The Chapters

“Have you?”

“Frightfully.” She did not open her eyes. “Don’t touch me, darling. Please don’t touch me.”

“All right.”

“It isn’t you. It’s just that I can’t stand it.”

“I know.”

The taxi went up the hill past the lighted square at the Pantheon and down the other side, the old streets dark and the houses shut. I sat in my corner and she sat in hers. When we came out onto the Boulevard Saint-Michel the street-lamps went past on the ceiling of the cab, one after another, and I could see her face and then not see it.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Montsouris. You said drive around.”

“I don’t want to drive around. It makes me feel sick, driving around.” She sat up and opened her eyes. “Take me to the Select, Jake. I want to sit down somewhere with lights.”

“You had a date at Montmartre.”

“Damn Montmartre. They’ll be there all night. They’ll never miss me.”

I leaned forward and told the driver to go to the Select on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. He turned the cab around in the middle of the street and we went back the way we had come.

The Select was crowded on the terrace and not so crowded inside. We sat at a table against the wall, under the mirror, and a waiter came. Brett ordered a brandy and soda and I ordered one too. There were some people at the bar that I knew slightly and a Swede who painted and was always there, and some Americans from the Quarter at a big table, talking about somebody who was not there. Nobody came over. Brett took off her hat and put it on the seat beside her and ran her hand back through her hair.

“That’s better,” she said. “Lights. People. I hate the dark in a taxi.”

“You used to like it.”

“I used to like a lot of things.”

The drinks came. The waiter poured the soda and Brett stopped him with her hand when she had enough. She drank half of it.

“I thought you weren’t going to get tight any more.”

“I’m not getting tight. I’m having a drink.” She looked at the glass. “You know I met a man last week.”

“You meet a man every week.”

“Don’t be a swine. This one’s different. He’s got pots of money.”

“What’s his name?”

“Aldo Venturini. He’s Italian, only he’s lived everywhere. He’s in rubber, or motor-cars, or something. He has a place in Biarritz and a place in Rome and a flat here in the Avenue Kléber. He wants to take me to Biarritz.”

“I never heard of him.”

“No reason you should. He doesn’t come to the Quarter. He thinks the Quarter’s dirty.”

“He ought to meet Georgette.”

“Who’s Georgette?”

“The girl I brought.”

Brett laughed. “Oh, my dear. Your fiancée. I heard all about that from Mrs. Braddocks before I’d been in the place two minutes. She told everybody.”

“She would.”

“Aldo’s rather sweet, really,” Brett said. “He’s fifty. He has lovely manners. He sends flowers. Nobody’s sent me flowers in years.”

“I could send you flowers.”

“You could, darling. But you wouldn’t.”

“I might.”

“You wouldn’t. And if you did I’d know what it meant, and so would you, and there we’d be.”

The Swede at the bar was looking at Brett in the mirror. Everybody looked at Brett. She did not look back at them. She turned her glass around on the table.

“Are you going to Biarritz?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I might. It’s lovely at Biarritz in the spring. Nobody there. Just the sea and the old ladies.”

“And Aldo.”

“And Aldo. He wants to marry me, I think. He hasn’t said so. He talks about his mother.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“Is it?”

“It always is with Italians.”

“You’d know, wouldn’t you. You were in Italy.” She looked at me and then away. “Oh, hell, Jake. I didn’t mean that.”

“That’s all right.”

“Should I go, do you think?”

“You ought to do whatever you like.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“It’s a good time of year for Biarritz,” I said.

“Yes. That’s what everybody says.”

“He sounds like a good sort.”

“He is a good sort. He’s a very good sort.” She finished her drink. “You’re being awfully nice about it.”

“I’m a nice fellow.”

“You’re a damned nice fellow,” Brett said. “That’s what’s so rotten.”

I did not want her to go to Biarritz with anybody, and I did not want her to stay in Paris and go around with that crowd, and there was nothing in the world I could ask her to do instead.

“Let’s have another,” I said.

“Let’s.”

We had another and Brett talked about Biarritz and about a place she had stayed once at San Sebastián, across the frontier, where you could swim out in the bay and see the whole town, and I told her about the fishing in Navarre. After a while she was cheerful again. She could get cheerful very quickly and she could lose it very quickly. The Americans at the big table got up and went out, all of them talking, and one of them waved to me, and I waved back.

“I say,” Brett said, “what about your fifty francs?”

“What about them?”

“You ought to go back and get them. If she’s gone off with one of them they’re yours. The woman said she’d keep them.”

“They’re not worth going back for.”

“Fifty francs is fifty francs. I’ll come with you. I’ll wait in the taxi. I’d like to see the place empty. It’ll be sad and lovely.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not in the least drunk. Pay the man, darling.”

I paid and we went out and got a taxi from the rank on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail. It was cooler now and the wind had come up a little, and the trees along the Boulevard were moving over the street lights. We went down the Rue Soufflot and around the Pantheon and down the steep street to the Bal. The door was still open and the light came out onto the cobbles, and I could hear the accordion, but not many feet on the floor.

“I’ll be here,” Brett said. “Don’t let her keep you.”

“She won’t want to keep me.”

“You never know,” Brett said. “You never can tell with a woman.”

Inside, the long room was nearly empty. The Braddocks party had gone and the young men had gone, and there were only three or four couples of the quarter on the floor, working people who had come in late, dancing slowly and very close. The proprietor was still up on his stool playing, and his bells jingled when he beat his foot. The policeman was asleep on the bench by the door with his cape around his shoulders and his chin on his chest.

Georgette was sitting at a table near the bar with her hat in front of her on the table. She had a glass of beer and she was talking to the patronne, who was leaning on the zinc. She saw me come in and she did not look surprised.

“Well,” she said. “It’s the fiancé.”

“Hello.”

“Your friends went to Montmartre. They wanted me to come. I said no.”

“Why?”

“They don’t pay. That kind never pays. They dance with you all night and say how charming, how amusing, and then they go off together.” She shrugged. “They were nice enough. The tall one dances well. He dances better than you.”

“Everybody dances better than me.”

“That’s true,” she said.

The patronne had gone to the back of the bar and she came out with the envelope and put it on the zinc in front of me.

“Monsieur,” she said. “The young lady did not ask. So I kept it, as you said.”

“Thank you, Madame.”

“You went off with the tall English lady,” Georgette said. “With the hair like a boy.”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“Outside. In a taxi.”

“Ah,” Georgette said. “Waiting.” She drank some of the beer. “It’s like that, is it?”

“No. It isn’t like anything.”

“It’s always like something.”

I took the envelope off the bar and put it on the table in front of her.

“What’s that?”

“It was for you. In case.”

She opened it and looked at the note and folded it and put it in her bag, and snapped the bag shut.

“You’re not a bad type,” she said again. “It’s a shame, all of it. Go on. She’ll be tired of waiting. That kind gets tired quickly.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

“Good night, Jacob. Good luck with the English.” She put on her hat and looked at herself in the little mirror and did not look up again.

The patronne said good night and I said good night to her, and went out past the policeman, who was still asleep, and got into the taxi.

“Well?” Brett asked.

“I gave it to her.”

“You would. Was she still there?”

“She was there.”

“Poor little thing.” Brett leaned back. “Everybody’s a poor little thing tonight. Where shall we go now?”

“Wherever you like.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go to Montmartre. Let’s go to the Halles and eat onion soup and watch the carts come in.”

We drove across the river by the Pont Neuf. The river was black and there were lights on the water under the bridges. At the Halles the carts were coming in from the country, big wagons piled with cabbages and carrots and leeks, the horses standing with their heads down, and men in blue smocks carrying baskets, and the streets were wet and smelled of vegetables. We went into a place on the Rue Coquillière that was open all night, full of market men and a few people in evening clothes who had come on from somewhere else, and we sat at a table by the window and had onion soup with the cheese stringing off the spoon, and a bottle of white wine.

Brett ate all her soup. She had not eaten since lunch, she said.

“You ought to eat more.”

“I know. Aldo says so. He’s always wanting to feed me. He takes me to Larue’s and orders everything on the card.”

“He sounds like a good sort,” I said.

“You said that before.”

“It’s still true.”

“Oh, Jake,” she said. “Don’t. Let’s not.”

“All right.”

We sat and drank the wine and watched through the window the men unloading, and a woman came in selling flowers from a basket, flowers that had come in on the carts, still wet, and I bought Brett a bunch of violets. She held them up to her face and looked at me over them.

“You see,” she said. “You did.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“No,” she said. “I know it doesn’t.”

It was getting grey outside. The street lamps looked pale and the sky over the roofs of the market was the color of dishwater, and then it was lighter. The market men were going out and new ones coming in. Brett put the violets in the band of her hat.

“I have to go to bed,” she said. “I have to go to bed or I shall die.”

We walked out to the Rue du Louvre and found a taxi. The driver was eating a piece of bread and he put it away inside his coat. I opened the door and Brett got in and sat down and put her head back.

“You won’t come?”

“No. I’ll walk.”

“It’s miles.”

“It’s not far. I want to walk.”

“You’re a dear, Jake.” She gave the driver the address of her hotel. “I’ll see you. I’ll see you at the Select. Tomorrow. Tonight, I mean.”

“All right.”

“Don’t be sad, darling.”

“I’m not sad.”

The taxi went off down the street and I stood there and watched it until it turned the corner. Then I walked down to the river.

It was light now. I went along the quai on the right bank, past the Louvre, and crossed at the Pont des Arts. The river was grey and moving fast and high from the spring rains, and there was a barge coming down with smoke going up from its chimney, and a man on the deck in a blue shirt washing his face in a bucket. The bookstalls along the parapet were shut, their green boxes padlocked. A few men were fishing already from the steps below the quai, sitting with their lines out and not looking at anything. I stopped and watched one of them for a while. He did not catch anything. On the left bank I turned up the river toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The sun came up behind Notre Dame and the towers were dark against it and the water was light, and there were sparrows in the trees along the quai, and a street-cleaner was washing down the gutter with a hose. I walked slowly. I was very tired and I did not feel anything much, and I thought that was a good thing, and I kept on walking along the river toward home.

The appointed morning brought them both to Kellynch Hall; Lady Russell in her carriage, at the very hour she had named, and Mr Shepherd on foot from the lodge, a little before it, with his papers under his arm and his countenance composed into the particular gravity he kept for the Elliots. He was a civil, cautious lawyer. Whatever his opinion of Sir Walter might be, he would rather have the disagreeable said by anybody else, and he was well pleased to find that Lady Russell was to speak first.

Lady Russell had not come unprepared. She had considered the subject for many days, with a sincere wish to do right and a very serious sense of what was owing to the family. She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent. She was also a woman of strict integrity, with a delicate sense of honour; and she was as desirous of saving Sir Walter's feelings as she was of saving his credit. She had therefore drawn up, in her own neat hand, a scheme of such moderate reductions as might, within seven years, clear him of all his debts. Some of the servants were to go; the stables were to be lessened; the journey to town was to be made a matter of every other year and not of every year; and there were to be fewer dinners, and those less magnificent. She read it through in a gentle, steady voice, pausing now and then to soften a phrase, and when she had done she laid the paper on the table beside him, as if it were a gift.

Sir Walter heard her to the end with the patience of a man who has already made up his mind. He then took up the paper, looked at it without reading it, and put it down again.

“My dear Lady Russell, I am very much obliged to you. It is extremely kind, and extremely well written, and quite impossible. Every other year in town! And what am I to say to the people I meet there, when they ask where I was the spring before? I might as well give out that I had been in the Fleet. No, no. You mean it all very well; but you do not consider what is required.”

Lady Russell coloured a little and said nothing. She had known him too long to argue with him on the first refusal. Mr Shepherd, seeing that his turn had come, cleared his throat and brought out his papers.

His proposal was of another kind. Lady Russell's was a lady's scheme, full of small savings and nice distinctions; his went to the principal articles directly. He spoke of the horses, of which he believed there were more than any gentleman in the county kept for so small a family. He spoke of the new greenhouse, whose building might be stopped where it stood, and of the wine merchant's account, which had not been looked into for three years. He spoke with great deference, and every sentence was so wrapped in apology that the substance of it could scarcely be seen. But Sir Walter saw it well enough, and took it ill.

“Part with the horses! Mr Shepherd, you would have me walk to church. Or perhaps you would have me hire a chaise from the Crown whenever Miss Elliot wishes to pay a call, like a curate's widow. I do not think you know what you are asking. The greenhouse is half built; would you have it left standing half built for all the neighbourhood to see? Nothing could more plainly publish the very thing we wish to keep private.” He rose, walked to the glass over the chimney-piece, and looked into it for some little time. The occupation seemed to restore him. “I am sure you both mean very well,” he said at last, more mildly; “but I cannot consent to be made ridiculous. Some other way must be found.”

There was a silence. Lady Russell looked at her paper, and Mr Shepherd looked at his. Elizabeth sat by the window with her work in her hands, doing nothing to it. Anne, who had been sitting a little apart, as she generally did, and whom nobody had thought of consulting, now spoke.

“If I might say something, sir, I do not think the difficulty is that either plan asks too much. I am afraid they both ask too little.”

Sir Walter turned round from the glass and looked at her in surprise, as if a chair had spoken. Lady Russell's eyes went to her quickly, with a look of anxious tenderness.

“Lady Russell's scheme would take seven years,” Anne went on, speaking quietly but without hesitation; she had thought of it too long to hesitate. “Seven years is a very long time to be always a little ashamed. It seems to me that it would be better, and even less painful, to do more at once and have done with it in three. If we gave up London entirely for the present, and not merely every other spring; if the horses were brought down to what would draw one carriage, and the rest sold; if the greenhouse were given up, and the south rooms shut, and we lived in the smaller rooms, as we do in winter already; if the household were made fit for a private gentleman's family, and not for a great one; then I believe, from what Mr Shepherd has told us, that the whole might be paid in far less time than has been proposed. Everybody would talk of it for a month, and then everybody would forget it. And I think there is no economy half so disagreeable as one that has to be kept up for seven years together.”

She stopped, rather frightened at having said so much. Nobody at Kellynch was used to hearing so long a speech from Anne. Mr Shepherd looked at her with a sort of respectful astonishment; he had never thought her worth a moment's attention before, and he was not sure what to make of her now. Lady Russell's face was all pleased agreement, and some anxiety besides.

Sir Walter's answer was ready, and it was not a kind one; but before he could make it, Elizabeth spoke from the window.

“I think Anne is right.”

Had the portraits on the staircase joined in the discussion, the company could hardly have been more astonished. Elizabeth had never been known to think Anne right in anything, from the choice of a ribbon to the placing of a table. Sir Walter was so much taken aback that he could only look at her.

“I mean, papa,” said Elizabeth, with some colour, and with the air of one who has spoken on impulse and must now find a reason for it, “that there is a great deal of sense in doing it all at once. And as for London, I am sure I do not care whether I see it this spring or not. It is very tiresome going up every year to the same rooms and the same people. One meets with nobody new. One meets with people one had much rather not meet.”

The sentiment did her some credit, if it had been only a sentiment. But Anne, who knew her sister better than her sister supposed, understood something more in it. Mr Elliot might be in town. A widower in black is more talked of than a married man; and Elizabeth had no wish to be seen, at nine-and-twenty, walking behind Lady Russell into drawing-rooms where the heir of Kellynch might be standing, and where every one would remember what had once been expected. To give up London would cost Elizabeth nothing. It would spare her a good deal, and allow her to feel virtuous in the bargain. Anne was grateful for the support, whatever its motive, though she did not flatter herself that it would last beyond the morning.

It did not even last so long, for it did not move Sir Walter at all. He was only more displeased to find himself opposed from a quarter he had always counted his own.

“You surprise me, Elizabeth. I should have thought you had more regard for what is due to your situation. Shut up the south rooms! Live in the little parlours, and let the neighbourhood say that Sir Walter Elliot can no longer afford to warm his own drawing-room! Anne may think such things very easy, perhaps; Anne has no particular consequence to support. But you and I, my dear, must think differently.” He turned to Lady Russell, as the only person present to whom it was worth appealing. “You see how it is. The young people have no notion of these matters. I will not hear of it.”

Lady Russell would not quarrel with him; but she could not bring herself to say that he was right. She said only, with some dignity, that she thought Anne's plan very well considered, and that she would be glad to go through it again whenever Sir Walter chose. Elizabeth, having been rebuked, returned to her work, and was careful to take no further part in the discussion. Anne, who had expected nothing else, was silent.

It was in this unpromising state of things that Mr Shepherd, who had been turning over his papers with the air of a man looking for his courage among them, ventured on a last suggestion.

“There is one other course, Sir Walter, which I mention only because it would be my duty to mention it, and which I should never have presumed to propose if I thought any other would answer. Gentlemen in your situation, and I could name some of the first families in the kingdom, have sometimes found it convenient, for a year or two, to make the house itself contribute to the relief of the estate. A place like Kellynch would command a very handsome rent. A careful tenant, a gentleman of good character, properly bound by articles—”

He got no further. Sir Walter had drawn himself up to his full height, which was considerable, and his face had coloured all over.

“A tenant! At Kellynch! Mr Shepherd, do I understand you? Would you have me turn out of my own house, and let some stranger walk about in it, and sit in my chair, and look at himself in my glasses, while I am shut up God knows where? Are the Elliots to be advertised, like a house at Taunton, with a description of the stables and the number of bedrooms? No, sir. I will not hear it. I desire that the word may never be used in my hearing again, by you or by anybody.”

Mr Shepherd bowed very low and gathered up his papers. He was too wise to press the matter, and not so offended as to give it up. He had seen gentlemen of Sir Walter's stamp refuse a thing violently on Monday and agree to it on Saturday, provided it came from some other quarter and under some other name; and he merely said, in his smoothest tone, that he was very sorry to have given pain, and that he would do himself the honour of waiting on Sir Walter again when Sir Walter had had leisure to reflect. Lady Russell soon afterwards rose to go. She took Anne's hand in leaving and pressed it, and her look said more than she could say before the others: that she had thought well of what Anne had said, and would not forget it.

So the morning ended, and nothing was determined. Sir Walter went back to the Baronetage and was comforted. Elizabeth, rather ashamed of having agreed with her sister, was particularly cold to her for the rest of the afternoon, and spoke of nothing but the shabbiness of Mr Shepherd's gloves.

The letter came in with the rest of the post, a little before dinner. It was from Mary, and was addressed, as Mary's letters generally were when she wanted something, to Anne.

“Dear Anne,” it ran, “I write in great haste, and am so unwell I can hardly hold my pen. I have not been out of the house these four days, and I do not know when I shall be, for the weather is so close and the children are so noisy that I get no rest. Charles is out shooting from morning till night, and never thinks whether I am alive or dead. Mrs Musgrove is very kind, I dare say, but she has her own girls to think of, and they are always at the Great House and never come to me when I want them. I am sure I have a sore throat coming on, and very likely something worse. I wish you would come to me directly. You are always of so much use, and there can be nothing to keep you at Kellynch, I am sure, for Elizabeth will not miss you. Pray come as soon as ever you can. Your affectionate sister, Mary Musgrove.

“P.S. I have heard nothing from Kellynch this age. Is it true papa is in difficulties? Charles's mother had it from somebody in Taunton, and I was quite ashamed.”

Anne read it twice: the first time as Mary's sister, the second as Mary's physician. She had long known that Mary's complaints were better nursed with company than with medicine. The postscript was the only part of the letter that gave her real pain. So the thing was already known at Uppercross, and talked of in Taunton, while at Kellynch it could not yet be spoken of plainly across a table.

She showed the letter at dinner. Her father said that Mary was always ill, and Elizabeth said that Anne might certainly go, if she liked, since nobody would want her; and neither of them seemed to notice the postscript at all.

That evening, when the others had retired, Anne sat alone for some time in the little room which had been her mother's, with the letter in her lap and the candle burning low. Her mind was made up. She would go to Uppercross. Mary wanted her, or believed she did, which came to the same thing; and it was something to be wanted anywhere. At Kellynch she could do no good. She had said what she thought, and said it as well as she could, and it had been heard and set aside. Elizabeth's support had come and gone in a quarter of an hour. Lady Russell might return to the charge, and Mr Shepherd certainly would, with his other course and its forbidden name; but whatever was decided would be decided without her.

The debts were exactly as they had been that morning. They were no smaller for all the talking, and no nearer being paid, and no more likely to be paid on any terms her father would accept. She could see no end to it. She could only hope, and she did not hope very much, that some better sense would prevail before she came home. In the meantime there was Mary's sore throat, and Mary's children, and Mary's grievances against the Great House. At Uppercross, at least, she might be useful. She put out the candle and went up to bed, with the letter still in her hand.

The book gave me no comfort, and I closed it with a sense of foreboding. Then, letting myself out by the front door, I set off down the drive at a pace my wounded leg had not attempted since I came home.

The storm we had all expected had never broken. The air was as heavy as it had been the night before, and a thin grey mist lay over the fields beyond the lodge gates. Nothing stirred in the village street but a cart or two and a dog nosing in a gutter. My mind was far too full of what had happened to notice much. Every so often that last dreadful arching of the body rose up before me, and with it the doctor's grave face and the word "tetanic," and I quickened my pace again.

Leastways Cottage, where the Belgians were lodged, stood a little back from the road. To my astonishment a thread of smoke was already rising from its chimney. Before I could reach the gate the door opened, and Poirot himself stood on the threshold. He was fully dressed, with his moustaches as elaborately curled as though he were bound for a garden party.

"Ah, it is you, my friend," he said gravely. "I thought it would be. Come in, come in. I have made the chocolate. You will take a cup; you have need of it."

"Poirot," I cried, "you don't know what has happened. Mrs. Inglethorp——"

He raised his hand.

"Is dead. Yes, I know it. It is a great sorrow to me. She was good to us, to all of us here, and I do not forget."

I stared at him.

"But how on earth can you know? It isn't an hour since it happened."

"It is very simple. I sleep little, me, and I was at my window to see the day come. A little before six a motor-car drew up at the gate, and a small, round gentleman got down, very full of himself, and knocked. You know him, I think? It was the good Dr. Wilkins. He attends our poor Belgians for the charity of madame, and he has the habit of stopping for a word when he passes. This morning he had a great deal to say." Poirot's eyes twinkled for a moment, but he did not smile. "Madame was dead. There had been convulsions of a violence most remarkable. There was to be a post-mortem, and very likely an inquest. And he had said from the first that madame's heart was not strong. All this he told me on my own doorstep, in the hearing of Madame Hannecart, who is not deaf, and I suppose of half the street besides."

"Then he hasn't the discretion of a parrot," I said angrily.

"It seems not. But he did me a service, for when you came I was already dressed. Now drink this, and tell me everything, slowly, in order, as it happened."

I did so while he busied himself with the cups. I told him of the locked doors, of the breaking in of the door from Mr. Inglethorp's room, of the convulsions, of the dying woman's cry of "Alfred—Alfred——", of Dr. Bauerstein's grim manner, and of Alfred Inglethorp's absence. I told him too of the look on Lawrence's face, though I own I did not know what to make of it myself. He listened without once interrupting. Only when I had finished did he put down his cup.

"You have done well to come for me, Hastings. The keys—Dr. Bauerstein gave them to Monsieur Cavendish, you say? And the rooms have not been entered since?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Good. Then go back at once. I have only to finish my toilet, and I follow you in a quarter of an hour. Tell Monsieur Cavendish that I come, and that I beg nothing may be touched. Nothing, you understand."

I protested that we might walk up together, but he was inflexible. I could not tell whether it was vanity about his appearance or some motive I could not guess. So I set off again alone, a good deal less weary than when I had come. It was an immense relief that the matter was now in his hands.

I had just turned in at the lodge gates when I heard quick footsteps behind me on the gravel. Looking round, I saw Alfred Inglethorp striding up the drive. He was without a hat, his black beard glistened with the damp of the mist, and his face wore the careless expression of a man coming home from an ordinary errand. He saw me and raised his hand.

"Good morning, Hastings. You're about early."

Clearly he did not know. I felt a horrible awkwardness, and for a moment I could find nothing to say. He looked at me more sharply.

"Is anything the matter?"

"I'm afraid," I said, "you had better come into the house. Your wife was taken very ill in the night."

He stopped short.

"Ill? Emily? But she was perfectly well when I left her."

John had seen us from the window and came out upon the steps. I left it to him to break the news, and he did it in a few awkward words. I watched Inglethorp closely. I wished to see how he took it, but I can hardly say what I saw. He went very pale, put his hand to his beard, and said, "Dead? Emily? Impossible," two or three times in a low voice. Then he sat down heavily on the bench in the hall and covered his face with his hands. Whether it was grief or something else I could not tell.

"We looked for you everywhere," said John, rather stiffly. "Your bed hadn't been slept in."

Inglethorp raised his head.

"No. No, I've been in the village all night. I'd better explain. I walked down with Bauerstein, as you know, and then I thought I'd look in on Denby about those accounts for the Red Cross bazaar. We sat talking longer than we meant. It was past midnight when I came back up here, and I found the front door bolted against me. Somebody must have forgotten I had the key. Well, I wasn't going to hammer on the door and rouse the whole house, and upset Emily into the bargain, so I simply walked back. Denby gave me a shake-down on his sofa." He shivered suddenly. "My God, if I'd only knocked! If I'd only been here!"

It sounded natural enough, and yet I did not like it. John muttered something, and Inglethorp got up and asked, in a shaken voice, whether he might see his wife. John told him the room was locked by the doctors' orders. Upon that he went slowly upstairs to his own room, and we heard the door close behind him.

Dorcas had been hovering at the back of the hall during this recital. As soon as he was gone she came forward, her honest face pink with indignation, and plucked at my sleeve.

"Begging your pardon, sir, but that's not true, what the master said about the door."

"What do you mean, Dorcas?"

"Nobody bolted it, sir. The mistress told me at supper that Mr. Inglethorp had the key and I was to leave the front door on the latch, and so I did. And when I ran down to let the doctor in, round about five this morning, it was just as I'd left it, sir, with neither of the bolts shot. I'd take my Bible oath on it. I had it open in a moment."

"You're quite certain?"

"As certain as I stand here, sir. The top bolt's stiff, and it always wants a knock from the palm of my hand to draw it. I'd have known."

I bade her say nothing of it to anyone for the present, and she promised, though with evident reluctance. I confess my mind was in a whirl. If the door had never been bolted, then why had Alfred Inglethorp not come in?

A few minutes later a small figure came up the drive with his head held high, stepping very delicately to spare his shoes. Poirot had arrived.

John received him courteously, if a trifle constrainedly, and Poirot made him a little speech of condolence which, for all its flourishes, was plainly sincere. As we crossed the hall to the stairs Cynthia came out of the morning-room. She was still very pale and her eyes were heavy. She stopped uncertainly on seeing a stranger, and I presented Poirot to her.

He bowed.

"Mademoiselle, I will not trouble you now. I ask you only one question. Last night, when you went to your bed, did you sleep at once, or did you lie awake?"

Cynthia looked at him with some surprise.

"I went off at once," she said. "The very moment my head touched the pillow—I don't even remember putting out my candle. It's queer, because I'm not a bit like that as a rule. I generally read for ages. And I didn't hear a thing until Mrs. Cavendish was shaking me, and even then I felt as stupid as an owl. I don't feel right now."

"I thank you, mademoiselle," said Poirot. He asked her nothing more, but I saw his eyes rest on her flushed cheeks for a moment before he turned to the stairs.

John gave him the keys and would have come up with us, but Poirot begged, very politely, that he might be left to make his examination alone with me. "Two are enough, and one of them does not talk," he said, with a glance at me that I did not altogether relish. John was glad enough to be spared, I think, and he went away to the dining-room.

Poirot unlocked the door that gave on the corridor, and we went in. Then he locked it behind us.

In the full light of morning the room looked strangely ordinary. The gas had been turned out, and the curtains had been drawn back. The bed with its dreadful burden had been decently covered. Nothing else had been touched. The little table by the bed lay on its side, and a reading-lamp, a few books, a box of matches, and a bunch of keys were scattered on the floor beside it. The shattered connecting door hung drunkenly on one hinge.

Poirot stood quite still in the middle of the room for a full minute, looking about him like a bird. Then he began to move, and I have never seen anything more methodical. He crossed first to the door into Mr. Inglethorp's room and examined the bolt and the splintered framework. He did the same for the door into Cynthia's room, which was still bolted on this side as Dorcas had said. Then he went to the corridor door. After that he knelt by the overturned table and turned over the things upon the floor one by one, without moving them from where they lay.

"The despatch-case," he murmured, looking at a purple box on the writing-table in the window. "Mademoiselle Cynthia brought it up, you told me? Good." He tried the lid and found it locked. Then he looked thoughtfully at the bunch of keys on the floor, but he did not touch them.

"Poirot," I said, "surely we ought to——"

"Patience, my friend. We have the whole morning, and nobody shall disturb us. I have the key."

He passed on to the fireplace. The ashes in the grate were cold and grey now, and he raked through them with extraordinary care, using the point of a pencil. Then he got up and stood for some time looking at the mantelpiece. There was the clock, a pair of china shepherdesses, a spill vase, and a photograph in a silver frame.

"It was here that Monsieur Lawrence looked?"

"Somewhere about there. It might have been over the mantelpiece, or on it. I followed his eyes, and I could see nothing out of the way."

"No," said Poirot slowly. "You would not." He did not explain what he meant, and I did not ask.

The minutes ran on into hours. Once there was a timid knock, and Dorcas's voice asked whether the gentlemen would like some coffee sent up. Poirot declined, rather to my regret. He had me describe again, standing where I had stood, exactly where each person was when we broke in, and where Mrs. Cavendish had appeared with Cynthia. He measured the distance from Cynthia's door to the bed with his own small feet. He spent a long time on hands and knees beside the door into Cynthia's room. It was there, just where the carpet ended under the door, that I heard him give a small exclamation.

"Ah! *Voilà!*"

He got up with something held carefully between finger and thumb and brought it to the window. It was a hairpin, an ordinary thin black wire hairpin such as any woman uses. One of its legs had been bent out almost straight, and the end of it was flattened and bright, as though it had been rubbed against metal.

"A hairpin!" I said, disappointed. "Why, there must be dozens of them in any woman's room."

"Without doubt. And this one, where do you suppose it came from?"

"From Mrs. Inglethorp's head, I suppose. Or from the maid's."

"Perhaps." He laid it on a sheet of clean notepaper from the writing-table, folded the paper round it with great care, and put the little packet into his pocket-book.

"But what does it mean, Poirot? What has a hairpin to do with it?"

"It means, *mon ami*, that I have put a hairpin in my pocket-book. For the moment that is all it means."

"You might at least tell me what you think."

"When I think something, I shall tell you. Now I only look and I ask myself questions. It is a very bad habit to answer them before one has finished asking them." He patted my arm kindly. "Do not be vexed, Hastings. You have given me much already. More than you know."

It was close on half-past eleven by the clock on the mantelpiece before he seemed satisfied. The sun had come round and fell in a hot bar across the carpet. For all the open window the air in the room was close and oppressive. Poirot took out the little packet once more and unfolded it on the writing-table between us. He stood looking down at the hairpin for a long while with his head on one side. His eyes had turned green, as I was to learn they always did when he was excited. I waited, hoping that now at last he would speak.

He did speak, but not as I had hoped.

"It is a pity," he said softly, as if to himself. "A great pity, Hastings, that madame had so strong a heart."

I stared at him. Dr. Wilkins had told us not six hours before that her heart was far from strong. I opened my mouth to say so, but Poirot had already bent over the table again, and the words died on my lips.

When Mary opened her eyes again the lamp in the railway carriage had been lighted, and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the shoulder.

"You have had a sleep!" she said. "It's time to open your eyes. We're at Thwaite Station and we've a long drive before us."

Mary stood up and tried to keep her eyes open while Mrs. Medlock collected her parcels. The little girl did not offer to help her, because in India native servants always picked up or carried things and it seemed quite proper that other people should wait on one.

The station was a small one and nobody but themselves seemed to be getting out of the train. The rain was still pouring down, and the platform shone wet and black under a single lamp. The station-master was coming toward them with a lantern held up in his hand. Behind him, a little apart, stood a tall man in a long dark cloak, who did not come forward at all.

Mrs. Medlock took one look at him and stopped so short that the purple velvet flowers on her bonnet shook as if a wind had caught them.

"Mercy on us!" she said under her breath. "It's the master himself."

Mary stared. She had been told she need not expect to see him, and ten to one she would not, and here he was before she had so much as got off the platform. She looked at him with all her eyes, because she wanted to know what a hunchback was. He was not at all like the hunchback in the French story. He was not a dwarf and he was not ugly. He had a thin, dark face, and there were streaks of white in his black hair, though he did not seem to be an old man. He was so tall that at first she did not see anything wrong with him, and then she saw that one of his shoulders was higher than the other and that he held himself a little bent, as if he were used to carrying something heavy. His face was not cross, as Basil had said. It was worse than cross. It looked as if nothing whatever interested it.

The station-master held up his lantern, and the light fell on Mary's sallow little face and her black crêpe hat.

"I did not look for you, sir," Mrs. Medlock was saying in quite a different voice from the brisk, hard one she had used in the train. "I'm sure I'd no notion--"

"The carriage is outside," said Mr. Craven.

He looked down at Mary for a moment. She did not curtsy, because nobody had ever taught her to, and she did not smile, because she did not feel like smiling. She simply looked back at him with her lips pinched together. His eyes rested on her as if she were a parcel which had been sent to him and which he must see had arrived, and then they went away from her again.

"This is the child," he said. It was not a question, and he did not wait for any answer. He turned and walked out of the station, and Mrs. Medlock and Mary followed him.

A smart brougham stood in the road, with a footman holding the door open. Mr. Craven got in first and sat in the farthest corner. Mary was put in beside Mrs. Medlock, opposite to him, and the door was shut, and the carriage drove away.

It was the strangest drive Mary had ever taken. Nobody spoke at all. Mrs. Medlock, who had talked so much in the train, sat as straight and still as if she were in church, with her hands folded over her black silk mantle; and Mr. Craven sat in his corner with his face turned toward the window, though there was nothing to be seen through it but darkness and the rain running down. Now and then, when the carriage lamps swung, Mary could see a little of his cheek and his white-streaked hair, and once she saw that his eyes were open, but he never turned them toward her. She thought that he was the most disagreeable person she had ever seen, more disagreeable even than Mrs. Medlock, and she was glad that she need not talk to him. At the same time she felt a queer small anger that he did not talk to her. Her Ayah had always talked to her, even when she slapped her.

They drove through a tiny village, and she saw whitewashed cottages and the lights of a public house. Then they passed a church and a vicarage and a little shop-window with toys and sweets and odd things set out for sale. Then they were on the highroad and she saw hedges and trees. After that there seemed nothing different for a long time, or at least it seemed a long time to her.

At last the horses began to go more slowly, as if they were climbing uphill, and presently there seemed to be no more hedges and no more trees. She could see nothing but a dense darkness on either side. A wind was rising, and it made a wild, low, rushing sound which was not like any sound she had ever heard before.

She leaned forward and pressed her face against the window just as the carriage gave a lurch and stopped altogether.

There was a shout from the box, and the footman got down, and they heard him splashing forward in the dark. Mr. Craven did not move. Mrs. Medlock let down the window a little way, and the wind came in and flung rain against her face.

"What is it?" she called out.

"It's a pony, Mrs. Medlock," the coachman's voice answered. "A moor pony lyin' right across th' road wi' its foal. Us'll have to shift 'em."

Mary had never seen a moor pony, and she did not know what a moor was. Before Mrs. Medlock could put up the window again she had turned the handle of the door on her own side and pushed it open and jumped down into the road. It was a thing she would never have been let do in India, but in India nobody had ever forgotten to tell her not to.

"Come back this minute!" cried Mrs. Medlock. "You'll be soaked through! Come back, you contrary child!"

But Mary did not come back at once. She stood in the wet and the dark with the wind tearing at her crêpe hat, and she looked.

There was nothing whatever to be seen. The carriage lamps made two small yellow circles on the road, and in one of them she could just make out something brown and shaggy getting up slowly on its legs, and something smaller and shaggier getting up beside it. Beyond the yellow circles there was only blackness, and it went on and on. She had never known that darkness could be so wide. There were no walls in it and no roofs, and no lights of any kind. The rain smelled of something she did not know, something sharp and sweet and earthy, which came to her on the wind. The wind itself came from so far away that it seemed to have been blowing across the black emptiness since the beginning of the world, and it made that low, wild, rushing sound all round her, as if the whole dark were breathing.

She did not feel frightened, which surprised her. She felt very small, and she felt a curious prickling all over her, and she wanted to stay.

"What is it?" she said aloud, though there was no one near enough to hear her.

"It's the moor," said a voice behind her.

She turned round. Mr. Craven had leaned forward in his corner and was looking out at her through the open door. The lamp-light showed his thin dark face quite plainly for the first time. He did not look angry. He looked at her, and then past her into the blackness, and for a moment there was something in his face which was not quite so uninterested as before; and then it was gone.

"Get in," he said.

That was all. He leaned back into his corner again.

Mary got in. Mrs. Medlock pulled her up on to the seat and shook out her wet skirts with a great many sharp little jerks and said, "Well, I never!" several times in a whisper; but she said nothing louder, because of the master. The footman slammed the door. The pony and her foal had been driven off the road into the dark, and the carriage went on.

After a long time the road began to go downhill, and then there were trees again, and then an avenue, and at last they drove into a clear space and stopped before an immensely long but low-built house which seemed to ramble round a stone court. At first Mary thought there were no lights at all in the windows, but as she got out of the carriage she saw that one room in a corner upstairs showed a dull glow.

The entrance door was a huge one, made of massive, curiously shaped panels of oak studded with big iron nails. It opened into an enormous hall, which was so dimly lighted that the faces in the portraits on the walls and the figures in the suits of armor made Mary feel that she did not want to look at them. As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked.

Mr. Craven walked through the hall without stopping. A thin old man had come forward to take his cloak, and they went away together up a wide staircase and turned out of sight. Mr. Craven did not look back. He had not said good-night. He had not said anything at all since "Get in."

"That's Pitcher," said Mrs. Medlock, when they were quite gone, and she let out a great breath as if she had been holding it ever since Thwaite Station. "Well! I shall have something to tell Maria. I've been at Misselthwaite these ten years and he's never once met a train. Don't you go thinking it means anything," she added sharply to Mary. "It doesn't. He'd business in Thwaite, I dare say. Come along with you."

She led Mary up the staircase and down a long corridor and up a short flight of steps and through another corridor and another, until a door opened in a wall and she found herself in a room with a fire in it.

"Well, here you are!" said Mrs. Medlock. "This room and the next are where you'll live, and you must keep to them. Don't you forget that!" And she went away to take off her bonnet and see about things.

Mary stood by the fire and warmed her hands. Presently the door opened again, but it was not a maid who came in. It was a young manservant, with big red hands and a broad red face and hair that stuck up at the back. He carried a tray with a cup and a plate on it, and he set it down on the table with a clatter and looked at her with great interest.

"Eh!" he said. "So tha'rt th' little lass fro' India. Tha' looks nobbut a bit of a thing. Mrs. Medlock says tha'rt to sup this an' get thysel' off to bed, for tha'st come a long road. It's porridge an' milk, an' there's a bit o' bread. Tha' mun eat it while it's hot, for there's nowt as nasty as porridge gone cowd."

Mary stared at him. She understood the word porridge and the word bed, and she thought she understood milk.

"I don't understand what you say," she said. "You don't talk English."

The young man was not offended in the least. He grinned so broadly that his face seemed to grow wider.

"Happen I don't," he said. "It's Yorkshire I talk. Tha'll get used to it."

"I shall not," said Mary.

"Tha' will," said he cheerfully. "Everybody does." And he went out and shut the door behind him, and she heard him whistling as he went down the corridor.

Mary ate the porridge because she was hungry, though she told herself she did not like it. Afterward Mrs. Medlock came back and took her into the next room, where there was a great dark bed with curtains and another small fire, and undressed her rather roughly and put her into the bed.

It was while Mrs. Medlock was folding the black frock over a chair that Mary heard the sound.

It was not loud. It seemed to come from very far off, from somewhere inside the great house, down some of its hundred corridors. It was a long, low, humming note which rose a little and then sank again, and then, after a moment, there were three dull knocks, slow and heavy, as if something were being struck on wood. Then the humming began again.

Mary sat up in bed.

"What is that?" she said.

Mrs. Medlock's hands stopped on the black frock for just a moment. Then they went on folding it.

"That's the wind," she said. "It wuthers round the chimneys on a night like this and gets into the old passages. You'll hear plenty of it before you've done."

"It doesn't sound like the wind," said Mary.

"Well, it is the wind," said Mrs. Medlock shortly, "and you lie down and go to sleep, and don't let me hear any more about it." She put out the candle and went away, and Mary heard her footsteps go down the corridor and a door shut somewhere.

Mary lay down, but she did not go to sleep. She lay with her eyes wide open in the dark and listened. She could hear the wind quite plainly. It was outside the window, rushing and beating against the glass, and it made the same wild, low sound which it had made on the moor when she stood in the road. She knew that sound now. The other sound was not like it at all. It was inside the house, and it had stopped and started again, and nothing that was only wind knocked three times.

Mrs. Medlock had stopped folding the frock. Mary had seen her.

She lay very still and waited, and after a while the humming came again, faint and far off, and the three slow knocks after it, and then there was nothing but the wind.

She was not frightened. She had been told she must keep to her two rooms and not go wandering and poking about, and she had said that she should not want to. But that had been in the railway carriage, before she had seen the moor or Mr. Craven's face in the lamp-light, and she was a contrary child who had always had her own way.

She pulled the heavy blankets up to her chin and stared into the dark. Mrs. Medlock might say it was the wind if she liked. Mary Lennox did not believe her. She would find out for herself what it was.

The first of the falling stars I saw myself. It came, as I have since been able to reckon, some two hours after midnight on a night towards the end of those ten days, when the talk of the volcanoes upon Mars had already begun to lose its savour in the papers. I had sat up late over my paper upon the moral ideas, which was going badly, and had gone out into the garden to cool my head before bed. The night was still and very clear. There was no moon. I was standing by the gate, looking idly eastward over the dark hedges towards Chertsey, when a line of greenish light drew itself swiftly across the sky from the direction of Winchester, high up, and much brighter than any shooting star I had ever seen. It seemed to me to fall slantwise and quite slowly, and to leave behind it a faint luminous trail, like the wake of a fish in phosphorescent water. Then it vanished somewhere beyond the dark mass of the Ottershaw woods. I thought I heard, a moment after, a faint concussion, such as a door makes slamming in a distant house, but I have never been sure of that, and it may have been only the fancy that came after.

I remember that I stood some time at the gate, half expecting a second. None came. I went indoors and told my wife, who was awake and asked what had kept me, that I had seen a meteor fall very near, and that it must have come down somewhere within a mile or two of us. She said sleepily that I should go and find it in the morning and make my fortune by it. So little did either of us think of it that we both slept soundly after.

I woke early, however, with the thing in my mind. It was a bright, warm morning, and a haze lay over the low ground towards the river. At breakfast my wife, who had been thinking of it too, said she would walk out with me, and we set off together before eight, going by the lane past the church and so on to the common beyond Ottershaw, in the direction in which I had seen the light go down. I had some notion that it would lie among the heather, and that we should find a little heap of scorched stone that a man might carry home in his pocket.

We found it, instead, in the old gravel pit at the edge of the common, a place that had been worked out years before and had long since filled with water from the springs below, so that it was now a dark, still pond some hundred yards across, fringed with rushes and a few stunted willows, where the boys of the neighbourhood went to bathe in summer. We should have missed it had it not been for the steam. As we came over the rise of the common we saw a white vapour going up from the hollow in a thin, wavering column, very distinct against the pines on the farther side, and for a moment I took it for a gipsy fire. Then, as we came to the brink, we saw what had made it.

The Thing lay at the near end of the pit, where the water was shallowest, and it had driven itself in at a steep slant, so that rather more than half of it was sunk beneath the surface and the rest stood up out of the pond like the stern of a stranded boat. It had torn a great raw gash in the bank as it went in; the gravel and clay were flung up on every side in heaps, the rushes were flattened and blackened for yards about, and a willow that had stood at the edge lay broken with its roots in the air. The water about the Thing was in a state of perpetual agitation, not boiling exactly, but shuddering and seething, and at the line where it met the metal it hissed continually and sent up the steam we had seen. A smell of hot iron and of scorched weed hung over everything. Dead fish, I remember, lay white upon the surface all about the near end of the pond, and a moorhen was running to and fro among the rushes on the farther side, crying.

What was visible of the object was a great curved surface, very large, as broad at the least as a railway carriage and much thicker, covered with a thick scaly crust of a dun colour, which was flaking off here and there as the water struck it. My wife held my arm, and for some little time neither of us said anything. I do not think either of us was frightened then; it was too strange and too quiet for fear. The only sound was that continual hissing and, now and then, a sharp crack as a piece of the crust split away and dropped into the water.

We had been there perhaps a quarter of an hour, and I had gone some way down the broken bank to see it more nearly, when I heard my name called and saw Ogilvy coming across the common at a great pace, bareheaded, with his coat flying. He had seen the thing fall from his observatory, it appeared, and had been searching for it since daybreak on the wrong side of the Chertsey road. He came down the bank to me in a shower of gravel and stood staring, breathing hard.

“There!” he said. “There! Did I not tell you? A meteorite, and a big one. By Heaven, what a size! There’s nothing in the museum at South Kensington to touch it.”

I asked him whether he had ever heard of a meteorite of such a shape. For it had struck me, as I looked at it, that the curve of the visible part was altogether too regular for any rough mass of stone or iron. Where the crust had fallen away one could see beneath it, faintly, something that was not the pitted surface I had seen upon meteorites in collections, but a smooth, dull, whitish metal, and the edge, where the Thing rose out of the water, was not jagged but rounded off in a true and even sweep.

“Shape!” said Ogilvy. “My dear fellow, they take any shape. I have seen them like a loaf, like a flat-iron, like a pear. That crust is the fusion crust; it’s melted in its passage through the air. Every one of them has it.”

“But the shape underneath,” I said. “Look at that edge. It is as round as a gasometer.”

He looked, and I saw a little doubt come into his face, and then go out of it again, as though he had put it away from him by an effort.

“Pure accident,” he said. “A mass of that size spins as it falls, you see, and the air works upon it like a lathe. It would come round. It would come quite round.” And then, with a return of his excitement, “Why, it may be the very thing we saw from the planet. No—no, of course not. A meteor from the shower, I mean—the heavy shower I told you of upon Mars; we are passing through the same stream of stuff, very likely. That would account for everything.”

I pointed out to him that it would account for nothing of the kind, and that if meteorites were falling upon Mars it was no reason why one of them should come to Ottershaw. He would not have it. He talked very fast, of iron and nickel, of the Cranbourne stone and the great mass at Melbourne, of the heat of passage through the air, of how the thing must have been hollowed and smoothed by the friction; and I think the very vehemence with which he talked was the measure of what he was trying not to think. I have wondered since whether, in that first half hour, he did not see as clearly as I what the Thing might be, and fight against the idea because it was too monstrous for a sober man of science to entertain. My wife, who had come a little way down the bank behind us, listened without a word. She told me afterwards that it was then, hearing Ogilvy argue so, that she first began to be afraid.

By nine o’clock the people had begun to come. The steam must have been visible from the Chertsey road, and a carter who had seen it had spread the news in Ottershaw. First came a couple of labourers from the brickfield, and then some boys, and then a man on a bicycle, and then a whole party of people from the village, with a dog that barked incessantly at the water; and after that they came in a steady stream, until by ten there were some fifty or sixty people ranged along the brink of the pit and standing upon the heaps of thrown-up gravel, talking, pointing, and staring. Ogilvy, with a sort of proprietary air, went among them explaining that it was a meteorite of the first magnitude and that no one must meddle with it, and he sent one of the boys running to the village to telegraph to Lord Hilton’s bailiff, on whose land, it appeared, the pit lay, and another to the station with a message to a friend of his at the Royal Society.

It was a little after ten that the young fellow burned himself. He was a lad of eighteen or nineteen, a butcher’s boy from Chertsey, as I learned afterwards, who had come out on his round and left his cart at the top of the common; a red-faced, cheerful, swaggering young fellow, with his sleeves rolled up. There was some talk among the bystanders of how hot the thing still was, and he laughed at it, and said that it had been lying in the water six hours and must be as cold as a pump handle by now. Before anyone could stop him he had waded out up to his knees in the shallows, at a place where the water had ceased to seethe, and laid his hand flat upon the metal where a great flake of the crust had broken away.

He screamed, and snatched it back, and fell over backwards into the water with a splash, and came out again upon the bank floundering and white as paper, holding his hand out before him and staring at it. The palm and the insides of the fingers were blistered white, and I could see the skin of them shrivelled and puckered as if it had been laid upon a stove. The crowd surged about him. A woman cried out. Some one had the sense to plunge the hand back into the water at the edge of the pit, farther from the Thing, where it was cool, and my wife tore a strip from her petticoat to bind it. The boy sat upon the gravel with his teeth chattering, saying over and over again, “It ain’t cold. It ain’t cold at all. It was hotter than it looks,” in a kind of stupid astonishment. Presently two of the brickfield men took him away between them up the common to find the doctor at Ottershaw.

That incident altered the temper of the crowd. Until then there had been a certain holiday jocularity about it all, and after it there was very little. People stood back from the edge of the pit and spoke in lower voices, and looked at the steaming metal with a new respect. Ogilvy went down to the brink and peered at the place where the boy had touched it, and came back to me, frowning.

“It should not be as hot as that,” he said, half to himself. “Not after six hours in water. Not the outside of it.”

“Unless,” I said, “the heat is coming from within.”

He looked at me sharply, and for the first time he did not answer me with his meteorites. He only said, “Nonsense. The mass is enormous. It holds its heat. That’s all,” and turned away to order a boy off the heaps of gravel. But I noticed that thereafter he stood a long time by himself, at the edge of the pit, watching the place where the metal met the water, with his hands behind him.

The sun rose higher and it grew very hot. The steam from the pond thinned, but did not cease, and the water about the Thing still shuddered continually. More people came: tradesmen from Chertsey in their carts, some ladies from one of the big houses with a groom, a pair of young men with a camera who set it up upon three legs on the heap of gravel and were very much in everybody’s way. Somebody had brought ginger beer and oranges to sell. A policeman arrived from Ottershaw and stood about with an air of not knowing what was expected of him. The talk went round and round, and I heard every theory, from the meteorite to a balloon, and from a balloon to a piece broken off the moon. One old man insisted to anyone who would listen that it was a sign of the end of the world, and was laughed at.

For my own part I could not rid myself of the thought of those ten flames I had seen, or rather that one flame that I had seen with my own eyes, the reddish flash at the edge of the planet on the night I sat with Ogilvy in his observatory. I said nothing of it to anyone. It seemed too wild a thing to say aloud among ginger beer and oranges. But the more I looked at that smooth round edge rising out of the water, the less I believed in Ogilvy’s lathe of air.

It was getting on towards noon when I began to press my wife to go home. She had stood beside me all the morning, and she was tired and very pale, and I did not like the look of the crowd, which was growing thicker and more unruly every hour, nor, if I am to be honest, did I like the thought of her so near to that Thing, though I could have given no reason for the feeling that would have satisfied Ogilvy. She did not want to go. She asked me to come with her, and when I said that I must stay a little and see what Ogilvy's friends from London made of it, she looked at me very steadily and asked what I thought it was.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Very likely Ogilvy is right.”

“You don’t think so,” she said.

I told her that it did not matter what I thought, that nothing could come of it, that it was only a great hot stone in a pond, and that I would be home to tea; and at last, a little against her will, she let me put her upon the path across the common. I watched her go up the slope between the heather and the gorse, stopping once at the top to look back and lift her hand, and then she was over the rise and out of sight. I turned back to the pit. The crowd was thicker than ever along the brink, the dog was still barking, the water still hissed about the half-buried metal, and Ogilvy was standing where I had left him, watching.

I got on my legs at last, which is a longer business at seventy than you might suppose, and stood looking at our young gentleman as if he had dropped down out of the sky upon the Shivering Sand.

When I last saw Mr. Franklin, he was a little lad in a round jacket. He had begged a ride on my shoulders about the grounds, and had paid for his ride by borrowing seven-and-sixpence off me the morning he went away. I set that loan down as lost to me, like the rest of the money a man lends in this world. He had gone abroad and grown up in France and Germany and Italy, and here he was back again: a slim, sunburnt, easy-mannered gentleman with a little brown beard and a laugh that came out of him before he had well opened his mouth. And he had the seven-and-sixpence in his waistcoat pocket, and he paid it over there on the sand, with interest in the shape of a half-sovereign, which I did not have the heart to refuse.

"But what brings you here four hours before your time, sir?" I asked, when I had got my breath and my money safe together. "The fly was ordered for the afternoon train. My lady is out. Miss Rachel is out. There isn't so much as a bed aired for you!"

"I'll sleep on the sand, if the beds won't have me," says Mr. Franklin. "As to how I came to be here, Betteredge, I'll tell you, because you're the one man in the house I would rather tell than any other. I came because of a letter."

He took me by the arm (his foreign way again) and walked me slowly up through the sandhills towards the plantation. When we were among the firs, where there was nobody to see us but the crows, he stopped, looked back once over his shoulder, which I thought a queer thing for a gentleman to do on his own aunt's land, and took a letter out of his breast-pocket.

"This was left at my father's house in London yesterday evening," he said. "Nobody saw who brought it. The servant found it under the door. Read it, and tell me what you make of it."

I put on my spectacles. Here I must stop and beg your pardon, good reader, for being so particular. You may not care whether an old man puts his spectacles on or off. But Mr. Bruff has told me to set down the exact words of every paper that came into my hands, and I can't read a written paper without my spectacles. So there they go on to my nose, and here is the letter, word for word, as I have since had leave to copy it:

*"Sir,—You are known to leave London for Yorkshire by the afternoon train on Thursday. You are known to carry with you something that was put into your hands to carry. It is not only your friends who know this. Go by the first train in the morning and not by the afternoon. Speak to no one on the road. Do not let what you carry leave your own keeping until you are under your aunt's roof. This comes from one who wishes you no harm, and who has no wish to be thanked.*

*"A Well-Wisher."*

There was no date to it and no address. The hand was small and upright, like a clerk's, and the paper was of the common kind you may buy at any stationer's shop for a penny a quire.

"Well?" says Mr. Franklin.

"Well, sir," says I, handing it back, "if I had a letter like that pushed under my door, I should put it in the fire, and go by what train I pleased."

"That was exactly my own view of it at nine o'clock last night," says Mr. Franklin. "At eleven o'clock I thought it might be as well to be on the safe side. At six this morning I was at the station. Whether I was followed or not I can't tell you; I looked hard at every face on the platform, and I never saw such an innocent set of people in my life. But here I am, safe and sound, and here is the thing I was told to take care of, still in my own keeping."

He clapped his hand on the left breast of his coat as he spoke. I noticed then, what I had not noticed before, that the coat sat a little stiffly there, as if there was something square and hard underneath it.

Now I promised my daughter Penelope, only that same afternoon, to put her question about the Indians and the ink and the little boy to Mr. Franklin. There was the very time and the very place for it. Did I do it? I did not. I was so taken up with the letter, and with the hand on the breast of the coat, and with Mr. Franklin's looking over his shoulder at the crows, that Penelope went clean out of my head. I own it to my shame. I did put the question later, as you shall hear in its proper place. But you, who have read in my last chapter what the boy said about the English gentleman who "has got It about him," will have been sharper at that moment than I was. I don't grudge you the satisfaction.

We came out of the plantation on to the lawn, and Mr. Franklin stopped again.

"Betteredge," says he, "you keep the plate?"

"I have kept the plate, sir, for more years than you have been alive."

"And the plate-room has a good lock on it?"

"The best lock in Yorkshire, Mr. Franklin, and an iron door behind the oak one. The late Sir John had it put in after the robbery at Frizinghall. There's only two keys to it. My lady keeps one, and I keep the other."

"Then you'll do me a favour." He put his hand inside his coat and took out a small packet, about the size of a snuff-box, done up in white paper and sealed at every fold with black wax. I saw a crest on the wax, but I could not make it out, and I did not like to look too close. "Lock that up in your plate-room for tonight," says he, "and don't ask me what's inside it. Tomorrow I'll take it back and tell you everything, or, at any rate, as much of everything as I'm allowed to tell. Tonight I want to know that it's behind an iron door, and that the key of the door is in the pocket of the most trustworthy man in England."

I leave any reader to picture what an old servant feels when a young gentleman says a thing like that to him. I took the packet. It was light in my hand; lighter than I had expected from the stiff look of his coat. Whatever was in it, it was not the family silver.

"You may trust me, sir," I said.

"I know I may," says Mr. Franklin. "That's why I gave it to you."

I went into the house by the back way, straight to the plate-room. I unlocked the oak door and the iron door, put the packet on the top shelf between the great silver épergne and the case of Sir John's racing cups, and locked both doors on it again. Then I tried the two locks one after the other, like a man who can't believe his own hands, and put the key on my watch-chain, where it hung under my waistcoat for the rest of the day. I never knew till then how much a key weighs.

I have been asked since, by persons who shall be nameless, whether I was not tempted to feel the packet, or to hold it up to the window, or to shake it by my ear. I answer that I was not. I am curious by nature, as all old men are. But a sealed packet given into your hands on your honour is not a thing to be felt and shaken. If you think otherwise, you and I were brought up differently, and there's an end of it.

When I came out of the plate-room, there was Penelope waiting for me in the passage, with her eyes as round as saucers.

"Father," she says, "is it true Mr. Franklin has come?"

"True as the Gospel, my dear. He's on the terrace this minute, smoking one of his foreign cigars, and asking the gardener what he's done to the roses."

"Then it's true about Rosanna too," says Penelope, dropping her voice.

"What's true about Rosanna?"

"She hasn't come back to the house, father. Nancy says you went to fetch her from the sands, and Mr. Franklin came, and Rosanna ran off. But she didn't run home. Young Duffy was cutting sticks at the end of the plantation, and he saw her go past him along the shore path, walking fast, with her head down. She's gone on to Cobb's Hole to her friend there. And she hasn't asked leave, and it isn't her day out, and Nancy is telling everybody in the servants' hall."

"Then Nancy may leave off telling them," says I, "and say it came from me. The girl had a fainting fit this morning. I gave her leave to walk it off." Which was a lie, but a small one, and I believe it has been forgiven me. "What made her go to Cobb's Hole, of all places, at this time of day?"

Penelope looked at me in a way that women have, as if there were something I ought to know already and she was not going to tell me. "I don't know, father," she says. "Only she went red and white when I asked Nancy about her, and so did Nancy, and so did everybody. Rosanna was never like this before."

I thought of the red I had seen in the girl's face on the sand, and I could make nothing of it. I set it down, like Mr. Franklin, to the varnish from foreign parts, and went about my business.

My lady's carriage came back at a little after four. Miss Rachel was not in it. She had been persuaded to stay on at the house where they had lunched, and was to be sent home in their carriage after dinner. So my lady came up the steps alone, and Mr. Franklin ran down them to meet her. I stood in the hall as was my duty. I saw her hold out both her hands to him and look at him for a long minute, as if she was trying to find her dead sister's face in his. I think she found it; her eyes were wet when she took him in with her to the drawing-room.

I had my orders to bring in tea, and so it happened that I was in the room, with the tray in my hands, when my lady said the thing I am now going to set down. I would not have you think I listened at the door. I never did such a thing in my life, excepting once, and that was in the year 'nineteen, and the less said about it the better.

They had been talking of Mr. Franklin's father, and of his travels, and of the German universities, and of all manner of things, when Mr. Franklin, very easy and pleasant, began:

"By-the-bye, aunt, I have been charged with something that concerns my uncle Herncastle—"

My lady put down her cup. She did not raise her voice; she never raised it, in all the years I served her. But she spoke in a way that made me stand stock still, with the tray, by the side-table.

"Franklin," she said, "you are my sister's son, and you are welcome in this house for as long as you please to stay in it. But I must ask one thing of you, and I ask it once for all. My brother's name is not to be spoken under my roof. Not to me, not to Rachel, and not to anyone in my service. Whatever concerns him, whatever you have been charged with, you will settle with the proper persons outside these doors, or not at all. I have my reasons, and I have had them for many years. I will not give them, and I will not be asked for them."

There was a silence in the room. I heard the clock on the chimney-piece, and a bee against the window-glass.

Mr. Franklin was a young man who talked, as you will find, a great deal and on every subject under the sun. But he had the grace to know when to hold his tongue. He got up, went over to my lady, and kissed her hand.

"You shall never hear it from me, aunt," he said. "I give you my word."

"Thank you, my dear," says my lady. And then, turning her head, "Betteredge, you may put the tray down. I believe it is growing heavy."

So it was. I put it down and went out, and I will own to you that my hands shook a little as I shut the door. My lady and her brother had been strangers for years, as everybody in the house knew, and the reason for it was understood to be the ugly story about him that followed him home from India. But I had never heard her refuse his name outright until that day. Here was the key of the plate-room lying on my waistcoat, and a sealed packet behind the iron door that had come from London in the charge of Mr. Herncastle's nephew; and here was my lady forbidding the subject in her own drawing-room. And I was a dull old man, and I didn't put the two things together. At any rate, not so as to say it out loud, even to myself.

The rest of the day went on as days go in a great house, with the dinner and the lamps and the ringing of bells. Mr. Franklin dined with my lady and kept her laughing, I heard, from the soup to the dessert. After dinner I got him alone for five minutes in the library, and kept my promise to Penelope at last. What passed between us about the Indians, and what Mr. Franklin said of it, I keep for my next chapter, where it belongs. I will only say here that he did not laugh, and that when I left him he was sitting very still with his cigar gone out between his fingers.

Miss Rachel came home a little after ten, and went straight up to her room. I heard her on the stairs, singing under her breath, and I did not see her. At half-past ten I made my rounds. I tried the doors and windows, as I have done every night these fifty years. I tried the oak door of the plate-room, and the iron door behind it, twice over each. Before I went to my own quarters I looked into the servants' hall. Nancy was yawning over the fire, and Rosanna Spearman's chair at the table was empty.

"Not back?" I said.

"Not back, Mr. Betteredge," says Nancy, who had got over her sulks, being sleepy. "And the back door to be locked at eleven, and me not to lock her out, I suppose?"

"You'll leave it on the latch for her," says I, "and I'll answer for it."

Then I went out to the back court, where the night was mild and still, and sat myself down in my beehive chair with a candle in a lantern at my elbow and Robinson Crusoe on my knee. Some of you will laugh when I say that I went to that book because I was uneasy. Let them laugh. I have never yet been uneasy in my life without finding a word in Robinson Crusoe to set me right. I opened him where he fell open, and this is what I read:

"Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself, when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about."

I read that three times over and felt a good deal the better for it, as I always do. Then I sat on with the book shut on my finger, and the key of the plate-room under my waistcoat, and I listened. I heard the sea a long way off, coming in over the Shivering Sand. I heard the last of the house going up to bed. What I did not hear, though I listened for it till the church clock at Cobb's Hole struck eleven and my candle was burnt down to nothing, was the click of the back-door latch, and a light step in the passage, that would have told me Rosanna Spearman had come home.

The First National Bank occupied the ground floor of a six-story gray building across Broadway from the Herald. I went over there and asked for somebody who could tell me about Donald Willsson's account. A uniformed guard passed me to a clerk, and the clerk passed me to a man called Kellerman, who sat inside a mahogany rail near the back with an adding machine and a pot of paste.

Kellerman was a paying teller who had been moved up to something with more paper and less money in it. He was about thirty-five, pink, with thin sandy hair combed carefully over the top of his head and rimless glasses that he kept taking off and putting back on. His face said he had read about the murder in the paper that morning and hadn't liked it, and that he liked a stranger asking about it even less.

I showed him the Continental card and told him why I was in Personville. It didn't please him, but it didn't send him to the vice-president either.

"Yesterday afternoon," I said, "a little before three, Willsson wrote a check for five thousand dollars on this bank. I'd like to know who cashed it."

He put his glasses on and looked at me through them.

"May I ask how you know that?"

"The stub's in his desk. Amount and nothing else."

He went away with that and was gone ten minutes. When he came back he had a ledger card, and he sat down and held it flat on the desk with both hands, as if it might blow away.

"That check hasn't come in," he said. "It hasn't been presented here, and it hasn't come through the clearing house. It wasn't certified either. Mr. Willsson didn't come into the bank at all yesterday, so far as anyone can remember, and he would have been remembered."

"Could it have been cashed somewhere else in town, and not come through yet?"

"It could. If it went to one of the other banks yesterday afternoon, it would have come to us this morning. It didn't. If somebody cashed it with a merchant or a hotel," he looked as if he didn't think much of merchants and hotels, "it might be a day or two. Five thousand dollars is a large check to cash in that way, even with Mr. Willsson's signature on it."

"Anything to stop it being paid now?"

He took his glasses off again.

"Mr. Willsson is dead. When we have official notice we will stop payment on his account until the estate is settled. We haven't had official notice. I suppose," he said slowly, "that the morning paper is notice enough, for practical purposes. I'd have to ask."

"Don't ask," I said. "Let it come in if it's going to come in. I want to know who brings it. If it turns up, here or through the clearing house, will you phone me at the Great Western? Before you do anything else about it."

He didn't like that. He said it was irregular. He said Mr. Elihu Willsson would have to be consulted, as the principal stockholder, and as the dead man's father. I said that Mr. Elihu Willsson had spent part of the morning calling me names, and that if Kellerman went and asked him whether he could do me a favor he'd get the answer I expected. He thought about that, turning the ledger card over and back again, and then said he would telephone me, as a courtesy, if the check appeared. I didn't believe him more than halfway, but I thanked him.

Outside I stood on the curb for a while and looked at the traffic. Twenty minutes away from the office, a check for five thousand dollars in his pocket, and he hadn't gone near the bank. Afterwards a woman had phoned him to make a date for ten o'clock, the same hour he had given me. He had said he would have to hurry away. He had hurried as far as the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street, where somebody in an alley put four bullets into him.

I found a lunch counter and ate a steak that had been cut from something with a lot of muscle, and went back to the hotel.

The clerk said there had been nobody asking for me and no messages. I went up to my room, took off my shoes, lay down on the bed with a cigarette, and tried to fit some of the pieces together. None of them fit. At about four o'clock the phone rang.

"A lady to see you," the clerk said. His voice had an interested sound in it. "Mrs. Willsson."

I said I'd be down, put my shoes on, and went down.

She was standing by a pillar in the lobby, away from the chairs, in a black tailored suit and a small black hat with a veil that came down as far as her nose. The veil didn't hide much. Her eyes had been crying or hadn't slept, or both, but her mouth was firm and red. The two or three men loafing in the lobby were looking at her, and weren't pretending not to.

"I would like to talk to you," she said. "Not here."

There was a writing room off the mezzanine that nobody ever used. I took her up there. She sat in a chair with her back to the window, put her gloved hands together in her lap, and looked at me with her chin up.

"You went this morning to my husband's father," she said.

"Who told you that?"

"That does not matter. It is true?"

"Yeah."

"And you told him that I went out last night, while you waited at my house, and that I came back with blood on my shoe. And that my husband was killed while I was out."

"I told him when you went out and when you came back. I told him I thought I'd seen blood on your slipper. I'm not sure it was blood. Was it?"

She didn't answer that. She said:

"He hates me. He has always hated me, from the first day. He would be very happy to see me hanged, that old man. You know that now?"

"He gave me that idea."

"And the police? You have told them also?"

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Nobody asked me," I said.

She looked at me for a while through the veil. Then she opened her bag, took out a handkerchief, didn't use it, and put it back.

"I will tell you what happened," she said. "Then you will see there is nothing. Somebody telephoned to me that my husband was with a woman, in a house in Hurricane Street, and I went there. I was jealous. You would say, a fool. I drove there, and I did not find the house. I went up and down in the car, and I did not find it, and I came home. That is all."

"You didn't get out of the car?"

"No."

"Then where'd the blood come from?"

"There was no blood." She said it quickly. "Perhaps it was mud. It was dark. I do not know what you saw."

"Who phoned you?"

"I do not know. A man. He did not say his name."

"And you didn't hear any shots, going up and down the block?"

"I did not hear any shots."

"Then you weren't in the eleven-hundred block at ten-forty," I said. "You'd have heard them. The neighbors did."

Her hands came apart in her lap and went back together.

"I do not know what block it was," she said. "I told you, I did not find the house."

"All right. What did Max Thaler want at your house this morning?"

That hit her. Her head jerked back an inch, and for a moment the firm red mouth wasn't so firm. Then she got it under control.

"You are very busy," she said, "for a man whose employer is dead."

"I've been paid for some of it. Thaler?"

"He came to say he was sorry about my husband. People come to say they are sorry. Is that strange?"

"From Thaler it's strange. Your husband was trying to run him out of town."

"My husband was trying to do many foolish things." She stood up. So did I. She was a little shorter than I'd thought, standing close. "Listen to me. I did not kill my husband. I did not want him dead. You will believe that or not, as you please. But you are here to work, and my husband paid you, and now he is dead and there is nobody to pay you. I will pay you. You will find out who killed him, and you will not go running to the police and to that old man with stories about my slippers."

"Nothing doing," I said.

"You have not heard how much."

"I don't have to. If you didn't kill him, you don't need to buy me. If you did, you can't."

She said something in French that I didn't catch, but didn't need a dictionary for. Then she said in English:

"You are a fool, too. You will be sorry."

"People keep telling me that."

"Did my husband give you any money? Before, I mean? Yesterday?"

"No," I said. "Why?"

"Nothing," she said, and went out of the writing room, and down the stairs, and across the lobby with her chin up, and out to the curb, where the Buick coupé was waiting. I watched her from the mezzanine rail. She drove it herself.

I stayed where I was and chewed on her last question. She knew, or thought she knew, that there had been money in the air. Maybe she knew about the check. Maybe somebody had told her about it this morning, somebody in three shades of brown.

I went up to my room, washed, and went out to eat. I took my time over dinner in a place on King Street where the coffee was good and the waiter let me alone, and I didn't get back to the Great Western until after eight.

The clerk had an envelope for me. It was a plain hotel envelope, not the Great Western's, sealed, with my room number penciled on it and nothing else.

"Who left it?"

"A kid brought it in. About half an hour ago." The clerk didn't look at me when he said it. "Said to give it to you personal."

"What kind of kid?"

"Just a kid. I didn't notice."

He had noticed, all right. He had noticed so well that he wasn't going to remember anything about it for anybody. I took the envelope upstairs and opened it under the light.

There was one sheet of paper in it, folded twice. The message was written in pencil, in small, neat, back-slanting letters:

You were seen talking to the lady this afternoon. She had nothing to do with it and neither did I. If you are smart you will look somewhere else. If you are not smart there is a train to Frisco at eleven-ten.

There was no signature. None was needed. Whoever had written it wanted me to know who had written it, and wanted to be able to say, later, that he hadn't written anything. The note was polite, except for the part about the train. I read it twice, and put it in my wallet, and sat on the edge of the bed and smoked.

It told me three things. Somebody had been watching the hotel, or the lady, or both. Thaler cared what I thought about the widow, enough to go on record about it without putting his name on the record. And the people who ran Personville had gotten around to noticing me in less than twenty-four hours. That was faster than I liked.

It didn't tell me anything about the check.

At half past nine I went down to the telegraph office in the lobby, borrowed a pad and a pencil from the girl behind the counter, and wrote a wire to the Old Man in San Francisco. It took three drafts to get it down to something the agency's bookkeeper wouldn't complain about. What I sent was this:

CLIENT DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD HERE LAST NIGHT BEFORE I SAW HIM STOP POLICE HAVE NOTHING STOP WIDOW WAS OUT OF HOUSE AT TIME OF KILLING AND HER STORY IS THIN STOP FATHER ELIHU WHO OWNS TOWN SAYS SHE DID IT AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE HER HANGED STOP LOCAL GAMBLER THALER CALLED ON HER THIS MORNING AND HAS SINCE WARNED ME OFF BY UNSIGNED NOTE STOP CLIENT WROTE CHECK FIVE THOUSAND AFTERNOON BEFORE DEATH NO PAYEE ON STUB CHECK NOT PRESENTED OR CERTIFIED AT FIRST NATIONAL STOP HAVE RETAINER BALANCE AND NOBODY ALIVE TO REPORT TO STOP WIDOW OFFERED TO HIRE ME I DECLINED STOP ADVISE WHETHER TO STAY ON AGENCY ACCOUNT OR COME HOME STOP WILL STAY UNTIL I HEAR

The girl counted the words with the eraser end of her pencil, moving her lips, and told me what it would cost. I paid her and watched her put it on the hook. Then I went up to my room again.

I opened the window. Personville's air came in, smelling of the smelters, and brought the noise of Broadway with it. Somewhere down there the Stutz was parked, or wasn't. Somewhere a woman who had phoned a man at his office in the afternoon was keeping out of sight, or wasn't. Old Elihu was propped up in his bed on the hill, hating his son's wife. The son's wife was driving her Buick home to an empty house.

And five thousand dollars in paper was in somebody's pocket, or somebody's safe, or at the bottom of somebody's stove. Donald Willsson had written it, carried it out of his office a little before three, and come back twenty minutes later without it. It hadn't gone to the bank. It hadn't been cashed anywhere that the bank knew of. Either whoever had it was waiting until the talk died down, or they knew the dead man's name on it was worth less, now, than the trouble it would bring them, or they'd never meant to cash it at all.

I undressed, put the gun under my pillow where I could reach it, and turned off the light. The eleven-ten to San Francisco whistled out of the yards while I was still awake. I lay there and listened until it was gone and thought about the check.

Eve was halfway down Shaftesbury Avenue before the full ethical bearings of the matter began to present themselves to her. The rain had stopped with the same abruptness with which it had begun, and a watery sun was doing its best to suggest that nothing of the kind had ever happened. And there she was, strolling along in the sunshine with a total stranger's umbrella tucked under her arm, a very good umbrella with a gold band round the handle, the sort of umbrella that people have views about when it goes astray.

She stopped outside a music-shop and looked at it. It seemed, as far as an umbrella can, to be looking back at her reproachfully.

“You can't keep it,” said Eve to herself. “That would be stealing. And you can't very well sell it, because that would be worse. So you'll have to take it back.”

It was not an easy decision for one who had so lately been lamenting that the world was full of hats and safety bets. But Eve had her code, and it contained a clause about umbrellas. Besides, there was something about the solemn young man with the eyeglass which made her feel that he ought to have his property returned to him. He had looked like someone whose umbrellas were important to him.

She went into a stationer's, bought a sheet of notepaper and an envelope for twopence, borrowed a pen from a lady who seemed to consider the request a slur on the establishment, and wrote:

“Thank you so much. It kept the rain off my hat, which was the thing that mattered most, and I don't think anyone has ever done anything so kind and so peculiar for me before. I hope you didn't get too wet going back.”

She thought for a moment about signing it, and decided against it. There seemed to be something not quite proper about sending one's name to a man who had dashed hatless across Dover Street and then vanished like a genie returning to his bottle. She addressed the envelope “To the Gentleman who had no Hat,” and felt that this covered the situation adequately.

The hall-porter of the Drones Club was a man of wide experience and he had long ago stopped being surprised by anything the members did. But he looked a little surprised when a young lady in a black bird of Paradise feather pushed an umbrella and an envelope across his counter.

“Would you give these, please,” said Eve, “to a tall gentleman with an eyeglass? He's very thin and very well dressed, and about half an hour ago he wasn't wearing a hat.”

The porter's face showed that he had identified the gentleman at once.

“Certainly, miss. The gentleman is in the club at present. Shall I send up and----”

“No, please don't,” said Eve hastily. “Just give them to him. Thank you so much.”

She fled, and the porter, having put the umbrella on the counter and the envelope beside it, went back to the racing edition of the evening paper, which had just come in.

* * * * *

It was some twenty minutes later that Psmith came down the stairs on his way to lunch, and his eye, sweeping the hall with its customary benevolence, fell on the umbrella.

“Comrade Bleakley,” he said, “unless I deceive myself, that is an old acquaintance.”

“Left for you, sir, by a young lady. And a note, sir.”

Psmith took the envelope, read the inscription, and was visibly affected. He opened it, read the contents twice, and then folded the sheet carefully and put it in his breast-pocket, where it lay, as he put it to himself, next to the heart.

“A young lady,” he said. “Did she leave a name?”

“No, sir.”

“An address? Some slight clue, such as the number of her telephone or the name of her favourite poet?”

“No, sir. Just went off quick, sir.”

“It is always the way,” said Psmith. “They come into our lives, they go out again, and all they leave behind them is an umbrella.” He picked it up and weighed it tenderly. “Still, it is something.”

He was still standing there holding it, like one who communes with a relic, when the swing-door flew open and a young man came in with the air of someone who has recently been rained on and is still upset about it. His name was the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, and he was, as the porter could have told anybody, the owner of the umbrella. He was a pink young man with a small moustache, and his feelings were plainly on the surface.

“I say!” said the Hon. Hugo. “I say, look here! That's my umbrella!”

Psmith turned and looked at him through his monocle with grave courtesy.

“It is?”

“Of course it is. I'd know it anywhere. It's got my initials on the band. I left it in the cloak-room this morning, and when I wanted it to go out to the dentist's it had gone, and I had to go in a cab, and the cab broke down in the Haymarket and I got soaked walking the rest. And now here you are, standing with it as cool as dammit. I mean to say!”

Psmith considered the situation. It occurred to him that a full explanation would involve a lady and an awning, and that the Hon. Hugo, a noted chatterer, would have the story all over the club by tea-time, with improvements of his own. The thing had to be kept private. It is one thing to commandeer a fellow-member's umbrella in the service of Beauty. It is quite another to have one's motives discussed over the billiard-table.

“Comrade Walderwick,” he said, “your emotion does you credit. A man should love his umbrella. But let us talk business. What would you take for it?”

“Take for it?”

“Its market value,” said Psmith, examining the article, “I should estimate at something in the neighbourhood of eighteen shillings. Say a pound, to allow for the gold band and a certain distinction of appearance. I will give you ten.”

“Ten bob?”

“Ten pounds.”

The Hon. Hugo stared at him. His mouth opened slightly, and his moustache seemed to droop in bewilderment.

“Ten quid? For an umbrella?”

“For this umbrella,” said Psmith. “I have grown attached to it. We have been through a great deal together, this umbrella and I, though admittedly in rather a short space of time. There are sentimental associations. I could not bear to part with it.”

“You're potty,” said the Hon. Hugo with conviction.

“Very possibly. But my money is perfectly sound.” Psmith produced a note-case and extracted from it two crisp five-pound notes, which he held out. They represented a considerable proportion of the capital with which he proposed to face the world now that he had given up fish, but he paid it over with the ease of a millionaire tipping a waiter. “The umbrella, Comrade Walderwick, is dead. Long live the umbrella.”

The Hon. Hugo took the notes. He looked at them, and then he looked at Psmith, and then he looked at the umbrella, as though he were trying to see what he had missed in it all those months.

“Well, I mean, if you really want it----”

“I really want it.”

“Right-ho, then,” said the Hon. Hugo, a little dazed. “I can get a dozen for this. Rummy thing, though.”

He went off towards the bar, shaking his head, to tell someone about it, and Psmith, with his property under his arm, went out to lunch. For the first time in his life he was a man who owned an umbrella outright, and he felt that his position in society had improved.

* * * * *

Lord Emsworth had asked Miss Halliday to call on him at the Senior Conservative Club in Northumberland Avenue at three o'clock, and at three o'clock precisely Eve was shown into a small and sombre room hung with portraits of statesmen who all seemed to disapprove of her. At a quarter past three the door opened and a long, thin, stooping gentleman came in, peering round him like an elderly bird looking for worms on a lawn.

“Eh?” said Lord Emsworth. “Ah! Yes. Quite so. You are----?”

“Miss Halliday, Lord Emsworth. You asked me to come and see you about the library.”

“The library! Of course, yes, the library. Baxter mentioned it.” He sat down and felt in his pockets in a hopeful sort of way. “I have mislaid my glasses. Most annoying. I had them at lunch, I'm certain of it, because I remember reading the menu. Or was that yesterday? I have had a very trying day, Miss--er--. I was to have lunched with a poet. A Canadian fellow named McTodd. My sister particularly wished it. And the fellow never came. I sat there for an hour and a quarter, and not a sign of him.”

Eve started. It was not a common name, and she thought of poor Cynthia on her way to Brighton, and of how odd it was that the man who had deserted Cynthia should also have deserted this vague old gentleman. It seemed to be something Mr. McTodd made a habit of. But this was no time to be talking about Cynthia's troubles, and she only said that it must have been very tiresome.

“Tiresome? It was more than that. I shall have to explain it all to my sister.” Lord Emsworth's face clouded, and he was silent for a moment, like a man picturing an interview he would sooner not have. Then he brightened. “However! The library. Yes. You understand cataloguing, I take it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Eve, with a confidence that was not altogether backed by experience.

“Capital. Capital. It is a large library. Nobody has touched it for years. My father meant to have it done, and so did I, and so, I believe, did my grandfather. Baxter says it is a disgrace.” He paused. “And how did you happen to hear of the post, Miss--er--Halliday?”

This was the point at which, as Eve afterwards admitted, she should have stopped and thought. But the room was stuffy, the statesmen on the walls were glaring at her, and Lord Emsworth was blinking at her in such a kindly and short-sighted way that she answered with perfect candour.

“Freddie told me about it.”

The effect was remarkable. Lord Emsworth gave a start so violent that it seemed to shake him all over. His mild face turned pink, and then a pale and anxious shade of mauve.

“Freddie? Frederick? My son?”

“Yes. I met him at----”

“Good God!” said Lord Emsworth.

He had risen from his chair and was staring at her with the expression of a man who, having gone out to pick a rose, sees a large wasp in it. Too late Eve remembered certain things she had heard about the Hon. Freddie Threepwood--that he had had to be removed from Oxford, that there had been some trouble with a chorus-girl, and that his father, as a result, had taken to regarding any woman under fifty who so much as mentioned him as a potential daughter-in-law of the most alarming kind. She remembered also, with a sinking of the heart, that Freddie had proposed to her twice in the Park and once at a dance, and that it was altogether likely that this was written clearly all over her face.

“Frederick recommended you?” said Lord Emsworth faintly. “Are you a--an intimate friend of Frederick's?”

“Oh, no,” said Eve, with great firmness. “Hardly at all. I just know him slightly, the way one does know people. He happened to mention that you wanted someone for the library, and I happened to want something to do, and that was all. I've only met him about three times.”

It was not strictly true, since the proposals alone accounted for three occasions and there had been several others in between, but she felt that the situation called for a little economy with facts. Lord Emsworth sat down again, slowly. He looked at her doubtfully, and Eve looked back at him with all the innocence of a child who has been asked whether it knows anything about the jam.

There followed a pause, during which his lordship could be seen struggling with the problem. On the one hand, a young woman whom Frederick knew, and who had come to Blandings on Frederick's suggestion, was a thing to be viewed with the gravest suspicion. On the other hand, Baxter had arranged the whole matter. Baxter had written the letters and fixed the dates and done whatever it is that Baxter did, and Lord Emsworth shrank from telling Baxter that it would all have to be done again. He also shrank, a good deal more, from the labour of interviewing a whole string of further young women in rooms like this one. And, in any case, this girl seemed a very nice girl. She had a pleasant voice, and he was almost sure, though he could not see her very clearly without his glasses, that she was pretty. He liked pretty girls, so long as Frederick did not marry them.

“Well, well,” he said at length, having apparently decided that the whole thing was too much for him. “Well, well, well. Baxter has arranged it all. You will come down to Blandings, then, as we--er--as Baxter arranged. He will write to you about trains. And Miss Halliday----”

“Yes, Lord Emsworth?”

“Frederick,” said his lordship with feeling, “will be there too. I mention it merely.”

He shook hands with her absently, and wandered out still patting his pockets, and Eve went out into Northumberland Avenue feeling as though she had been on the Big Dipper at a fair and had not quite got her balance back. She had the post. On the other hand, it was evident that her future employer was going to spend the summer watching her and Freddie as a cat watches a mouse-hole, which was not going to make it any easier to talk to Mr. Keeble about Phyllis without being noticed. It struck her also that she had better be firmer with Freddie than she had ever been.

She decided to walk up to Shaftesbury Avenue and tell Clarkie about it. Clarkie was always good for a sympathetic hearing, and, besides, it had begun to rain again.

* * * * *

It was raining quite steadily by the time she reached the foot of the stairs leading to the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, and it was here that a long figure, coming down those stairs with the unhurried dignity of a bishop leaving a garden-party, stopped on the bottom step, and a grave voice said:

“It is raining. May I offer you the shelter of my umbrella?”

Eve looked up. She saw the monocle. She saw the solemn, friendly face. And she saw, with a start of recognition, an umbrella with a gold band round the handle.

“It's you!” she said.

“Isn't everybody somebody?” said Psmith. “But I agree that I am, in a manner of speaking, me. Where are you going? I will escort you there, and we will keep dry together.”

“You're the man who gave me the umbrella this morning.”

Psmith raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch.

“I fear you are confusing me with someone else. It is a thing that happens. There is a type of face--long, thin, rather distinguished--which is found everywhere in the better parts of London. I myself have been taken for a well-known Cabinet Minister and, on one occasion, for a heron.”

“But that's the umbrella! I'd know it anywhere. I carried it all the way to Shaftesbury Avenue.”

Psmith looked at the umbrella as though seeing it for the first time.

“This?” he said. “This is an old family umbrella. It has been in our possession for--well, for some time. I have the strongest reasons for believing it to be mine. I could produce, if necessary, a witness who would swear that I paid money for it.”

“And you were hatless this morning.”

“A great many men are hatless at one time or another,” said Psmith. “It is one of the problems of our civilisation. I myself, as you see, am wearing a hat this afternoon, which seems to me to settle the question. Shall we walk? The rain, I notice, is getting worse, and your hat, if I may say so, is too good for this sort of thing.”

Eve laughed. She could not help it. There was something about this long young man, with his air of saying the most absurd things as if he were reading the lessons in church, which made it impossible to be dignified with him. They walked together down Shaftesbury Avenue under the umbrella, and she did not know how it happened, but she found herself telling him about her afternoon. She did not mention Lord Emsworth by name, nor Blandings, but she told him about the elderly gentleman who had lost his spectacles, and about the poet who had failed to turn up to lunch, and about the terrible moment when the name of the elderly gentleman's son had been spoken.

“A painful situation,” said Psmith gravely. “But you have got the post?”

“Yes, I've got it. I don't quite know how.”

“It was your personal magnetism,” said Psmith. “Nothing can stand against it. I have been in its presence for four minutes, and I am already a changed man.”

At the corner of Piccadilly Circus the rain eased off, and Eve stopped.

“I'm going this way,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“For what?”

“For the umbrella. This morning.”

“I have told you,” said Psmith, “that you are under a misapprehension. But if I ever meet the fellow, I will tell him you said so. He will be pleased. I have an idea he is the sort of man who would be.”

He raised his hat, and she watched him go off down Piccadilly with the umbrella on his shoulder like a rifle. Neither of them had noticed a taxi-cab, drawn up in the stream of traffic at the corner, from whose window a pink face with a small moustache had been observing them with an expression of dawning intelligence.

* * * * *

It was nearly eight o'clock, and the smoking-room of the Drones Club was empty except for Psmith, who sat in his favourite chair by the window with the umbrella leaning against its arm, when the Hon. Hugo Walderwick came in, dressed for dinner and pleased with himself.

“I say,” he said. “I've got it.”

“You have got what, Comrade Walderwick? Not, I hope, anything catching?”

“Why you bought my umbrella. I saw you this afternoon from a cab, walking along Shaftesbury Avenue under it with a girl. And I knew I'd seen her somewhere before, and I've been thinking about it ever since, and I've just remembered. It was at a dance at the Leightons' in the spring. Freddie Threepwood introduced me. She's a Miss Halliday. Eve Halliday. Freddie's frightfully keen on her. He keeps proposing to her, and she keeps turning him down. Everybody knows about it.” The Hon. Hugo beamed. “So that's what the ten quid was for, eh? Oh, I say, what!”

“You have a remarkable mind, Comrade Walderwick,” said Psmith. “You should put it to some use. Shouldn't you be dining?”

“Oh, rather. Well, so long.” The Hon. Hugo went to the door and paused there. “Eve Halliday,” he said again, as if he were rather proud of it, and he went out chuckling.

Psmith sat on alone. Outside, the lamps had been lit in Dover Street, and the shop-front of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe, with its awning rolled up for the night, looked very plain and uninteresting. He took the note from his breast-pocket and read it again. Then he laid his hand gently on the gold band of the umbrella, which had cost him ten pounds, and looked out of the window at the rain, which had begun again.

“Eve Halliday,” he said to himself. And after a while, as if the matter needed some thought: “Ten pounds. Cheap.”

“*Letter, Hon. Arthur Holmwood to Miss Lucy Westenra.*

“*Albemarle Hotel, 27 May.*

“My own dearest,--

“You told me I was to write you every word of last night, and so I shall, though I warn you there are some words that will not bear writing and some that I had better not remember. You need not be alarmed; it was all very sober at the end, and not so very merry at the beginning, and the best of it was in the middle.

“Quincey had taken a private room, with a fire, though the evening was warm, because he said a camp-fire was in the bargain and he would not be beat. There were only the three of us, as he promised. Jack Seward came late, straight from the asylum, with his hair not properly brushed, and I think he had not eaten all day. You know, dear, what I mean when I say that I was a little shy of meeting either of them. I need not have been. Quincey met me at the door and took me by both hands and looked at me for a long moment without saying anything, and then he said, ‘Art, I’ve seen you come through a fever and a flood, and I never saw you look like this. I reckon the doctor had better take a look at you.’ And Jack came round the table and shook hands with me, and said in that quiet way of his that he had no professional advice to offer, since the case was one where the patient was better than any physician could make him. Lucy, I felt a lump in my throat, and I am not ashamed to tell you so.

“We dined very well, and talked of old times: of the Marquesas, where Quincey swam out through the surf with a line when our boat was stove in; and of the night on the Korea when Jack set my arm by lantern-light and swore at me in Latin the whole while so that I should not notice. Then, when the cloth was drawn, Quincey stood up and filled our glasses and made a speech. I cannot give it you, for it was all in his own manner, half of it slang and half of it very nearly poetry, and I do not think he had prepared a word. But the end of it was that we were to drink to the happiest man in the world and the noblest girl in it, and that any man who did not drain his glass to the bottom was to be put out of doors. Jack drank it standing, and so did Quincey, and then they both sat down, and there was a little silence which I shall not describe.

“Then I gave them my message, and you may believe their ears did tingle. I told them that your mother has consented, and that my father, though he is still far from well, sends you his blessing, and that we are to be married in the autumn. Quincey swore he would come from the end of the earth to see it, if he had to ride the whole way; and Jack said that he would be there if he had to leave every lunatic in his charge to take care of himself. I made them both promise, and they did.

“We walked back together as far as Piccadilly, very late. Jack was silent most of the way. At the corner he took my hand and said, ‘Be good to her, Art,’ and nothing more; and then he and Quincey went off together towards the park. I watched them go, and I thought, dear, that there are not two better men in England, and that I do not deserve either of them any more than I deserve you.

“I shall call at four. Tell your mother I shall bring the book I spoke of.

“Your ever devoted

“ARTHUR.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Dined last night with Quincey and Art. I had dreaded it, and it was, after all, a good evening; the best I have had for a long time. There is a medicine in the society of honest men which the pharmacopœia does not list. Art is so happy that he cannot see anything else; which is as it should be. Quincey watched me all the evening, I think, as one watches a horse that has been lamed, to see how it goes. I went well enough. I drank their toast and meant it. That is the whole of the matter, and I shall not return to it.

*28 May.*--Renfield. A curious incident, which I record accurately, since I have resolved to keep his case accurately.

I went to his room at about eleven. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, quite quiet, looking at the window, where a spider has spun a web in the upper corner of the sash. He did not turn when I came in. I asked him how he did. He answered civilly that he did very well, and that the weather was fine. Then, without any change of tone, and without any question of mine to lead him, he said:--

“Is Miss Westenra to be married soon, doctor?”

I confess that for a moment I could not answer him. I have never spoken that name in his hearing; I am certain of it. I asked him, as coolly as I could, who Miss Westenra might be. He looked at me then, full in the face, with a sort of polite amusement, as a man might look at a child who pretends not to know where he has hidden a sweet.

“Oh, come, doctor,” he said. “A young lady with fair hair. They say she is to marry a lord’s son. I only asked because you seemed to take an interest.”

I asked him who “they” were. He said, “Everybody,” and would say no more on the subject. He turned back to the window and began to talk, with great animation, of the number of flies which come in at this season, and whether they are more plentiful in a hot summer or a wet one.

*Later.*--I have found the explanation, and I set it down lest I should be tempted to make more of the thing than it deserves. Hardy, the attendant on that corridor, was in Chatham Street on some errand of mine a fortnight ago, and it seems that he has since been gossiping in the kitchen of the young lady to whose house the doctor sends his man. Renfield has sharp ears; he hears the attendants talk at their meals through the grating, and he forgets nothing. So much for the mystery. I have spoken to Hardy.

But I do not like it. Not that he knows, for that is explained; but that he should have chosen to tell me that he knows, and should have watched my face while he did it. It argues a design, and a patience in the design, of which I had not believed him capable. *Mem.*, to observe whether he tries the same thing again, and with what object.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*3 June.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“I have waited three days before writing this, because I hoped every post would bring me something to put it right, and nothing has come. I must tell some one, and you are the only one I can tell.

“You know that I had only those few hurried lines from Jonathan early in May, and that he spoke of returning in about a week. Well, the week went by, and another, and I told myself that business is always longer than one expects, and that the posts in those countries are very slow, and that I was a goose to be anxious. And then on Thursday there came a letter with a foreign stamp, in a hand I did not know. I thought at first that Jonathan must have hurt his hand, and I tore it open, and it was not from him at all. I copy it for you exactly, spelling and all, because I want you to tell me honestly what you make of it:--

“‘*Klausenburg, 22 May.*

“‘Honoured Miss,--

“‘You will pardon that a stranger writes to you. I am a merchant of this town, and I have the pleasure to know a little your English young gentleman, Mr. Harker, who was stopping at the Hotel Royale in the beginning of this month. We spoke together at the table many times and he is very pleasant, and he told me of you and gave me your direction, as he was fearing that his letters should be lost, the posts being bad in the mountains where he goes.

“‘I have now from him a message, brought by a man who comes down from that country with wood. He asks me that I write to you and say that he is well, but that his business is longer than he was thinking and he must stay some weeks more. He says you shall not be anxious and not write to him, because he is not in one place and letters will not find him. He will write when he can. He sends to you his love and respects.

“‘I write in English so good as I can, and I beg you to pardon faults.

“‘With much esteem,

“‘Your servant,

“‘JÓZSEF SZABÓ.’

“There, dear. I have read it I do not know how many times. At first I was so glad to know that he was well that I cried over it, and kissed the poor foreign gentleman’s signature, which I dare say he would think very odd. But since then I have begun to wonder. Why should Jonathan send a message by a wood-carrier, and to a stranger, when he could as easily send a letter to me? And why should he tell me not to write? It is not like him. He knows that his letters are all I have. And he has not been ‘going about’; he went to one house, on one piece of business, and he told me so. I cannot understand it.

“I took the letter to Mr. Hawkins yesterday. He is so kind, Lucy; he is like a father to Jonathan, and I think he would be to me too, if I let him. He read it through twice, and then he took off his glasses and polished them, which is what he does when he does not wish one to see his face. He said that no doubt it was all quite right, and that foreign clients were often exacting, and that Jonathan was a very capable young man. But he said too that he would telegraph to Klausenburg himself, ‘to save me the trouble,’ and he asked if he might keep the letter. So now I am waiting for that.

“I am ashamed to send you such a gloomy letter when you are so happy. Don’t think me selfish, dear. I read your last over again last night, the part about number Three, to cheer myself, and it did. I am so glad for you, and I think Arthur must be the luckiest man in England, and I shall tell him so the first time I see him, whether he blushes or no. Write to me soon and tell me I am foolish.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street,*

“*5 June.*

“My darling Mina,--

“You are foolish, and I tell you so at once, as you asked. Of course Jonathan is well, since he says so, and of course he is kept by business, since men always are. As for the wood-carrier, I dare say there is no proper post at all in those mountains, and he took the first honest man he could find, and was glad of him. I think Mr. Szabó a dear, and his English is a great deal better than my Hungarian.

“Arthur says so too; I read him the part of your letter that was not private--you need not be afraid--and he says that when he was in the Carpathians shooting, three years ago, he did not see a letter for six weeks together, and his people at home thought him dead, and he was only very dirty. He sends you his kindest regards, and says that you are to come and stay with us the moment you are free, and that he will not have you moping.

“And, Mina, you must not mind Mr. Hawkins and his telegram. Old gentlemen like to do things. It is his way of being fond of you both. When he hears back from Klausenburg that Jonathan is quite safe and very busy, you will both laugh at yourselves.

“Mamma is better this week. Dr. Seward called on Tuesday, only as a friend, and was very kind and very grave, and asked after you. I told him about your trouble, and he said, in that way he has of looking at one, that ‘uncertainty is the hardest thing the mind has to bear, harder than bad news.’ I did not think that very comforting, and I told him so, and he laughed and said he was a poor hand at comfort, and that Quincey Morris was the man for that. Mr. Morris is gone into the country for a few weeks, but he is to come back before the summer is out.

“Write the moment you hear. I shall think of you every hour till you do.

“Ever your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Mr. Peter Hawkins to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Exeter, 6 June.*

“My dear Miss Mina,--

“I have not yet had any reply to my telegram of the 2nd, and I write only that you may not think I have forgotten. I have also written by post to the proprietor of the Hotel Royale, and to our correspondent at Buda-Pesth, who may know something of Mr. Szabó. I have no doubt that the delay is due to nothing worse than the distance and the difference of language.

“Pray do not distress yourself. Jonathan has a clear head and a sound heart, and he is well able to take care of himself. I would not have sent him else.

“I shall forward to you whatever reply comes, the moment it comes.

“With kindest regards, believe me,

“Yours very sincerely,

“PETER HAWKINS.”

*Telegram, Proprietor, Hotel Royale, Klausenburg, to Peter Hawkins, Exeter, forwarded to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*9 June.*

“No merchant named Szabó known here. Harker stayed one night only, third May. Spoke with no one. Departed alone.”

"You are tired, madame," said Robert, when they had gone a little way along the sandy path and the voices of the children had grown thin behind them. "You should not have walked so far in the sun."

"It was not the walking," returned Madame Ratignolle. "It was sitting. One sits upon those hard boards as if one were a girl of fifteen, and then one gets up and remembers one is not." She leaned more heavily upon him and laughed a little, as if she were not displeased to be reminded of it. "And we talked. Mrs. Pontellier talked. I have never heard her talk so much in all the weeks she has been here."

Robert did not answer at once. He was looking down at the path, where the camomile had crept in and lay crushed and fragrant under their feet. When he spoke it was without any of the playfulness with which he was used to address her.

"She talks as if she had only just found out that she could," he said. "Have you noticed it, Madame Ratignolle? She is like some one who has been living in a house with the shutters closed, and has opened one of them and is astonished at the light. She does not know yet what to do with it."

"What a fanciful boy you are!" said Adèle, and she pressed his arm with her gloved hand, and asked him whether he thought the little one, her Marie, had been too long in the wind. He talked about Marie the rest of the way to the house, and about the wind.

At noon a telegram came for Mrs. Pontellier. The boy from Klein's brought it across on his pony, and waited in the shade of the water-oaks while she opened it, fanning himself with his cap. It was from her husband, and it said that he was detained by business and would not come over on Saturday; that he hoped she and the boys were well; that he would write. She read it twice, standing at the foot of the steps, and then folded it very small and put it into the pocket of her muslin. She gave the boy a dime, and he rode away.

She was surprised at herself because she did not feel disappointed. She tried to feel it, going slowly up the steps; she thought of the box of bonbons and pâtés and the fruits that had come the week before, and of how the ladies had declared Mr. Pontellier the best husband in the world. She had declared it herself. But the feeling would not come. What came instead was a sort of spaciousness, as though the week, which had had a wall at the end of it, now had none; and this she did not care to examine.

The afternoon was long and hot. The children slept after their dinner, and the quadroon sat with her sewing in the doorway of the room where they lay. The house was very quiet. From somewhere in the main building came the sound of a piano played with one finger, the same four notes over and over, and then silence.

Edna took her bathing things and went down to the beach alone. It was not the hour at which people bathed. The sun was still high and fierce, and the long path was empty except for a lizard that ran across it and was gone into the grass. The wind of the morning had fallen off. The water, when she reached it, lay almost flat, heaving a little, very softly, as if it were breathing in its sleep.

She had been learning to swim all summer. She had gone in with the others at the accustomed hour, among the laughing women and the shouting children; she had let Robert and a dozen others hold her up and tell her what to do with her arms. She had never once been able to do it. Always, when the hand beneath her was withdrawn, a kind of terror seized her; the water seemed to open under her like a mouth, and she would reach out blindly for the hand and find it.

There was no hand now. She went out until the water was at her waist, and then at her breast, and stood there a long while, feeling the slow lift and fall of it against her body. The sun struck through the water and made a pale, trembling light upon the sand under her feet. She thought of nothing; or if she thought, it was of the meadow in Kentucky, of the grass higher than her waist, and of the little girl who had beaten it aside with her arms.

Then she leaned forward upon the water and let it take her.

It held her. She struck out once, twice, awkwardly, with a great deal of splashing; then more quietly, three times, four; and she was not standing any longer, and she was not sinking. She was moving. It lasted perhaps only a moment. Her feet came down again and found the sand, and she stood up gasping, with the water running out of her hair and into her eyes, and she laughed aloud, although there was no one to hear.

She did not try again. She was afraid, not of the water, but that it might not happen a second time, and she wanted to keep it as it was. She came slowly out and went into the bath-house, and dressed there in the green half-light that came through the chinks of the boards, her hands not quite steady.

When she came out upon the little gallery the lady in black was sitting on the porch of the neighboring bath-house, as she had been in the morning, with her book of devotions closed upon her knee. Edna had seen her every day since she came to Grand Isle and had never heard her voice. She had supposed, vaguely, that the lady did not speak to any one.

"You were in the water alone," said the lady in black.

Edna stopped, a little startled. The voice was low and rather dry, and the face under the black straw was older than she had thought, and very composed.

"Yes," said Edna.

"I watched you. I did not mean to. One does not come here to watch the water, but one watches it all the same." She looked out at the Gulf, and then back at Edna. "It is a treacherous thing to go in alone, madame, when one does not know it."

"I know it a little now," said Edna, and colored, because she had not meant to say it.

The lady in black considered her a moment. Then she opened her book again. "So we all think," she said, not unkindly, and did not look up any more.

Edna walked home along the path with her wet hair heavy upon her neck. She had it in her mind to tell some one; she thought that she would tell Robert, and then that she would tell Madame Ratignolle; but when she came to the house and saw them all upon the gallery, she said nothing to any of them, and she did not know why.

Robert had gone off to the wharf by the time the sun was low. Madame Ratignolle, recovered of her stiffness, came over after supper to sit a while, bringing her needlework, and the two women sat together on the Pontellier porch while the light went out of the sky. Edna told her about the telegram, and Adèle was full of sympathy; it was too bad, it was a great shame, the men of business had no hearts at all. And then, as if it followed quite naturally, she laughed and said:

"Robert was very poetical about you this morning, *ma chère*. I must tell you. He said you were like some one who had lived in a house with the shutters shut, and had opened one, and was astonished at the light. And that you did not know yet what to do with it. Was not that pretty? He is a clever boy, Robert, when he is not being foolish."

"Did he say that?" asked Edna.

"Exactly that. I thought it very pretty." Adèle bent over her work, and presently she spoke of her husband, and of the soirée musicale they meant to give in the winter, and of Marie's cough; and at last she gathered up her things, and kissed the air near Edna's cheek in the Creole fashion without touching it, and went away across the dark yard to her own children.

The boys had long been in bed. Edna had gone in to look at them, and had found them asleep, Raoul with one arm flung up over his head and the little one curled against the wall. She stood over them a moment and then came out again and sat down in the low rocker on the gallery, and did not light the lamp.

The night was warm and very still. The sea was only a murmur beyond the dark shapes of the trees, the same soft breathing she had heard at noon. Somewhere in the main house a door closed, and a voice said good-night, and then there was no sound at all but the sea.

She sat with her hands lying open in her lap. She thought of the water holding her up, and of the lady in black, who had watched her. She did not think of Léonce. She thought of a house with the shutters closed, and one of them flung back upon the light; and she wondered, turning the words over and over as she had turned the folded telegram in her pocket, how Robert had known, and what he had meant, and whether it was true that she did not know what to do with it.