heard him so serious."

Edna said nothing. She heard the children laughing on the steps, and the creak of the boards under the nurse's feet, and the small sound of the sea. She turned Robert's words over, and they did not seem to fit any shape she knew, yet they were already settling into her, the way the warm water had settled around her waist that afternoon.

Later, when Adèle had gone home with her needlework and the children were asleep behind the shutters, Edna went out and sat alone on the gallery. The lamp was out. The moon had risen over the Gulf and laid a long, pale road across the water, and somewhere beyond the dunes the surf kept up its slow, unending talk. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, and still she could hear it, the voice she had not heard saying it, *like the sea, like the sea*, and she could feel the ghost of the current pulling at her feet.

*Letter, Sister Superior, St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Buda-Pesth, to Miss Mina Murray.*

"*Buda-Pesth, 16th May.*

"Dear Madam,--

"I write at the request of a patient in this hospital, Mr. Jonathan Harker, an English gentleman, who has asked me to tell you that he is safe. He was brought to us some days ago in a weak and feverish state, having been found on the road in a condition of great exhaustion. The physician tells me it is a low fever, brought on by exposure and want of rest, and that there is no cause for alarm. He is improving, though slowly, and he is not yet able to hold a pen steadily, which is why I am writing for him.

"He wished me to say that he is sorry to cause you anxiety, and that he will be delayed in returning to England for some weeks, perhaps longer. He begs you will not come out to him, as the journey would be useless and the roads are very bad. He asked me particularly to say that his love is unchanged, and that he thinks of you constantly.

"In his fever he speaks a great deal of his journey and of dark roads, which I dare say is natural in a man so wearied. I would not trouble you with it, except that I thought you would wish to know how much he has suffered.

"I remain, Madam, with respect,

"Sister Agatha."

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

"*26th May.*

"My dearest Lucy,--

"I have had such a shock, and I hardly know how to write it down, so I must simply set it out plainly as I would for a lesson. This morning the post brought a letter from Buda-Pesth, from a Sister at a hospital there. Jonathan is in it. He has been ill with a fever, and he is still too weak to write himself, so the Sister wrote for him. He is safe, dear; she was very particular about that, and she said so twice. But he will not be home in a week as he promised. He may be some weeks longer, and he has begged me not to go to him.

"Of course I shall not go. I could not, in any case, for I have no money to spare and no one to take the school in my absence. But oh, Lucy, I have sat by the window all afternoon with the letter on my knee, and I cannot make myself stop reading it. The Sister's hand is so careful and so kind, and yet there is something in the way she writes *dark roads* that I cannot put out of my mind. I know it is only the fever. I know that a man who has been ill speaks nonsense. But I keep thinking of Jonathan alone in a strange country, in a strange bed, unable even to hold a pen, and nobody near him who knows his name except strangers.

"I have written to Mr. Hawkins, who will know what the firm can do, and I have written to Jonathan at the hospital, though I do not know whether the letter will reach him. I have also begun to pray, which I have not done so regularly since I was a girl. You will laugh at me, I know, but it does help a little.

"Do not let my trouble spoil your happiness. I am so glad of your news, although I have read it only once and I can hardly think of anything but Jonathan. Write to me soon, and tell me something cheerful, and then I shall be able to sleep.

"Ever your loving

"MINA.

"P.S.--The ten o'clock bell has gone, and I am writing by the light of one candle. I will post this in the morning."

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*26 May.*--Renfield quieter to-day, and I was glad of it, for I had a bad night and did not want a scene. I went to his room after lunch and found him sitting by the window with his hands folded in his lap, as neat as a clerk waiting for his employer. He greeted me very civilly and asked whether I had had a good morning. I said I had, and asked him how he had slept.

He did not answer that at once. He looked out at the lawn for some time, and then he said, in the most ordinary voice in the world:

"Is Miss Westenra keeping well, Doctor?"

I was so surprised that for a moment I could not answer. I have never once spoken her name in his hearing. I am sure of it, for I have been careful in all my dealings with him, having learned long since that his fixed ideas come out of the most trivial remarks, and that I can seldom tell beforehand what will set him off. I asked him where he had heard the name.

He turned his head slowly and looked at me with that same patient, considering expression he wears when he is trying to be reasonable. "I should like to know," he said, "that she is well. A man may ask after a lady's health, I suppose, even if he is in the asylum. Is she coming to see the place? Will she come soon?"

I told him Miss Westenra was in London, and well, as far as I knew. He nodded as though this were exactly what he expected, and went back to his lawn. He said nothing more of her, and when I left him he was humming to himself.

I have written the conversation down as nearly as I can recollect it. I shall have to consider whether it means anything. Patients often hear names through the wall, or from the attendants, and fasten on them. But Miss Westenra is not a name that is spoken in this house, and I cannot think how the question came to him.

*Mem.*: ask Attendant Williams whether any visitor has mentioned her. Ask Art whether Renfield could have met her in town. Probably neither.

*Dr. Seward's Diary.*

*28 May.*--Morris's camp-fire was held last night in his rooms at the Albemarle, and it was, I think, the most cheerful evening I have spent this year. He had a grate piled high with coal, which he called the prairie, and he would not let us sit anywhere but on the rugs in front of it, so that we looked, he said, like a troop of Indians at the end of a hard day. Art came late, and I could see at once that he had something on his mind that was pleasing him very much.

Morris had ordered a plain supper of cold beef and claret, and he would not allow any speeches until we had eaten. He told us a long story about a stampede in the Nebraska country, in which he himself had ridden off the bank of a river and come out on the other side wearing a dead buffalo as a coat. I do not vouch for the details, but Art laughed until he had to put down his glass, and that was worth the price of the evening.

When the cloth was cleared, Morris stood up with his glass and proposed the health of the happiest man in the world, who had won the noblest heart that God had made. We drank it standing. Then Art stood up, rather awkwardly, and said that he bore messages, as he had told us in his telegram, and that the chief of them was that Miss Westenra had consented to be his wife.

I cannot pretend that I took the news with an easy mind, though I am sure no one could have seen anything in my face except the proper warmth. I have known Art since we were boys, and I have never known him so entirely happy. He spoke of Lucy with a kind of wonder, as though he could not believe that a woman so bright and so good had chosen him. Morris was loud in his delight and pounded Art on the back until Art begged for mercy. I drank to them both, and meant it, and went on drinking long after I had any reason to.

Afterwards, when the others had gone to the window to smoke, Art took me aside and asked whether I thought Lucy's mother would object to the match on the ground of his own family being in debt. I told him she would not, for I had heard her speak of him with great approval. He was so relieved that he grasped my hand and held it. I have never had a friend who was so easily made happy, and I hope he may always be so.

Morris, when we left, put his arm through mine and said that I had been very quiet, and asked whether I was ill. I said I was only tired. He did not believe me, and he said so, in the frank American way he has, but he let the matter drop when I asked him to. I shall not be easy until I have seen him again and had another look at his face, which is the most honest I know.

It was past two when I got to bed. Renfield's question keeps coming back to me, although I can see no reason why it should trouble me. I shall look in on him at the usual hour, and shall tell him, if he asks again, that Miss Westenra is very well and is about to be married.

*Telegram from Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

"*29 May.*

"JONATHAN HAS LEFT HOSPITAL STOP NOBODY KNOWS WHERE HE IS STOP HAWKINS"

It was not until the clock over the Piccadilly Hotel had struck twelve that Eve remembered the umbrella. She had been walking for some minutes with her mind on Cynthia's wretched situation, and it was only when she passed a shop window that reflected her own hands, empty of anything but gloves, that she realised she had come away from Shaftesbury Avenue without having given the thing back to anybody. It was a handsome umbrella, with a silver band on the handle and a name engraved on the band, and it had been lent her by a complete stranger. She could not keep it. She could not, she felt, very well carry it about London for the rest of the day, looking like a woman who had been bequeathed a legacy by a fairy.

So she turned back into Dover Street and found the club, which was as gloomy from the pavement as it had looked from under the awning, and went up the steps and in.

The porter in the hall was an elderly man with a grey moustache and the manner of a bishop who has been asked a question about the Trinity. Eve held out the umbrella.

“I found this in the street this morning,” she said, which was almost true. “I think it belongs to one of the members. A gentleman came across the road and gave it to me, and I’m afraid he went in here before I could thank him. Would you be so kind as to return it?”

The porter received the umbrella with the gravity due to a foundling. He turned it over, examined the band, and looked at Eve in a manner which suggested that she was the first person in his experience ever to have brought a club umbrella back of her own accord.

“Very good, madam.”

“And would you give him this? It’s only a line.”

She had written it on the back of a card from her bag, sitting on the edge of a leather chair in the hall while the porter, with a lingering look at the hat, went to find pen and ink. It was a short note. It said that the lady under the awning was very much obliged to the gentleman who had lent her his umbrella, and begged to return it with her warmest thanks. She did not sign it. It seemed to her, on the whole, a good deal more dignified to leave it unsigned, and she had a suspicion that gentlemen who went about lending umbrellas to girls in the rain did not necessarily want to be found.

She walked out into the sunshine, which had come back as suddenly as it had gone, and felt quite cheerful about it.

* * * * *

Mr. Walderwick, of the Honourable variety, was a short, stout, reddish man who had been in the smoking-room since half-past eleven, and had spent the greater part of that time explaining to a series of sympathetic acquaintances that he had been robbed in broad daylight of the best umbrella he had ever possessed. He was still explaining it when the porter came in with the umbrella on one arm and a card on a tray.

“Found, sir. Young lady brought it in.”

Mr. Walderwick snatched the card, read it, and stared at the umbrella as at some apparition.

“Young lady?” he said. “What young lady? Where the devil has it been?”

“Gentleman lent it her in the rain, sir,” said the porter, who had evidently drawn his own conclusions from the note and was not going to be hurried out of them.

It was at this moment that Mr. Walderwick’s eye, roaming the room in search of an explanation, fell upon the tall, thin figure of Psmith, lounging in a deep chair by the window with a cigarette in one hand and an expression of grave detachment upon his face.

“Psmith!” said Mr. Walderwick. “It was you! You took my umbrella this morning!”

Psmith removed the cigarette from his lips and regarded him with courteous interest.

“Did I?”

“You did. I saw you go out with it. Don’t pretend you didn’t. Porter, this gentleman took it out, and it has come back with a girl.”

“With a note, sir,” said the porter helpfully. “Very nicely put.”

Mr. Walderwick looked at the card again. It seemed to make matters no clearer.

Psmith, for his part, appeared to be giving the matter his full and unhurried attention. He rose, crossed the room with a gentle, unhurried dignity, and took the umbrella from the porter. He examined the silver band, turned the handle over in his fingers, and nodded slowly, as one who has had his suspicions confirmed.

“A very sound umbrella,” he said. “I have always thought so.”

“Well, it’s mine,” said Mr. Walderwick. “And what I want to know is—”

“I should be glad to purchase it,” said Psmith.

Mr. Walderwick’s mouth opened and remained open.

“Purchase it?”

“From you. It is in my opinion an umbrella of rare quality, and I am anxious to possess it. I will give you fifty pounds for it.”

There was a murmur from the chairs by the fireplace. Mr. Walderwick, who had paid eleven shillings for the umbrella at a shop in the Haymarket some three years before, and had since been as near as he ever came to deriving pleasure from it, looked at Psmith, then at the umbrella, then at Psmith again. He had the air of a man who suspects that he is being made fun of but cannot, for the life of him, see where the joke is.

“Fifty pounds,” he said slowly.

“Fifty pounds,” said Psmith. “I will write you a cheque, if you wish. Or you may prefer notes. I am not particular.”

Mr. Walderwick was not, when it came to it, a man to refuse fifty pounds for an umbrella, however much it might have been meant to be a matter of principle. He held out his hand and took the money from Psmith’s note-case with the air of one picking up something that might explode, and Psmith, having received a receipt in the form of a scrawl on the back of a menu card, tucked the umbrella under his arm and resumed his chair.

“Thank you, Walderwick,” he said. “You have been most accommodating.”

“But . . . what the devil did you want with it?”

“I had a reason,” said Psmith, and declined to say anything more.

* * * * *

By half-past three the rain had long since dried up, and Eve, having walked from Dover Street to the Piccadilly Hotel by a route which took in a bookshop, a tea-shop and the windows of a milliner whose hats she could not afford to look at for long, found herself in Piccadilly with a quarter of an hour to spare and a strong desire to be sensible about it.

She was not, however, destined to be sensible for very long. For as she passed the corner of Half Moon Street a tall, thin young man came round it from the opposite direction, swinging a rather superb umbrella, and stopped dead in front of her.

It was the monocle that identified him. There could be no mistaking that gravely benevolent eye behind the glass.

“You!” said Eve.

“Good afternoon,” said Psmith, and raised his hat with a grace that would have done credit to a Court chamberlain. “I trust you are none the worse for the rain.”

“I took your umbrella back to your club,” said Eve. “Didn’t the porter give it to you?”

“The porter,” said Psmith, “is a man of much tact and no small intelligence. I have no doubt he did his duty.”

“Then you did get it?” Eve looked at the umbrella under his arm, and back at his face, and her eyes were very bright. “And you aren’t going to say you’re the man who lent it me?”

“I should be sorry to deny a lady anything she has set her heart on,” said Psmith. “But I am bound to admit that I know a great many men who own umbrellas, and that it is a common failing of the species to lend them to strangers under the impression that they will never be seen again.”

“But this one came back.”

“So it did,” agreed Psmith. “A most gratifying outcome, which I attribute to the excellent quality of the umbrella. It is a remarkable article.”

Eve laughed. She had a way of laughing with her whole face, and Psmith, who was not a man easily disconcerted, found himself looking at it with more attention than the matter strictly required.

“I did want to thank him,” she said. “It was the most surprising thing that’s happened to me in months. I stood there like a fool, and he was gone before I had got my breath back.”

“You must not reproach yourself. The gentleman, I am sure, was in no mood for speeches. He is probably in a club somewhere, drinking his coffee and forgetting all about it.”

“I hope he’s forgotten all about me. I should hate to be a nuisance.”

“I think you may safely count yourself out of his thoughts,” said Psmith gravely. “Where are you going now, if I may ask?”

“To an interview. I’m going to see a Mr. Baxter, who wants someone to catalogue a library for him. It’s in the country, somewhere. He’s to see me at half-past three, in a room at this hotel, and I’m not in the least sure I shall get it, because I have never catalogued anything in my life except a box of my father’s bills, and I put those in the wrong order.”

“Baxter,” said Psmith, with the slight but perceptible interest of a man hearing a name that rings a faint bell. He let it pass. “And you are not, I gather, very confident?”

“I’m terrified,” said Eve cheerfully. “But one can’t starve on terror, so I’m going to try.”

“Then I wish you every success,” said Psmith, “and I trust that the gentleman with the umbrella will be pleased to know you are doing well.”

He raised his hat again and went on his way, leaving Eve standing at the corner of Half Moon Street with her hand to her hat and the distinct feeling that she had been talked to very nicely and had not been told one single thing.

* * * * *

Mr. Baxter received her in a small private room on the first floor, which had been hired, so far as Eve could make out, for the sole purpose of having a table in it and a great many papers on the table. He was a thin, careful, intensely serious young man, with pince-nez on a black ribbon and a manner which suggested that every sentence he uttered had been checked for errors before leaving his mouth. He rose when she came in, bowed, and sat down again with the air of a man who has been given a difficult document to read and intends to read it properly.

“Miss Halliday. Pray be seated.”

She sat.

“You have, I understand, some experience of library work?”

“Some,” said Eve, with truth as far as it went.

“Pray describe it.”

She described it. She described the reading of books at her father’s elbow, the arranging of his notes, the weeding of a small and terrible lending library in Kensington which had been her only employment for six weeks at the age of nineteen. Mr. Baxter listened without expression and made notes in a small neat hand. Then he asked her about the decimal system of classification, and she said she had heard of it, and he asked her how she would proceed with a shelf of books on agriculture, and she said she would start with the ones that had the nicest covers.

Mr. Baxter paused in his writing and looked up.

“The nicest covers?”

“I’m sorry. I meant the ones with the most useful titles. I’m not very technical, Mr. Baxter. I’m afraid I should be an appalling librarian in every way except that I read enormously.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Baxter, and wrote something down. “And your references?”

“Miss Ada Clarkson, of the Ada Clarkson Employment Bureau, can vouch for me—”

It was at this moment that the feather fell.

It had been trembling in the draught from the window ever since Eve sat down, and at the word *Clarkson* it made up its mind. Bird-of-paradise feathers are not designed for the confines of a hotel room. The long black plume, detaching itself from the hat with the gentle inevitability of a thing that has been waiting for an excuse, swept down across Eve’s shoulder, brushed the edge of Mr. Baxter’s table, and tickled his nose.

Mr. Baxter’s nose twitched. His eyes watered. He drew a deep breath, which Eve, watching in an agony of sympathy, had no difficulty in identifying as the prelude to a sneeze of unusual violence. It came. It bowed his head, shook his pince-nez, and sent the whole stack of his papers, which had been held down by nothing more than a bottle of ink, sliding in a long white wave to the floor. The ink-bottle followed, and the ink, which was of a dark and obstinate blue, went across the table and into the carefully ruled columns of what Eve afterwards discovered to be Mr. Baxter’s preliminary survey of the Blandings Castle library.

There was a short silence.

“Oh, I am so sorry!” cried Eve, leaping up and seizing the blotter. “It was the feather. It has a mind of its own. I’ll pick everything up.”

“Pray do not trouble,” said Mr. Baxter in a voice of deep and bitter restraint. He removed his pince-nez, polished them, replaced them, and surveyed the ruin with the expression of a man who has seen a great many things go wrong in the course of his duties and has resolved not to be surprised by any of them. “I shall have to copy the whole of the list again. It is of no consequence.”

“It’s a dreadful thing to have happened.”

“It is an inconvenience,” said Mr. Baxter, with dignity. “Nothing more. I have no doubt that you would be most careful with books, Miss Halliday, if you could only remember that a library is not a place for feathers.”

“I shall never wear another one,” said Eve humbly.

“I am glad to hear it.” Mr. Baxter gathered up the sodden sheets with care, laid them in a neat pile, and looked at her for some moments over the top of his pince-nez. Then he cleared his throat. “I am bound to say that your answers have been, on the whole, candid. That is a quality I value. The work at Blandings is of a somewhat exacting nature, and I should require a good deal of attention to detail. You will, I think, have to learn a great deal. But I am prepared to consider your application favourably. You will hear from me.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Eve, with a sincerity which took Mr. Baxter a little aback. “Thank you so much, Mr. Baxter. I’ll try very hard. I’ll be very careful with the ink.”

“See that you are,” said Mr. Baxter, and showed her to the door.

* * * * *

It was past seven when Psmith, having dined in a leisurely fashion at the club and spent an hour in a chair by the smoking-room window, became aware that he was not alone. Mr. Chichester, a large, cheerful Drone with a voice that could have been heard across the Serpentine, had come in and dropped into the chair opposite with the air of a man who has a piece of news he cannot wait to deliver.

“You’ve been in the wars, Psmith,” he said. “Walderwick’s been telling everybody you bought his umbrella for fifty quid.”

“It is a fact,” said Psmith. “I have it here.”

He laid the umbrella across his knees and regarded it with a certain tender pride.

“Fifty quid,” said Mr. Chichester, shaking his head. “Walderwick says it was a girl who brought it back. Went up to the desk and wouldn’t give her name. Pretty, he says, and wearing a hat like a Christmas tree. Know anybody like that?”

“I have met one or two young women,” said Psmith. “I do not, as a rule, inquire into their hats.”

“Well, you must have met this one, or you’d not have wanted the umbrella. But if you want my opinion, you were done. Walderwick would have let it go for a fiver if you’d asked him properly.” Mr. Chichester leaned back and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Though I will say, she’s worth a few pounds of anybody’s money. You’ll have seen her with the Jackson lot, I daresay. Phyllis Jackson’s school friend. Eve Halliday, her name is. Her father used to write for the *Recorder* till he drank himself into the ground. Hard up as a church mouse, poor girl, and too proud to let anyone know it.”

Psmith did not answer at once. He sat very still, with one long hand resting on the handle of the umbrella, and for a moment his monocle caught the light from the lamp and gave his face an expression of extraordinary solemnity.

“Eve Halliday,” he said.

“That’s the girl,” said Mr. Chichester, and went back to his newspaper.

Psmith remained where he was long after the room had emptied and the waiters had begun to move the chairs about for the night. He turned the umbrella over and over in his hands, and every now and then he said the name again, very quietly, under his breath, as a man might repeat a password he has been given and does not intend to forget.

“Poor darling,” I said.

“Don’t be a fool, Jake.” She did not open her eyes. The cab turned at the bottom of the hill and the lamps of the Boulevard Saint-Michel slid over her face and off it again. “Where are we going?”

“I told him to drive around.”

“Tell him somewhere. Tell him Montmartre.”

I leaned forward and opened the little window in the partition and gave the address of the Place Pigalle to the driver. He nodded without turning his head. I sat back. Brett had her hands in her lap, one over the other, and her fingers were moving on the back of her wrist.

“You’re going to be sick?”

“No. I never get sick in taxis. Only in the morning.”

We went up the Boulevard Saint-Germain past the lighted cafés, where the tables were full of people who had nothing to do but look at the street. The driver took the long way round the Odéon. Brett opened her eyes and looked out at the traffic and closed them again.

“I’ve got a new one,” she said.

“A new what?”

“Don’t be stupid, Jake. A new man. I met him last week at Cannes, or the week before. Before I came up here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Harvey Pollock.”

I had never heard of him. I said so.

“No, you wouldn’t have. He’s an American, from Pittsburgh or somewhere. He has pots of money. He has a yacht at Antibes that’s bigger than most of the houses in the town.” She laughed a little. “He wants me to go to Biarritz with him in October.”

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know. I thought I might.”

“Does he know about the others?”

“Which others?”

“The ones with the wavy hair.”

Brett turned and looked at me. The light from a shop front went across her face and I saw that she was not angry. She looked tired and very young, and a little drunk now in a way she had not been at the bar.

“They’re my friends,” she said. “You don’t have to be rude about them.”

“I wasn’t being rude.”

“You were being wonderfully rude. You were being a sort of lovely rude little boy.”

“Why did you go with them?”

“I didn’t go with them. They were there. I was there. That’s all.” She put her hand on my knee and took it away again. “Do you want me to tell you it was nothing?”

“No.”

“Well, it was nothing.”

“All right.”

“You’re not very helpful, are you?”

“I try to be.”

“You don’t.”

The cab came up out of the lights of the Rue Lafayette and the streets got narrower and steeper, and we went up past the dark shops into the Place Pigalle. The lights of the cabarets were on and there were men standing under the awnings and women walking along in twos. Brett had her face to the window again. She did not say anything until the driver stopped.

“Here?” I asked.

“Here,” she said. “It’s not much, is it?”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s a terrible place.” She opened the door and got out before I could help her. I paid the driver and he touched his cap and drove away down the hill. We stood on the pavement. Across the square a man was selling roses from a basket and a girl in a yellow coat was laughing at him.

“We might have a drink,” Brett said.

We went into a bar on the corner that had nobody in it except a waiter and two men at the far end arguing about a horse. We sat at a table by the window. Brett ordered a brandy and soda and I ordered a fine. The waiter brought them and went away.

“Do you still think I’m a rotten lot?” Brett asked.

“No.”

“You did. You looked as if you did.”

“I was thinking about something else.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re a bad liar, Jake. Your face goes all dead. Like a stone.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“Oh, you were. You always do when you say nothing.”

I looked at the window. There was a reflection of the room in it, the lamp on the table, the two of us, and behind us the glass of the door. Brett drank her brandy and put the glass down carefully, the way she did everything when she had had a good deal.

“Will you do something for me?” she said.

“What?”

“Take me home. Not to my place. Just take me home, and then go and do whatever you were going to do before.”

“What was I going to do?”

“Go back to that girl. Georgette. Whatever she’s called.”

“She’s called Hobin.”

Brett laughed, a short laugh that was almost a cough. “My God, I forgot. Go back and see she’s all right.”

“She’s all right. She can take care of herself.”

“Yes, I expect she can.” Brett turned the glass round on the table. “Poor Jake. You’re always having to see that someone’s all right.”

“I wasn’t going to see anybody all right.”

“Yes you were.”

“I left the envelope with the patronne.”

“What envelope?”

“Fifty francs. In case she went off with one of the others.”

Brett looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “That’s a lovely thing to do,” in a voice that had nothing lovely in it at all, and picked up her glass again.

We finished the drinks. The men at the end of the bar had stopped arguing about the horse and were talking quietly about something else. Outside a taxi went by slowly, its light off, with a man in the back who was looking up at the windows of the cabarets. I thought about the girl in the room with the long benches, and the accordion, and the bells on the player’s ankle, and then I stopped thinking about it.

“Let’s go,” Brett said.

We got a taxi at the corner of the square. The driver was asleep in his seat and woke when I knocked on the window. Brett gave him an address in the Rue de Rivoli and he grunted and started the engine. In the back she moved against me, not to be kissed, only to be close, and I could smell the wool of her sweater and the brandy on her breath. She put her head on my shoulder. Neither of us said anything for a long way.

“I’ll be all right,” she said at last.

“I know you will.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“No.”

“Don’t sound so sure.”

I did not say anything to that. The taxi came down through the dark streets and across the river by the Pont des Arts, and the lights of the Louvre were on across the water. At the Rue de Rivoli it stopped. Brett sat up and took her bag from the seat and opened it and shut it again without taking anything out.

“Jake,” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked at me in the light from the street and started to say something, and then she stopped and shook her head.

“Good night, darling,” she said.

“Good night, Brett.”

I told the driver to take her to the address and paid him in advance for the fare and a tip, and he touched his cap. I stood on the pavement and watched the taxi go off along the arcade under the lights, and I saw the back of Brett’s head through the rear window until it turned the corner and was gone.

I walked back the way we had come, down toward the Seine. I did not take a cab. The streets were empty and wet from a washing-down somewhere, and the smell of the river came up to meet me as I went down the steps by the Pont Neuf. The sky over the Right Bank had begun to go grey. I stood on the quai and looked down at the water, which was high and brown and moving quickly under the arches, with a few lights from the barges reflected in it.

I had been angry all night, and that was not the trouble. I was in love with her. I had been in love with her for a long time and there was nothing I could do about it, and I knew it, and she knew it, and neither of us would ever say so.

I walked along the quai on the Left Bank. The bookstalls were shut, their green boxes locked and chained to the parapet. A man was hosing down the pavement in front of a café and he nodded to me and I nodded back. Behind the trees on the far bank the sky was turning yellow and then pale, and the windows of the buildings along the river came up out of the dark one by one, grey and then white. A barge horn sounded somewhere downstream. I walked on, past the Quai Voltaire, with my hands in my pockets and the fifty francs somewhere behind me in a Bal musette, and by the time I reached the bridge the city was waking up around me, and I was tired enough to go to bed.

I did not wait for the car. The village lay a little over a mile off across the park, and I covered it at a pace that would have shamed my doctors at the Front. The lane was grey with the first light, the hedges dripping, though the rain had not yet come. Behind the cottages the air hung heavy and breathless, as though the storm the evening had promised were still gathering somewhere out of sight.

Poirot's door stood ajar. I had not even raised my hand to knock when it opened wider, and there he was in his dressing-gown, a little absurd in its violet silk, his moustaches already waxed to their points though it was not yet six.

“Ah, Hastings. You come about Madame Inglethorp.”

I stared at him.

“How on earth did you know?”

“Come in, my friend. You are wet to the knees, and you have run, I think. Sit. No, not that chair, it is full of the newspapers. There.” He busied himself with a spirit lamp. “You are going to tell me that she is dead, and that the doctors do not agree about the cause. Is it not so?”

“Not quite,” I said, a little nettled. “Bauerstein is not sure, but he means to have a post-mortem. He as good as said it was poison.”

“Bauerstein.” He nodded slowly, as if the name were a piece he had been waiting to fit. “Yes. That is correct. A man who studies poisons does not go hurrying through the night to a house where an old lady has died of her heart, unless he has a reason to be curious.”

“Then you knew before I came. Poirot, who told you?”

He lifted the kettle from the lamp and poured, with great care, before he answered.

“Dr. Wilkins. He stopped at my gate on his way back from Styles, at about half past five. He was in a state of great importance and he could not keep still. He said that the poor Mrs. Inglethorp had died in terrible convulsions, that he had warned her a hundred times, and that he had no idea it could be anything but her heart. He told me all this twice, my friend, and with great pleasure the second time.” He handed me a cup. “You see, he is not a man who can keep a secret. Drink your tea. We will go up to the house together, and I will be very quiet and very polite, and nobody will ask why I was dressed so early.”

I drank, and the tea was scalding, and I felt that I had been outmanoeuvred in some way I did not understand, which was a familiar sensation where Poirot was concerned.

We set out together up the lane. The sky was a flat pewter colour now and the first birds had begun, reluctantly, to sing. Poirot walked with his small, precise steps, his hands folded behind him, and he said nothing at all until we reached the gate of the park.

Then he said, without turning his head: “And Mr. Inglethorp? Where is he, this morning?”

“That is the question,” I said. “He was not in the house. Nobody knows where he spent the night.”

“Ah. That is interesting.” He sighed. “Everybody is always so interested in where the husband was.”

We were still some way from the house when we saw a figure coming towards us along the drive, walking with a long, rather slouching stride. It was Alfred Inglethorp. His black beard was dishevelled, his clothes were muddied to the thigh, and he carried his hat in his hand as though he had forgotten it was there. When he saw us he stopped, and I thought for an instant that he meant to turn back. Then he came on.

“Hastings. What is all this? Baily met me at the lodge and told me some nonsense about my wife being taken ill. I can hardly believe it.” He passed a hand over his face. “I walked Bauerstein down to the village last night. He was anxious to catch the last train from Tadminster and I went with him to the station. He caught it, I am glad to say. And I, like a fool, missed the connection back and was obliged to walk the whole seven miles home by the upper road. I did not get in until a few minutes ago. I came by the garden door, so as not to wake anybody. I had no notion—” He broke off, and his voice cracked a little. “Good God. Is she really dead?”

“I am afraid so,” I said.

He looked at Poirot, who was regarding him with an expression of the mildest and most courteous interest.

“And who is this?”

“My friend, M. Poirot,” I said. “He is going to help us.”

“Help?” said Alfred Inglethorp sharply. Then, with an effort, he controlled himself. “Forgive me. I am not myself. Of course. Anything that can be done.”

He went on up the drive, a little unsteadily, and disappeared round the side of the house towards the garden door.

Poirot said nothing until he was out of earshot. Then he remarked, in an ordinary tone: “He walked seven miles, you say, my friend. In those boots, in the dark. It is a long way.”

“He was tired, I should think.”

“Certainly. He is very tired.” Poirot's eyes were half closed. “It is curious, is it not, how a man who has been walking all night is always so anxious to tell us when he came in?”

We found Mary Cavendish in the hall. She was very pale, and she looked at Poirot with an odd, appealing intensity. But it was John who came out of the dining-room and took his hand, and said he was glad we had come.

It was Dorcas, however, who gave me the moment I had hoped for. She was in the hall, polishing the brass of the umbrella stand with a face like a funeral, and when Poirot went to the foot of the stairs to look up at the gallery she came round to my side and spoke in a low, shaking voice.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I don't like to say it in front of the family. It's Mr. Inglethorp. He says he only came in this minute. But I heard him myself, sir. I was awake, what with the storm and the poor mistress being in such a state. It was past two o'clock by the stable clock, and I heard the garden door go, and then his boots on the stairs, slow, like a man who has walked a long way. I'd take my oath on it.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No, sir. Who'd I tell? It wasn't my place.”

I thanked her, and she went back to her brass with a sniff, and I found Poirot at my elbow.

“You heard,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“Then we must be careful with Mr. Inglethorp's seven miles. Come, Hastings. I wish to see the room.”

John had the keys, and he gave them to me without a word. We climbed the stairs, passed the gallery, and went along the corridor to the right wing, where the broken door of Mrs. Inglethorp's room still hung drunkenly from one hinge. The keys Bauerstein had given us turned easily. Poirot closed the door behind us and stood for a moment with his back against it, looking about him with an air of great patience.

The room was in disorder, as we had left it. The small table by the bed lay on its side, a jug of water spilt across the carpet, and the ashes in the grate were grey and cold. The windows were shut and the curtains half drawn. There was a faint, sweetish smell in the air that I did not like at all.

Poirot did not touch anything for a long time. He moved slowly round the room with his hands clasped behind his back, bending now and then to look at the carpet, the bedclothes, the edge of the mantelpiece. Once he went down on his knees beside the overturned table and stayed there, very still, for nearly a minute. Then he rose, dusted his knees with great care, and stooped again, this time over the hearth.

I saw his hand move quickly, and then he straightened and turned to me, and in his palm lay something very small. It was no bigger than a grain of rice, a little crumpled thing, pale and dull against his brown skin. He held it up to the light from the window.

“Look, Hastings.”

I looked. I could make nothing of it.

“What is it?”

“Ah.” He smiled, and closed his fingers over it, and slipped it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. “That, my friend, is a thing I do not yet explain.”

“Poirot—”

“Not yet.”

He was already moving towards the door. I took a breath and let it out again, and followed him. But at the threshold he stopped and turned back, and his eyes passed over the bed, the rumpled pillows, the table, and came to rest on the window.

“We must ask one more person a question,” he said. “Mademoiselle Cynthia will be in the morning-room. Will you fetch her, please? Tell her it is not a serious matter.”

I found Cynthia Murdoch by the window in the morning-room, her hands idle in her lap. Her face was white and tired, and she had plainly been crying, though she tried to hide it. She got up when she saw me, and I said Poirot would be glad of a word with her, and she followed me without asking why.

Poirot received her with a small, courteous bow and placed a chair for her, though he did not sit himself. He stood a little way off, his head on one side, as though he were considering a picture.

“Mademoiselle,” he said gently, “forgive me for troubling you at such a time. I ask only one thing. Last night, when you went to bed, did you sleep well?”

Cynthia looked startled, and then a little puzzled. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I did. I went off almost at once. I don't think I stirred until Mary came and shook me. I was dreadfully heavy, I'm afraid. Mary says I looked quite strange.” She hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

“Only that,” said Poirot, and he smiled. “Thank you, mademoiselle. You have been very helpful.”

She went out, her shoulders bowed, and the door closed softly behind her.

Poirot stood for a moment looking at the closed door. Then he turned to me, and his face was grave.

“You see, Hastings,” he said quietly, “the young lady sleeps like a stone. The old lady rings no bell, nor cries out, and yet the whole house wakes at last. And the walker, who was so far away, has no notion of the time at all.” He lifted one finger, as he did when he was pleased with himself. “A man who wishes to be seen many miles off is always very careful to be seen at the right hour. It is the hour, my friend, that tells us the truth, never the walk.”

“I don't follow you in the least.”

“No. Not yet.” He glanced towards the window, where the grey light had grown brighter and the first thin rain had begun to speckle the glass. “But it is nearly eleven, and the storm is coming. Before we speak to anyone else, there is one thing we must do, and it must be done in that room, upstairs, with the door locked behind us.”

He moved his hand towards his pocket, touched it lightly, and then let it fall.

“It is a great pity, Hastings,” he murmured, almost to himself, “that the coffee was so much more honest than the people who carried it.”