The Chapters

The consultation was held at Kellynch Hall the next morning; and it was among the peculiarities of Sir Walter Elliot's mind, that he could sit down to the contemplation of his own ruin with a countenance of perfect serenity, provided the room were a handsome one and the company properly disposed in it. Lady Russell walked up from the village before noon; Mr Shepherd had ridden over from the market town, with a pocket-book of memoranda which he was in no hurry to produce; Elizabeth had placed herself where the light was least unkind; and Anne, whom nobody had thought of desiring to be present, and nobody thought of sending away, sat a little apart with her work.

Lady Russell had considered the business longer than any of them, and she had considered it upon paper. She had gone through the expenditure of four years, article by article; she had allowed for every thing which she believed Sir Walter could not, in decency to himself, be asked to relinquish; and she had brought the result with her, drawn out in a fair hand, and divided into heads. Her scheme was, in short, that the annual journey to London should be given up; that the number of the servants should be reduced by four; that one carriage should be laid down, and the horses lessened in proportion; that the table should be contracted to the family and such neighbours as could be received without display; and that the whole saving so effected should be paid over, quarterly, into Mr Shepherd's hands for the discharge of the debts, by which means Sir Walter might see himself a free man in seven years. She read it through with the composure of a woman who knew that every line of it was just, and who was determined to be neither hurried nor put out.

Sir Walter heard the first paragraph very well; he was, indeed, so agreeably employed, while she read, in observing how the morning light dealt with her temples, that the second was half over before he attended to it. But at the third he sat upright.

"Give up the spring in town!" said he. "My dear Lady Russell, you can hardly have considered what you are saying. Give up the spring in town, and lay down a carriage, and turn away four of my people, and let it be understood from one end of the county to the other that Sir Walter Elliot cannot afford to live like a gentleman! I would sooner quit Kellynch altogether than remain in it upon such terms. A man is not to strip himself of the common decencies of his station for the convenience of his tradespeople. Seven years! I should be pointed at for seven years. No; I cannot allow it. There is not one article in the whole paper which I can allow."

Lady Russell folded her sheets again without any alteration of colour, and Mr Shepherd, being then applied to, and having a great dislike of being the first to say what was disagreeable, was obliged at last to say it. His plan was of a plainer sort. He had made out a schedule of what was owing; he proposed that the small portion of the estate which was not entailed should be sold; that a fall of timber should be made in the plantations beyond the church; that the home farm, now in Sir Walter's own hands, should be let to a responsible man; and that with these means, joined to some reduction in the household, the whole of the incumbrance might be swept away within four years, and the property go down to Sir Walter's successors clear.

"Sell?" said Sir Walter. "Sell land? Sell the trees of Kellynch, that were standing there before Mr Shepherd's family were heard of? I have said, once for all, that not a rood of this estate shall pass out of my hands. I have mortgaged where I had the power, and that is enough for any man to have done. The Kellynch estate came to me whole, and whole it goes from me. You will oblige me, Mr Shepherd, by never proposing such a thing again."

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said that he had only presumed to state what appeared to him the shortest way, and that he was very sensible of the objections. Elizabeth observed that the timber at least was quite out of the question, for the beyond-the-church plantation was seen from the road. There was then a silence of some length, in which Sir Walter recovered his good humour and everybody else lost theirs.

It was in this pause that Anne, without having intended when she came into the room to say a word, found herself speaking.

She was of opinion that neither scheme went far enough. Lady Russell's she thought too tender of appearances, and Mr Shepherd's she thought unnecessary, if only they had courage to be poor for a while in their own house. What she wished for was a plan which should look the whole of the evil in the face at once, and be done with it; which should hold nothing sacred but the paying of what was owed, and count no reduction a disgrace which was made in order to be honest. She would have the London journey given up, not for a season but altogether; she would have the greater part of the house shut up, and the family live in a few rooms, as many families of better claims than theirs had lived before them; she would have but one carriage, and that a plain one; she would have the establishment lessened by seven, not by four, every servant so parted with being provided with a character and a small allowance until placed; she would have the table reduced to what was really eaten; and she would have the charities which had been cut off the last spring restored to the uttermost farthing, and paid before any thing else whatever, since a subscription promised in the village was as much a debt as a bill in Bond Street, and a great deal less able to wait. By such means, she believed, they might be clear in four years without parting with a single acre or a single tree.

She spoke quietly, and rather rapidly, and was aware, before she had done, of her father's eye-brows.

"Anne is very good," said Sir Walter, "but Anne has always had strange notions."

"I do not think them strange at all," said Elizabeth.

The astonishment of the room was general. Lady Russell laid down her paper; Mr Shepherd looked at his hat; Anne coloured, and could not for a moment believe that she had heard rightly.

"I have been thinking of something of the very sort myself," continued Elizabeth, with the composure of one taking possession of her own property, "though I own I had not thought of the shutting up of the rooms, which is an excellent thing, and would save a great deal in fires and in wax alone. If we are to be reduced, let us be reduced *thoroughly*, and in our own house, where nobody can see us doing it. What I cannot bear is the other way—selling, and cutting down timber, and the whole country talking of it by Michaelmas. The Miss Durands would have it all over Taunton in a fortnight. In the east wing, and the great drawing-room, and the two spare chambers, we are at no man's mercy. And as the drawing-room is not to be new furnished, it may as well be shut up as not."

She added, indeed, that the two footmen must remain, as she could not appear at church with one; and that her own woman was not to be spoken of in the reckoning; but these were qualifications only, and her support of the plan was as decided as it was unexpected. Anne, who had never in her life been agreed with by her sister upon any subject of importance, felt something like a pang at receiving the support in such a manner, and was ashamed of the feeling, and grateful in spite of it.

Sir Walter, thus deserted, was more distressed than he had been by all the rest. He had been accustomed to find in Elizabeth the echo of his own understanding, and he liked it better than any music.

"Shut up Kellynch Hall!" he said. "Live in a corner of my own house, like a widow in lodgings! I am to receive Lord and Lady Dalrymple, when they honour this country, in a small room, with a hired chaise at my door and one man behind it! You have all been reading of frugality in some book. I know what is due to my name, if nobody else does; and I say that a thing which cannot be done with credit had better not be done at all. Something must be found; something must certainly be found; but it must be something which an Elliot may do."

Mr Shepherd, perceiving that every road within the estate had now been shut against him, ventured at last upon the one which lay without it. He observed, with many apologies, that there was still another course, and one taken every day by gentlemen of the first consequence; that a house was not the less a man's own for being occupied by another; that Kellynch Hall was known to be one of the finest situations in the west of England, and would command its own terms; that a gentleman might live where he pleased, and let his own residence, and return to it whenever it suited him; and that if Sir Walter could bring himself to think of a tenant—

"A *tenant!*" cried Sir Walter, rising. "A tenant at Kellynch Hall! A stranger sitting at my table, and walking in my shrubberies, and looking at my pictures, and telling his acquaintance that he is master of Sir Walter Elliot's house! Mr Shepherd, I have listened to a great deal this morning, and I have borne it, I hope, as I ought; but there is a limit. You will never, so long as I live, use that word in my hearing again. I forbid it. Let it be understood among you all that it has not been spoken."

Mr Shepherd was extremely sorry; he had spoken as a man of business, and not, he was sure, as a friend would have spoken; he begged the whole might be considered as unsaid; and he took up his hat with the air of a man who intends to say it again at a more favourable season.

At this moment the letters were brought in. There was one for Elizabeth, which she opened, read a line of, and gave across to Anne with a slight movement of the shoulders. It was from Uppercross.

"My dear Elizabeth,—I make no apology for writing to you rather than to Anne, as I know Anne never tells anybody how ill I am. I have not been well since Tuesday se'nnight; my throat is very bad, and I have such pains in my side as I never remember, and Mr Robinson says it is nothing, which is what he always says. Charles is out from breakfast till it is dark, and comes home with the dogs, and thinks I am perfectly well because I am dressed. The children are very troublesome, and little Charles will mind nobody. I have not seen a soul since Thursday, unless the Miss Musgroves calling for half an hour is to be called seeing anybody. I am sure I do not complain, but I am very ill indeed, and quite alone. I wish Anne would come to me. I dare say she can be spared, for there can be nothing to keep her at Kellynch; and if she cannot come on Monday, she must come on Tuesday, for I am really not fit to be left. My love to my father.—Yours affectionately, M. M."

"Mary is always ill," said Sir Walter, laying down his own letters. "It comes of her having married into a family that dines at five. Nothing ruins the constitution like early hours in a damp situation."

"She had better have Anne," said Elizabeth. "She will be quiet with Anne, and nobody wants her here."

And so, without one point of the morning's business being determined, the council broke up. Mr Shepherd was to bring a fuller statement of the debts before the end of the week; Lady Russell was to consider whether her paper might not be so altered as to be more palatable; Sir Walter went out to look at the young trees which he had refused to sell; and the three plans, the moderate, the practical, and the honest, lay upon the table together, all equally rejected.

The evening was very still. Anne sat alone in the small room beyond the hall, where the light lasted longest, with her sister's letter open in her lap and the accounts of the morning going backwards and forwards in her mind. Nothing was settled; nothing, she believed, would be settled by any means which her father would consent to hear of; the debts stood exactly where they had stood at breakfast, and would stand so, she feared, until they had grown past the reach of any economy at all. She had said her say, and it had been supported, and it had come to nothing; and she was aware of a strange dejection in having been listened to for once, and finding it make no difference. Lady Russell would try again to-morrow, and would fail; and the summer would go on.

But Mary was ill, or believed herself ill, which at Uppercross came to much the same thing; and there, at least, she was wanted. There was a use for her at her sister's, if it were only to be sat with, and complained to, and found fault with by candlelight. She would write in the morning, and go on Tuesday. Here nobody would miss her; her opinion had been given and had been swallowed up; her convenience, as always, might give way. She folded the letter, and put it in her pocket, and sat watching the last of the light upon the park, resolved, and unhappy, and perfectly composed.

She slept a long time, and when she awoke the rain was still driving against the glass and the light had gone gray and thick, so that she could not tell whether it was afternoon or evening. Mrs. Medlock had bought a lunch basket at one of the stations, and they had some cold chicken and bread and butter and hot tea, and after it Mrs. Medlock settled herself in her corner with her bonnet a little on one side and dozed with her mouth open, and Mary sat and looked at her and thought her uglier than ever.

When she woke up again Mrs. Medlock was pinning her mantle straight and talking as if she had never left off.

"We shall be there before long now," she said. "You'll not see much of it to-night, for it'll be dark, but there's a good drive after we leave the train. Five miles of it, and every yard across the moor."

"What is a moor?" said Mary.

"Look out of the window in about ten minutes and you'll see," Mrs. Medlock answered. "There's naught on it but heather and gorse and whinbushes, and naught lives on it but wild ponies and sheep."

"It doesn't sound like anything I should like," said Mary, and she turned her face away with her lips pinched together.

The train stopped at last at a small station where only two or three people got out and the lamps swung in the wind and threw their light on wet stones. Mary stood on the platform holding her black gloved hands together, and Mrs. Medlock bustled after the porter about the boxes; and then she stopped quite suddenly, in the middle of a word, and Mary saw that she was staring at a man who had come out of the shadow at the end of the platform.

He was a tall man in a long dark overcoat, and though the collar was turned up about his face Mary could see that his shoulders were crooked, and that one of them was higher than the other. He had black hair with a white streak in it, and a face that looked as if it had been unhappy so long that it had forgotten any other way of looking. He came up to them without hurrying and stood still, and the rain glistened on his shoulders.

"Mr. Craven, sir!" said Mrs. Medlock, quite breathless. "I never thought--"

"I was on the road," he said. "Is this the child?"

"Yes, sir. This is Miss Mary."

He looked down at Mary and Mary looked up at him, and neither of them said anything at all for a moment. He looked at her, she thought, as a person looks at a chair which has been carried into a room and set down where it is not wanted; and then something in his face altered a little, as if for a second he had seen somebody else and not her at all, and he turned his head away.

"The carriage is outside," he said, and walked before them down the platform.

That was all. He did not ask her if she was tired, or if she had had her tea, or say that he was glad to see her; and Mary, who did not in the least want to be asked anything, was nevertheless conscious of a queer, cross, empty feeling, as if she had been made smaller than she was. She climbed into the carriage after Mrs. Medlock and sat back in her corner, and Mr. Archibald Craven got in and sat in the other corner with his face to the window and did not speak again.

It was quite dark by that time. The lamps of the carriage made two yellow patches which slid along wet hedges and then along nothing at all, and Mary knew by the way the wheels changed their sound that they had left the village behind and were going up. The rain had almost stopped, but the wind had got up in its place, and it came against the side of the carriage in great pushes, and made a long noise going away over something wide.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock, buttoning her mantle over her chest. "There's no such wind anywhere else in England."

Mary put her face nearer to the glass, but there was nothing to see but blackness, and she could not tell whether they were driving through it or over it or beside it. It was not like darkness in a room. It seemed to go on and on, and to be full of that great sound.

Then the carriage stopped so suddenly that she was jerked forward on the seat, and the coachman was heard shouting at the horses, and the light of the lamps swung sideways. Mrs. Medlock let down the window and put her head out and got a mouthful of wind for her pains.

"What is it? What are we stopping for?"

"Sheep, ma'am," the coachman called back. "Th' flock's come down off th' hill an' they're lyin' i' th' road for th' warmth of it. I mun get down an' shift 'em."

"Sheep!" said Mrs. Medlock. "At this hour!"

Mr. Craven opened the door on his side and got out without a word, and Mary, before she knew that she meant to do it at all, slipped down from her seat and got out after him.

The wind took her the moment her feet touched the ground. It pushed her black crêpe hat crooked and dragged at her thin hair and got inside her sleeves, and it was so cold and so full of something wet and clean that it made her catch her breath. It did not smell in the least like India, or like the streets in London, or like anything she had ever smelled before. It smelled of wet earth, and of something rough and sweet growing close to the ground, and it was so strong that it seemed a rude thing rather than a smell at all.

She stood in the ruts by the wheel and looked about her. In front, in the lamplight, there were grey woolly backs moving and stumbling, and the coachman among them waving his arms, and one sheep ran up the bank at the side of the road and stood there stamping. Beyond the lamps there was nothing whatever. The rain had blown off, and here and there a star showed through the running clouds, and she could just make out that the land went up on one hand, black and bare, and away on the other, and that not one light of any house was to be seen anywhere in the whole of it.

Mary had never in her life been in a place where there was so much of anything and so little in it. She ought, she thought afterward, to have been frightened. She was not frightened. She stood with her chin up and let the wind push at her, and she was thinking, in a slow, contrary way, that at any rate nobody could tell her to keep out of that.

Mr. Craven had gone a few steps forward and was standing with his back to the carriage, looking at the darkness as if he had entirely forgotten that there was a child in the world. When the road was clear he turned round.

"Get in," he said.

Mary got in.

After that they drove for what seemed to her a very long time, and she began to be so sleepy that the great sound of the wind became part of her sleep; and then there were trees, and the wheels went smoothly, and the lamps showed her a wall of stone that went up higher than she could see. The carriage stopped in a court, and there were three or four steps and an enormous door, and a dim hall, hung round with armour and portraits, so badly lighted that the faces in the frames seemed to be leaning forward out of the dark to look at her.

Mr. Craven crossed the hall without taking off his hat.

"Take her to her room, Mrs. Medlock," he said. "She is not to be brought to me."

Then a door shut somewhere and he was gone, and that was all Mary ever had of her uncle upon her first night in his house.

Mrs. Medlock took her up a broad staircase and down a long corridor and up some more steps and down another corridor, until Mary had lost all count of the turnings, and at last opened a door and pushed her, not unkindly, into a room where there was a fire and a lighted lamp and a supper laid on the table.

"Well, here you are!" she said. "This room and the next one are where you'll live--and you'll keep to them, remember."

The room had walls covered with worked hangings of a forest with trees and birds and little strange people in it, and a great four-post bed with curtains, and one window with the wind pressing against it. Mary sat down on a stool near the fire because her feet were cold, and looked at the hangings, and thought that everything in the house was too big and had been made for somebody else.

Presently there was a knock, and the door was opened by a manservant--a big raw-boned young man in the manor's livery, with red cheeks and enormous hands, carrying a tray with a jug of milk on it.

"Eh! but tha'rt nobbut a bit of a thing," he said, setting it down and looking at her with the greatest good humour. "Tha' mun get thysel' outside o' this. Ther's a sup o' milk an' some bread an' butter an' a bit o' cold meat, an' tha' mun eat it all up, for tha's had a long ride an' it's a rough neet."

Mary stared at him.

"I don't know what you are saying," she said. "I can't understand you at all. Please say it in English."

The young man threw back his head and laughed as if she had made a joke, though he laughed quite politely.

"That is English," he said. "It's Yorkshire English, that's all. I said tha' mun--I said you must eat your supper. Us all talks like that here. Tha'll get used to it."

"I shall not," said Mary coldly. "It is not English at all."

He only chuckled again and mended the fire and went away, and Mary ate the bread and butter and drank the milk because she was hungrier than she had known, and thought that a place where the servants could not speak so that a person could understand them was the stupidest place she had ever come to.

Afterward Mrs. Medlock came and stood over her while she was undressed by nobody at all but herself, and the candle was put by the bed and the lamp taken away, and Mary lay down in the great four-post bed and was left in the dark.

The wind was very loud. It came round the corner of the house in long runs and rattled the window and went away again with a low mourning sound that seemed to travel round the walls. Mary lay and listened to it, and she was so tired that she was slipping over the edge of sleep when the wind fell all at once, quite still, as it does sometimes; and in the stillness she heard something else.

It was not loud. It came from a long way off, from somewhere down one of the corridors--a dull, fretful sound, going on and on, and stopping, and beginning again. She sat straight up in bed with her heart thumping. She thought of a dog shut up somewhere, and then she thought that it was not a dog.

The door opened and Mrs. Medlock came in with a candle, and her face looked cross and hurried.

"You've not gone to sleep," she said. "What are you sitting up for?"

"I heard something," said Mary. "Listen. There it is. What is it?"

Mrs. Medlock stood quite still for a second with the candle shaking a little, and then she said, in her briskest, hardest voice:

"It's the wind. There's nothing else it could be. This house is full of passages and the wind gets into them and goes wuthering about like that. You'll hear it every night of your life while you're here, and you'd best get used to it. Lie down."

She put out the candle and shut the door behind her, and Mary heard her go away down the corridor rather faster than she had come.

Mary lay down again in the dark. The wind rose once more and covered everything with its great noise, and she could not hear anything else at all; but she lay wide awake with her eyes open, being contrary.

It was not the wind, she said to herself. She did not care what Mrs. Medlock said. Nobody in this house ever told her anything, just as nobody had ever told her anything in the bungalow in India; but there was nobody to stop her from finding out. And lying there in the enormous bed, in the dark, in the strange house on the edge of the moor, Mary Lennox made up her mind that she would find out for herself what the sound was.

“Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable,” Brett said.

The taxi went up the street and past the lighted door of the pub and then turned and climbed toward the Panthéon. The Panthéon was lighted and the square was empty. We went down the Rue Saint-Jacques with the shops shuttered and the street dark and cool going down, and then it opened out by the hospital wall and the trees were black against the sky and the sky was not black but a very dark blue.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” Brett said.

“All right.”

“I’m no good, you know.”

“You’re all right.”

“No. I’m not.” She was looking out of the window. “Give me a cigarette, will you?”

I lit two cigarettes and gave her one. She smoked with her head back against the seat.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Montsouris. I told him the park.”

“Good God. What’s at Montsouris?”

“Nothing. Trees.”

“I don’t want trees.” She sat up. “Take me to the Select. I want to sit where there’s light.”

I opened the glass and told the driver the Boulevard Montparnasse. He turned at the Observatoire and we came down past the Closerie des Lilas with the awnings in and the chairs stacked, and past the statue with the naked sword, and then there were the lights of the corner ahead of us and the terraces still going.

“That’s better,” Brett said. “I can’t bear the dark just now.”

We got out and I paid the driver and we sat down at a table on the terrace of the Select. There were people at the tables, mostly people I knew by sight. A woman was crying quietly at a table by the door and the man with her was reading a newspaper. The waiter came.

“Brandy and soda,” Brett said.

“You said you were never going to get tight any more.”

“I said that at ten o’clock.”

The waiter brought the drinks and I paid him and he made a note on the saucer.

“I met a chap last week,” Brett said. “Mippipopolous.”

“What?”

“Count Mippipopolous. He’s a Greek. He has more money than anybody I’ve ever met, and he’s quite decent about it, too.”

“I never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have. He never does anything one hears of. He’s got something in the States. Sugar, I think, or sweetshops. He sat with me at Zelli’s until five in the morning and never once said anything a fool would say.”

“That’s something.”

“It’s a great deal, my dear. He wants to take me to Biarritz.”

“Are you going?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to go to Biarritz.” She turned her glass around on the marble. “He offered me a good deal of money to go. He was quite serious about it. He didn’t get shirty when I said no, either. He simply asked would I have supper with him instead.”

“He sounds fine.”

“He is fine. He said I was the only woman he’d met who wasn’t sad about something. Wasn’t that beautiful of him?”

“He can’t see very well.”

“He sees perfectly well,” Brett said. “That’s what makes it beautiful.”

She finished her drink and I ordered two more. Out in the street a man went by pushing a cart with the wheels making a noise on the pavement, and a taxi came down the boulevard very fast and slowed and stopped up ahead by the Rotonde.

“Are you happy, Jake?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t say sure like that.”

“I’m happy,” I said. “Look at the crowd. Look at the lights. What isn’t there to be happy about?”

“You’re a rotten liar.”

“I’m a newspaperman.”

Brett laughed. “Poor old Jake.” She looked at me across the table. Her eyes had the look they got when she was going to say something and then did not say it. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

I looked out at the boulevard. A gendarme went by on a bicycle, riding slowly.

“You could come up to Montmartre with me,” Brett said. “The crowd would be delighted.”

“I’ve got work in the morning.”

“Of course. Work.”

“That’s it.”

“You’re a good chap, Jake.”

“Sure,” I said.

None of that was true. There was no work in the morning that could not wait until the afternoon, and I did not want her to go to Montmartre or anywhere else with anybody.

Brett sat with both hands around her glass. Somebody at a table behind us was explaining, in a very loud voice, what was wrong with the Ballets Russes. It got late. The woman by the door had stopped crying and was powdering her face.

“Did she get your fifty francs?” Brett asked.

“Who?”

“Your fiancée. The one with the bad teeth. You put it in an envelope, my dear. I watched you do it, and I thought, there’s Jake being noble again.”

“I don’t know if she got it.”

“Let’s go and see.”

“It’s past three.”

“They’ll be going still. Those places go till they stop.” She stood up. “Come on. I want to know what happened to your fifty francs. It’s the only thing all evening I’ve wanted to know.”

We got a taxi in front of the Rotonde and drove back up the hill. The streets were empty and we went fast. Brett sat looking straight ahead with her chin up and her hair brushed back.

“It’s not the money,” I said.

“I know it isn’t.”

“I only wanted to know she was all right.”

“I know that, too,” Brett said. “That’s why I want to see.”

The taxi came down the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève and I told the driver to wait and we went in. Inside there was hardly anybody. The proprietor was still up on his high stool with the accordion but he was playing very softly with his ankle bells quiet, and four or five people were dancing, holding on to each other and not moving much. The policeman was gone. The daughter of the house was asleep with her head on her arms at a table by the door. The place was cooler now and it smelled of spilled wine and sweat and cigarettes.

Georgette was sitting alone at a table near the bar with her hat on the bench beside her, eating a hard-boiled egg. She saw us and did not get up.

“Well,” she said. “There he is.”

“Hello, Georgette.”

“Hello yourself.”

The patronne came over from the zinc, wiping her hands, and looked at me and then went and got the envelope from under the bar and brought it and put it on the table.

“The gentlemen went away,” she said. “They went to Montmartre. Mademoiselle stayed.”

“They took the taxis and off they went,” Georgette said. “They danced with me all night, every one of them, and then they went away like that, and not one of them bought me anything to eat. Not one of them. I danced with seven of them.”

“Have something now,” I said.

“I’ve had an egg.”

“Have something to drink, then.”

She thought about it. “A pernod,” she said.

I ordered a pernod for Georgette and brandy and sodas for Brett and me, and we sat down. Georgette looked at Brett, and Brett looked back at her and smiled, and Georgette decided something and moved her hat over to make room.

“You were with them,” Georgette said.

“I came with them,” said Brett.

“They’re not any good.”

“No,” Brett said. “They’re not much good.”

“They laugh all the time and they don’t mean it,” Georgette said. “When somebody laughs he should mean it.” She drank some of the pernod and made a face at the taste, which she liked. “Your friend is chic,” she said to me. “You could see it in the street. You can always see it.”

“Thank you very much,” Brett said in French.

“It’s not a compliment. It’s what I see.”

I pushed the envelope across the table to Georgette. She looked at it and did not touch it.

“What’s that?”

“It’s yours.”

“What for?”

“I went off and left you. It’s for the dinner and the taxi.”

“You paid the dinner.”

“Take it,” I said.

She opened the envelope with her thumb and looked in it and then folded it once and put it in her bag and shut the bag and put the bag on her lap and kept her hand on it.

“You’re a good type,” she said. “I said it before.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a shame you’re sick.”

“Yes,” I said.

Brett was looking at her glass. The accordion was playing something slow and one of the couples on the floor stopped dancing and stood talking and then began again.

We finished the drinks and I paid, and Georgette said she would stay a little, that there was no sense in going home now, that at this hour the streets were full of nothing. She shook hands with Brett and then with me. Her hand was hot.

“Bonne chance,” she said.

“You too.”

“Oh, me,” Georgette said. She sat down again and put her hat on.

Outside the taxi had gone. The street went steeply down and the housefronts were gray now instead of black, and the sky above the roofs was white, and you could see the shape of everything without any of it having color yet.

“There goes your fifty francs,” Brett said.

“I got what I paid for.”

“What was that?”

“Peace of mind.”

“You,” said Brett. She took my arm and we walked down the hill. Our shoes made a good sound on the stones. At the bottom, at the Place Maubert, the water carts were going and the street was wet and shining, and there was a market cart with two horses standing while the driver drank a coffee at the counter of a bar that had just opened. Two taxis stood at the corner with their flags up and one driver asleep.

“Well,” Brett said.

“Well.”

“You won’t come.”

“No.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s settled, then.”

“I’ll see you.”

“Do. Come to the Crillon at five. I’ll be there.”

“You never are.”

“I will be. Don’t be so damned superior.” She was looking down the street toward the river. “It’s light,” she said. “Isn’t it disgusting how light it gets.”

I woke the driver and Brett got in and gave him the address herself, and settled back in the corner the way she had before, with her chin up.

“Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Brett.”

The taxi started and went off along the boulevard and I watched it until it turned. Then I put my hands in my pockets and walked down toward the water.

There was no one on the quai. The bookstalls were locked and the tops of them were wet with dew. The river was gray and then it was the color of pewter and then, above the bridges, it began to have some light in it. A string of barges came up very slowly behind a tug and the tug's smoke went out flat over the water and hung there. Notre Dame stood up big and gray at the end of the island with the light coming behind it, and the towers were black and then they were not black. Down under the quai wall a man was already fishing, sitting on a folded sack, and I stopped and leaned on the parapet and watched him for a while. He did not catch anything and did not seem to expect to.

At the Pont de la Tournelle two men were washing down the sidewalk with a hose, and the water ran along the gutter carrying cigarette ends and a cabbage leaf. A bus went by with its lights still on, empty except for the conductor. The market carts came up from the south, one behind another, the horses going slowly and the drivers half asleep on the loads, and the whole street smelled of leeks and wet stone.

It was a fine morning and it was going to be a fine day. I walked home along the river with the light coming up the way it does, all at once and then evenly, and it was pleasant walking and there was nobody to talk to and nobody wanting anything, and for that hour of the day that was all right.

The storm had broken about midnight. I remember noticing, as I let myself out of the front door a few minutes after six, that the gravel of the drive was pitted and running with water, and that the whole world smelt of wet earth and lime blossom. It seemed a monstrous thing that the morning should be so fresh and so innocent.

I had read enough in the library to send me off at a swinging pace. The description in that book had been horribly circumstantial: the arching of the body, the rigidity, the frightful convulsions recurring at intervals. I had seen all of it. I put my head down and walked.

Styles St. Mary was hardly awake. A cart stood outside the Three Crowns, and a woman was scrubbing a doorstep, and that was all. Leastways Cottage stands at the far end of the village street, a little back from the road, and as I came up to the gate the door opened and my friend himself stepped out upon the path.

He was, as always, arrayed with an exquisite neatness which no misfortune of exile could impair. His moustaches had been waxed to a nicety; his little boots shone. But there was no surprise in his face when he saw me—no surprise at all.

"Poirot!" I cried. "I have come for you. Something terrible has happened at Styles——"

"Ah," he said gravely, "then it is true. Madame Inglethorp is dead."

I stopped short in the gateway.

"You know?"

"But certainly I know. It was Baily who told me. He came by not twenty minutes ago, driving back from carrying Dr. Wilkins to his house, and when he saw me at the window he stopped the car in the road and shouted it out to me—with much detail and some considerable enjoyment, that poor young man. It is not every morning that one may be the first with such news." He shook his head slowly. "It is not credible. So kind, so good a lady. Come inside, my friend. Tell me."

I told him, standing in the little parlour among the packing-cases and the potted geraniums, and I told him badly, for I was tired and shaken and could not keep to any order. He did not once interrupt me. He sat with his eyes closed and the tips of his fingers pressed together, and only at the mention of Dr. Bauerstein's name did those fingers give the smallest tremor.

"A post-mortem," he said at last, "and to-night. And you, Hastings, have been to the library and have read about the strychnine." He opened one eye. "Do not look so astonished. Your face, mon ami, is a printed page, and this morning it is printed very large. Eh bien. Mr. John Cavendish permits that I concern myself with this affair?"

"He has given me a free hand."

"That is not at all the same thing," said Poirot dryly, "but it will serve. Now attend to me. You will go back at once, at once, you understand, and you will see that nobody—nobody at all, not the good Dorcas with her duster, not Monsieur Lawrence with his nerves—enters those two rooms, nor the boudoir below. That is your affair until I come."

"And you?"

"Me, I have first to make certain arrangements for my compatriots, who cannot be left without their breakfast because a lady has died. And I must think a little. Thinking, Hastings, is best done alone and sitting still. I shall be with you before nine."

I got back to Styles a little after seven, and let myself in at the front door, which stood already unbolted. Dorcas was in the hall. Her eyes were red, but she had her cap straight and her apron on, and she was doing what an English servant always does in the presence of death, which is to go on with the work.

"You'll take some coffee, sir? You've had nothing."

"Presently. Dorcas, has anyone been upstairs?"

"No, sir. The doctor locked the rooms, and Mr. John has the keys in his pocket, and I'm sure I wouldn't go anigh them, not for a fortune." She hesitated, and then, with the air of one relieving herself of something that has been on her mind: "There's a thing I don't understand, sir, and it's been worriting me since half-past six."

"What is it?"

"The latch-key, sir." She went to the oak chest by the door and picked up something that lay on the corner of it. "That's it. It was lying here when I came down and drew the bolts this morning, in that very spot, where I couldn't have missed it."

"Well?"

"Well, sir, the master had it. I heard him say so with my own ears when he went out with Dr. Bauerstein last night—'I have the latch-key, don't any of you sit up for me.' Those were his words. And how it comes to be lying on that chest this morning, when Mr. Inglethorp isn't in the house and hasn't been, is more than I can tell you."

I looked at the small key lying in her hand, and I confess that my heart gave a great leap.

"Say nothing about this, Dorcas—to anyone."

"I'm sure I don't want to, sir," said Dorcas, and put it back exactly where she had found it.

I had not been ten minutes in the dining-room, where John and Lawrence sat over untouched cups, when we heard the crunch of a step on the wet gravel, and then the front door, and then a voice in the hall asking a question of Dorcas. John's face turned a dull red. He got up and stood with his hands on the back of his chair.

Alfred Inglethorp came in. He was dusty about the boots to the ankle, and his black beard looked blacker than ever against the pallor of his face, but he was otherwise precisely as usual, and he came straight across the room to John with both hands out.

"My dear boy—I have only this moment heard—the woman at the lodge—I cannot believe it. Emily—my poor Emily. Tell me. Tell me everything."

John told him, in half a dozen dry sentences, and he heard it standing quite still. Then he sat down heavily in Mrs. Inglethorp's own chair by the window and put his hand over his eyes, and there was a silence in which I could hear a thrush singing on the lawn.

"And I was not here," he said at last. "I shall not forgive myself for that. I shall never forgive myself."

"Where were you?" said Lawrence.

It was flung at him, harshly, out of the corner of the room. Inglethorp lifted his head. If he resented it, he gave no sign.

"At Tadminster," he said. "I walked down to the village with Dr. Bauerstein and left him at his door a little after half-past nine, and then, as it was a fine night and I had business with Denby which I have twice put off, I walked on. It is seven miles. Denby and I sat over his papers till past one o'clock—there was a great deal to go through—and it was then raining as it rains once in a summer, and he would not hear of my starting back. He put me up. I got away at six and walked in, and at the lodge gates the woman ran out and stopped me." He passed his hand across his forehead. "If I had come back—if I had so much as guessed——"

"You had the latch-key," said John.

"I had it in my pocket the whole night through," said Inglethorp, "for what good it did me. It is in my pocket now."

He felt in the pocket of his coat as he spoke; and then in the other; and then, patiently, in his waistcoat. He found nothing. He gave a short unhappy laugh and let his hands fall.

"I have dropped it somewhere on the road, then. It is of no consequence."

Nobody answered him. Presently he went upstairs to change his boots, and I heard his door shut, and John let out his breath like a man who has been under water.

In the passage I met Dorcas coming from the kitchen.

"Dorcas—the key that was on the chest. It is still there?"

"Yes, sir," she said, "in the very same place. I looked not five minutes ago."

Poirot came at ten minutes to nine, walking up the drive with that quick, mincing, slightly limping gait of his, and stopping half-way to remove some object from the gravel—a snail, I think—and set it tenderly upon the grass. John received him in the morning-room with a stiff politeness which thawed considerably in the course of ten minutes, for Poirot was at his best, grave, deferential, and enormously the friend of the family; and at the end of it John took the two keys out of his pocket and put them into the little man's hand without a word.

"I thank you, Monsieur Cavendish. Presently I shall make use of them. For the moment, no. The rooms will keep; they have all the patience in the world, rooms. It is the living who forget."

He would not go up. To my extreme impatience he spent the next two hours in the most trivial fashion: he walked round the outside of the house; he stood a long time under the windows of the right wing with his head on one side, like a bird; he examined the flower-bed, which the rain had beaten flat; he passed the time of day with Manning the gardener and admired the tomatoes. He spoke for a quarter of an hour to Dorcas in the housekeeper's room, and came out of it as bland as when he went in, and would tell me nothing whatever of what had passed. And at about half-past ten, as we came round the corner of the house by the rose garden, we came upon Cynthia Murdoch.

She was sitting on the stone seat with her hands in her lap and nothing at all in them, doing nothing, which was so unlike her that it was shocking. Her auburn hair was pushed up anyhow, and her eyes were heavy. She got up when she saw us.

"This is Monsieur Poirot, Cynthia," I said. "He is going to help us."

"How do you do," said Cynthia mechanically.

Poirot bowed over her hand with immense ceremony.

"Mademoiselle, I ask you one thing only, and then I go away and leave you in peace. Are you, as a rule, a sound sleeper?"

She looked at him with a sort of dull surprise, as though she had braced herself for something else altogether.

"No," she said, "that's just it. I'm the lightest sleeper in this house. A door shutting downstairs wakes me. I've been laughed at for it for years." Her voice wavered suddenly. "And last night Mary shook me and shook me and called my name, and I heard her a long way off, like somebody calling out of the next parish, and I couldn't get up out of it. I can't remember getting into the corridor at all. It—it frightens me rather, when I think of it."

"Thank you, mademoiselle," said Poirot. "That is all."

He bowed again and walked on, and I had to trot to come up with him. He said absolutely nothing. His face wore the expression of a man who has just received a letter and is waiting until he is alone to open it.

It was, I suppose, a little after eleven when he stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked up.

"Now," he said. "You and I alone, Hastings. And you will oblige me by touching nothing—nothing at all."

The corridor of the right wing was very hot and very still; the sun had come round and lay in a broad band along the floor. Poirot turned the key, and we went in, and he locked the door again behind us and put the key in his pocket.

The room was as we had left it at five that morning, and the broad daylight made it somehow worse. The bed with its tumbled clothes; the little table overturned by the bedside, and beside it the fragments of a lamp; a coffee cup with the dregs long dried in it; a box of matches, an empty tumbler, the ashes cold and grey in the grate.

Poirot went round that room as I have never seen any human being go round a room. He got down upon his knees on the carpet. He looked under the bed, into the wash-hand basin, into the waste-paper basket, and into the very cinders, which he sifted with a small pair of tongs and left as he found them. He took the papers from the writing-table and read them through, one by one, with maddening deliberation. He stood on tiptoe before the mantelpiece and moved the prim little ornaments—a china shepherdess, two lustre vases, a spill-jar—the eighth of an inch that was necessary to bring them into a line, and stood back and looked at them with real pleasure.

Then he went across to the door which leads into Cynthia Murdoch's rooms.

"This door was bolted last night."

"Yes. Dorcas says it has never been undone in her time."

"It is bolted now," said Poirot.

He put his face within six inches of the bolt and remained so for perhaps a minute, quite motionless. Then he took from his waistcoat pocket a small pair of tweezers, and with the utmost delicacy detached something from the metal and carried it across the room to the window.

"Look."

Lying on the tip of the tweezers was a fragment of stuff no bigger than my little finger-nail, and of a dark green colour.

"What is it?"

"It is a piece of dark green fabric," said Poirot placidly.

"But—but how did it come there? Whose is it? Poirot, that door is bolted on this side. Do you mean that somebody in this house——"

He took a clean envelope from his pocket, slipped the fragment inside, wrote something on the outside in his small, precise handwriting, and laid the envelope on the little table between us.

"I mean nothing at all, my friend. Not yet."

"But you must have some idea!"

"I have several, and they are none of them for this morning." He looked at me and his eyes had gone green, as they did when anything excited him. "Do not press me, Hastings. If I speak too soon I shall speak like a fool, and then, out of vanity, I shall be obliged to go on being a fool."

I looked from him to the envelope and back again, and my exasperation must have shown, for he laid his hand for a moment on my arm, quite kindly. Then he turned and let his eyes travel once more round that hot, bright, disordered room, over the bed, over the table, over the little row of straightened ornaments upon the mantelpiece, and his face grew slowly grave.

"In this room," he said, "there is a thing that has been left, and a thing that has been taken away. And me, I have found the one that was left."

"And the other?" I said.

"The other," said Poirot, "was never in the room at all."

What in the world he meant by that, I had not the faintest idea.

As for the seven-and-sixpence, I may as well own here that I had forgotten all about it, and that Mr. Franklin had not. It was money I had lent him out of my own pocket, when he was a boy of thirteen, to buy a fishing-rod with, on a solemn promise of repayment which had stood over, from that day to this, for a matter of twelve years. There is a great deal of talk in the world about the honesty of nations. Give me the man who remembers a debt of seven-and-sixpence to his mother's servant, and I will engage to find you an honest nation to put him in.

“Never mind the money, sir,” I said, when I had got the breath back into my body. “What I want to know is, how you come to be here at all? We were told to look for you by the evening train. It's not two o'clock yet.”

Mr. Franklin plucked the rose out of his button-hole, and began pulling it to pieces—a habit of his, as I came to find, when there was anything on his mind that he was turning over.

“I came by the mail, Betteredge,” he says. “I have been at Frizinghall since eleven in the forenoon. I left my luggage at the station to follow by the carrier, and walked across the fields, and along the shore. And so I came upon you and your—” he stopped, and looked once towards the sandhills where the grey cloak had gone, and then thought better of it, and left the sentence where it was.

“And what put you on travelling by the mail, sir,” I said, “when the whole house is expecting you by the six o'clock train, and my lady has ordered the pony-chaise to the station on purpose?”

“That,” says he.

He took out his pocket-book, and out of the pocket-book a letter, and put the letter into my hand, in the coolest manner in the world, exactly as if he had been giving me a bill to pay. I got out my spectacles, and I read what follows. You shall read it too, if you please, for it is a part of my statement; and if you skip it, you will only have to come back to it later, which is a waste of everybody's time.

“Gray's Inn Square, Wednesday.

“Dear Sir,—I write in haste, on a matter which you ought, I think, to be acquainted with before you leave London.

“At half-past four this afternoon a stranger called at these chambers and asked to see me. I was engaged, and he was denied. He thereupon inquired of my clerk whether Mr. Franklin Blake was going into Yorkshire, and on what day, and by what train. He gave no name, and offered no reason. He was, as my clerk describes him, a person of a dark complexion and a foreign manner, extraordinarily civil, and speaking better English than either you or I. He did not wait for an answer to his question, but went away like a man who had got one already.

“Half an hour afterwards my clerk, going out on an errand of mine, observed the same person loitering at the corner of the square, in company with two others of his own colour and country.

“I am not an imaginative man, and I attempt no explanation of this. But I have been a lawyer for thirty years, and I have learnt in that time that when strangers take an interest in a gentleman's movements, the gentleman will do well to take an interest in theirs. My advice is contained in two lines. Alter nothing in your arrangements—but travel earlier than you have told anybody that you mean to travel; and place the property which we spoke of on Tuesday in the strong-room of the nearest bank on the day of your arrival, and not one day later.

“Faithfully yours, “MATTHEW BRUFF.”

I read it twice; and, having read it twice, I looked at Mr. Franklin over the top of my spectacles, and Mr. Franklin looked at what was left of his rose.

Mr. Bruff, of Gray's Inn Square, was our family lawyer, and a man, as I had always understood, with about as much fancy in him as a pair of kitchen tongs. That such a person should sit down at the end of a day's work and write about dark-complexioned strangers standing at corners, was a thing which took me aback more than the letter itself. And there was another thing in it that stuck in me like a fish-bone.

“Asking your pardon, Mr. Franklin,” I said, giving him back the letter, “what is 'the property which we spoke of on Tuesday'?”

“The one question,” says he, smiling in my face as pleasantly as you please, “which I can't answer.”

“Very good, sir,” says I, a little stiff, perhaps, in the manner of saying it.

“Don't be offended, you dear old thing,” says Mr. Franklin. “It's not my secret—yet. When it is mine to tell, you shall have it before anybody in this house, my aunt excepted. In the meantime,” he goes on, changing his voice, and putting his hand into the breast of that beautiful fawn-coloured coat, “you can do something for me which will be a great deal more to the purpose than being told.”

Out came a little packet, sealed in four places with the same seal, and tied about with a piece of green string—no bigger, take it altogether, than my snuff-box.

“Have you a plate-room here still, with the old iron door to it?” he asked.

“We have, sir.”

“And do you keep the key of it yourself?”

“I have kept it, sir, since before you were born.”

“Then lock that up in it to-night, and say nothing to anybody, man or woman, about it. To-morrow morning I shall want the pony-chaise, and I shall drive over to the bank at Frizinghall, and take it off your hands. That's the whole business.”

Now I put it to you, as a reasonable person. Here was a gentleman four hours before his time, with a lawyer's letter in his pocket-book about foreigners at street corners, handing me a sealed packet the size of a snuff-box, and telling me to hide it under an iron door for one night, and ask no questions. If I had been Robinson Crusoe, sitting in my cave with my three muskets by me, I should have set that down in my journal under the head of EVIL, and looked about for the GOOD to balance it. Being only Gabriel Betteredge, I put the packet in my inside pocket, and buttoned my coat over it.

“Am I to know what's in it, sir?” I said—not because I expected to be told, but because a man likes to have it on record that he asked.

“No,” says Mr. Franklin. “And Betteredge—when you have locked the door on it, be so good as to forget that you have locked anything in.”

That was easily said. I have forgotten a great many things in my time; but I never yet succeeded in forgetting anything by being told to.

We got up off the sand—Mr. Franklin helping me, and making no more of it than if I had been a feather-bed—and we walked back by the plantation towards the house. On the way, thinking that a little cheerful conversation might do him good, I told him of the three Indian jugglers who had come to the terrace that morning with their hand-drums and their little English boy; and how my daughter Penelope had followed them, and seen the ink poured into the boy's hand, and heard him say that an English gentleman was travelling towards this house that day, and had got It about him; and how the boy could not say whether the gentleman would come at the close of day or no.

Cheerful conversation, indeed! Mr. Franklin stopped dead in the middle of the fir-trees.

“Say that again,” he says.

I said it again. He heard me out without stirring, and with a face that I didn't like at all in a young gentleman on his holiday.

“Had got It about him,” he repeats, quite softly, to himself. “Betteredge, did the boy use that word? It?”

“That was the word, sir, as my girl reported it. And a mighty poor trick I thought it, and told her so.”

“So it may be,” says Mr. Franklin. “And it may not.”

He walked on, and said nothing more for fifty yards; and then he took my arm, in his foreign fashion, and made himself pleasant again about the fine weather and the state of the crops, in a manner that would have deceived anybody but a man who was carrying that packet buttoned up inside his coat, and feeling it there at every step, like a live thing.

What was in his mind, when he stood among the fir-trees and asked me to say it again, I did not know then. I do know now. And so, if you will only jog on with me a little longer, will you.

Penelope was on the terrace when we came round the corner of the house, and dropped her curtsey to Mr. Franklin—a proceeding which she has never in her life been known to perform without first looking to see whether her cap was straight.

Mr. Franklin going in to his rooms, my daughter kept me back at the door.

“Rosanna's not come in, father.”

“Not come in!” says I. “The dinner was cleared an hour ago.”

“I have been to her room, and I have been to the linen closet, and Nancy has been to the drying-ground,” says Penelope. “Sam saw her from the top of the plantation. She wasn't coming this way at all. She went off along the shore, towards Cobb's Hole.”

Cobb's Hole, as I have already told you, was where the one friend she had in our parts lived—the fisherman's daughter, of whom I shall have more to say than I want to say, in another place. It was not the girl's turn out; she had had her turn already, and she was due back in the house. Being head of the servants, my plain duty was to be angry about it. Being an old man who had just dried her eyes for her on the slope of the beach, and heard her talk of her grave, I found the anger uncommonly hard to come by.

“Say nothing to anybody,” I said. “If she is not in by supper-time, I shall have something to say to her myself.”

“It was a queer thing, father,” says Penelope, hanging back with her hand on the door, “that she should go off without a word to me, on the very day when—” There she stopped, and coloured up, and went in about her business, and I was left standing on the terrace with a packet in my breast and a fool's face on my shoulders, no wiser than before.

My lady came home from her lunching-party at four o'clock, and came home alone; Miss Rachel having stopped behind at the Ablewhites', with a promise to be driven over in the cool of the evening. Consequently, Mr. Franklin's meeting with my young lady, which the whole household had been laying wagers about for a week, was put off; and consequently, also, my lady had her nephew to herself, which (as it turned out) was exactly what my lady wanted.

I was in her sitting-room at the time, with the household book under my arm, waiting to take her orders about Mr. Franklin's rooms. She had him by both hands, and she looked him over, from his curly head to his boots, in the way that a mother has—my lady having been sister to his mother, and having, I do believe, loved the boy the better for the years he had been kept out of her sight.

“Franklin,” she says, “I am too glad to see you to be civil. You shall be scolded for coming by the wrong train to-morrow.”

Then, all in a moment, her face altered. She let go of his hands, and sat down, and I saw the look come into her eyes which I had seen there twice before in my life, and never once without trouble coming after it.

“Before you have been an hour in this house,” she says, “there is one thing I must ask of you; and I would rather ask it now than have it to ask by-and-by. My brother's name is never mentioned among us. Colonel Herncastle's name, if you please, is not to be spoken under my roof—not in my hearing, and, above all, not in my daughter's hearing. You have lived abroad, and you may not know how things stand. I tell you how they stand, and I ask you to respect it, without asking me why.”

Of the Colonel and his doings I shall have something to say at the proper time and place; and a poor thing it will be to say, when it is said. It is enough here that he had come back from India with a name that no decent family cares to own; that my lady, who had never in my knowledge shut her door on a beggar, had shut it on her own brother; and that from that day to this the Colonel's name had lain in this house like a dead rat behind a wainscot—not seen, but known of by everybody.

I looked at Mr. Franklin, because it was the last thing in the world that I ought to have done, and because I could not help it. He had gone a shade paler; and he stood for a good half-minute without saying a word—which, in a gentleman with his tongue and his manners, was as remarkable as a clock stopping.

“Certainly, aunt,” he says at last. “Not a word.”

“You hesitated,” says my lady, quietly.

“I was thinking how completely I agree with you,” says Mr. Franklin.

Whether my lady believed him I am not able to say; she had a way of leaving a thing alone which was worth other people's way of arguing about it. She rang for tea, and told me to have the north room got ready with a fire in it, foreign parts having made her nephew delicate about English evenings, and there was an end of it.

But I said to myself, going down the stairs: “The Colonel's name is not to be mentioned in this house; and there is something in my pocket, Gabriel, that is not to be mentioned either. And whose seal, I should like to know, is on the four corners of it?”

I went to the plate-room before the servants' supper, with the candle in one hand and the key in the other. It is a stone room off the back passage, with an iron door to it, and a cupboard in the wall behind the plate-baskets, where my lady's mother kept her jewels in the old time. I put the packet in the cupboard, and locked the cupboard, and locked the door, and hung both keys on my own bunch; and then I stood there a moment, like an old fool, listening—to what, I am sure I don't know, unless it was to my own heart, which had no business to be so busy at my age.

The night was as fine a May night as I remember. My lady and Mr. Franklin sat talking in the drawing-room with the windows open, and the sound of his voice going on and on, and my lady's laugh now and again, which I had not heard for months, and was heartily glad to hear. The house being quiet, and my supper being done, I took my pipe and my Robinson Crusoe out into the back court, and got into my beehive chair, with the moon coming up over the wall, and the sea sounding half a mile off.

I opened the book, as my custom is when my mind wants steadying, at the first place my thumb came to; and this is what I found: “Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.” I read it over twice, and put my pipe out, and read it again. There has never yet been a difficulty in my life, from a chimney on fire to a sulky kitchen-maid, in which that book has failed to have its say beforehand; and if you think that a weakness in an old man, you are welcome to your opinion, and I am welcome to mine.

At ten o'clock Penelope came out to me with a shawl over her head, and stood by the chair without speaking, which is not her way.

“Well?” I said.

“The side door's unbolted, father, and her candle's on the shelf where I left it. Rosanna's not come home.”

*Letter, Arthur Holmwood to Miss Lucy Westenra.*

“*Albany*,

“*27 May*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I am under orders to write to you before I sleep. Not from Jack Seward, who prescribes bromide and cold water for everything, but from that other doctor who sits inside a man and tells him what he must do; and so here I am with the candles guttering and half London gone to bed.

“I must tell you about last night, because it was your night, though you were three miles off at a dinner-party and never knew it. Quincey has rooms in Jermyn Street which are the queerest place in the whole town. There is a Mexican saddle on a trestle in the corner, and a grizzly’s skin before the fire, and a coil of rope hanging on the chimney-glass which he tells me is a lasso and which the housemaid, poor soul, dusts every morning as though it were a bell-pull. He gave us a dinner cooked by a man he brought from somewhere near the Rio Grande, and it was very good indeed, and very hot, and Jack, who has been living upon tea and remorse, ate like a Christian for the first time in a week.

“We were three at the table, and Quincey had a fourth chair set, and would not have it moved, and would not say for whom it was; but he looked at it once or twice in the evening in a way that made me want to shake hands with him and say nothing.

“Then, when the cloth was off, he stood up--you know how slow he is when he means a thing--and said: ‘Boys, we’ve drunk together in some queer corners of the world, and we shall drink in some queerer yet. But to-night we drink standing, to the happiest man in all the wide world, who has won the noblest heart that God has made and the best worth winning.’ And they drank it, my dear, both of them, and neither of them spilled a drop nor let his hand shake, and I sat there feeling the greatest fool and the luckiest man in England.

“And now I must say one thing, and then no more of it ever. You told me on Tuesday what you thought I ought to know, and I am glad you told me, for I should have found it out at that table. Neither of them said a syllable, and I shall say none either. Only this: I went to Quincey’s rooms to be envied, and I came away from them humbled. There are two men in the world whom I would trust with everything I have, including you; and I have learned that in the one matter which touches me nearest they have both behaved like great gentlemen and have not asked me to admire them for it.

“Jack was quiet, but not gloomy. He talked a good deal about his asylum, and about a patient of his, an elderly man with a fixed idea which he cannot make out, and which he means to make out if it takes him a twelvemonth. He said it in the tone in which Quincey speaks of a bear he has not shot yet. I think work is the best thing that could happen to him, and he has plenty of it.

“Quincey talks of the plains again in the autumn, but he says it in a way that means he will not go if he is wanted here.

“My father’s gout is better, and he asks after your mother most particularly. I shall be at Chatham Street on Saturday at four, and if it rains I shall come at three.

“Yours, my own dearest, till the sun goes out,

“ARTHUR.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*28 May.*--Appetite returning; ate a very tolerable dinner at Morris’s two nights ago and have eaten since. So much for my ebb tide. The cure is company and beef, with a little of Quincey’s Rio Grande pepper, and I set it down for the benefit of the profession.

Went to Renfield at eleven. I have at last got hold of one end of the thread. The man collects flies. He has an incredible number of them, and had made an arrangement of pill-boxes and a tin canister for their keeping; he begged from me, with the humility of a schoolboy, more sugar, and when I asked him what he wanted with sugar he answered readily enough that it was to bring the flies. He has a pocket-book in which he is for ever jotting down entries, mostly of figures in columns which he adds up and rules off, like a man balancing accounts. When I asked to see it he shut it with his hand flat upon it and said, quite politely, ‘Not yet, doctor.’ Not yet! There is a whole calendar in the man’s ‘not yet.’

*Mem.*, that a maniac’s book-keeping is worth more to me at present than a shelf of Burton. What is he adding, and to what does he mean the total to come?

I had got so far, and was writing my notes at the table by the window with the attendant outside the door, when he asked me suddenly, without any leading of mine, without a word before it that had anything to do with it--

‘Doctor, is Miss Westenra to be married?’

I record it exactly. I was not prepared, and I do not know what my face did; but I know that my pencil went on the floor, and that in stooping for it I had time to get command of myself and to answer in a level voice that the affairs of ladies were not our business, his or mine.

He was not in the least put out. He looked at me with those steady, patient, sane-looking eyes of his and said: ‘I ask because I hope she may be happy. I would not have her troubled.’ And then, after a pause: ‘You are not eating, doctor. You should eat.’ Then he went back to his flies, and I could get nothing more from him. He had a look about him, however, of a man who has taken a trick and does not mean to boast of it.

There is no mystery in it if I keep my head. I made enquiry afterwards, and it seems that our friend has been much in the corridor of late, and that the men talk. A house of madmen is a whispering-gallery, and the maddest of them all has the sharpest ears in it. Some fool of an attendant has been condoling with another fool over the Superintendent’s low spirits, and has been overheard, and my private grief has got below stairs and thence into the ward. That is the whole of it, and it is quite enough.

*Mem.*, that I have been careless, and that a man who cannot keep his own countenance has no right to make a study of other men’s. Also, that I felt nothing at the sound of her name except a very small, very cold shock, and that I was thinking of the patient again within five minutes. Cured by a lunatic! I shall not publish that in the *Lancet*.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*30 May*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Number Three indeed! You wicked girl, to keep me waiting through two whole sheets and then to tell me in a postscript. I have read it a great many times, and I have kissed the place where the writing runs crooked, and I am so happy that I have been of no use to the Fourth Form for three days. Mr. Holmwood is the luckiest man alive, and if he is not always sensible of it I shall tell him so.

“Now I must be dull, and tell you why I have been slow in answering. I have had no line from Jonathan since the hurried one I told you of, which came before the ninth of the month. He said then that he would be home in about a week, and it is three weeks and more, and there has been nothing at all.

“I do not want you to think me a goose. I am not frightened; there is nothing to be frightened at. Letters go astray in those countries; you have only to look at the map to see how far it is, and how few railways, and Jonathan told me himself before he went that the posts beyond Buda-Pesth are what he called a lottery. But I find that I look at the letter-tray twice before breakfast, which is not sensible in a young woman who means to be useful, and I have taken to setting myself extra shorthand at night because it keeps my head quiet.

“I wrote to Mr. Hawkins, and he answered me by return, so kindly that I could have cried over it. He says that clients abroad are the slowest things in creation, that he once waited nine weeks for a Portuguese, and that Jonathan is the most careful man of business he ever had under him and would never leave his work half done for the sake of catching a train. He says I am to write to him at once if I hear, and that he will write to me if he hears, and he sends me his respectful compliments, which from him means a great deal.

“There, that is all my trouble, and it looks smaller written out than it did in my head, which is a thing I have noticed about troubles before.

“The school breaks up in five weeks, and then, if your mother will have me, I shall come to you and we shall build our castles in the air until they touch the ceiling.

“Give my dear love to yourself, and my respects to Number Three.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Ferencz Szabó, Klausenburgh, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*1 June*.

“Honoured Miss,--

“You will pardon, I entreat, that a stranger writes to you, and that he writes in an English which he has learned from the business and not from the schools.

“I am of the firm of Szabó and Son, forwarding agents in this town of Klausenburgh, and much English gentlemen’s baggage passes through my hands. There came to me on Wednesday a person come down out of the mountains, who left with me a message and your name and address written very plain upon a paper, and desired that it should be sent to you by the post.

“The message is this: that Mr. Jonathan Harker, solicitor, of England, is in good health, but that he is detained by the affairs of his client, a nobleman whose house lies some days’ journey beyond Bistritz among the mountains, where there is no post and no telegraph, and where a letter must wait upon the chance of a carrier. He cannot therefore write for himself. He begs that you will not be uneasy, that you will believe him detained by business only, and that you will make his duty to Mr. Peter Hawkins of Exeter, and say to him that the deeds go forward well and that he will come home so soon as ever he is free of them.

“I have discharged my commission, honoured Miss, and I do it with pleasure, for it is not much trouble to write a letter, and it is a great trouble to wait for one. If I can serve you further in this town you have but to command me.

“With the assurance of my perfect respect,

“FERENCZ SZABÓ,

“*p.p.* Szabó and Son, Forwarding Agents.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*2 June*.

“My darling Mina,--

“You are not a goose, and if you say it again I shall come down by the first train and box your ears. Of course he is safe. Men are always safe; it is we who do all the trembling for them, and then they come home and want their dinner.

“Mamma says you are to come the very day the school breaks up, and to stay as long as ever you will, and she has said it in that voice which means it is settled. Arthur was here on Saturday, and was told all about Jonathan, and says that a solicitor with a foreign client is a prisoner till the last signature, and that he has an uncle who was three months in Spain over a vineyard.

“Write to me the instant you hear anything, at any hour, and I will do the same for you if there is anything of mine worth telling; and there is a great deal, but it will keep until we can sit by the fire.

“Your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*6 June*.

“My dearest Lucy,--

“News, and good news, and I have been so foolishly happy all day that Miss Barton asked me if I had come into money.

“Yesterday morning there came a letter from Klausenburgh, from a forwarding agent there, a stranger, who had been charged with a message for me. Jonathan is well. He is kept in the mountains beyond Bistritz over his client’s business, where there is neither post nor telegraph, and he could not write himself, and he sent word by a man coming down out of the hills that I was not to be uneasy. There is a message for Mr. Hawkins too, about the deeds going well, which is so exactly like Jonathan that I laughed when I read it; business first, and his duty to his employer, and the poor foolish girl at the end of it.

“I have sent the letter on to Mr. Hawkins, or I would have copied it out for you word for word.

“And now I shall confess to you the one small silly thing, because if I do not tell somebody I shall keep turning it over. There is nothing in the letter that Jonathan alone could have said. Not one word that is his own. I read it four times looking for something--for the way he calls me, or a word about the seventeenth, which he has never forgotten in his life--and there is nothing but business and kindness. I know quite well that a message carried down a mountain by a stranger and written out by another stranger cannot be expected to have love in it, and I am ashamed of myself; but there it is, and now it is told, and I shall not think of it again.

“I have written to Herr Szabó to thank him with all my heart, and to beg him to tell me anything more he can learn, and I have said that if there should be news I would gratefully pay for a telegram.

“Tell your mother that I accept, with my whole heart, and count the days.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*10 June.*--Renfield’s flies are now to be counted in hundreds, and the sugar bill of this establishment is a scandal. He has begun to give the flies to the spiders. When I remonstrated he said, ‘They are not wasted, doctor. Nothing is wasted that is used.’ The book-keeping goes on. He has not once spoken of the ladies of my acquaintance since the 28th, and I have taken care to give him no opening. The attendants have had a lecture on the subject of talking in corridors, and one of them will be looking for a new place on Saturday.

*Mem.*, my own appetite excellent. I dine with Art on Thursday.

*Telegram, Ferencz Szabó, Klausenburgh, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*12 June*.

“Never seen nor heard of Herr Harker. Wrote you no letter. Send it me. Am at your service.

“SZABÓ.”

The rain, which had begun at ten o'clock with all the enthusiasm of a young performer making a first appearance, had by half-past eleven played itself out and retired, leaving the pavements of Shaftesbury Avenue steaming gently in a watery sunshine. Eve, coming down the steps of the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, put up her chin at the sky in a hostile manner and then looked down at the umbrella in her hand.

It was, she perceived on a closer inspection, a remarkably fine umbrella. It had a silver band, and a handle of some wood which had plainly not been picked up in a hurry, and about it there hung that indefinable air of costliness which distinguishes the umbrella that has been bought from the umbrella that has merely happened. It was not the sort of umbrella which a girl who is down to her last few pounds can regard with an easy conscience. It was, in fact, the sort of umbrella which somebody was going to miss.

Eve had a strong sense of property, chiefly, as she often explained, because she had never had any. She stood on the pavement and reasoned the thing out. She did not know the young man's name. She did not know where he lived. All that she knew about him was that he wore a monocle, had omitted to put on a hat, and had gone into a gloomy building opposite Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe's coal establishment in Dover Street. It was not much, but it was enough; and a girl who has been brought up from infancy to deal with persons at the front door holding blue papers is not readily baffled by a small problem in detection.

She looked in at a post-office in Vigo Street on the way, and there, with one of those pens which are provided by a paternal government for the express purpose of discouraging correspondence, she wrote as follows:

"Dear Sir,--I do not know your name, so I cannot begin this letter properly, and it is starting badly in consequence.

"Thank you very much indeed for the umbrella. It saved my hat, which is the only really good thing I possess and which could not have been replaced this year, or, as far as I can see at present, next. I would have thanked you at the time, but you ran away before I could open my mouth, which I consider most unfair. Anybody can be a knight-errant if he refuses to stop and be thanked.

"If you are ever caught in the rain yourself, I hope you will meet a girl with an umbrella and that she will behave as handsomely as you did.

"Yours very gratefully,

"(I would sign my name, but as you do not know it any better than I know yours, it would only be showing off.)"

The porter of the Drones Club was a man of ripe years and settled convictions, and few things had power to move him; but he looked with a distinct approval at the young lady who came up the steps at a quarter past twelve and placed an umbrella on the ledge of his box.

"I want to leave this for one of your members," said Eve.

"What name, miss?"

"That," said Eve, "is the whole difficulty. I don't know his name. He is tall and thin, and he wears an eyeglass, and this morning he was not wearing a hat."

The porter's face did not change, but something happened behind it.

"There's been inquiries about a umbrella this morning, miss," he said.

"Inquiries?" Eve looked at him with sudden misgiving. "You don't think--I mean, it *was* his umbrella, wasn't it?"

"I couldn't say, miss."

"Because if it wasn't," said Eve, "it seems to me that a great many people are going to be extremely annoyed with me, and I would rather it was sooner than later. Do you know who he is?"

"I fancy I could put a name to the gentleman, miss."

"Then what is it?"

"It is not the custom of the club, miss," said the porter, with the massive calm of a man quoting Scripture, "to give the names of members."

"Then how will you know who to give it to?"

"I shall know, miss," said the porter.

Eve went down the steps into Dover Street with the feeling, which visits us all at times, that she had been out-generalled by a superior intelligence. It was not till she had reached Piccadilly that she discovered that she was rather sorry to have parted with the umbrella. It had been an extremely good umbrella.

* * * * *

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick was one of those young men who are to be found in large numbers in the neighbourhood of St. James's Street--solid, admirably dressed, and with a mind capable of concentrating upon one thing at a time, provided that the thing was not a complicated one. At the moment his mind was concentrated upon an umbrella; and, following the trail from the cloak-room with the grim persistence of a bloodhound which has been personally insulted, he tracked it to the smoking-room, where Psmith sat gazing dreamily out of the window at the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe.

"Smith," said the Hon. Hugo.

"Comrade Walderwick," said Psmith, waking from his trance with a start, "you find me in reflective mood. I have been asking myself whether coal, considered as a spectacle, has not been unduly neglected by our modern painters."

"Never mind about coal. Have you seen my umbrella?"

"In what sense," inquired Psmith courteously, "do you employ the word 'seen'?"

"Dash it, seen. Looked at. Set eyes on. Blue-grey silk with a silver band. The cloak-room man says a tall chap with an eyeglass took it out of the rack at half-past ten this morning."

"The description," admitted Psmith, "is a wide one. London is full of tall chaps with eyeglasses. It is one of the things which make the metropolis what it is."

"Well, did you take it or didn't you?"

Psmith removed his monocle, polished it thoughtfully, and replaced it.

"Comrade Walderwick," he said gravely, "there are moments in the life of every man when he must remain silent. This is one of them. Ask me anything else. Ask me my views on the Balkan situation, on the future of the drama, on the proper treatment of the common cold. But on the subject of umbrellas my lips are sealed."

"But, my dear old man, where *is* it?"

"Let us," said Psmith, "approach this matter from the business angle. What did that umbrella cost you?"

"Cost me? I don't know. Twenty-five bob."

"I will give you ten pounds for it."

There was a pause. Down in the street a taxi-cab hooted, and somewhere in the building a waiter dropped a glass. The Hon. Hugo Walderwick stood perfectly still, his mouth a little open, in the attitude of a man who has been struck between the eyes by a soft but heavy object.

"Ten *quid*?"

"Ten pounds," said Psmith, producing a cheque-book and unscrewing his fountain-pen. "I am aware that it is a fancy price. But I am a man of sudden and irresistible whims, and I have taken a fancy to that umbrella. I wish to feel that it is mine, that no other hand may lawfully grasp its handle, that I may speak of it in company as 'my umbrella' without a pang. To Hugo Walderwick, Esquire--ten pounds--there we are. Do not thank me. The pleasure is mine."

Walderwick took the cheque and looked at it in a dazed way.

"But look here, you know, where *is* the bally thing?"

"That," said Psmith, "is a detail into which, as the vendor, you are hardly entitled to inquire. It is the buyer, Comrade Walderwick, who takes the risk. Caveat emptor. And now, if you will forgive me, I have a good deal of quiet thinking to do."

Walderwick withdrew, moving slowly, in search of somebody to whom he could relate the affair; and Psmith, resuming his seat by the window, reflected with satisfaction that he was now the owner, at a cost of ten pounds and by right of purchase, of an umbrella which was at that moment somewhere in the West End of London in the possession of a young woman whose name he did not know. It seemed to him, on the whole, one of the soundest investments he had ever made.

* * * * *

At half-past two the sky, which had been brooding all the earlier part of the afternoon, delivered itself of a second and even more energetic shower; and Eve, who had an hour to fill and eightpence in her purse with which to fill it, dived thankfully through the nearest open doorway, which happened to be that of the Rideaway Galleries in Bond Street, where an exhibition of the later manner of Mr. Everard Pinkney was being held free of charge to a public which had shown, so far, a certain reticence in availing itself of the privilege.

There was only one other visitor in the long room. He was standing before a large canvas entitled "Reverie," and he was tall and thin, and he wore a monocle, and this time he had a hat, which he was holding.

"Well!" said Eve.

The young man turned.

"You," said Eve, "are the man who gave me the umbrella."

"I beg your pardon?"

"This morning. In Dover Street. Outside a coal shop."

The young man looked at her with a grave and courteous regret, as one who would gladly oblige if it were in any way possible.

"I fear," he said, "that you are the victim of one of those resemblances which are the curse of modern life. I have never given an umbrella to anybody. It is a thing I have set my face against. Start giving people umbrellas and you never know where it will end."

"But it *was* you. You had an eyeglass."

"So, I am told, have upwards of four thousand men in the metropolitan area alone."

"You had no hat."

"There," said the young man, "you interest me. A hatless man in Dover Street in a downpour is a phenomenon which no student of human nature can afford to ignore. Tell me more. I ask as one who is making a collection of the eccentricities of the age."

And Eve, who had never in her life been able to resist telling a story to anybody who wished to hear it, told him the whole thing--the awning, the rain, the bird of Paradise feather, the sudden apparition and the still more sudden departure. Her hearer listened with his head a little on one side, and at the end of it shook that head slowly.

"A shocking exhibition," he said.

"It was nothing of the kind. It was extremely nice of him."

"You take the sentimental view. I look deeper. Consider the facts. A young man, at half-past ten in the morning, is in possession of an umbrella which, on your own showing, was a costly one. He hands it to a total stranger and instantly disappears into a building. Does that suggest to you a settled and orderly mind? To me it suggests a man who has for some time been sailing very close to the wind and has at last gone over."

"Or," said Eve, "a man who was sorry for somebody who was getting wet."

"That," admitted the young man, "is a possible construction, though a charitable one. I trust you returned the umbrella?"

"I left it at the club at a quarter past twelve."

"You did quite right," said the young man warmly. "That umbrella will be a great comfort to somebody. And now, may I ask what you thought of the picture?"

They inspected Mr. Pinkney's later manner together for some ten minutes, at the end of which they had discovered a complete unanimity of view, Eve holding that "Reverie" was a fried egg and her companion contending, with equal firmness, that it was a fried egg painted by a man who had never seen one.

"It has been a curious day for me altogether," said Eve, as they came to the last of the canvases. "Everybody I meet seems to be connected with fish. Yesterday I heard of a Mr. Smith who is in the fish business."

"The fish industry," said the young man gravely, "is full of Smiths. It is one of the tragedies of the trade. I was myself associated with it in a subordinate capacity until yesterday evening, when I severed the connection. I found the atmosphere unsympathetic. Sooner or later, in fish, a man's soul begins to ask questions."

Eve looked at the clock at the end of the gallery and gave a squeak.

"I must go. I am being interviewed at three about a job."

"I, too," said her companion, "am at the moment resting between engagements. We are fellow-sufferers. May I see you to a bus?"

He saw her to a bus at the top of Bond Street and handed her on to it with a bow of the sort which is seldom seen on that route.

"Good-bye," said Eve from the step. "And thank you again for the umbrella."

"I have never given you an umbrella," said the young man firmly.

The bus bore her away down Piccadilly; and it was not until it was out of sight that Psmith, walking pensively westward, discovered that for the second time that day he had omitted to ascertain her name.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club in Northumberland Avenue sets aside for the reception of female visitors a small dark room containing four leather chairs, a table, a bound volume of Punch for the year 1901, and an engraving of a statesman who has long ceased to be of interest to anybody. Into this apartment Eve was shown at two minutes to three, and found it already occupied by a long, thin, elderly gentleman with a drooping and benevolent expression, who was engaged in restoring to an upright position a lamentable rose which had come adrift from his buttonhole.

"Beastly day," said Eve, sitting down.

"Eh? Oh! Ah! Quite, quite," said the elderly gentleman.

"Are you waiting for somebody, too?"

"I am waiting," said the elderly gentleman, after giving the matter some thought, "for a young woman. About a library. My sister arranged it. I have the greatest difficulty in remembering these things. Only this afternoon I lunched with a poet--a Canadian, I fancy--and his name has gone completely out of my head."

"I'm waiting for a peer," said Eve. "Lord Emsworth. I've never met him, and I'm horribly nervous, so please tell me if my hat is straight."

"Charming, charming," said the elderly gentleman, who was not looking at it.

"His son says he is the most absent-minded man in England," went on Eve, to whom conversation was as breathing. "Freddie--that's the son--says that he once drove home from a garden-party in a total stranger's car and never noticed it, and that he doesn't care two straws for anything in the world except his garden, and that he is completely under the thumb of a Scotch head-gardener called McAllister, who bullies him. I do hope he isn't going to be too terrifying. Do you know him?"

"I am Emsworth," said the elderly gentleman.

There followed one of those silences which seem to go on for several years. Eve was aware of a strong desire to be dead.

"Every word of it perfectly true," said Lord Emsworth with enthusiasm. "Every single word. Frederick is a young man of no ability whatever, but on that point he is sound. McAllister *does* bully me. Only last week, when I ventured to suggest--merely to suggest, my dear young lady--that the moss in the yew alley might be left as it was, the fellow looked at me. You have no conception how that man looks at one."

"I'm so terribly sorry--" began Eve.

"He wants gravel," said Lord Emsworth, gazing sombrely at the statesman on the wall. "Gravel in a yew alley! Now what, in your opinion, is the proper treatment for green fly upon rambler roses?"

"Soft soap and quassia," said Eve, who had spent three summers of her childhood in a garden with an old man who knew.

"Bless my soul!" said Lord Emsworth, and beamed upon her as upon a daughter long lost and unexpectedly restored.

It was eleven minutes to four when she got away, and in that time the interview had covered hollyhocks, the iniquity of the Shropshire climate, the character of Angus McAllister, the pruning of wistaria, and the shameful behaviour of a neighbour who had won a first for sweet peas at the Shrewsbury Show under circumstances which Lord Emsworth was not prepared, in the presence of a lady, to describe. It had not touched at any point upon books, upon libraries, upon cataloguing, or upon Eve's qualifications for the post; nor had she found the smallest opening for the question she had come determined to ask, which was whether a Mr. Joseph Keeble would be at the castle. At the door she stopped and put it to him squarely.

"Lord Emsworth, am I engaged?"

"Eh? Oh! Ah! Certainly, certainly, most decidedly," said Lord Emsworth, groping for his pince-nez, which were down his back. "Delighted. You will come down to Blandings on Friday, Miss--er--Halloway. Soft soap and quassia. I shall tell McAllister so this very evening."

* * * * *

At half-past six that evening the smoking-room of the Drones was empty save for one occupant. Psmith, deep in a chair by the window, was informed by the porter that a young lady had left an article at the desk during the day, together with a communication.

Psmith read the communication twice. Then he laid it on his knee and sat for a while looking at the umbrella, which he had propped against the arm of his chair with some care, as one handles a museum piece.

"This lady," he said. "Did she leave no name?"

"She did not sign the note, sir. But I asked her for one, in case of inquiries. It's the rule of the club." The porter consulted a slip of paper with the air of a man producing the ace of trumps. "Halliday, sir. Miss Eve Halliday."

"Thank you, Comrade," said Psmith. "That will be all."

The porter withdrew. Outside, the rain had stopped again, and the wet street below the window had turned to gold in the evening sun.

"Eve Halliday," said Psmith to the empty room. He said it two or three times, in the manner of a man tasting some rare vintage. Then he took up the umbrella and regarded it with quiet satisfaction. "Comrade Walderwick," he observed, "has never in his life owned ten pounds' worth of anything."

The First National Bank was a gray stone box on Broadway with more pillars in front of it than it needed. I went in and told a man at a desk in the railed-off space that I wanted to talk to somebody about Donald Willsson's account. He passed me along to a young fellow at a flat-topped desk under a window.

He was a nice-looking boy of twenty-five or so, with blond hair brushed back, a good chin, and clothes that had been cut by somebody who knew how. The card on his desk said Robert Albury. He stood up and gave me a hand that had some grip in it.

I gave him one of my cards, the ones that say Continental Detective Agency on them, and told him I was working on the Willsson murder. That was stretching it, since nobody had hired me yet, but he didn't ask to see my papers.

"Anything I can do," he said. "It's a rotten business."

"You knew him?"

"I handled his account. He came in himself, most times. He liked to do things himself." The boy's face colored a little and he looked at the desk. "He was decent to me. I liked him."

"Yesterday afternoon, a little before three o'clock, he wrote a check for five thousand dollars. The stub doesn't say who it was made out to. I'd like to know whether it's been through here."

Albury pulled a pad over and made a note.

"It wouldn't have cleared yet if it had been deposited somewhere else yesterday afternoon, but it would show if it had been cashed here, or certified. Wait a minute."

He was gone eight or ten minutes. When he came back he was carrying a slip of paper, and he wasn't looking so cheerful.

"There's no such item," he said. "Nothing on his account yesterday at all, in or out, except a check for two hundred and fifty that came through the clearing house in the morning, and that was drawn last week. Nothing certified. I asked Miss⁠—I asked the certification clerk and both paying tellers. If Mr. Willsson had come in he'd have come to me, or they'd have seen him. He wasn't in yesterday."

"You're sure of that?"

"As sure as you can be of a thing like that. He was known here. Somebody would have remembered."

"How was his balance?"

Albury hesitated the way bank men do, and then decided that a dead man's affairs were not so sacred.

"Comfortable. Better than twenty thousand. The check would have been good."

"There was another check," I said. "A little one, four or five days ago, made out to the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco. Would that have come through?"

He went away again and came back nodding.

"It cleared Tuesday. Two hundred and fifty dollars. That's the item I mentioned."

So the money he had paid to get me here had traveled by the ordinary route, and the five thousand had gone off the map.

"He was out of the office about twenty minutes when he wrote it," I said. "It's a five-minute walk from the Herald to here."

"He didn't come here." The boy turned a pencil over in his fingers. "You know, you can't do much of anything with a check for five thousand dollars in this town without coming to us, or to the Merchants', and they'd have wanted it certified before they'd give up that much cash. Whoever has it hasn't tried to turn it into money yet."

"Or hasn't wanted to."

"That's a funny thing to want," he said.

I said it was, and asked:

"How well did you know his wife?"

The color came up in his face again, and this time it stayed. He put the pencil down very carefully.

"I've met Mrs. Willsson. She banks here too. She has her own account."

"Draw anything on it lately?"

"I couldn't tell you that," he said, and his voice had gone stiff on him. "I don't think I ought to have told you as much as I have."

"You've told me a man didn't come into your bank," I said. "There's no law against that. If the five thousand shows up, I'm at the Great Western."

He said he would let me know, and shook hands again, and I went out into the sunlight with nothing in my hands but a hole where a check ought to have been.

I spent the next hour and a half on the telephone and on my feet, and got the following for it: The police had a list of what had been in the dead man's clothes when they picked him off the sidewalk in Hurricane Street. A watch, a bunch of keys, a fountain pen, a cigarette case, a hundred and sixty dollars in bills, some silver, two letters from a paper mill, and a memorandum book with nothing in it but figures. No check. Nothing folded up small in the watch pocket, nothing in his hat. Whatever he had done with the five thousand dollars, he hadn't done it in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street.

A man in the chief's office told me all this cheerfully enough over the wire. He was a great deal more interested in telling me that the department expected an arrest within twenty-four hours. He didn't say of whom, and I doubt that he knew.

I ate a late lunch, went back to the Great Western, and had my foot on the first step of the stairs when the clerk sang out that there was a lady waiting for me.

She was sitting in one of the leather chairs near the cigar stand, with her back to the window, and the light coming past her made her hair look like something spun out of the ash from a wood fire. She had on a dark blue coat with gray fur at the collar and cuffs, and gray gloves, and gray shoes. I didn't waste any time looking at the shoes. They wouldn't be the green ones.

She got up when she saw me and put out her hand.

"I do not know your name," she said, in that voice with the little burr of accent in it. "You did not give it to me last night."

I gave it to her now and asked how she had known where to find me.

"You told my husband's father you were here. His secretary told me."

That would be the Lewis girl's father, being helpful to somebody. I said:

"There's a room upstairs, or there's here."

"Here is well enough. Nobody will listen." She looked around the lobby, at the two men asleep behind newspapers and the clerk polishing his fingernails, and sat down again. Her face was as white as it had been at five minutes past eleven the night before, but it was steadier. She kept her chin up.

"My husband's father has told the police that I killed him," she said.

"Has he?"

"You know he has. You were with him this morning. You told him things. About the telephone, and my going out, and coming back." She had her gloved hands together in her lap, holding one inside the other. "I have not come to complain of that. You saw what you saw. I am not a fool. I want to know what you are going to do."

"Find out who killed him."

"For whom? Nobody has hired you. My husband is dead. His father will not employ you⁠—he has told everybody in Personville what he thinks of you." A little of the whiteness went out of her face when she said that, and something that was nearly a smile got as far as her eyes and stopped there. "So you are working for nobody, and yet you are working. That is what I do not understand, and what I do not like."

"Neither do I," I said. "It's a bad habit I've got. Where were you between twenty minutes past ten and five minutes past eleven last night?"

"Driving," she said.

"Driving where?"

"Out the Boulevard, and back. I was upset. I wished to be alone."

"You didn't drive down Hurricane Street?"

"No."

"Who telephoned you?"

"A man. He did not give his name."

"What did he say?"

She looked at me a moment before she answered, and I watched her deciding how much of the truth was going to be good for me.

"He said that if I wished to know how my husband spent his evenings I should not sit at home waiting for him."

"And you went out to see?"

"I went out because I was angry. I did not go to see anything."

"You came back with blood on your shoe," I said.

That was the wrong thing to say to her, or maybe the right one. She stood up. She wasn't tall, and she had to look up at me to do it, but she did it well.

"You are a pig," she said, quite calmly, "like the rest of them in this town."

"Uh-huh. Did your husband give you a check for five thousand dollars yesterday?"

"No." Her surprise looked like the real article, or else she was better at it than most.

"Do you know who he did give one to?"

"I know nothing about my husband's money. I never knew anything about it." She pulled her gloves straight. "I came here to ask you a question and you have not answered it, so I will ask another. Do you think I killed him?"

"I don't know."

"That is honest, at least." She looked at the door, and then back at me, and for a second she was nineteen years old and frightened to death, and then she was twenty-five or thirty again and hard as the glass in the window behind her. "They will hang it on me because it is easy and because I am foreign and because the old man wishes it. You will see."

She went out to a Buick coupé at the curb and drove away without looking back, and she took the corner too fast.

I was standing there thinking about that when a kid of maybe sixteen came in off the sidewalk, asked the clerk something, and was pointed at me. He handed me an envelope with nothing written on it, and started for the door.

I got a hand on his shoulder.

"Who gave it to you?"

"Fella in a car."

"What kind of car?"

"Big one. Gray. Stutz, I guess."

"What did he look like?"

"Little guy. Young. Brown suit, brown hat. He talked funny⁠—like this." The kid put on a hoarse whisper that had nothing wrong with it except that it was a boy's imitation. "Gimme a dollar."

I gave him another one and let him go, and opened the envelope going up the stairs. There was a half-sheet of hotel stationery in it, not this hotel's, with three lines on it in soft pencil:

"The woman didn't do it. Ask yourself who got a check yesterday and what became of it. Then take a train."

No signature, no need of one.

I sat on the edge of my bed and read it three times. It could mean that Max Thaler wanted me out of town and was willing to spend a few words to do it cheap, before he had to spend anything else. It could mean that he was tender-hearted about the widow, which would go with his walking into her house at nine o'clock in the morning eleven hours after her husband was killed. It could mean that he knew where the five thousand dollars had gone and was steering me at it because it pointed away from him. It could mean that he knew about the check because he had it in his pocket.

It was a lot of meanings for twenty-six words.

At half-past seven I ate dinner, and afterwards I walked down Broadway to the telegraph office, where the operator was a middle-aged woman who read every word twice while I stood there. The wire went to the Old Man in San Francisco, and it read:

DONALD WILLSSON MURDERED LAST NIGHT BEFORE KEEPING APPOINTMENT WITH ME STOP HAVE NO INSTRUCTIONS FROM HIM AND NONE AVAILABLE STOP HIS FATHER ELIHU DECLINES TO EMPLOY AGENCY AND ACCUSES WIDOW STOP DECEASED DREW CHECK FIVE THOUSAND AFTERNOON OF DEATH PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NOT PRESENTED NOT CERTIFIED AND NOT AMONG EFFECTS STOP LOCAL POLITICAL SITUATION MAY EXPLAIN KILLING STOP HAVE BEEN ADVISED BY INTERESTED PARTY TO LEAVE TOWN STOP RETAINER PAID BY DECEASED NOT YET EARNED STOP AM STAYING UNLESS YOU WIRE OTHERWISE

I paid for it, and for the reply, and went back to the hotel.

My room was on the sixth floor, in front. I turned off the light, opened the window, and sat by it with my coat off, smoking, looking down at Broadway, where the electric signs of two picture houses and a cigar store worked away at each other and the wet-looking pavement threw the colors back up at them. Somewhere down there a Stutz touring car was standing at a curb with a smallish young man in it, and somewhere a Buick coupé was in a garage on Mountain Boulevard with the engine cooling off, and somewhere in Poisonville was a piece of pale green paper with Donald Willsson's name written across the bottom of it in ink that had been wet the afternoon he died.

Five thousand dollars is too much money to hand a man and too much to throw away, and nobody in this town was in the habit of doing either. Whoever had it hadn't tried to spend it. That could be because they were afraid to, or because they were waiting, or because they didn't know they had it.

I finished the cigarette, flipped it out the window, and watched the red spark go down six floors and go out.

The path back to the house was hot and white, and the yellow camomile gave out a dusty, bitter smell in the sun. Robert carried Madame Ratignolle's little girl upon one arm; upon the other Madame Ratignolle leaned with the whole weight of her beautiful, complaining body, stopping now and then to say that the cramp had gone up into her side, and that she would be better presently.

"You hunt for us the entire morning," she said, when she had breath for it, "and when you find us you have not two words to say."

"I said everything I had to say to the children," returned Robert. "There is no keeping anything from them; they have it out of you in five minutes."

"And Madame Pontellier? You have not been away from her elbow since the first of the month. Madame Lebrun says she must charge her double for the use of you." Madame Ratignolle laughed comfortably at her own pleasantry and fanned herself with her free hand.

Robert walked a little way in silence, hitching the child higher on his shoulder.

"She is not like the rest of you," he said at last. "You are all like the water out there this morning—one can see clear down to the bottom of you, and there is nothing at the bottom that anybody minds looking at. She has been asleep. I think she has been asleep since she was a little girl in Kentucky. This summer she is beginning to wake up, and she does not know it herself. When she is wide awake she will not go to sleep again for the asking—not for yours, madame, nor for mine, nor for anybody's."

"*Mon Dieu!*" said Madame Ratignolle. "You have been reading books at the office when you should have been adding up figures." She was more diverted than impressed. "Did you compose that just now, walking, or have you had it by you for a week?"

Robert colored a little under his tan and began to whistle, and asked her whether the cramp was better; and the talk went off to Adèle's ailments, and to a receipt for a *bouillon* which Madame Lebrun's cook made badly, and thence to nothing at all, in the way of talk between people who are hot and have not much farther to go.

A telegram had come for Mrs. Pontellier from the city. The boy from Klein's brought it across before the midday meal, and she read it standing in the middle of the room with her hat still on. Mr. Pontellier was detained by business of importance; he would not be able to come out on Saturday; he hoped she and the boys were well and that she was not going in the water at the hot hours. There was something about a possible sale of property in Bienville street, and the whole of it was worded with the crispness of a man who pays by the word and receives value for his money.

Every one at Lebrun's knew of the telegram before the soup was off the table. Madame Lebrun said it was a shame, and that Monsieur Pontellier worked altogether too hard; the Farival twins said it was a pity, as they had counted upon him for the Sunday music; and the ladies were unanimous in observing that there was not a better husband in Louisiana. Edna was obliged to admit that she knew of none better. She said she was very sorry, and she supposed that she was; but what she chiefly felt, sitting there with the yellow slip of paper folded small in her hand, was that the week had all at once grown wider, as a field grows wider when the fences are taken away from it. She was a little ashamed, and put the feeling from her, and did not put it very far.

The afternoon was still and blinding. The children were asleep; the quadroon sat with her head against the door-post, asleep also, or as good as asleep. There was no sound in the house but the flies, and out of doors nothing was moving except the heat itself, which shook a little above the sand. Mrs. Pontellier took her key from the nail and went down to the beach alone.

She had been trying all summer to learn to swim. Robert had held her under the arms and shouted encouragement at her; the Farival twins had shown her how they did it; Madame Ratignolle had assured her that it was the easiest thing in the world if one did not think about it. Edna had thought about it incessantly. There had always come a moment, when the sand slipped away from beneath her feet, when a terror seized her—an unreasoning, ungovernable dread of the water that stood higher than her head—and she had caught at whatever hand or rope or pole was nearest, and had come out laughing and mortified.

There was nobody at all in the water now, and nobody on the beach except the lady in black, who sat on the gallery of the far bath-house with her beads and her book of devotions, telling one and reading the other, and gaining, no doubt, a great many days of indulgence.

Edna went into the water slowly, as she always did. It was warm at the top and cold underneath, and the choppy little waves of the morning had gone down, so that the Gulf lay in long, slack swells that lifted her and set her down again without hurry. She waded out until the water was under her chin, and stood there a while, moving her arms as she had been taught, with her toes upon the bottom. Then, without having resolved upon it, she lifted her feet.

For a moment she was aware of nothing but her own heart. Then she found that she was moving; that the water, which she had believed all summer to be an element that swallowed people, was holding her up as easily as it held the weed and the froth. She took a few strokes—four, or perhaps six; she never afterward knew—and the panic came back upon her all at once, and she put her feet down and found the bottom exactly where she had left it, and stood breathing hard, with the water running out of her hair.

She would have shouted if there had been anybody to shout to. There was nobody. She swam again a stroke or two, near in, where it was safe, and then she came out and sat down upon the hot sand and was foolishly happy.

The lady in black had closed her book upon her finger and was looking at her.

"You were a long way out," she said, "for one who cannot swim."

It was the first time she had ever spoken to Edna. Her voice was thin and civil and perfectly without interest, like the voice of a person who says the responses.

"I was not so far as it looked," said Edna.

"It is well to be afraid of it," the lady in black said, turning her book over. "It is the ones who are not afraid of it that it takes." And she opened her devotions again at the place her finger had kept.

Edna laughed, and said that she had no doubt of it, and went into the bath-house to dress. She did not tell the lady in black that she had swum. She did not tell anybody. She came up the sandy path with her hair drying under her hat and her heart still going quickly, and when Madame Lebrun called from the gallery to know if the water had been pleasant, she answered that it had been very pleasant, and went in and sat with the children until they woke.

It was after supper, when the two of them were walking up and down between the cottages in the blue of the evening, that Madame Ratignolle laughed suddenly and said:

"I have not told you the absurdity your friend uttered this morning, coming up from the beach. He is turning philosopher; it is the heat."

"What was it?" said Edna.

"He said you had been asleep since you were a little girl, and that this summer you are beginning to wake up, and that when you are wide awake you will not go to sleep again for anybody's asking. There! I told him he had been reading books instead of keeping accounts." She was still laughing. "Mind you do not tell him I repeated it. He would never forgive me; he is as vain of his sayings as Victor is of his moustache."

"He talks a great deal of nonsense," said Edna.

"He does, *ma chère*. It is his one industry."

They walked on to the end of the row and back, and Madame Ratignolle went in to her children.

At half after nine the two boys were asleep, lying crosswise as they always did, with the sheet kicked to the foot of the bed, and the quadroon had gone to her own quarters. Somebody was playing quadrilles at the house, and the sound came over thin and cheerful, with the voices of the young people between the figures. Edna sat out on the gallery of the cottage in the wicker rocker, with her hands lying open in her lap, and did not rock.

Beyond the low black line of the water-oaks the Gulf could be heard, taking the beach and letting it go, taking it and letting it go, with the sound of something that is in no hurry whatever and has all the night before it. She thought of the four or six strokes, which nobody in the world knew of but herself; and she thought, over and over, in the words Adèle had used and laughed at, that she was beginning to wake up, and that when she was wide awake she would not go to sleep again for anybody's asking. She could not have said whether the thought frightened her or pleased her. She sat with it a long while, until the music at the house left off and the lights began to go out one after another along the row.

Then came the night of the first falling star.

It was seen a little before midnight, and I saw it. I had sat up late over the last of my papers upon the probable development of moral ideas, and the lamp and the closeness of the room had given me a headache, so that about half-past eleven I put out the light and went into the garden to cool my head and smoke. The night was warm and very still, with that faint smell of watered earth that comes after a hot day, and I stood by the gate looking north-eastward over the black masses of the trees. I was thinking, I remember, of nothing more considerable than the arrangement of a paragraph.

Then out of the west there came a greenish streak of flame, so bright that for the tenth of a second the gravel path and the leaves of the pear tree stood out about me as if a door had been opened upon a furnace. It went over with an incredible swiftness, drawing a train of sparks behind it, dipping as it went; and it vanished behind the black line of the woods towards Ottershaw. I remember the profound blackness that came after it and the smarting of my eyes. Then, a good ten seconds later—I counted them afterwards, and it is one of the many things I have had cause to reflect upon since—there came a heavy, muffled thud, that I felt in the soles of my feet quite as much as I heard, and the casement behind me rattled in its frame, and a dog began barking furiously somewhere down towards the river.

Ten seconds. Two miles. Any schoolboy with a table of the velocity of sound might have made the calculation, and I did make it, and thought no more of the matter than that it was a fine large meteorite and had probably fallen in Hampshire. My wife called from the window to know what the noise had been, and I answered that it was a falling star, and that she might see one herself if she cared to sit up in the dew; and presently I came in and went to bed. So little do we know the hour of our visitation. In all England that night, I suppose, not twenty people gave the thing five minutes' thought, and I was not among the twenty. I slept as soundly as any of them.

I woke early, before five, with the light coming grey through the blind and an unreasonable restlessness upon me, and when I put my head out of the window I saw, above the trees to the north-east, a thin column of white vapour standing up perfectly straight in the still air, and spreading out at the top like the smoke of a bonfire. It did not look in the least terrible. It looked like the steam of an engine at work in the meadows. But I dressed without waking my wife and went out with my boots in my hand, and let myself out of the house, and took the footpath across the fields.

The dew was heavy and the sun not yet clear of the horizon. I remember a lark going up, and the cattle standing in the mist by the hedge, and my own absurd hurry. Before I had gone half a mile I could hear the sound: a steady, sibilant hissing, such as a great kettle makes, and under it a slower noise, a sort of intermittent boiling. There is a common there between Ottershaw and Chertsey where the gravel diggers had left a pit, and the pit had filled with water years before out of the Bourne, and was grown about with willows and reeds, and had roach in it, and was a place where boys went to bathe. It was here that the Thing had come down.

The bank on the western side was gone. It had been ploughed away for fifty yards, and the soil and stones flung up into ridges, and beyond them the heather was burning in patches with a little blue smoke that lay along the ground, and two of the willows were down and blackened, and one still stood with all its leaves shrivelled brown on one side, like a tree in October. The water had been driven clean out of the pit and had come back again; there was black mud and weed hanging in the bushes six feet up, and dead roach, scores of them, floating white side upward in the shallows, and the whole place smelt of hot mud and steam.

And in the middle of the pit, half sunk in the water and tilted a little towards me, lay the Thing.

I have to set down what I saw and not what I have since learned. What I saw was an enormous cylinder, lying tipped in the water so that the flat end of it, which was towards me, stood clear like the end of a boiler; and it was caked all over with a thick, scaly, dun-coloured crust, that flaked off here and there as I watched and fell hissing into the water. Where it had flaked I could see a dull surface beneath, neither quite grey nor quite brown. Its diameter I judged at the time to be twenty yards, and I was under the mark; it was nearer thirty. About the water-line the pit was boiling in earnest, and the steam went up in a great slow column, and drifted, and made a smell of scalded weeds. It was so hot that at forty paces I felt it upon my face like an open oven, and the grass between me and it was drying and curling as if a hot iron had been passed over it.

I stood there a long time alone, and I remember that I was not frightened, but that I could not think. And then I noticed the thing that would not let me be. Round the great flat end of it, some distance in from the rim, there ran a circle—a fine dark line, quite regular, going out of sight under the crust and coming again beyond it, such a line as a man may see on the lid of a canister. And while I looked there came from within the mass a dull sound, a single deep note, as though somewhere in that great bulk something had shifted its weight. I went back several yards before I knew that I had moved.

I went for Ogilvy. He was up and at his breakfast, and he came out to me in the doorway with his napkin in his hand and heard about a third of what I had to say, and then went in for his hat, and we were out on the road together and walking so fast that talk was impossible. When we came over the ridge and he saw the steam standing up out of the pit he gave a kind of shout and began to run, and I have never seen a man so purely happy.

It was when he had gone round the pit twice and pushed in as near as the heat would let him, and had burnt a hole in his sleeve, that we quarrelled.

"It's a meteorite," he said. "It's the finest meteorite that ever fell in England. It's the finest that ever fell anywhere in the memory of man. Denning must see it. It must be got out before the water eats the crust off it."

"Look at the shape of it," said I.

"That is the shape they take," he said. "That is the shape a mass takes that comes through the air at twenty miles a second and is turned in its flight. The end of it is planed flat by the atmosphere as truly as a lathe would do it. It is the commonest thing in the world."

"And the line round the end of it?"

"A crack. It's cooling, my dear fellow. A mass like that comes in white-hot on the outside and cold as space within, and it splits as it cools. That is what makes the noise you heard, and that is what will go on making it, and if you stand there long enough you will hear the whole thing sing to you like a cracked bell."

I said that I had watched a light go out of Mars ten nights running, and that here, in a pit within two miles of the observatory where we had watched it, lay a cylinder with a lid to it.

He turned round on me at that. "A million to one," he said. "I told you the odds. Do you know how many meteorites fall upon this earth in a year, and how many millions of miles of empty space there are between us and Mars, and what it would mean to hit a moving target across forty million miles of it? And out of that you will make me a canister. Write it in your paper on moral ideas. Don't say it here, where a reporter may hear you, and don't say it to me."

There was a heat in it beyond what the question wanted, and I have wondered since how much of what he said was said to me and how much of it to himself. At the time I only felt the fool. He was the astronomer, and I was the man who wrote articles; and I laughed and gave it up, and helped him to beat out the heather that was smouldering towards the furze, and by seven o'clock he had sent a boy off with a pencilled note to Henderson, the London journalist who lived at Ottershaw, and was talking of telegraphing to the Astronomer Royal.

I went home to breakfast with my head full of it and told my wife, and she said at once that she should come and see it. I made some objection about the heat and the walk; she reminded me, with perfect justice, that I had already walked it twice before breakfast. So we went out together at about half-past nine, and she carried a parasol, and lifted her skirt out of the wet grass at the stiles, and observed that if the thing was going to bring all Chertsey across the fields the Bourne meadow would be trodden into a highroad; and I remember the extraordinary comfort of her talk, and how it made the whole affair small and manageable and English.

She would not go within fifty yards of it. She stood on the ridge of thrown-up gravel with the parasol over her, and looked at it for a long while without saying anything at all, and then said that she did not like the noise it made; and indeed the dull knocking within it had grown more frequent as the sun rose, and once, while we stood there, a great sheet of the crust came away from the upper flank and slid down and went into the water with a report like a gun and a burst of steam that drove everybody back.

For by that time there were people. There had been six when we came, and there were thirty by eleven, and I should think a hundred by noon. They came from Ottershaw and from Chertsey and from Horsell, on foot and on bicycles, and there was a costermonger's cart drawn up on the road and doing a trade in ginger-beer before ten. Two men from the gasworks argued for half an hour that it was a boiler that had burst and been blown out of some works up the river, and neither of them could be got to say what works, or how far a boiler may be expected to fly. An old gentleman in a straw hat maintained that it was a balloon. The landlord of the Spotted Dog said it was foreign, and there the matter rested. A boy threw a stone at it, and the stone struck the crust and made it ring, a deep, dead note that stopped all the talk for a moment; and Ogilvy went for him with such fury that the boy's mother took offence, and there was a good deal of unpleasantness.

Then Gregg the butcher's boy was burned.

He had been dared to it by the others, and he went along the fallen willow that lay half out into the water, and got to where the flank of the Thing rose out of the steam, grey and dull and ashy, looking for all the world as cold as a heap of cinders; and he put his hand flat upon it. The ash broke away under his palm and he touched what was beneath. I heard him scream, and I saw him come off the willow into the mud on his hands and knees, and there was a stink of burnt skin. We got him out between us, and Ogilvy poured water over the hand and I tied it up in my wife's handkerchief, and the palm of it was white and blistered right across, with the flesh of two fingers seared to the bone at the tips. He went off howling towards Ottershaw with his mother and half the boys of the place about him, and after that Ogilvy got two hurdles from the hedge and set some of the men to make a line, and there was no more touching.

The sun came round over the willows and it grew very hot. My wife had gone white, and I saw that the boy's hand had been too much for her, and that she was staying only because I stayed. I told her there was nothing to see but a hot stone, that it would be a week getting cool, that Ogilvy would have the whole Royal Society camped in the meadow before night, and that I would be home to dinner. She said, "You will come home?" and I said that of course I should come home; and presently, a little before twelve—I know the hour, because Ogilvy had his watch out and was making some computation about the cooling—she took her parasol and went.

I watched her along the footpath through the meadow, a small figure in the sunlight going away between the hedges, and at the turn by the elms she stopped and looked back at me, and I waved my hand, and she went on and out of sight.

Then I turned round again to the pit, where the steam was still going up straight into the hot blue sky, and stayed.