The Chapters

It was past eleven when we came back to the house, and my wife, who had been yawning since we crossed the bridge, went up to bed while I remained below. The night was too warm for sleep. I opened the window of my study, lit a pipe, and sat with my elbows on the sill, looking out over the dark tops of the trees towards the common, where the lamps of Chertsey made a faint yellow stain beneath the sky. Mars hung high above the roofs by then, a small steady point of red, and I regarded it with the idle complacency of a man who has lately looked at that planet through a good telescope and fancies he understands it a little better for the looking.

I had been sitting there perhaps half an hour when I saw the falling star.

It came out of the south-west, low and very swift, a streak of greenish white that brightened as it dropped, so that for an instant the tops of the trees along the heath were lit with a livid glare. Most falling stars are little things that flare for a moment and are gone in a spatter of sparks; this one did not break up. It went on steadily, a long bright line ruled down the dark, until it dropped behind the black mass of trees beyond the common. A faint reddish brightness hung for a second above the place where it had gone, and then faded like a coal being covered over. The whole thing cannot have lasted three seconds. I remember standing up with the pipe gone cold in my hand, and feeling a foolish regret that Ogilvy was not beside me to see a real fall of a star with his own eyes, since he had been so ready to say that the sky sends us stones. I supposed it had come down upon the heath, that some labourer would find a blackened lump of rock in the morning, and that the thing would be in the papers by the end of the week. Then I went to bed, and slept as soundly as a man can who has nothing on his conscience but a bicycle and a hedge.

It was my wife who woke me, a little after seven, with the news. The milk-boy had brought it to the back door along with the morning’s milk: a star had fallen in the old gravel-pit off the Chertsey road, the water in the bottom of it had boiled, and the thing was lying there still, smoking, with half the village going down the lane to look at it.

“A meteorite,” she said, when I had told her what I had seen. She said it with the composure of a woman who has been told a thing by the milk-boy, and I, who had nothing but my own eyes to set against it, was inclined to agree with her. But I was dressed and out of the house within the quarter-hour, and by the time I had wheeled my bicycle out of the shed she was standing at the gate with her hat on and her gloves in her hand.

“I am coming with you.”

“There will be nothing to see but a hole and some cinders.”

“Then I shall see the hole and the cinders,” she said, “and you will not go off alone to be burned by them.”

I did not argue. It was no great distance, and I had long since learned that she was right about more things than I cared to admit. So we went down the lane together, I wheeling the bicycle at her side, under a sky already hot and colourless, between hedges where the dew still hung on the bramble leaves. Carts were travelling the same way, and labourers from the brickfields in their shirtsleeves, and a pair of cyclists from Chertsey who rode past us with their heads down. Long before we reached the pit we could see a white column of steam standing above the hedges like the breath of some great animal, though the morning was anything but cold.

The gravel-pit was a shallow, irregular hollow among the sandy ground, its raw banks scarred by the spades of men long since gone, and its floor filled to a depth of some feet with brown water that had gathered there in the wet spring. The thing lay in the middle of it. It was half in the water and half out, tilted a little, so that it looked like some vast creature that had wallowed up out of a bog and stuck there. I found its size hard to judge. It was perhaps thirty yards across, or a little less, and rounded on the top like the crown of a barrel; but its colour was none I could name, a dull, scaled blackness, pitted and cindered like the clinker of a furnace, with here and there a place where the crust had flaked away to show a metallic shine beneath. Round the part that lay in the water the surface boiled gently, and from that boiling a thin white steam went up in a steady column and spread into a haze over the pit. A continual faint ticking came from it as the metal contracted, and every now and again there was a little rattle of grit as the sand of the banks slid in. A sharp, hot smell hung in the air above it, like the smell of a smithy when a shoe has been left too long in the fire.

“Yes, yes, very remarkable. Mind the wet, there.”

That was Ogilvy, who stood on the far bank with his hat pushed back, a notebook in one hand and a thermometer in the other. He had plainly been there since before dawn. His collar was undone, his face was red with the sun and excitement, and he looked happier than I had seen him since the night of our vigil. He came round the edge of the pit to meet us, making a wide circle to keep clear of the boiling water, bowed to my wife, and gripped my hand with a force that was almost painful.

“There you are,” he said. “A meteorite. I told you the heavens would send us stones, and here is one of them, and of a size I never expected to see outside a museum. Splendid!”

“It is not a stone,” I said.

“Nor did I say it was. It is a meteorite, which is another matter altogether: a mass of metal, iron very likely, with a good deal of nickel in it, that has come down through the air and been heated by its passage until the outside fused and ran. Look at the pitting. That is the scale of its burning.”

“And the water?”

“Quenched it, naturally. The water boils because the thing is hot, and that is all there is to it.”

“Then why is it so regular?” I said. “Look at the top of it, Ogilvy. There is a line running round it, like the join of two halves—”

“Crystallisation,” said Ogilvy, with a little impatience. “Nature is full of regular forms. Salt is regular. Snow is regular. You may look at a snowflake under the microscope and find more order in it than in the Lord Mayor’s procession. You are looking at this thing, my dear fellow, with a newspaper held before your eyes.”

“You saw the flame from Mars yourself. You told me so that night. Ten nights of flame, and each one—”

“I saw a jet of gas, and so did a hundred other men with telescopes, and I do not deny it had some connection with the planet. I said the planet was in convulsions, and so it may be. But a jet of gas that shoots off into empty space is one thing, and a lump of metal that falls out of the sky is another, and the one has no more to do with the other than the weather in Java has to do with the price of coal. It is coincidence, nothing more. The heavens are full of coincidence.”

I thought of his million-to-one chances, and of the mild and reasonable tone in which he had declared them, and I said nothing. Ogilvy was already turning back to his notebook. But I was not satisfied, and I looked at the thing in the pit for a long while, trying to make a stone of it. It would not be made into a stone. Whatever it was, it had been made, and the ticking that came out of it sounded to me less like the contraction of cooling metal than like the working of some very patient mechanism.

“Keep back from it,” said Ogilvy, over his shoulder. “The outside is still hot enough to take the skin off anyone fool enough to lay a hand on it. I don’t say it’s dangerous. Only that it’s hot.”

By eight the crowd had begun to gather in earnest. The news had gone round the cottages as news does, by no one knew what channel, and by nine there were perhaps forty people about the rim of the pit: labourers in their working clothes, women with babies on their hips, a few gentlemen from the big houses on the Chertsey side in light summer coats, and a great many boys, who had climbed the banks and sat along the top like starlings on a wire. A constable came up from Chertsey, looked at the thing for some minutes with his hands behind his back, and then asked Ogilvy in a loud voice whether it was dangerous. Ogilvy told him it was a meteorite. The constable seemed relieved, and went off to keep the carters from driving their horses into the sand.

It was a young labourer from the brickfields who settled the matter for most of them, though not by argument. He had been standing at the edge of the water with three or four of his mates, jeering at Ogilvy’s notebook and declaring that it was only a lump of old iron somebody had flung in to make fools of the gentlemen. When Ogilvy turned to speak to the constable, the fellow stepped down the sloping bank with the careless courage of his years and laid his open palm flat upon the nearest part of the metal, just above the waterline.

He snatched it away at once, with a yell that brought the whole crowd round. For a moment nobody understood what had happened. Then they saw the hand, already reddening across the palm, and a line of white blister rising along the fingers as they looked, and the man himself standing with the hand clutched to his chest, swearing and staring at it as though it belonged to someone else. His mates laughed at first, and then they did not laugh.

“I told you not to touch it!” Ogilvy shouted. “Put it in the water. The cold water, at the edge there, not—”

The man went down on his knees at the margin of the pit and plunged the hand into the brown water, and his face was as white as paper. Someone brought him a rag. Someone else said it was a judgement on him for meddling, and was answered sharply by a woman with a baby, who said it was a judgement on nobody and that the fellow would be lucky to keep the use of his fingers. The crowd shifted and muttered and pressed closer, and then, because nobody cared to be the next to put out his hand, it drew back from the water. Ogilvy wrote something in his notebook. I believe it was the time.

The sun climbed. By eleven the heat was coming up out of the sand in a shimmer, the steam from the pit no longer went straight up but wandered off across the field in lazy twists, and the smell of hot iron lay over everything. The crowd had grown past anything I had expected. There were carriages drawn up along the Chertsey road now, and a man with a camera on a tripod who had been twice told by the constable to move on, and more cyclists, and a pair of young men in straw hats laying wagers on which of the boys would fall off the bank first. Somebody had begun to sell lemonade. At the back a man was reading aloud from a newspaper the paragraph in which the thing had first been described, and the crowd, which had come for a sight, seemed pleased to have it explained to them in print.

My wife had said very little for an hour. She stood by the bicycle with one hand resting on the saddle and watched the steam, and I saw that her face had lost some of its colour, and that she kept glancing up the lane towards Ottershaw as if she half expected something to come down it.

“I want to go home,” she said at last.

“Then go home,” I said. “There is no sense in both of us standing in this heat. You will have the luncheon to see to, and the maid will not know whether the potatoes are to be boiled or baked. I shall come back as soon as there is anything to tell.”

“You will have nothing to tell but that the crowd has grown.”

“Then I shall tell you that, and you may be glad of it.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she looked at me with the particular look she keeps for occasions when she has decided I am being foolish, and has decided also that it is not worth quarrelling over. “You will promise me you will not go down to it.”

“I promise.”

“And you will not let these people push you down the bank.”

“I cannot undertake for the whole of Chertsey,” I said, and she almost smiled.

She took the bicycle from me, for she rode it better than I did, and set off up the lane with her skirt gathered in one hand and the other on the handlebar. At the bend by the hedge she turned round once and lifted her hand. Then the hedge hid her, and I was left with the crowd and the steam.

I stayed. When I turned back to the pit the crowd had grown while we stood there, and the rim of it was black with people from the road almost to the hedge at the field’s edge, and the boys along the top of the bank had multiplied as boys will. Ogilvy had gone off towards Ottershaw to wire the news to London and the observatories, and had left his notebook lying in the sand. Down in the water the thing lay as it had lain since the night before, tilted and blackened and patient, its steam going up into the blue, its metal ticking as it cooled.

It was about noon. The sun stood straight above the pit, the heat came off the sand in waves, and I could feel it through the soles of my boots. I thought of my wife at the luncheon table with the maid and the potatoes, and was glad she was out of the glare. Then I went forward to the edge of the crowd, where I could see the seam running round the top of the thing, and I stood there with my hands in my pockets, and waited with all the rest of them for it to cool.

When she opened her eyes again the lamp above the seat had been lighted, and the window, which had been gray all day, had turned black. The train was slowing with a long, grinding sigh. Mrs. Medlock was settling her bonnet and frowning at the glass, where the rain ran down in streaks and showed nothing but a few yellow smudges of light.

"Now then," she said. "Wake up. We're there."

Mary sat up stiffly. Her hat had slipped, and one of her black gloves had come unbuttoned at the wrist, and she did not trouble to put either right. When she looked out at the platform it was only a long wet strip of lamplight, with a low shed at one end and nothing beyond it that she could see.

"Is this Misselthwaite?"

"Misselthwaite!" Mrs. Medlock gave a short laugh. "Not it. There's a long drive yet, and a cold one."

Mary climbed down last, because she had been told to, and stood on the wet boards waiting for someone to tell her what came next. The porter hurried past her without looking.

Then she saw him. He stood a little apart under the lamp at the far end of the platform, and he did not move when the porter pushed by. He was a tall man, though not so tall as he might have been, for one shoulder was higher than the other, and his back had a stoop in it that made his long dark coat hang crookedly. His face was thin and rather pale, and the rain had darkened his hair. He looked at Mary for a moment in the way one looks at a parcel that has come to the wrong house and must be signed for all the same.

"Is this the child?" His voice was low and perfectly level.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Medlock. "This is Miss Mary Lennox."

Mary looked back at him, because she had never in her life looked away first, and she saw that his eyes were gray and very tired.

"The carriage is outside," he said, and turned.

That was all. He did not offer his hand, or say that he was glad she had come, or that she must be tired. Mary would not have taken his hand if he had offered it, and she found that she minded very much that he had not.

The carriage was large and closed, with a pair of horses that stamped and blew white breath into the lamplight. Mr. Craven took the seat facing the horses, so that Mary could make out nothing of him but a dark shape against the cushions. Mrs. Medlock spread a rug across their knees. Mary pushed it off with her feet, and Mrs. Medlock let her.

Once the last houses had fallen away there was nothing to see. The road was a pale ribbon in the lamplight, with a blackness on either side so complete that Mary could not tell where the land stopped and the sky began. Once a wheel struck a stone and the carriage lurched, and Mrs. Medlock said "Eh!" and caught at the strap.

"That's the moor," she said, seeing Mary look. "You'll see it by daylight, if the weather's kind, which it won't be. Nowt but heather and bog and sheep for miles."

Mary wondered what heather was, and what a bog would feel like to stand in, but she did not ask. Mr. Craven said nothing at all.

Then the horses stopped so suddenly that Mary was flung against the seat in front of her. The driver swore and shouted, something pale and low heaved in the road beyond the lamps, and the carriage stood still.

"What is it?" Mary asked.

"Hush," said Mrs. Medlock, but she was leaning forward to look too.

The driver went ahead with a lantern and came back. Mr. Craven put his head out of the window and spoke to him, short and sharp, and Mary caught only the end of the answer.

"...lying right across t' road, sir. A whole flock on 'em, as if they'd paid for the place. Won't shift for owt but a dog, and we've none."

Mr. Craven drew his head in. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked into the dark, and it seemed to Mary that he did not intend to do anything about it at all.

Mary had sat still all day, and it had made her very cross. She put her hand on the door before anyone could tell her not to, pushed it open, and climbed down onto the road.

"Miss Mary!" Mrs. Medlock's voice rose behind her like a kettle. "Ye'll stop where ye are this minute!"

Mary did not stop. The driver's back was turned, and Mr. Craven did not look round. She walked a few steps past the lamp and stood still.

The wind came straight across the open land with nothing to stop it, and it went through her thin black clothes as though they were paper. It smelled of wet earth and of something sharp and green that she had never smelled before. In the lamplight she could see the sheep lying in a pale heap across the road, their backs humped and wet. A few raised their heads and turned toward her, and their eyes caught the light and shone back like small coins. Beyond them the road ran on into a blackness that was not like the dark of a room at all, for it had no ceiling and did not seem to end anywhere.

Mary lifted her face. Above her the clouds had torn apart, and there were stars in the gap, more of them than she had ever seen in India. The sky was so large and empty that it seemed to lean down over the moor to look at her. For one whole minute she forgot to be disagreeable. She stood in the cold heather, which soaked through her boots at once, and she did not know whether she liked it. She thought it was very large, and very quiet, and that she did not understand it in the least.

"Miss Mary!"

She turned and walked back, and she climbed into the carriage without any help. Mr. Craven was looking at her. It was the first time he had looked at her directly since the platform, and his face showed nothing she could read. He said nothing. He only moved his feet an inch to make room for her, and turned to the window again.

It was some time before the sheep could be persuaded to get up, one by one, grumbling, and go off the road in a slow, dissatisfied stream. Then the horses leaned into their collars, and they went on.

At last the carriage turned onto a gravel sweep, and Mary could see only a great dark mass that seemed to rise out of the moor and shut out the stars. There were a few lights high up in it, and one lamp above a door that stood open. Mr. Craven got out and went up the steps without looking back, and then he was gone into the house.

Mrs. Medlock took Mary through a stone-floored hall so high that the candles seemed to give up before they reached the ceiling. Old dark pictures hung along the walls. The staircase went up and up, and at the top of it there was a passage, and then another, and Mary could not have found her way back if she had tried.

"That end's the West Wing," said Mrs. Medlock, nodding down a corridor that ran away into shadow. "Mr. Craven's rooms are over there. You'll not have occasion to go near it, so don't you go trying."

The room she opened was large and cold, with a high bed hung in curtains faded to the color of weak tea, and a fire that had been lit too late and was now sulking in the grate.

"This is yours," said Mrs. Medlock. "It's a cold house. You'll get used to it, or you won't."

Mary said that she did not like the bed, which was true, and that it was very cold, which was also true. Mrs. Medlock did not answer. She went out, came back presently, and behind her came a man carrying a tray.

He was an old man, stooped, with gray whiskers and a waistcoat brushed so often it had gone shiny. He set the tray on the table by the fire, straightened slowly, and looked at Mary from under heavy eyebrows.

"This is Pitcher," said Mrs. Medlock. "He's brought your supper. Mind you eat it."

Mary remembered the name from the railway carriage, and she looked at Pitcher with more interest than she had shown anyone for days.

"Tha's t' little lass fro' India, art tha?" said Pitcher. "Ah've browt thi supper. Sup it while it's hot, for there's nobbut bread an' milk an' a bit o' cold mutton, an' tha'll get no more afore morning."

Mary frowned. She had caught "supper," and "milk," and something that might have been "India," but the rest came at her all rounded and dropped at the ends and run together, and made no sense at all.

"I do not understand you," she said. "You are speaking very queerly. I cannot understand half of what you say."

Pitcher considered her, as though this were a fact he had not expected and was not sure what to make of.

"Eh," he said at last, not unkindly. "It's nobbut Yorkshire, miss."

"It is not English."

"Nay, it's English right enough. Happen tha'll get used to it." He lifted the cover from the dish, and the smell of warm bread came out into the cold room. "Eat thi supper, lass."

Mary did not say she would eat it because he had told her to. She sat down at the table and took up the bread, and found, to her great annoyance, that she was much hungrier than she had supposed. She ate all the bread and butter and most of the mutton, and drank the warm milk, which tasted of something she could not name. Pitcher watched without comment until she had finished, nodded once, and went away.

Mrs. Medlock came back to see to her buttons and her nightgown, and did it without any gentleness at all, but efficiently. The bed was colder than anything Mary had ever lain in, and the pillow smelled of damp.

"Now you go to sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, standing with the candle. "And don't you go getting out of bed to poke about. Mr. Craven won't have it."

Mary did not answer. She lay with her eyes open and watched the candle flame lean and straighten in the draft from under the door. Mrs. Medlock had her hand on the latch when the sound came.

It was far away, somewhere below and beyond, through what seemed a great many doors. It was not loud, but it was clear enough: a dull, heavy thud, as if something had been thrown against a panel by someone who did not much care whether it broke. Then a long, slow scraping, like furniture dragged over bare boards. Then a second thud, fainter. Then nothing.

Mary sat up in bed.

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still with her hand on the latch. For a moment her red face was still too, and then she gave a short, impatient sniff and turned round.

"What was that?" said Mary.

"That's the wind."

"It is not the wind. The wind does not knock."

"It does in a house this age," said Mrs. Medlock. "Old places is full of noises. There's chimneys and passages and doors hung three hundred years since, and the wind gets into all of 'em and goes banging about like a drunk man looking for his bed. You'll hear it all night if you lie listening. So don't."

"The wind on the moor did not sound like that."

"You've not been here long enough to know what's wind and what's not." It was, Mary thought, a very poor sort of answer, and very likely a lie. "Lie down."

Mary lay down, because there was nothing else to do with a sheet pulled up to her chin. Mrs. Medlock bent over her with the candle, looked at her for a moment, and then blew it out and went away. The latch clicked. Her footsteps went off along the passage and were lost.

The dark came down all at once, thick and complete, and it was a different dark from the moor's. It had a ceiling. It had walls, and beyond the walls lay the whole silent house, with its hundred rooms, most of them shut and locked.

Mary lay still and listened. For a long time there was nothing but the hiss of the wind at the window and the tick of cooling wood in the grate. Then, very faintly, the thud came again, and the scrape after it, and then it stopped.

She did not believe it was the wind. Mrs. Medlock had answered quickly, and Mary had learned that people who answer quickly are generally hiding something. Mrs. Medlock had also said, with great emphasis, that she was not to go poking about.

Mary turned over in the cold bed and stared into the blackness where the ceiling must be. She was very much awake now, and very disagreeable, and she had made up her mind. She would find out for herself what the sound was.

It was not until she had reached the top of Shaftesbury Avenue, and the sun had come out with the abruptness of a conjurer producing a rabbit, that Eve gave the umbrella any serious thought. Until then it had been merely a convenience, and she had carried it with the careless contentment of one who has been handed something for nothing. But now the shower had gone, the pavements were steaming gently, and the thing began to trouble her conscience. It was a handsome umbrella, with a crook of plain malacca and a silk that had never been bought for less than a guinea, and it belonged to a man who had given it away in the most reckless manner imaginable and was at this moment very probably wandering about London without one. It was plainly the duty of an honest woman to restore it.

She had no difficulty in deciding where he was to be found. She walked back down the avenue, turned into Dover Street, and presented herself at the door of the gloomy building opposite Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe's. It was opened by a porter of such dignified and funereal bearing that Eve, who had expected to be asked her business, found herself half expecting to be asked for references.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you would give this to the gentleman who lent it to me this morning? He ran across the road in the rain. He was very tall, and he had an eyeglass. I haven't been able to thank him, and I don't know his name, so I've written him a note.”

She had written it on the back of an envelope, the only paper she had about her.

“Very good, madam.”

The porter received the umbrella and the envelope with the solemn care of a verger accepting the plate, and his expression, which had doubtless witnessed many strange things in its time, betrayed no surprise whatever. It was the face of a man who had been at the club for twenty years and had learned never to volunteer information about its members. Eve went away down the steps feeling that a duty had been discharged, and that the club had accepted her gift in the manner of an institution which had never before been asked to take delivery of an umbrella from a girl in a hat.

* * * * *

Psmith, meanwhile, had lunched with some deliberation and was sitting in the smoking-room with the *Morning Post* across his knees and an air of tranquil well-being, when the Honourable Mr. Walderwick came in. Walderwick was a pink young man with the face of a disappointed cherub, and he crossed the room now with the bristling dignity of one who has been wronged and has at last been supplied with the name of the wrongdoer.

“Psmith,” he said, “what the devil did you do with my umbrella?”

Psmith lowered the paper and regarded him through his monocle with grave and courteous inquiry.

“Walderwick,” he said. “Good afternoon.”

“Don't good afternoon me. The cloak-room man tells me you walked out with it at half past ten this morning. And now the porter has just handed it back to me, with this.” He produced a folded envelope and read from the back of it in a voice of mounting outrage. “‘To the gentleman who lent me this umbrella, with my most grateful thanks.’ Lent it! I never lent an umbrella to a living soul in my life. And a girl brought it in, the porter says, and described the fellow who'd taken it. Tall, eyeglass. Psmith, how many men do you suppose there are in London who—”

He stopped, because Psmith had risen and was contemplating the umbrella under Walderwick's arm with an expression of the deepest tenderness.

“Walderwick,” said Psmith, “I should like to buy that umbrella.”

“You want to buy my umbrella?”

“I do.”

“It's mine.”

“Quite so. I am prepared to give you fifty pounds for it.”

Walderwick stared. He looked at the umbrella, then at Psmith, then at the umbrella again, in the manner of a man who cannot decide whether he has been insulted or whether the world has suddenly gone mad.

“Fifty pounds!” he said at length. “Psmith, it's a seven-and-sixpenny umbrella.”

“Then you will have made a very handsome profit. Shall I write you a cheque?”

Walderwick opened his mouth to demand an explanation, caught Psmith's eye, and thought better of it. Psmith did not explain. He had found, in the course of a long and varied career, that explanations are seldom half so satisfactory as silence, and this was not a matter he proposed to hurry. Walderwick, who had been brought up to believe that a bargain is a bargain whatever the motives of the other party, said, “Done,” and Psmith wrote the cheque at the writing-table with a flourish which he did not trouble to account for either.

The umbrella changed hands. Walderwick, handing over the envelope as an afterthought, said, “You'd better have this too. It's addressed to you, I suppose.” Psmith unfolded it, read the few lines on the back twice, and then a third time, with the expression of a collector who has been handed a first edition across a grocer's counter. *I am the girl in the hat*, the note concluded. Psmith folded it with great care and placed it in his breast pocket.

* * * * *

It was a little before three when Psmith came out into Piccadilly. The shower had left the street bright and freshly washed, and the sun lay warmly on the pavements and the tops of the omnibuses and on the umbrella, which Psmith carried furled and at the slope, like a rifle at a review. He had a vague notion of buying something improving at Hatchard's, and he was passing the bookseller's window when he became aware that someone was already standing in front of it, nose very nearly against the glass, contemplating the volumes with the rapt and sorrowful expression of one who has been told that she may look but must not touch.

Psmith, who had never in his life been able to walk past a pretty girl without at least acknowledging the fact, stopped.

“Good afternoon,” he said, raising his hat.

Eve turned. Her eyes met his monocle. Then they dropped, in a stunned way, to the umbrella.

“Oh!” she said. “That's—you've got it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The umbrella. I took it back to your club this morning, and—” She stopped, and looked at him again, and something of the pleasant sense of the absurd which had carried her through the morning came into her face. “You're the man,” she said. “Aren't you?”

“I am a man,” said Psmith, “carrying an umbrella, which is as much as can be said for most of us in Piccadilly at this hour.”

“You ran across the road. You had an eyeglass, and you never said a word.”

“I have frequently been reproached for my silence. This umbrella I acquired today from a gentleman who was, I regret to say, most unwilling to part with it.”

“But—”

“Many men in London wear eyeglasses,” Psmith pointed out gently. “I have counted at least six since luncheon, and two of them were tall enough to have crossed any road in the Empire.”

Eve laughed in spite of herself. “You're not being a bit frank with me.”

“I should be sorry to give that impression. Frankness is a thing I have always practised at a distance.”

“Might I know your name?” said Psmith.

“No,” said Eve quickly. “And you mustn't tell me yours. I've just had a morning of exactly the sort of thing that happens in novels, and they always end badly, with a proposal in the last chapter.” She paused, and then added, with a slight flush, “Besides, I've an appointment at half past three in Half Moon Street, and I shall be late for it if I stand here talking to strangers with umbrellas.”

Psmith bowed. He had been on the point of asking her name, and he was secretly relieved to have been spared the impropriety of pressing for it after she had so sensibly declined to give it.

“Then I shall not press you,” he said. “Good luck with your appointment.”

“Thank you for the umbrella,” said Eve, “whoever you are.”

“Whoever I am,” said Psmith, “I am delighted to have been of service.”

She went off down Piccadilly with a light step, and the bird of paradise on her hat bobbed away over the heads of the crowd like a signal flag leaving a ship. Psmith watched it out of sight.

* * * * *

The hotel in Half Moon Street was of that discreet and retiring type which seems to have been built for the purpose of keeping its guests from being seen by one another. Eve was shown up to a sitting-room on the first floor, arriving at precisely half past three, which was more than could be said for most of the people she had met that week.

Lord Emsworth was standing at the window, with the mild, hopeful, faintly bewildered air of a heron that has been told the river is somewhere else. He was engaged in looking for his pince-nez, and they were at that moment on the bridge of his nose. At the table sat a thin, precise young man with a notebook, whom Eve had heard described at some length by Freddie Threepwood, and who looked, as Freddie had said, like a man who has never once been late for anything and has never once enjoyed it.

“Eh? Ah! Miss—er—Halliday,” said Lord Emsworth, peering in her direction and then, as the search concluded in a dab of the fingers, peering through his glasses with some satisfaction. “Yes. Sit down, my dear. Yes. Baxter, this is the girl, what?”

“This is Miss Halliday, your lordship.”

“Ah. Yes. Quite.”

“You have had some experience of cataloguing, Miss Halliday?” said Baxter.

“A certain amount. I catalogued my father's library, which was made up chiefly of books he had borrowed and never returned.”

Baxter wrote this down, with a pencil that did not appear to find it amusing. “And your knowledge of Latin?”

“Sufficient for title-pages, and a little over for the epigraphs.”

“Good,” said Baxter, making a mark. Lord Emsworth said, “Capital,” without the least idea what had been said, and beamed upon the carpet. The interview was going, Eve felt, extremely well, and she had begun to see herself installed among the calf-bound folios with a view of the gardens, when Baxter's eyes, which had been travelling steadily upward, came to rest upon her hat.

They stayed there. They had the fixed and mournful attention of a man who has discovered a stain on the tablecloth at a dinner party.

“Miss Halliday,” he said at last, “I am obliged to raise a point, and I must ask you to forgive me. His lordship's library is a place of studious repose. You would be working among rare and valuable volumes. I am bound to ask whether a hat of that description is quite—” he searched for the word and found it with evident distaste “—in keeping.”

“It's only a hat,” said Eve.

“It is,” said Baxter, “a bird.”

Lord Emsworth, who had now located the pince-nez properly and was gazing at Eve through them with fresh interest, said, “Good heavens! Is that a bird?”

“A bird of paradise, your lordship.”

“Is it alive?”

“It is not, your lordship.”

“Oh,” said Lord Emsworth, with deep regret. “Poor fellow.”

Baxter continued without pause. “I must ask you, Miss Halliday, to remove it for the duration of our discussion.”

Eve considered this. The hat had cost her more than she could comfortably afford, and she had been rather proud of it; it had carried her through a morning of umbrellas and rain with considerable spirit. But she wanted the post, and she wanted it badly, and she had never been able to see the sense of fighting a battle which could be avoided by taking one's hat off. She took it off. She laid it on her knee, where it lay with the forlorn air of a bird brought down by a clumsy sportsman.

Lord Emsworth, satisfied that something had been done about the bird, beamed on her. “Splendid,” he said. “Splendid. Very good. She'll do, eh, Baxter?”

“Provisionally, your lordship.” Baxter closed his notebook. “You will hear from me as to the terms, Miss Halliday. I trust you understand that the library is not a place for the display of millinery. Subject to that, I see no reason why you should not be engaged.”

“Thank you very much,” said Eve, and she meant it.

On the stairs she put the hat on again, with the feeling of a battle won at some cost. It was, she reflected, the first time a hat had both lost her a post and won her one in the same afternoon, and she was not sure which of the two she ought to resent.

* * * * *

Mike Jackson, summoned from West Kensington by a telephone message which had described the occasion as a council of war, dined with Psmith at the club that evening. By the time the coffee had come they had covered Mike's prospects, Psmith's resignation from the fish business, and the general perfidy of landlords.

“Did you go round to Clarkie's, as you meant to?” Mike asked.

“I did not. I was otherwise engaged. Tell me, Mike, you know a considerable number of young women. Do you happen to know one who wears a black frock and a hat of soft satin, with a bird-of-paradise feather falling over the left shoulder?”

Mike looked at him for a moment, then laughed. “Eve Halliday. Good Lord, Psmith, you've been asking after Phyl's pals? She was at Phyl's only yesterday. Old school friend from Wayland House, the one who looks like a duchess and has about a hundred and fifty pounds a year to show for it. Phyl says she's the most hopeless little idiot in London and the nicest.”

“Halliday,” said Psmith. “Eve Halliday.” He repeated the name slowly, as a man might test the ice on a pond before venturing out upon it. “A name of singular charm.”

“What's the matter with you? Have you been struck by lightning?”

“Merely by a hat,” said Psmith.

Mike caught the last train to West Kensington, where Phyllis would be waiting to ask whether he had got on any better, and Psmith, having seen him into a taxi, returned to the smoking-room. The room was nearly empty. The waiters had begun to put out the lamps. Psmith took the chair by the window, laid the umbrella across his knees, and looked out at the front of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, whose awning had been rolled up for the night and was, it seemed to him, a good deal duller for its absence.

He took the envelope from his breast pocket and read the last line once more. *I am the girl in the hat.*

“Eve Halliday,” said Psmith softly, to nobody in particular. Then, having considered the matter, he said it again.

“I know it,” I said.

“You don’t know a damned thing about it.” She kept her eyes shut. We came down the hill past the dark railings of the gardens, and the street lamps went over her face one after another and left it dark again. “Jake, I don’t want to go to Montsouris.”

“It’s a good place to go.”

“It’s a place where people walk about in the dark with their collars up, waiting for something to happen. I don’t want anything to happen. I want to look at something.”

“What do you want to look at?”

“Tell him Les Halles.”

“Les Halles?”

“The market. I want onion soup standing up at a counter, and I want to watch the carts come in. Something ought to be working in this town at this hour, and it might as well be the cabbages.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He looked at us in the little mirror, shrugged, and swung the cab around in the middle of the street. We went back the way we had come, past the Pantheon standing up pale against the sky, and down toward the river. Brett lay back in the corner again. Her hair was flattened where she had leaned against the leather, and with her eyes shut she looked very young. Then she opened them and did not look young at all.

“I met a man last Thursday,” she said.

“Did you?”

“He’s called Ferdy Wyatt. He has pots of money. His people made it out of coal in Pittsburgh, and now he has a house at Cannes and a motor-boat he can’t steer.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Of course you never heard of him. Nobody has. That’s what’s so restful about him.”

We crossed the river by the Pont au Change. The water under the bridge was black and quick, and the lights of the quays lay on it in long yellow lines that broke when the current went through them.

“He wants me to go down to Cannes with him,” Brett said.

“Are you going?”

“I don’t know, darling. I may.”

“Would you mind?” she asked.

“Mind what?”

“If I went.”

“Why should I mind?”

“No reason at all.”

“Then I don’t mind.”

“No. I didn’t think you would.”

I was jealous of a man I had never seen.

Brett did not say anything. She put her hand on the leather seat between us and moved it an inch toward me, and then she left it there and looked out at the river.

The Halles were waking up when we got there. The streets around the sheds were full of carts, and the big lorries were backed up to the loading doors with their lamps still lit. The men in blue smocks shouted at each other and at the horses. The paving was wet where the hoses had been, and the air smelled of straw and cabbage stalks and cold earth. Under the iron roofs the stalls were piled with white leeks, bundles of asparagus, round green lettuces that looked polished, and baskets of early strawberries with the leaves still on them. Men went past us at a trot with the baskets on their shoulders. Brett stood on the kerb with her arms folded and watched them.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said. “Nobody here is miserable at all.”

“They get up at four to sell cabbages.”

“That’s what I mean.”

We went into a café at the corner where the market men stood along the zinc in their smocks and drank white wine out of thick glasses. The patron nodded to Brett as though he had been expecting her, and we took the two places at the end of the counter. The soup came in brown bowls with the cheese melted over the bread, and the steam came up into our faces. Brett burned her mouth and laughed at herself, and then she ate the whole bowl without stopping, and I saw that she had been hungry all night and had not known it.

“What’s he like, this Wyatt?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s tall and rather shy, and he sends flowers in boxes. Nobody ever sent me flowers in a box before. It makes one feel like a funeral.” She put down her spoon. “He thinks I’m marvellously frank.”

“Are you?”

“Terribly.”

I was finishing my soup when I thought of the envelope. It was lying in the drawer under the zinc at the Bal with my fifty francs inside it, and I found I did not want to leave it there.

“I’ve got to go back for my money,” I said.

“What money?”

“The fifty francs. I left them with the patronne.”

“Oh, Jake, you are a perfect fool.” Brett wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Go on, then. You’d be miserable all day if you didn’t.”

We got back into the cab and I gave the driver the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. Brett sat up straight and looked at the back of his neck.

“I’m not going into that box again,” she said. “Not if they paid me to dance on the table.”

“Wait for me.”

“I’ll wait. Hurry up, or the carts will all be gone.”

The Bal was nearly empty when I went in. The accordion had stopped, and the proprietor was up on a chair stacking benches on the tables. The policeman was gone from the door. Behind the zinc the patronne was counting glasses into a basket, and she looked up as I came in and did not seem surprised to see me.

Georgette was sitting at the end table by the dancing-floor with her hat on the bench beside her. There was a glass in front of her that she had not touched. She saw me and did not get up.

“So,” she said. “You come back.”

“For my envelope.”

“Ah, the envelope.” She laughed with her mouth shut, the way she did. “They all went off. The tall one said he would come back for me. Then he went off with the other one in a taxi, and I have been sitting here like a fool since midnight.”

“Are you going home?”

“Where else would I go? To Liège?”

“Brussels.”

“Yes, Brussels. Go and get your envelope, Jacob.”

I went over to the zinc. The patronne reached under the counter without a word and brought out the envelope, still sealed, and I put it in my inside pocket.

“The young lady did not ask for you,” she said. “But she did not go with anybody else either.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose she did.”

I went back to Georgette’s table. She watched me come.

“So you are taking it back.”

“Yes.”

“Then you never meant it for me.”

“I don’t know what I meant,” I said. “I’m not sure I meant anything.”

She nodded, as though she had expected that and was not especially surprised. “You are not a bad type,” she said. “Good night, Jacob.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

Brett was sitting in the corner of the cab with her face turned to the window. The driver was on the step outside, smoking, and the meter was ticking. When I got in she did not look round.

“Well?” she said. “Did you get it?”

“Yes.”

“And the fiancée?”

“She’s still there.”

“Poor little devil.” Brett turned and looked at me. “Are you pleased with yourself?”

“No.”

“Good. You would have been insufferable.” She turned back to the window. “Take me home, Jake. I’ve had enough of being out.”

We went along the river. The sky over the roofs had turned from black to grey, and the first light came up behind the towers of Notre-Dame and lay flat on the water. A boy went by on a bicycle with a long loaf under his arm. A man was washing the windows of a café, and he stopped with his cloth in his hand to watch the cab go past. Brett put her head back against the seat. In the grey light I could see the marks of the night under her eyes, and she did not talk, and I did not either.

At the Pont Royal she sat forward. “Stop here, Jake. I’ll get another cab. This one has been everywhere.”

We got out on the quai. The river was bright now, and the stone of the parapet was beginning to go yellow in the first sun. An empty taxi came along from the bridge with its flag down. I stepped out into the road and held up my hand, and it pulled in to the kerb.

Brett got in and sat looking at me through the open door.

“Good night, Jake,” she said, and then she laughed. “Or is it good morning?”

“It’s morning.”

“So it is.” She put her hand on my arm and held it there a moment, and then she took it away. “Don’t be a fool, darling.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You always do.”

I shut the door. The taxi went off along the quai and out onto the bridge toward the Tuileries, and I watched it until it was gone. Then I put my hands in my pockets and began to walk.

The bookstalls along the quai were shut, their green boxes locked against the parapet. A man was hosing down the pavement in front of a café, and the water ran off in a thin stream into the gutter at my feet. The sun was up over the roofs now, and it was going to be a hot day. I did not hurry. I walked along the river with the water going by beside me, and I did not think about Brett, or Ferdy Wyatt, or the fifty francs, for almost the whole length of the quai.

Lady Russell came to Kellynch on the morning she had appointed, with a sheet of figures folded small in her pocket and a resolution to be patient. She knew Sir Walter too well to suppose he could be argued into anything, but she had believed for thirteen years that he might sometimes be led, if the road were made smooth and the first step seemed to be his own. She had sat up two nights over her calculations. They were careful and they were kind, and they had been drawn so that nothing in them should wound the consequence of the family beyond what its preservation absolutely required.

She found him in the library, with the Baronetage open upon the table at its accustomed page. He greeted her with all the warmth due to a friend of long standing, and with a good deal of attention to his own reflection in the glass above the chimney-piece. He heard her out with a patience that did him credit. She laid before him, one by one, her proposals: that the men servants should be reduced by two; that the second carriage, with the pair of horses which drew it, should be disposed of; that the riding horses should be kept to a bare necessity; that the house should be conducted in a quieter style, without the succession of dinners which had been the chief drain upon it since her friend’s death; and that the family should go to town, if it went at all, for the shortest time decency allowed. She was moderate throughout. She did not once use the word *economy*, which she felt certain would close his ears entirely.

“My dear Lady Russell,” said Sir Walter, when she had done, in the tone of a man indulging an affectionate but somewhat tiresome old story, “you are very good, and I am sure you mean every kindness. But you must allow me to know what is due to the house of Elliot. Two men servants! I might as well dismiss the butler and carry my own letters to the post. The carriage I shall not part with. It has been seen in this county these many years, and I do not intend that every family in it should begin to suppose I have come down in the world. As for entertaining, I shall entertain as my station requires, and not a dinner less.”

“I had hoped you might regard it as a temporary—”

“A reduction once made, Lady Russell, is never temporary. I have no intention of being reduced.” He smiled to soften it, and begged her to take some refreshment before her walk.

She did not produce her figures. She had seen enough of his face to know they would be laid aside unread. She walked home across the park within the hour, but resolved to be present in the evening, when Mr Shepherd, who had been bidden to dine, was to lay his own plan before the family; she might at least hear the thing fairly argued.

Mr Shepherd came out from the market-town at five o’clock, with a paper in his pocket-book which was not so very different from Lady Russell’s, though it began at the opposite end. He was a man of business, and knew that a carriage is a visible thing, and therefore the last to be given up. He began, accordingly, with the stables and the garden and the household at large; and having brought the expense of these down to what he considered a decent figure, he proceeded to the timber. There was an old copse upon the northern boundary of the estate, which he had long thought might be felled to very good advantage, and whose proceeds would clear the most pressing of the smaller accounts.

“That copse was planted by my grandfather,” said Sir Walter, “and I will not have it felled to pay the butcher.”

“The butcher, Sir Walter, is not the difficulty,” said Mr Shepherd, with a deference which did him credit. “It is the sum total. Taken item by item, the accounts are small. Taken together they are very large indeed.”

“Then we must bear the sum total,” said Sir Walter, “as gentlemen have always done.”

They had dined first, and the subject had been avoided at table by a tacit agreement that Sir Walter could not be expected to digest it with the soup. It was afterwards, in the drawing-room, with the candles lit and the windows still open upon the evening air, that Mr Shepherd unfolded his paper and was heard out by the whole party: Sir Walter with his eyes half closed, Lady Russell with her work, Elizabeth with an air of perfect composure, and Anne, who had taken her usual seat a little apart from the rest, and who listened with the attention of one who has been very seldom listened to.

When he had done, Sir Walter opened his eyes and rejected the whole of it in a sentence. “You have now put before me the whole of your wisdom, Mr Shepherd, and I find it amounts to selling the trees and dismissing the gardener. Is there nothing further?”

Mr Shepherd, who had perhaps expected no better, looked at his paper and said that he could think of nothing further which did not touch the house itself. There the matter seemed about to sink, as every other had sunk before it, into a silence nobody was disposed to break.

It was Anne who broke it. She had not meant to speak. She had, through the whole of the evening, been making sums of her own, as a person will who has long been without any other occupation for her mind; and the sums had come out in a manner she did not like. Her voice was not loud, but it was quite distinct.

“I beg your pardon, Father, but may I say something?”

Sir Walter turned his head with the look of a man who has heard a piece of furniture address him. “You, Anne? I was not aware you had any opinion upon the subject.”

“I have not much,” said Anne, “but I have been reckoning; and I think neither Lady Russell’s plan nor Mr Shepherd’s goes far enough. Each would save something. Neither, I think, would bring the whole within any reasonable number of years. If we are to do it at all, we ought to do it thoroughly.”

“I would sell the second carriage and the riding horses, and keep one pony-chaise for the errands. I would shut up the east rooms, which none of us uses, and so dispense with the housemaids kept only to dust them. I would reduce the establishment to what three persons living quietly require, and not what is wanted by a family in the habit of receiving company. The grounds might be kept to the kitchen-garden and the walk before the windows, and the rest left to itself. We should have no new clothes and no new furniture until the debts are cleared, and we should not go to town this spring at all. And each creditor should be paid in order, beginning with the smallest, so that the tradesmen may see we mean what we say. I would undertake to keep the accounts, if it were thought useful. I have very little else to occupy me.”

For a moment Sir Walter looked at his daughter as though she had been introduced to him that evening and had not made a favourable impression. Lady Russell, who had known her goddaughter’s judgement for a great many years, was not surprised by it in the least; but she was pleased, and showed it only by a slight inclination of the head.

It was Elizabeth who astonished them all. She looked up from the fire, where she had been surveying the room with composure, and said, in a tone of decision she had not once shown on the subject before:

“I think Anne is perfectly right. It is absurd to keep a carriage for three people who never go out in it together, and there is no sense in maintaining the east rooms for the sake of the dust. If the thing must be done, it had better be done thoroughly; and I must say Anne’s is the only plan which does not touch what is really due to us.”

It was not in Elizabeth’s nature to take up any proposal of her sister’s; but a scheme which left the drawing-rooms, the dinners and her own gowns untouched, and which sent the economy down to the stables and the attics, had a recommendation she could not overlook. Anne, who understood her sister very well, suspected that the support was offered less from confidence in her figures than from a wish to see the sacrifice fall upon someone else. She was not so ungracious as to say so; and the pleasure of being supported, even on such terms, was a thing she had not often enjoyed.

“Elizabeth, you cannot mean—”

“I mean that it is the most sensible thing said this evening,” said Elizabeth.

Sir Walter was not converted. He could not be, for to adopt Anne’s plan would be to confess that his daughter had done in one evening what he had failed to do in a year. But neither could he dismiss it as he had dismissed the others. He said that Anne’s figures might very possibly be exact, that Mr Shepherd should look them over, and that the matter must be settled when that gentleman had leisure to consider it. Mr Shepherd, who had seen a great many matters settled in precisely this manner, bowed.

It was then, when the company had begun to suppose the subject deferred, that Mr Shepherd, with the air of a man who knows he has come to the last of his resources, cleared his throat.

“There is one measure more, Sir Walter, which I should be failing in my duty not to mention, though I am aware it will not be welcome. In a great many families in your situation, where the house itself is the difficulty, it has answered very well to let the house, furnished, to some tenant of substance, and for the family to live upon the proceeds in a smaller—”

“Tenant!” said Sir Walter.

He did not raise his voice; he had no need to. The word seemed to fall upon the room like a dropped glass.

“Mr Shepherd, I must beg you will not use that word again in my presence. I will not have Kellynch Hall spoken of as a thing to be taken by a stranger, nor have some person of no family walking my grounds and counting my trees. You will oblige me by never mentioning it again.”

Mr Shepherd begged his pardon and said he would not presume to do so. Lady Russell looked down at her work. Elizabeth lifted her chin to a degree which might be read as either approval or indignation. But the word had been spoken; and though Sir Walter might forbid its repetition, he could not restore the room to the silence it had held before. Every one of them had heard it, and none could now unhear it, however carefully the subject was avoided for the rest of the evening.

The footman came in at that moment with the evening post, and brought a letter on a salver to Anne. Sir Walter glanced at the direction. “From Uppercross, I perceive,” he said, “which means from Mary. You had better read it, Anne. I daresay it is a catalogue of her complaints, and we have had enough of those for one evening.”

Anne broke the seal by the window, where the light was still good. Her sister wrote, as she always wrote, in a hurry and with a great many dashes:

“My dear Anne,—I am sorry to say I am very far from well, and nobody here has the least idea how ill I am. I have had a sore throat these five days, and such a pain in my head that I can scarcely hold my cup. Charles is out with his dogs from morning till night, and does not so much as ask after me; and everybody else is so taken up with their own affairs that I am left entirely to the servants, who do not care for me in the least. I am sure I should be better if you were here. I do not like to say so, but I begin to think I shall be very bad indeed. Pray come as soon as you can. Your affectionate sister, M. Musgrove.”

Anne had read a great many such letters, and knew to a nicety what they were worth, which was sometimes a good deal and sometimes nothing at all. Mary was never so ill as when there was nobody to attend her, and it was not impossible that the sore throat had its origin rather in solitude than in the throat. But the appeal was plain, and it had been made to her.

“Well?” said Sir Walter.

“Mary is unwell, and asks me to come to her.”

“Mary is always unwell when she wants something. You may go, if you please. I shall not object, provided you do not expect to be sent for.”

“I think, if Mary is really ill, Anne ought to go,” said Lady Russell gently.

Anne said that she would consider it. She did not add that she had considered it already.

It was late before the house was quiet. Anne went up to her own room, where she had sat so many evenings with nothing to hear but the clock, and set her candle beside the letter. She had made up her mind, though she had not announced it. Mary was unwell, or believed herself so; and Anne, who had long been nobody’s first thought, could not bear the notion of her sister calling in vain. She would go to Uppercross in the morning.

Yet her thoughts would not settle upon Mary for long. Her father had agreed to nothing. Lady Russell’s figures had gone home unread, Mr Shepherd’s copse still stood upon the northern boundary, and the sums Anne had made so carefully lay in her drawer, where nobody able to act upon them had yet been persuaded to look. The tradesmen were no less numerous than at breakfast, nor the debts any smaller; and the question of how they were to be paid, which had occupied the whole of the long day, was no nearer an answer than it had been that morning. The only thing decided was that Anne should go to Uppercross; and she had decided it herself.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(*Kept in phonograph*)

*27 May.*--Morris kept his word about the camp-fire, and I have spent the morning trying to decide whether I was glad of it. I think I was. He had the front room of his chambers turned into something between a smoking-room and a trading-post, with Indian rugs on the floor, a rack of rifles that nobody will ever fire, and a pair of buffalo horns over the sideboard which he says he won from a Texan at cards and will not discuss further. Holmwood came in late, with the colour of a man who has been in the open air all day and has been well rewarded for it. He shook hands with Morris, and then with me, and I was sorry to find that his grip was as warm as ever.

He would not make a speech, he said, because he had prepared one on the way across London and it had gone out of his head at the door. Then he said it in four words. “Lucy has said yes.” He had asked her that morning, he told us, and she had answered before he had finished the question.

Morris upset his glass, swore at it with great cheerfulness, and stood up to propose the health. “To the happiest man in all the wide world,” he said, “who has won the noblest heart God ever made, and the best worth winning. Art, we’re not going to say a word against you, except that you’re late.” We drank it standing. I found, a little to my own surprise, that I meant it. I have been in love with her for longer than I care to admit, and I have had the sense to be sorry for myself only in private. Last night I was sorrier for Morris than for myself. He has been refused by the same girl, and he has made a joke of it at every table in London, which is the bravest thing I have seen a man do.

Morris asked after Harker. “He’s out there in the wilds still, I guess, and not writing to anybody. I’d like to meet the man who takes a holiday and never sends a line.” Holmwood said that Mina had had nothing from him since the first days of the month. “She says the post is slow out there,” he said. “She says it very brightly. I don’t think she believes it, and I don’t think she wants me to.”

I said nothing, and the three of us sat until past eleven. Morris told the story of the landing at the Marquesas again, with a wound added that had not been in the first version, and Holmwood laughed until he had to put his glass down. I walked back the long way. When I reached the house I did not go up to the wards, although it was late and I usually do. I had no cheerfulness left to spend on the men.

*28 May.*--Renfield asked me a question this morning which I have not been able to put out of my head. I went to him at seven, as usual, to take his pulse and see whether he had slept. He was sitting by the window with his hands folded in his lap, looking out over the wall at the grey strip of sky above it, and he did not turn round when I came in. I said good morning. He said good morning. We talked about his breakfast, which he has been refusing, and about his temperature, which is perfectly normal; and then, without any word from me and without any change in his voice, he said:--

“Doctor, is Miss Westenra going to be married?”

I was so surprised that for a moment I forgot to take the notes. I have never mentioned Miss Westenra to him. To my knowledge I have never said her name within his hearing at all, and the attendants could not have known it by any ordinary means, for none of them knows her. I asked him, as steadily as I could, how he came to know the name. He said he did not know it. He said he had heard it. He said everybody knew who was going to be married, and that he should like to be told before the wedding, because a man ought to know who is to have a thing before it is given away. Then he smiled, quite pleasantly, and asked whether he might have a little more milk.

I did not press him. I could feel my own colour rising, which is a foolish thing for a physician to notice in himself, and I set it down here so that it may be remembered I noticed it. The men who could have spoken her name in his hearing are Holmwood and Morris, and I know, because I have the visitors’ book, that neither has been inside these walls since the spring. Last night they said her name at Morris’s table, with me sitting between them, and neither was within earshot of Renfield, nor of anyone who attends him. I have asked the attendants to tell me at once if he speaks of anyone at all. I do not know which I would rather be true: that it is a fancy of mine, or that it is not.

*Letter, Josef Kessler to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz, 28 May.*

“Madam,--

“You will not know my name, and I beg your pardon for the liberty I take. Mr. Jonathan Harker lodged in my house in the first days of May, on his way into the mountains upon the business of his employer. He gave me your name and direction, and asked that if he did not come down again by the date he named, I should send word of his welfare to the lady whose name he had given. That date is past. I therefore write, as he bade me.

“He went out from my door in a carriage sent for him by his client, the gentleman who has bought the English estate called Carfax, of which he had the charge. The driver was a tall man of the district, who spoke very little German and no English at all. Mr. Harker was in good health and good spirits. He laughed at my wife, who had a great deal to say about the roads over the pass, and he told her he would be back within the week, with his papers signed and a fine story to tell.

“On the twentieth of this month a carter came to my door with a message. He had it by heart, and gave it to my wife in German, which she repeated to me. The English gentleman was detained a little longer upon his client’s business. The papers were not yet in order. Miss Murray was to be told that he was well, and that he thought of her every hour. I asked the man for a line in writing, and he said that the gentleman had none to spare. I did not know what to make of this, Madam, and I do not know now.

“I have sent twice to the village where the carter is said to live. Once I was told that the man had gone east, and once that there had never been such a man in the village at all. I cannot tell which answer was meant to be believed. I do not say there is cause for alarm, Madam. I say only that a gentleman who promised a week has now been gone nearly four weeks, that I think you should know it, and that I have written to his employer also.

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

“JOSEF KESSLER,

“Proprietor.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*6 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I am going to write before I have had time to think, because if I think first I shall not write at all, and I want you to know how I really am. A letter has come from Bistritz. It arrived this morning with foreign stamps all over the envelope, and I read it standing in the hall with my hat still on. Jonathan is delayed. That is what it says, in a stranger’s words, and I have read it so often that I could say it to you without the paper. He is kept by business. The papers are not yet in order. He is well, and he thinks of me.

“Those last words sound like him, Lucy. He would say exactly that and nothing more, because he has never once in his life been able to say a tender thing without first making it sound like a clerk’s memorandum. I cannot tell whether that makes me happier or more frightened.

“I have written to Mr. Hawkins, who was very kind, and who says that business abroad is always slow and that he has heard nothing either. He said it as though he were quite sure, and I think he is trying to be kind too, and I think that may be the worst of it: that everybody is being so very kind.

“You will tell me to be patient, and to go out and walk in the air, and not to read the letter over again. I shall try. I shall go on with the school and be a good schoolmistress and tell the children about the Romans, who were all very well organised, I am told, except for the roads. But if you hear anything at all, from Mr. Holmwood or from Dr. Seward or from anyone who has ever been on the Continent, write to me at once, and do not spare me.

“And you, you naughty girl. You have told me nothing of your own affairs for a fortnight, though I can read between the lines of a letter as well as any schoolmistress can read a child’s handwriting. I have had my suspicions since your letter of the twenty-fourth, which was all blots. Do not tell me if you would rather not. But you will tell me, I know you will, because you always do.

“The ten o’clock bell is ringing for the children, so I must go. Give my love to your mother, and tell me all, and tell it quickly.

“Your loving

“MINA.

“P.S.--I have not cried over the letter from Bistritz. I have cried over your blots, which are a great deal worse.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street*,

“*8 June.*

“My darling Mina,--

“Your letter came this morning, and I have read it three times, and each time I have cried a little more, which Mama says is very silly and I say is the only sensible answer to a letter like that. Oh, my dear, I am so sorry. I wish I could be with you, or you with me, so that we might sit by the fire and be sensible about it together. I have said my prayers for Jonathan every night this week, and I have said them with more feeling than I ever said anything in my life, so you may be quite sure that God has heard at least one of them.

“Now I must tell you my own news, because you have guessed it, you dreadful creature, and I want to be the one who says it. Arthur and I are to be married. He asked me on the morning of the twenty-sixth, in the morning-room, with the sun lying across the carpet, and I said yes before he had properly finished asking. I am afraid I said it so loudly that Mama came in from the hall to see whether the house was on fire. Mama is delighted. She says she always knew, which she did not, and I shall not argue with her. We are to be married in the autumn, when I am twenty and quite grown up, and you are to be my first bridesmaid, and you are not to argue about that either.

“Dr. Seward dined with us on Sunday, and was as cheerful as anybody could wish, and talked a great deal about his patients, which I think is his way of being brave. I do feel for him, Mina. I know you think me a heartless flirt, and perhaps I am. But I am so very happy that it makes me want everybody else to be a little happy too, even the ones who cannot be. Mr. Morris called in the afternoon and asked whether I had been wise enough to choose the right man. I told him I had, and he laughed until he had to sit down on the hall chair.

“As for Jonathan, my darling, he will come home. Men always come home when they have said they will, even if they have to walk the whole way, and one evening you will open the door and he will be standing on the step in that dreadful hat, looking as though he had never been away at all. I am quite certain of it. Do not let yourself be frightened. Write to me the very moment you hear anything, even if it is only a line.

“I am quite well, and I am eating everything in sight, which Mama says is what comes of being happy.

“Your ever loving

“LUCY.

“P.S.--Mr. Morris says he will dance at the wedding if it kills him. I have told him that is exactly what I am afraid of.”

*Telegram from Buda-Pesth to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*9 July.*

“HARKER ARRIVED BUDA-PESTH ON FOOT STOP ADMITTED HOSPITAL STOP FEVERISH STOP ASKS FOR YOU STOP SISTER ILONA SZABO”

The First National Bank had a clock over its Broadway door that kept good time. It was the only thing about the place I trusted. Inside, the marble had been scrubbed, the brass rubbed to a shine, and the men behind the wire grilles wore the careful faces of people who had been told their jobs depended on not being interesting.

I asked for whoever handled checks that came across the counter. A teller with a spot on his chin sent me to the back, where a thin young man in sleeve garters was bent over a ledger. When he looked up and saw my card, he looked past me at the door before he looked at the card again.

“Pruitt,” he said. “I pay out. What do you want?”

I told him who I was and what I wanted, which was to learn what had become of a five-thousand-dollar check drawn on this bank by Donald Willsson the afternoon before he was shot. He moistened his lips. He said he didn’t see how the bank could be expected to discuss a depositor’s affairs with a stranger, particularly a depositor who had just been—

“Look and see whether it’s come in,” I said. “That’s all. You don’t have to tell me anything you’d have to explain to the old man.”

He didn’t like it, but he liked having me at his window even less. He took a bound book from the shelf behind him, ran a forefinger down a column of figures, turned back a page, and ran it down again.

“It hasn’t been presented.”

“Here?”

“Here, or through the clearing house, or anywhere else that would send it back to us. A check drawn on this bank comes across this counter or it comes through clearing. This one has come neither way.” He shut the book on his finger. “It hasn’t been certified, either.”

“Would it have been, if somebody had asked?”

“That’s what certifying is. A man wants his check guaranteed, he asks the cashier, and the cashier writes across the face. Nobody asked.”

“Suppose somebody had come to the window with it. Cash?”

“It was drawn to cash.” He said it as if the words had been in his mouth a long time and he was glad to be rid of them. “Five thousand in one piece. The paying teller doesn’t count out a dollar until he’s had the manager at the window. That’s the rule. I’d have made the call.”

“Did Willsson have the money to meet it?”

“His balance was eleven thousand and some at the close the day before.” His eyes went to the grilles on either side of him and came back. “It wouldn’t have bounced.”

“And whose bank is this, besides his?”

He gave me a look with a little surprise in it. “The old man’s, if you want to know. Most everything in Personville is with this bank, one way or another.”

I let that go by. A man who writes a five-thousand-dollar check and goes out with it for twenty minutes ought to come back with something, a receipt or a story. Either he had gone to the bank and never got as far as the wicket, or he had gone to hand the check to somebody who had not yet come to collect it.

“Could it have been cashed somewhere else?” I asked. “Another bank, another window?”

“Then it would have come back to us by now. It hasn’t come back. It hasn’t gone anywhere we know about.”

“So it’s still in somebody’s pocket.”

“Or in a drawer, or in a fire. I don’t know which. I only know it isn’t here.” He put the book back on the shelf with great care, the way a man puts away something he expects to be asked about later. “I’d take it kindly if you didn’t say it came from me.”

“I’ll forget your name as soon as I’ve written it down,” I said.

He hated that. I left before he could do more about it than hate it.

It was a little after three when I got back to the Great Western. The clerk looked up from his register with the expression of a man who had been waiting all day to be proved right about something.

“There’s a lady in the lobby,” he said. “Came in about a quarter of an hour ago and asked for you by name. I told her you hadn’t left word for anybody. She said she hadn’t come to leave word. Then she sat down.”

“Did she say what she wanted?”

“She wanted to see you.” He nodded toward a chair beside a potted palm that had been dying since the hotel opened. “She didn’t say she’d been asked to.”

She rose when she saw me. She wore black now, a plain dress with a high collar and a black hat without ornament, and one glove off and one on, as if she had started to put them on and been interrupted. The face under the hat was the one I remembered from the dim house on Mountain Boulevard: slender, pale under its powder, the mouth held a little too straight. Her hair was still very blonde. In the lobby light it looked like something that had been paid for.

“You are the man from San Francisco,” she said. Her accent was slight. The words came out carefully, each one set down where she meant it to go.

“I am.”

“You did not invite me here. I know that. I did not ask whether I might come.”

“Sit down, Mrs. Willsson.”

She sat, and I took the chair across from her. The palm between us had a leaf gone brown at the tip. She looked at it while she spoke.

“My father-in-law has told you that I killed my husband.”

“He told me a number of things. Most of them he shouted.”

“Yes. He shouts. It is the one thing about him that has never changed.” She drew her bare hand over the glove on the other. “Did you believe him?”

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“That is the first sensible thing anyone has said to me since last night.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “You know where I went.”

“You went out at ten-twenty. You came back at five past eleven. You didn’t say where you’d been.”

“I went out.”

“Where?”

“To a place where I had been told I would be needed.”

“Who told you that?”

“A man on the telephone.” Her fingers folded the loose glove into a small hard square. “I went. There was nothing there but a street, and people on it, and a great deal of noise from people I did not know. I did not stay. I came back to the house, and you were waiting, and you know the rest of that better than I do. You were there.”

“And your shoe?”

Her eyes went down to the black pump crossed under the hem of her dress and came back up. “It was the gutter. Personville has no clean gutters. You have seen them.”

“I’ve seen them.”

“Then believe me about the gutter, or believe the other thing. It makes no difference to me now.”

She had not blinked once while she said it. I wondered whether she had practiced that or whether it came with the accent.

“You went to the bank today,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“They told you it has not been cashed.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody needed to tell me.” She said it slowly, as if she were laying each word on the table between us where I could see it. “It has not been cashed because nobody has been paid yet.”

“Paid for what?”

She got up. Both gloves were on now, buttoned, and the small smile had come and gone again without any warmth in it. “You are clever,” she said. “Donald would have liked that. He did not like very many things, but he liked people who were clever.” She looked down at me. “Do not take money from my father-in-law. He will want you to find me, and he will pay well for it.”

She went out through the Broadway door without looking back, and without looking to left or right. The clerk watched her go, then looked at me, and I went up to my room.

I had been in it about an hour, sitting on the bed with my coat off and my shoes still on, when somebody knocked. I opened the door to a boy of twelve or so in a cap too big for him and a jacket that had been somebody else’s first. He held out an envelope, folded once. When I took it he said, “Man said you’d know him,” and was halfway down the corridor before I could ask which man.

I shut the door and read it standing up.

The paper was cheap, and the message was in pencil, in a round careful hand, the kind a schoolroom sergeant beats into a child and the child never forgets:

“Mr. T. is sorry not to have had the pleasure. He saw you on Mountain Boulevard this morning and hopes you liked what you saw. Personville is a poor town for a stranger after dark, and the Hurricane Street end is poorer. Mr. T. advises you to keep to Broadway and to stop calling on the old man, who is not worth the walk. If you have business, Mr. T. will be glad to discuss it with you and with nobody else. He is generally about.”

It was signed with a single letter: W.

I read it twice. Then I went to the window and looked down into the street. A couple of Fords were parked along the curb under the lamps, and nobody was sitting in either of them. A big car with its engine going, or one that had just stopped going, is an easy thing to miss in a town that lives on cars. I went back and sat down on the bed.

Thaler had not come up the stairs. He hadn’t needed to. He had sent a boy with a pencil note, which was cheaper than sending anything else and a good deal harder to explain away.

I took out my notebook and wrote the wire on the back of a sheet of hotel stationery. The paper had a drawing of the Great Western in one corner and a bird on the roof that wasn’t any kind I knew. I wrote it in capitals, because the telegraph company charges by the word and the Old Man charges by the sense:

SAN FRANCISCO CALIF CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY ATTENTION OLD MAN

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT FOUR TIMES TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT ELEVEN HUNDRED BLOCK HURRICANE STREET STOP NO WITNESS SAW FACES STOP WIFE LEFT HOUSE TEN TWENTY RETURNED ELEVEN FIVE STOP SHE SAYS NOTHING USEFUL AND SHOE STAINED FROM GUTTER STOP ELIHU WILLSSON BLAMES HER AND SAYS SO LOUDLY STOP CHECK FIVE THOUSAND DRAWN TO CASH BY WILLSSON TWO FIFTY PM STUB HAS NO NAME STOP NOT PRESENTED NOT CERTIFIED STOP WOMAN PHONED WILLSSON THAT AFTERNOON ARRANGING TEN OCLOCK STOP THALER SEEN ENTERING WILLSSON HOUSE THIS MORNING STOP THALER SENT NOTE TONIGHT ADVISING ME KEEP TO BROADWAY STOP WIDOW SAYS CHECK NOT CASHED BECAUSE NOBODY PAID YET STOP WANT TO KNOW WHETHER TO STAY STOP OP

I carried it down myself. The clerk counted the words with his lips moving, arrived at a figure, and looked at me as though he expected an argument. I didn’t give him one. The wire went out a little before ten.

Back in my room I turned off the light and left the window open an inch. Personville came up the hill in the dark: a streetcar bell, a train whistle from somewhere down by the smelter, a man telling a woman on the sidewalk to be quiet.

I lay down on the bed with my shoes on and went over it again. A check for five thousand dollars, made out to cash, had left Donald Willsson’s book at ten minutes to three. It had not come back to the First National Bank with anybody’s name on the back. Nobody had been paid yet, his wife said, and she had said it as if she knew who the payment was for. A smallish man called Whisper had sent me a polite warning about Mountain Boulevard and had not troubled to deliver it in person. The old man in the white pajamas had told me his son was killed by a French hussy, and I had no reason to believe he had told the truth about anything since the day he was born.

Somewhere in town was five thousand dollars of paper worth nothing until it was presented. Somebody had it in a pocket or a drawer. They were in no hurry, or they were waiting for the price to go up, or they were waiting to see what I would do next. I didn’t know where the check had gone. I knew where it hadn’t gone.

I turned on my side toward the window and lay in the dark with my shoes on, waiting to find out who would be the first to walk up to a teller’s cage and ask for it.

I did not wait to be told twice. In the coach-house I found an old bicycle that belonged to one of the gardeners, its tyres a little soft but serviceable, and I set off down the drive as fast as I could pedal. The car had gone for Dr. Wilkins, and I had no intention of waiting for its return.

The morning was grey and close. There was no wind at all, and the limes along the avenue hung motionless, as though they too were waiting for the storm that had been promised all evening and had not yet come. The road was white with dust. A cock crowed thinly somewhere behind a farm, and otherwise the village of Styles St. Mary was still asleep, its blinds all drawn.

Poirot’s lodging stood at the far end of the street: a small, neat house with a green door, found for him, with several other Belgian families, through Mrs. Inglethorp’s charity. I had been there often enough to know it, and I was off my machine and rattling the gate before I had considered how I was to break the news.

I need not have troubled. The door opened before I reached it, and there stood Poirot, dressed as carefully as though he were going to early Mass. His moustaches were immaculate, his grey suit pressed, and his hat already in his hand.

“Ah, Hastings,” he said gently. “You have come to tell me that Madame Inglethorp is dead.”

I stared at him.

“How on earth—”

“Dr. Wilkins.” Poirot stood aside to let me in. “He stopped his car at my gate not an hour ago, on his way home from Styles. He was most kind. He wished me to know, as a neighbour, that he had warned her a hundred times about her heart. I think he took a great deal of comfort in telling me so.”

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“He told me everything, mon ami. Dr. Wilkins has never in his life been able to keep a piece of news in his mouth for more than five minutes.”

I sat down at his little table without being asked, and told him the rest: the locked door, the convulsions, the arching of the body, Dr. Bauerstein’s grave face in the doorway, the keys handed over, the post-mortem. I kept my own suspicion until the end, and then I gave it to him with some emphasis, for I was rather proud of it.

“I believe she was poisoned, Poirot. Strychnine, I think. I have been reading about it in the library.”

“Ah, so you have been reading.” He nodded slowly, and his eyes did not leave my face. “And Dr. Bauerstein shares this opinion?”

“He insisted on the post-mortem. Wilkins would have given a certificate and been done with it.”

“Then Dr. Wilkins did not tell me that part.” Poirot poured a little coffee from the pot on the stove, sipped it, and set the cup down with great care. “And the husband, Hastings? Monsieur Inglethorp. Where is he in all this?”

“That’s just it. Nobody knows. He is not in the house.”

“Not in the house.” He repeated it in the tone of a man who has been handed an interesting letter and has not yet opened it. “Interesting. Very interesting. Go, mon ami. Tell Monsieur Cavendish that I come. Give me ten minutes. A man does not enter a house of death with his collar crooked.”

I rode back faster than I had come. Baily was standing at the open front door with a face the colour of grey paper, and Dorcas was sobbing in the passage behind him. In the hall the household had gathered in a loose, miserable knot at the foot of the stairs. Lawrence leant against the newel-post with his hands in his pockets. John stood with his back to the dining-room door, looking at nothing. Mary Cavendish was a little apart from them, one hand at her throat.

I had barely set foot on the mat when Alfred Inglethorp came in from the garden passage.

He had, it seemed, been out all night. His black beard was flecked with dust, his boots caked to the ankle, and his coat hung from his shoulders in a way that suggested hours of walking. He held his hat in his hand. He stopped short at the sight of us and looked from one face to another.

“What is it?” he said. “Why is everyone standing about? Dorcas, what has happened?”

“Oh, sir,” wailed Dorcas. “The mistress—”

“Emily? Is she ill?”

“She’s dead, Alfred,” said John quietly. “She died in the small hours. There is to be a post-mortem, I’m afraid.”

Alfred did not move. For a moment I thought he would sway, but he put his free hand against the banister and held himself upright.

“Dead,” he said at last, very low. “Dead. And I was not here.”

“Where were you?” asked Lawrence. It was the first time I had ever heard him put a question with an edge to it.

“I walked Bauerstein down to the village, as far as the church,” said Alfred. He spoke in a flat, controlled voice, the voice of a man who has had no time to rehearse and is anxious to be believed. “He would not let me come further, and I was glad of it. I could not face the house. The night was so close—you all remember what it was like—and I could not sleep. So I walked out along the Tadminster road, meaning to go a mile or two and come back. The storm came up over the downs while I was out there, and there was nothing to shelter under but a hedge. I was soaked to the skin. I got into a barn near Hall Farm and lay up in the straw until the worst of it had passed, and then I walked about the lanes until it was light. I came in by the garden door with my key, and I was on my way up to change when I found the hall in this state.”

It was a plausible account, and he gave it well. Yet I found my eyes going to his coat. It was grey with dust. It was not black with wet, as a coat must be after a man has been soaked to the skin and tramped the lanes for hours.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” said a voice from the back of the group, and everyone turned. It was Dorcas, twisting her apron in both hands. “Only it never rained. Not here in Styles. I was down at six to see to the range, and the step was dry as my apron, and the gravel’s white as ever. There wasn’t a drop all night, and no thunder neither. Not in the village.”

“You cannot know what happened on the Tadminster road, girl.”

“No, sir,” said Dorcas, and her chin trembled, but she did not look away. “I only know what I saw.”

Nobody spoke. Alfred’s eyes rested on her steadily for a moment, and then he gave a small shrug, as though a servant’s mistake was hardly worth the trouble of correcting.

“Then the storm must have been very particular,” he said. “I dare say I was mistaken about where it fell.” He turned to John. “I should like to see her.”

“Not yet. Bauerstein has locked the rooms, and I have the keys. You’ll have to wait, Alfred.”

Alfred’s mouth tightened. He said no more, but I saw him glance up at the gallery and then away again, very quickly.

Poirot arrived a little after eight, on foot and at a brisk pace. His ten minutes, I reflected, had become nearer an hour, as they generally did. He took off his hat to Dorcas before he so much as glanced at anyone else, and said, “Mademoiselle, I am sorry for your loss.” This so overcame her that she burst into fresh tears, which seemed to satisfy him. Then he bowed to John.

“Monsieur Cavendish, I am sorry to come on such a morning. Hastings tells me you have been good enough to give him a free hand.”

“I have,” said John wearily. “I’m afraid there’s no hope for us, M. Poirot.”

“Hope is not something that is offered, monsieur. It is only found, and then only by looking.” He held out his hand. “The keys, if you please.”

John gave them to him without a word, as though he were relieved to be rid of them. Alfred took a step forward.

“I have a right to be present.”

“Certainly, monsieur. You shall be present, and presently. But first, let me see the room as the lady left it.” Poirot said this so pleasantly that Alfred, after a moment’s hesitation, inclined his head and went back towards the library.

We went up the stairs together, and Poirot would not hurry. At the head of the gallery he stopped and looked down at the carpet for a long time, as though something had been written there in ink. I was about to ask him what he saw when he moved on, and we came to Mrs. Inglethorp’s door. He unlocked it and we went in.

The room was as we had left it, except that the air had grown stale and sweetish, and someone had drawn the curtains. Poirot drew them back again, and the grey light fell across the carpet. He went first to the window. The catch was fastened on the inside. He examined it closely, then the sash, then the sill, testing each with his thumb, with the same unhurried attention a man gives to a document he suspects of having been altered.

Then he turned to the little table beside the bed. It had been set upright again, I supposed by the doctors. A carafe of water stood on it, with a box of matches and a novel lying face downward with its spine cracked. The carpet beside it was darkened in a patch where water had spilled and dried. Poirot knelt there, with a small grunt of discomfort, and went over the pile an inch at a time, his face close to the floor.

I stood by the door and watched him, feeling impatient and rather foolish. I had expected something more dramatic. He examined the bolt, drew the ashes in the grate apart with the tip of a pencil and studied them, and peered at the row of prim ornaments on the mantelpiece as though they had said something to him. Then he stooped again, and this time he reached into the shadow beneath the valance of the bed and drew out something pinched between finger and thumb.

He held it up to the grey light from the window. It was a small thing, a little key of dull brass, no longer than my little finger, of the kind that opens a writing-case or a jewel box.

“Ah,” said Poirot softly.

“What is it?” I came to his side.

“Do not touch, mon ami. Look, only.” He tilted his hand so that I could see it on his palm.

“Does it belong to the room?”

“It was under the bed.”

“And what does it open?”

“That I will tell you when I know.”

“Then why show it to me at all?”

He smiled. “Because you have very sharp eyes, Hastings, and I should not care for you to think I had lost something. But I shall not explain it. Not yet.”

I was on the point of pressing him, but I knew better than to try. He folded the key into a clean white handkerchief and put it into his waistcoat pocket, and I saw him pat the place afterwards, as though to be sure it was still there.

The morning went on, as such mornings do, in a fog of small errands. Dr. Wilkins returned at nine, full of importance, and had a long murmured conference with John in the study. The blinds were drawn in the drawing-room. Mrs. Cavendish sat very upright by the window with her hands in her lap and did not speak. Alfred stayed in the library with the door shut. Poirot seemed to be everywhere at once, peering at the stairs, at the garden door, at the gravel below the terrace, and asking Baily a great many questions in a low voice that Baily answered with growing bewilderment.

It was while we were crossing the hall, a little before ten, that we came upon Cynthia Murdoch. She had come down in a plain blue frock, her hair still loosely pinned, and she stood at the foot of the stairs looking at nothing in particular. She was very pale, and when Poirot spoke to her she started, as though she had been woken all over again.

“Mademoiselle, forgive me. I will trouble you with one question only.” He bowed. “Last night, when you went to bed, did you sleep the whole night through?”

“I—yes, monsieur. Right through. I’m a dreadful sleeper once I’m off, Mary says. She had to shake me awake this morning, and I didn’t know where I was.” She faltered and looked down at her hands. “I’m rather ashamed of it.”

“There is no shame in sleep, mademoiselle. Thank you.”

She watched him go with a puzzled, unhappy face, and then went quickly out through the garden door.

It was close upon half past eleven when Poirot touched my sleeve on the terrace, where I had been standing for some time pretending to watch a gardener’s boy hoe the beds with an interest I did not feel.

“Come, Hastings,” he said. “Let us go up again, you and I, while the house is busy with its own sorrows.”

We climbed the stairs without speaking. Poirot unlocked the door, went in, and then locked it again behind us and put the key in his pocket. It seemed an unnecessary precaution, since the whole household was downstairs, and nobody, I supposed, would wish to come up here alone. The clock on the mantelpiece said twenty minutes to twelve.

He took the handkerchief from his waistcoat, unfolded it, and set the little brass key down on the bare top of the table beside the bed. Then he stepped back to one side of it, and I stepped to the other, and we stood looking at one another across it, as though it were a board of chess that neither of us yet knew how to play.

“Hastings,” he said at last, “I have been very stupid, and you must forgive me for it. The poor lady did not lock herself in at all.”

He touched the key with the tip of one finger.

“She locked everybody else out.”

I did not understand him, and I said so. But Poirot only smiled, and turned the little key so that its bow faced the window, and left it there between us.

Robert did most of the talking on the way up the sandy path. Madame Ratignolle leaned upon his arm, and her steps were short and slow, so he had leisure to point out the camomile the heat had already begun to scorch, to stoop for a shell he declared perfect, and to hold back the tangled growth at the edge of the path while she passed. Once he turned and looked behind him. Far back, where the beach dissolved into glare, a white figure was stooping over the children beneath the tent. He smiled a little at what he saw, then said something low, which caused Madame Ratignolle to raise her eyebrows and afterward to laugh softly behind her gloved hand.

Edna did not hear it. She had stayed upon the sand with the children, who were not disposed to leave the shade of the tent and had been promised a sea-shell for every quarter hour they sat quietly. What Robert had said she learned later in the day, from Adèle's own lips, with every inflection preserved, as one carries a ribbon home from a shop and cannot resist unrolling it again.

When she came up the path at noon with the boys trailing after her, the telegram was already waiting on the table of the cottage. Madame Lebrun's boy had brought it and set it down with a good deal of ceremony, then lingered in the doorway as though a coin might be expected. Edna tore it open with her hat still on her head.

WILL NOT COME OUT THIS WEEK-END. BUSINESS. LEONCE.

She read it twice. The words were the same both times, which was all she had any right to expect of them. She waited for some feeling to accompany the news, a disappointment or a small chill, and none came. What came instead was a loosening, as when a knot she had not known she was tying is suddenly undone and the cord slips free. She folded the paper along its crease and put it into the pocket of her muslin, where it stiffened against her hip whenever she moved.

Raoul asked whether papa was coming on the boat. When she told him no, he considered this for a while with a look of grave relief which she did not care to examine, and then he asked for his luncheon.

Madame Ratignolle came across the gallery in the middle of the afternoon, when the heat had slackened a little and the water beyond the dunes had turned from glare to a deeper green. She had recovered her color and her composure. She settled herself in the wicker chair with her sewing in her lap and the air of a woman who has been carrying something all day and can carry it no longer.

"Robert said the most extraordinary thing to me this morning," she began, "and I have hardly been able to keep it to myself."

"Robert says a great many things," returned Edna. She sat on the top step with her back against the post and her bare feet among the warm boards.

"Yes, but this was about you, *ma chère*." Adèle bent over a small white garment she was hemming and drew her thread through with great care before she went on. "He said you walk about the world like a sleep-walker. Not unhappily; he was quite serious. He said you were dreaming with your eyes open, and that someone ought to have the courage to wake you; and that he would very much like to be the one, only he was afraid you would not thank him for it." She laughed softly and held the little garment up to the light. "Imagine! He said it as if he were describing the sunset. Men say such things when they have been too long in the sun."

Edna laughed too. The laugh came a moment late and sounded in her own ears like someone else's. She felt the blood climb into her throat and her face, and she turned toward the water so that Adèle should not see it, though she suspected Adèle saw everything and found it charming.

"Robert is a boy," she said. "He is six-and-twenty, which is always a boy."

"And Léonce will not come on Saturday," Adèle said, having seen the paper on the table. "*Ah, les affaires!* It is always business with them." She sighed, with the tone of a woman who had heard the word from every husband in New Orleans, and let the matter lie, as she let most things lie that were not hers to pick up.

For a long while after she had gone, Edna sat where she was, watching the light lengthen across the sand. Then she went into the cottage, took her bathing-suit from its hook, and came out again with her key in her hand. She did not say where she was going. There was no one on the gallery to tell.

The beach at that hour was nearly deserted. The children's tent had been folded and the lovers had wandered off somewhere else. A few bathers splashed beyond the first line of breakers, and on the gallery of the bath-house next to her own sat the lady in black, her prayer-book closed upon her knee and her shawl drawn close about her, though the air was warm. Edna had passed her every morning for weeks and had never once heard her voice.

She changed behind the door of her compartment with a hurried, half-guilty haste, as though about to do something forbidden, and went down the steps into the water. It was warm at the edge and cooler as she waded out, the sand shifting under her feet in little ridges. Hitherto she had gone into the sea only as far as it would hold her with someone's hand beneath her, or else she had waded and shrieked and come out again. Today she did not stop.

She lay back, letting her arms float out on either side. The water took her weight and lifted her gently, so that the sun lay full upon her face and the sky spread very wide above. She did not sink. Then, without quite deciding to, she moved her arms, beating the water as she had done as a little girl in a Kentucky meadow, where the grass stood higher than her waist. Her legs kicked behind her. One stroke, then another, then a third, and the beach slid a little way behind her. She laughed aloud, swallowed a mouthful of salt, and went on. At last her arms grew heavy. She stood up with the water at her shoulders and her heart knocking, and turned to look back at the shore, which seemed much farther off than she had supposed.

She had done it. She would tell no one. There was nobody to whom the telling would have meant anything, and the thing itself was enough.

When she came up the steps of the bath-house, dripping and breathless, the lady in black spoke to her. It was the first time. Her face was pale and composed and gave nothing away.

"You must not go so far out alone, madame," she said in a low, even voice, looking not at Edna but out at the water. "The current runs strongly past the bar at this hour, and there is no one near enough to call."

"I was not so far," said Edna, and was surprised to hear her own voice unsteady.

"You were far enough." The lady in black drew her shawl a little closer. "You swim very well for one who has only lately begun. It is not everyone who learns without a hand beneath her."

Edna felt the color rise in her face a second time that afternoon. She had not supposed that anyone was watching her, except Robert, who watched everything. "Thank you," she said, and did not know what else to say.

"Good afternoon, madame," said the lady in black, and turned her eyes back to the sea.

At night the children slept, one with his arm flung over his face and the other curled small beneath the sheet, and the nurse had withdrawn to her own corner of the cottage. Edna sat alone on the gallery. Along the front of the big house the lamps were lit, and from somewhere within came the sound of a piano, played slowly and then stopped in the middle of a phrase. The sea was invisible in the dark, but she could hear it, a long soft sound that came and went against the piles beneath her, as regular as breathing.

She sat with her hands loose in her lap and her hair still damp at the nape of her neck. Robert's words, as Adèle had given them to her, went round and round in her mind. *Walking in her sleep.* Someone ought to have the courage to wake her. She could not have said whether the words were a reproach or a kindness, nor whether she had been waiting all summer for someone to say them aloud. She only knew that the strokes were still in her arms, and that the words would not let her go.

Mr. Franklin, having all but squeezed the breath out of me, was in no way abashed by the consequences. He got up off the sand, brushed the grit from the skirts of his fawn-coloured coat (which was cut, I thought, a good deal finer than anything I had ever seen on a gentleman before his dinner), and held out a hand to help me to my feet. I took it, as I was bound to do, and I was on my legs, with my stick in one hand and my hat in the other, before I had made up my mind whether to be glad to see him or to scold him for coming at the wrong hour.

“You look at me, Betteredge,” says he, “as if I were a ghost come up out of the quicksand.”

“I look at you, sir, as if you were four hours before your time,” I said. “Which is a thing I never looked for in a gentleman in all my days. Our gentlemen are generally late. It is the custom of the country, and very convenient to the servants, who get their dinners in peace. You have turned the custom upside down, Mr. Franklin, and I don’t know what my lady will say to it.”

“My aunt will be glad to see me, I hope,” says he, laughing. “And so will you, when you have had time to think of it. Where is she?”

I informed him that my lady and Miss Rachel had gone to lunch at a neighbour’s, some miles off, and were not expected home before the afternoon was well advanced.

“Then I have caught you alone, which is the best luck I have had since I left London,” says he. “I was to come down by the evening train, as I wrote to my aunt, and to sleep at York. But a letter came to me at breakfast-time that altered all my plans. I took the first train I could get, left my portmanteau with the carrier at the station, and walked the rest of the way over your hills, because I could not sit still in a fly. Now I want you to read that letter, and then tell me whether I was a fool to come early.”

“Whether you were a fool, sir, I am not yet in a position to say,” I answered. “But you owe me seven-and-sixpence, and I am not in a position to forget it.”

I took out my spectacles, which I carry about me for the sake of my dignity rather than for any service they do my eyes, and I put them on, and I read the letter through. I give it here exactly as I read it, for you will presently see that I had good reason to remember every word.

“London, Wednesday night.

“My dear Franklin,—I write in haste, and I beg you will read what follows before you do anything else. This afternoon a person called at my chambers who declined to give his name, and who put questions to me concerning your movements, and concerning certain papers of your uncle’s, which I did not like at all. I told him nothing. I am not satisfied that he will go away content without an answer, and I have reason to think he will not be the only one who comes asking.

“My advice is that you do not wait for the day you have named. Go down to Lady Verinder’s by the first train tomorrow, and keep under her roof until you hear from me. Say nothing of this letter on the road, nor to any one in the railway carriage, however civil he may be. I will not put particulars on paper. They are not fit for paper, and I am not yet sure of them myself.

“Burn this when you have read it.

“Yours in haste, “Bruff.”

I read it twice over, once with my spectacles on and once without, and I did not understand one word more the second time than the first. I put this down to the nature of the letter, and not to the state of my eyes. Then I gave it back, and said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “Did you burn it, sir?”

“No,” says Mr. Franklin. “I was told to, and I didn’t. I wanted somebody in this house to know what is in it, Betteredge; and you are the only man I can think of who will be sensible about a thing without making a song and dance over it.”

I was flattered, I own. I may add that I was also a little frightened, which is not an agreeable sensation at my time of life, and one I do not recommend to anybody. Mr. Franklin folded the letter and put it back in his breast-pocket. Then he looked away from me up the sand, towards the sandhills where Rosanna Spearman’s little grey cloak had last been seen; and then he looked back, and I saw that he had something more to say.

“There is a second thing,” says he, “and it is the real reason I came to you, and not to my aunt, the moment I got through the gate. Have you a safe place where a thing may be locked up for the night?”

“The plate-room, sir,” said I. “It has an oak door bound with iron, and a lock that would defy any thief in Yorkshire. The key is mine, and my lady keeps the other with her own hand. Nothing goes in or out of that room that I don’t know of.”

“Then that is where it must go tonight.” He took a small packet from the same pocket and held it out to me. It was wrapped in brown paper, sealed at the joins with red wax, and it was no bigger, as near as I could judge, than the palm of my hand. “Lock it up for me, Betteredge. Don’t open it. Don’t ask me what it is. I would rather you did not know; and if anybody should question you afterwards, you may swear with a clear conscience that you never knew.”

“Mr. Franklin,” I said, “I have been in service since I was a boy, and I never yet asked a gentleman what he kept in his pockets.”

I took the packet, and I will tell you exactly what I did with it, because I know what a fool I should look if anybody came after me with questions. I did not open it. I did not hold it up to the window to see through the paper, nor shake it to hear what it might say. I turned it over once in my hand, to judge its weight, as a steward is bound to judge anything put into his keeping; and I will only say that it weighed a great deal less than I expected, and that I was not one whit the wiser for the weighing.

Then I walked with him across the back court and in at the offices, and down the stone passage to the plate-room, where I unlocked the oak door and set the packet on the top shelf at the back, behind the great silver soup-tureen which has not been used since Sir John’s time. I locked the door again, and the key went on my watch-chain with the others. I have it there now, as I write; and I may say it is the only key in my bunch that has ever given me a moment’s real uneasiness.

Reader, you will be asking why I did not put the obvious question to Mr. Franklin, when the whole of my life has been spent in asking questions of my betters, with the best intentions in the world. I can only answer that a steward who means to keep his place must sometimes content himself with keeping his tongue as well; and that there was something in the young gentleman’s face, when he gave me that packet, which made me think the less of my curiosity. Mr. Franklin went up to change his dusty clothes. I went out again into the yard, meaning to sit down for ten minutes in the sun before I had to see about the tea.

I had got no further than the back court when my daughter Penelope came hurrying across the stones towards me, with her apron up to her face and no bonnet on her head. She had gone out on her own account to look for Rosanna, being uneasy about her, and had been as far as the edge of the plantation and down through the sandhills to the beach; and she had come back alone.

“She isn’t in, father,” says Penelope. “I went right down to the sand, and there was nobody on it but the gulls. Then I met a boy from Cobb’s Hole on the cliff-top, with a basket of crabs on his back, and I asked him if he had seen a woman in a grey cloak. He says he saw her not half an hour since, on the path below the cliff, going on towards the village, very slow, with her head down, and never once looking back.”

“Towards the Hole!” says I. “Then she has gone on to see her friend, as she does now and then; and she will come back, my dear, when she has had her tea and her cry out, and not a minute before.”

“She isn’t coming back to the house, father,” says Penelope, very quiet. “The boy says she never turned round at all.”

I did not like it. I have said already that I did not like the place, and I liked still less that the girl should choose such an hour to walk to Cobb’s Hole, with one of her fainting-fits lying on her and no dinner inside her, and the wind coming up cold off the water. But I was the head of the servants, with a gentleman newly come into the house and a lady due home within the hour, and I had no intention of setting off across the rocks after a second housemaid at my time of life. I said as much to Penelope. She said nothing. But she gave me a look that I have not forgotten to this day, and I will leave it to you to decide whether I deserved it.

My lady came home a little before four, in the close carriage. Miss Rachel went straight up to her own room without stopping for anything, and was not seen again until the dinner-bell. I was given the pleasure of showing Mr. Franklin into the morning-room, where my lady sat with her bonnet still on and her gloves in her lap. She rose to meet him, and the two of them embraced in a warm and sensible manner, which I was glad to see, and which was a good deal less foreign than his own. Then she held him off at arm’s length and looked him over, from his fawn-coloured boots to the rose in his button-hole, and said something about his looks and his journey. I was turning to fetch the tea-tray when she stopped me.

“Stay where you are, Betteredge,” says my lady. “I want a witness to what I am about to say to Franklin; and you have a better memory than either of us.”

She turned back to her nephew. “There is one subject,” says she, “that I will not have discussed under my roof. I will not have it talked of at my table, or in my drawing-room, or on my stairs, by you or by any one who comes into this house. It is the Moonstone, Franklin. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you perfectly, aunt,” says Mr. Franklin, and he said it without the least hesitation, and with a very grave face. “The subject shall not be discussed under your roof, by me or by anybody in my hearing. You have my word for it.”

I looked at the tea-things, and I held my tongue. I had been wanting the whole afternoon to ask Mr. Franklin what he made of the little English boy and his “It”; and here was my lady, who knew nothing of the matter for all I could tell, closing the door on it as neatly as ever she closed a drawer. I set down the tray and went out. I will own that I went out with my mouth shut and my curiosity in full cry; and I will own, too, that I felt the young gentleman’s word had been given to my lady and not to me, which is the way of the world with stewards.

The dinner that evening was a quiet one, and I shall not trouble you with it. I was on my feet behind my lady’s chair all through it, where a steward hears a good deal and says nothing. Nobody mentioned the Moonstone. This was not because the subject had lost its interest for anybody at the table, but because it had been forbidden; and I have noticed, in a long life, that a forbidden thing is always the thing that sits nearest the salt. Nancy came to me at nine o’clock to say that Rosanna was not back, and that nobody had seen so much as the shadow of her in the lane. Nancy had lost her appetite, which in Nancy is a serious matter, and I told her to go to bed.

By ten o’clock the house had gone quiet. My lady had retired, and Mr. Franklin had been shown up to his room with the best of the spare blankets and a jug of hot water, which he declared he could not do without. I took my candle as far as the back court and no further. I set my beehive chair where I had sat in the sun that morning, under the wall that keeps off the wind from the sea, and I brought out *Robinson Crusoe* from the shelf in my sitting-room and opened him on my knee. The packet lay safe in the plate-room, with the key against my chain. The night was fine, and the sea was loud beyond the plantation, as it always is when the tide has turned. I read a page of Crusoe, and then another, and came at last to the place where he finds the print of a naked foot in the sand, and goes home in such a fright that he cannot sleep for it. I read that page three times over, and I could not have told you, after the third time, one word of what was on it. Every time the latch of the back gate lifted in the wind, I looked up. It was never Rosanna Spearman. The candle burned down, the tide went out over the Shivering Sand, and the moon came up pale above the firs; and our second housemaid had not come home.