The Chapters

She did not know how long she had slept, but when she awoke the lamp in the roof of the carriage had been lighted, the window-panes were quite black, and the train was slowing down with a long grinding noise. Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm.

"Wake up, now," she said. "This is Thwaite, and we've a long drive before us yet. Your hat's all on one side."

She put it straight with a jerk, and then they were out upon a small wet platform where there was scarcely any light but the lantern a porter carried and one or two lamps which flared in the wind. Mary had never known a night come down so early or so black. The air was raw and cold, and she stood close by her trunk and pinched her lips together, because she did not choose to let anybody see her shiver.

It was then that Mrs. Medlock made a queer sound, a sort of gasp with a word stopped in the middle of it, and Mary looked up to see what she was staring at.

A man was standing under the nearest lamp. He was tall and thin and wore a long dark cloak which the rain had made darker, and when he came forward Mary saw that one of his shoulders was higher than the other and that his back was bent. So that was what a hunchback was. She had expected something much more dreadful, and she felt almost cheated. His face was thin and dark, and it might have been a handsome face if it had not looked so wretched.

"Eh, sir!" said Mrs. Medlock, and the purple velvet flowers on her bonnet shook as if a wind had caught them. "I never thought--I'd no notion you'd trouble yourself to--"

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

He did not look at Mrs. Medlock. He looked at Mary. He looked at her for so long, with the rain dripping from the brim of his hat, that she began to feel as she had felt on the morning when the servants whispered together and would not tell her anything. It seemed as if he were searching her face for something, and she could not tell whether he found it or not. She stared straight back at him, because she did not intend to be the first to look away.

"You are Mary," he said at last.

"Yes," said Mary.

That was all. He turned and walked down the platform, and Mrs. Medlock hurried after him with Mary by the hand. Nobody had ever said her name to her in quite that way before--as if it were something which had been handed to him and which he had looked at and put down again.

Outside the station a closed carriage was waiting, with two horses and a coachman and a big young footman who had the trunk up on the roof in a moment. Mr. Craven got in first and sat in the far corner, opposite to them, and turned his face toward the black window; and from that moment he did not speak again.

Mrs. Medlock did not speak either. The brisk, talkative woman of the railway carriage had quite disappeared, and in her place sat a stiff, silent one with her hands folded on her black silk mantle, who hardly seemed to breathe. Mary saw this at once, and she was not sorry. It pleased her to find that there was somebody in the world of whom Mrs. Medlock was afraid. She did not think she was afraid of him herself--she had never been afraid of anybody--but she watched him out of the corner of her eye whenever the lamps swung their light across his face. He never once looked at her. He sat with his chin sunk in the collar of his cloak, and once he put his hand over his eyes and kept it there a long time.

They drove through a village where there were lighted windows and the red glow of an inn door, and then there were no more lights at all. The road grew rough, and the wheels jolted and splashed, and a great wind got up which seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. Mary could see nothing but the little piece of wet road the lamps showed, and some low bushes crowding at its edges, and beyond that the blackness. She would have liked very much to ask whether this was the moor. But she would not ask, because she did not want to seem to care.

Then, all at once, the horses snorted and plunged, and the carriage stopped with a jerk that threw her against Mrs. Medlock's arm. There was shouting outside. The footman jumped down from the box, and his lantern went swinging past the window.

Mr. Craven lifted his head. Without a word he opened the door and got out, and the wind came rushing in and filled the carriage, and the door swung back on its hinges and was not shut.

"Sit still," said Mrs. Medlock sharply. "Sit you still, now."

Perhaps it was because she had been told to sit still that Mary did not. She had never in her life been used to doing as she was bid. Before Mrs. Medlock could catch at her skirt she had slipped past the rug and out through the open door, and had jumped down into the road.

The wind met her like a great pushing hand. It snatched at her crêpe hat and wrapped her black dress about her legs and blew into her mouth so that she gasped. The rain had stopped, though the air was still full of wet. She took two or three steps off the road, and the ground under her feet was not like any ground she knew. It was rough and springy and caught at her ankles, and it smelled of wet earth and of something else, sharp and sweetish, which she had never smelled before.

In the light of the lantern she could see what had stopped them. The road dipped there into a hollow, and the hollow was full of sheep, lying huddled together out of the wind and refusing to get up, and when the lantern swung toward them their eyes shone green and queer. The footman was pushing among them with his knees and shouting something which Mary could not make out. Mr. Craven stood a little way off, a dark crooked shape with his cloak blowing out behind him. He was not watching the sheep. He was looking away into the dark.

Beyond the small circle of lantern-light there was nothing at all. Mary turned round, and there was nothing that way either. It went on and on in every direction, blacker than any night in India, without a house or a light or an end to it, and the wind came across it with a long, rushing roar like the sea she had listened to from the ship. In India she had always been the most important person in any place she was in, because the servants had made her so. But the dark did not know she was there, and the wind did not care; and for the first time in her life Mary Lennox felt small. It was a new feeling and she did not like it. And yet she did not want to go back into the carriage. She stood with her hands clenched in their black gloves and let the wind blow at her, and listened.

So this was a moor.

Then the lantern swung round, and she saw that Mr. Craven had turned his head and was looking at her across the road. She could not see his face, only the shape of him against the light.

"Get back into the carriage," he said.

He did not say it crossly, and he certainly did not say it kindly. He said it exactly as he might have told the footman to fetch down a trunk. And Mary, who had quite meant not to, went back and climbed in.

"Well!" whispered Mrs. Medlock, hauling her on to the seat. "Of all the contrary little--you wait!"

But she did not say what Mary was to wait for, because presently the sheep were shoved out of the hollow, and Mr. Craven got in again and sat down in his corner, and the carriage went on. He did not look at Mary. He did not look at anything but the black window.

It seemed a very long time before the wheels ran more smoothly and branches began to brush against the roof, and a long time after that before they stopped at last before a great house which seemed to ramble on and on into the dark, with only a light here and there in its windows. A huge door opened into a hall hung with portraits and old armour, and an old man with white hair stood waiting in it. Mr. Craven said, "My rooms, Pitcher," and went away down a passage without once looking round, and far off Mary heard a door shut.

Mrs. Medlock let out a breath as if she had been holding it ever since Thwaite.

"Come along, then," she said.

She took Mary up a broad staircase and along a corridor, and up some steps and along another corridor, and another, until at last she opened a door into a room where a fire was burning. There were dark panels on the walls and a picture of a stiff lady in a ruff, and a great bed with curtains.

"This is where you'll sleep," said Mrs. Medlock, "and you'll keep to these rooms and not go roaming. I've things to see to. John'll bring your supper up."

She went away, and Mary sat down on a footstool by the fire and did not take off her hat, because there was no one to take it off for her.

Presently the door opened and the big young footman came in with a tray. His hair was still wet and his face was broad and red and good-natured, and he did not salaam or look humble in the least.

"Here's thi supper, miss," he said, setting it down with a clatter. "Mrs. Medlock says tha'rt to eat it all an' then get thysen to bed, for tha'll be fair done wi' all yon travellin'. By gum, but it's a wild neet! It were Braithwaite's yowes as stopped us. They allus lig i' that bottom when it blaws hard, for it's lewer theer, an' there's nowt to be done wi' 'em but shove." (Lig is Yorkshire for lie, and lewer means sheltered, but Mary did not know it.)

Mary stared at him. She had never heard anything like it in her life.

"I don't understand what you are saying," she said. "I can't understand half of it. Why don't you speak properly?"

He did not seem at all offended. He knelt down to mend the fire and grinned at her over his shoulder.

"Eh, it's nobbut Yorkshire," he said. "Tha'll pick it up soon enough. Ah said it were sheep i' th' road--that's all. Tha saw 'em thysen. Ah saw thee stood out theer. Th' master saw thee an' all." He stopped with the poker in his hand, and shook his head as if he had better say no more about the master, and went on poking.

"In India," said Mary, drawing herself up on her footstool, "the servants do not talk unless they are spoken to."

"Do they not?" said the footman cheerfully. "Well, tha spoke to me, didn't tha? Eat thy supper while it's warm, miss."

And he went out, and she heard him begin to whistle in the passage and then stop short all at once, as if he had remembered something.

Mary ate a little bread and butter and drank some milk. When Mrs. Medlock came back she found her still sitting in her hat, and took it off with a sniff, and got her into her nightgown and into the great bed with more briskness than gentleness. Then she took up the candle.

It was then that Mary heard the sound.

Somewhere a long way off, inside the house, there was a slow, dragging kind of sound, as if something were being moved along a floor. It stopped. Then there came a soft, heavy knock, like a door being shut by some one who did not wish to be heard shutting it; and then the dragging sound again, going farther away.

"What is that?" said Mary.

Mrs. Medlock had her hand on the door. She stood quite still a moment with the candle held up, so that the light shook on the stiff lady in the ruff.

"That?" she said. "That's the wind. It gets into them long passages and sets the doors knocking. You'll hear plenty of it before the winter's out."

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

"It's the wind," said Mrs. Medlock, "and you'll lie down and go to sleep." And she went out and shut the door, and Mary heard her footsteps going away down the corridor a great deal faster than a stout woman generally walks.

The fire had sunk to a red glow and the room was quite dark. Outside, the wind was roaring round the house, and Mary knew that sound now. She had stood in it on the moor. It rushed and flung itself about and never stopped to take breath. But under it, inside the house, the other sound began again--slowly, and stopping, and going on, and then the soft knock of a door. The wind on the moor had pushed her and filled her mouth, but it had never once crept along a floor, or shut a door quietly.

Mrs. Medlock had said that she must not go wandering and poking about, and she herself had said that she should not want to. But she had said it in the railway carriage, before she had seen Mr. Archibald Craven looking at her under the lamp, or stood alone in the dark with the moor all round her; and the clergyman's children had not called her Mistress Mary Quite Contrary for nothing. She lay very still with her eyes wide open, listening.

"I shall find out what it is," she said to herself. "I shall find out for myself."

The consultation took place on a fine morning towards the end of July. Lady Russell came up from the village a little after eleven. Mr Shepherd had ridden over from the market town with a green bag of papers, and was shewn in so soon after her that Sir Walter could receive them together in the library, where the favourite volume lay in its accustomed place, and so spare himself the fatigue of hearing the same disagreeable subject twice. Elizabeth was of the party, as mistress of the house and sharer in its distresses. Anne was of it too, because she had been sitting at the window with her work when they came in, and nobody had thought it worth while either to send her away or to ask her to stay.

Lady Russell spoke first. She had given the matter the most anxious consideration. She was a woman of strict integrity, with a very delicate sense of what was owing to every creditor. But she also set a great value on rank and consequence, and had a tenderness for Sir Walter's feelings which his feelings had done little to deserve; and the plan she had drawn out, in her own neat hand, upon two sheets of paper, bore the honourable marks of both anxieties. The spring journey to London was to be kept, but shortened to a month and made in lodgings of less figure. Two of the carriage horses were to be sold, a footman and an under-gardener spared, and the forcing-houses no longer heated through the winter. The drawing-room was to remain unfurnished, as Elizabeth had already consented it should. A settled sum, never to be touched upon any pretence whatever, was to be paid over every quarter-day towards the debts, which might thus, with ordinary patience, be discharged in ten years.

Sir Walter heard her to the end, which was a great deal for Sir Walter, and then desired to know whether she had at all considered what she was asking.

“A month in town, in lodgings! My dear Lady Russell, I might as well send my name to the newspapers at once. We should be met in every street by people who had seen us in our proper style the year before. And two of the horses! You would have me go about with a pair, like a country attorney.”

He said this without the smallest consciousness that the only country attorney in the room was at his elbow. Mr Shepherd had long made it one of the principal businesses of his life to be insensible to such remarks, and he bowed as if he had been complimented.

“Ten years, too,” added Sir Walter. “In ten years I shall be—” but there he stopped. It was not a calculation he chose to finish.

No; it would not do; it was not to be thought of. Lady Russell's two sheets of paper were folded up again, with a composure which did her great credit, and returned to her reticule.

Mr Shepherd had hoped with all his heart that her scheme might be taken and his own spared the mortification of being refused. He now found himself obliged to bring it forward. He was a careful, civil man, who would always rather lead his patron towards a disagreeable truth by a long way round than meet it with him face to face. His proposal came so wrapped about in regrets and precedents, and in respectful mention of other families of the first consequence, that it was some minutes before anybody could be sure what it was. It proved to be this. The small portion of the estate which was not under settlement should be disposed of, and the oaks in the lower plantation, which were remarkably fine and would fetch a great deal, should be felled. With the produce, the most pressing of the creditors might be satisfied at once, and the rest brought to reasonable terms.

“Sell!” said Sir Walter. “I believe I have told you, Shepherd, more than once, that I will never sell. The Kellynch estate shall pass as I received it”—and here, though the heir presumptive was the last man in England he would have wished to oblige, he drew himself up as though defending that gentleman's rights in person—“whole and entire. As for the oaks, they are the finest thing to be seen from the south front. Cut them down, and the place would look like the seat of some man who made his fortune last year and has not yet had time to grow any trees. No, Shepherd; I am surprised at you.”

There followed a silence of some length, in which Sir Walter looked at the ceiling, Elizabeth at her rings, Mr Shepherd at his green bag, and Lady Russell at nothing at all. Into this silence, to the astonishment of everybody, and not least of herself, Anne spoke.

“I beg your pardon, sir; but if neither of these plans will do, may I say what I have sometimes thought? It seems to me that the trouble is not that they ask too much, but that they ask too little. Ten years is a long while for the people we owe to wait. We might give up going to town entirely, and put down every horse but a single pair, and every carriage but one. The servants might be brought down to what the house really requires, and the rooms we do not use shut up. We might give no dinners, and see nobody but our oldest friends. If every thing beyond what is truly necessary went to Mr Shepherd for the creditors, quarter by quarter, I believe it might all be done in four years, or very little more. Nothing need be sold, and no one to whom we owe money need wait longer than he must.”

Mr Shepherd, appealed to by Lady Russell's eye, turned over a few of his papers and allowed that Miss Anne's reckoning was not far wrong. He would rather have said four years and a half.

Sir Walter looked at his second daughter as he might have looked at a chair which had ventured an opinion. But before he could frame a reply suitable to such a liberty, Elizabeth, who had not spoken all the morning, said, in her coolest and most decided manner,

“I think Anne is right.”

Had the Baronetage itself risen from its table and addressed the company, it could hardly have caused a greater sensation.

“If we must be uncomfortable, papa,” she went on, “I had much rather be uncomfortable to some purpose, and have done with it. I would sooner not go to town at all than go for a month into lodgings to be pitied by everybody we know. As for giving no dinners, we are in black already, so nobody can wonder at our seeing no company. And I am heartily tired of dining with the same half-dozen families and hearing the same things said about the roads.”

Lady Russell was pleased, and did not quite know what to make of her pleasure. Anne was grateful, but she did not flatter herself about the cause, and she was right not to. It was not the justice of Anne's scheme which had recommended it to Elizabeth, but its brevity. Four years, strictly borne, would bring her out at three-and-thirty, with her father's credit restored and the London season before her once more. Ten years of half-measures would bring her to nine-and-thirty. She had worked that sum, while her father was declining to finish his own, with a sensation very like terror.

Sir Walter was more disturbed by this than by any thing yet said. In thirteen years he could not recollect Elizabeth taking any side but his own, and the novelty was highly disagreeable to him.

“My dear Elizabeth, you do not know what you are saying. Every horse but one pair! The best rooms shut up! Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch sitting behind his own shutters, like a man with something to hide! I would rather—” He did not say what he would rather; but everybody could see that he would rather any thing than that.

Mr Shepherd had watched this family disagreement with the discreet attention of a man who sees an opening he has long despaired of, and he now judged that his moment had come. He spoke with many apologies, and with his eyes on Lady Russell rather than on his patron. Perhaps, he submitted, the difficulty lay not so much in the saving as in being seen to save. If so, there was a course, by no means uncommon among gentlemen of the first consequence, by which both might be avoided. A house such as Kellynch would command a very handsome rent. A family might live elsewhere, in perfect comfort and credit, on part of their income, while the house itself quietly paid off the rest. A respectable tenant—

“A what?” said Sir Walter.

Mr Shepherd repeated, rather more faintly, that he had spoken of a tenant.

“A tenant! In Kellynch Hall! Some stranger sleeping in my bed, and walking in my grounds, and hanging up his hat in my hall, and paying me for the privilege as he pays his tailor! Shepherd, I have heard a great deal this morning, and I have borne it; but I will not bear *that*. I desire that the word may never be spoken in my presence again. Never, by anybody, on any account whatever.”

Mr Shepherd bowed and was silent. In the half hour which followed, he was twice observed to begin a sentence which seemed to lead in that direction, and to turn it off very dexterously onto the state of the turnpike road.

The meeting broke up as such meetings commonly do when the principal party has rejected every thing and proposed nothing: with a general sense of fatigue, and a private resolution in each person to think about it further. Mr Shepherd rode back to the market town with his green bag no lighter than he had brought it. At parting, Lady Russell held Anne's hand a moment longer than was necessary and said only, “You were quite right, my dear.” But her look said besides that she was sorry it had been of so little use.

It had been of little use indeed. Elizabeth, who had been an economist at noon, was by four o'clock talking of the colours that would be worn next spring. Sir Walter walked twice round the shrubbery to recover himself, and then got so far as to say that he supposed something might be done about the forcing-houses. That was the furthest he had yet advanced, and further, Anne suspected, than he would be found to have gone by the morrow.

A little before dinner the post brought Anne a letter from Uppercross.

“Uppercross Cottage, Tuesday.

“My dear Anne,—I have been so very unwell these ten days that I can hardly hold my pen, and I dare say nobody at Kellynch has once thought of me. Charles is out from morning till night and never considers how I am left. Mrs Musgrove does not come down from the Great House more than once a day, though she must know how ill I have been. My head has not been free from pain since Sunday se'nnight, and my nerves are quite gone, and the children are wild, and the apothecary says it is nothing, which only shews how little he knows. You must come to me directly. You know I am never well without you, and I cannot think what you find to do at Kellynch that you cannot be spared. I am sure Elizabeth does not want you.—Yours affectionately,

“Mary M.”

She read it through in silence. When her father desired her to say what Mary wanted, she told them.

“Then she had better go,” said Sir Walter. “There is nothing whatever to keep her here.”

“Certainly she had better go,” said Elizabeth. “I am sure I do not want her; and it will be one fewer at table, which is always something.”

It was, Anne could not help reflecting, the only article of retrenchment on which the whole family had that day been able to agree.

She went up early, and sat a long while at her open window. She watched the light go off the lawn, and the oaks in the lower plantation, reprieved, darken into one mass against the sky. She had spoken, and for once had been heard, and it had made no difference. The debts were exactly where they had been at breakfast. The bills lay unpaid in Mr Shepherd's bag, and to-morrow her father would take up his favourite volume in as much need of consolation as to-day. Elizabeth's support, which had so astonished them all, had been given to a sum in arithmetic and not to her sister, and Anne did not expect it to last.

There was nothing she could do at Kellynch. At Uppercross, at least, she would be wanted. It would only be by Mary, and for no better purposes than Mary's: to be listened to, and agreed with, and to take the children off her hands for an hour. Still, to be wanted at all was something to one who had so long been used to being nothing. Lady Russell would be sorry, and Anne was sorry for her; she would walk down to her in the morning and explain. But her mind was made up before the last of the light was gone. She would go to Mary. Of all that had been talked of at Kellynch that day, it was the only thing that had been settled at all.

The storm which had threatened us all the previous evening had never broken, after all. When I let myself out of the house and struck across the park towards the village, the air lay close and heavy under a pale, sultry sky, and as soon as I came out upon the high road the dust rose white about my feet at every step. I walked fast, for my mind was racing faster still. The book in the library had told me all I needed to know. The violence of the convulsions, the dreadful arching of the body, the consciousness retained almost to the end—every symptom of which I had read, I had seen with my own eyes that very morning. As I went I set them in order, so that I might lay the whole case before Poirot clearly and without waste of time. I confess I was not a little pleased with my summary.

I might have spared myself the trouble. Leastways Cottage, where Poirot lodged with his compatriots, stood a little back from the road at the near end of the village. I had scarcely laid my hand upon the gate when the door opened and the little man himself appeared upon the step. He wore a dressing-gown of a somewhat startling plum colour, his moustaches had not yet received their morning attention, and he held a cup of chocolate in his hand. But his face, as he looked at me, was very grave.

“Ah, it is you, Hastings. I thought that you would come. Enter, my friend, enter.”

“Poirot,” I began breathlessly, “something terrible has happened——”

“Madame Inglethorp is dead,” he said quietly. “Yes. I know it.”

I stared at him in the blankest astonishment.

“But how in the world——? It is not two hours since——”

“Since she died. Precisely.” He drew me into the little parlour and pressed me into a chair. “It was Dr. Bauerstein who told me. I rise early—it is the habit of a lifetime—and not twenty minutes ago I was at my window, making my toilet, when the doctor came along the road from the direction of Styles. He walked fast, with his head bent, like a man who has a great deal to think about. He saw me, raised his hat, and stopped at the gate. We have met, you understand, at the house of Madame, when she came to see how her Belgians did. He told me that she was dead, and that in his opinion the death was not a natural one.” Poirot paused. “He told me also, with a certain satisfaction I think, that there must be an inquest. Then he went on his way.”

“He was at the house just before she died,” I said. “He happened to be passing the lodge gates as the car went out for Dr. Wilkins.”

“Passing the lodge gates. At five o’clock in the morning.” Poirot set down his cup. “Tiens! He is an early walker, the good doctor. But go on, my friend. Tell me everything, and in its order.”

I told him everything, from Lawrence’s candle at my bedside to the two keys in John’s hand, and I did not leave out my researches in the library. At the word strychnine he nodded slowly, but made no comment. When I had done, he sat for some moments in silence.

“She was good to us,” he said at last. “Seven exiles who had lost everything, and she gave us a roof and a welcome. I do not forget that, Hastings. I will come.” He rose. “But not like this. A man who goes upon such an errand does not go with his moustaches in disorder. Return to the house, and tell Monsieur Cavendish that I follow within the half-hour. The two rooms are locked, you say? Good. See that no one—no one, you comprehend—enters them until I come.”

It was a little after seven when I came up the drive again. John was in the hall, and Lawrence with him. I had hardly begun to tell them that Poirot was on his way when there was a step upon the gravel outside, and Alfred Inglethorp walked in at the open front door.

He stopped short at the sight of us. I think our faces must have told him something, for his own changed. He was unshaven, and his black beard looked blacker than ever against the sallow pallor of his skin.

“Good morning,” he said. “You are all very early. Is anything the matter?”

For a moment nobody answered. Then John said, in a voice I scarcely recognized:

“My mother died at five o’clock this morning.”

Inglethorp stood perfectly still.

“Emily? Dead?” He put out a hand, as though to steady himself, and sat down heavily upon the old oak chest beside the door. “But it is impossible. She was perfectly well when I left her last night. What—what was it?”

“Some kind of seizure. The doctors were here.”

“And I was not.” He passed a hand across his eyes. “Good God—I was not here!”

I watched him narrowly. If it was acting, it was uncommonly good acting. And yet I could not rid myself of the feeling that it *was* acting, and that the stage had been set a little too carefully. Then, without being asked, he told us where he had been.

“I walked down with Bauerstein, as you know, and left him at the corner by the post office. Then I went on to Denby’s. Emily wished the business of the Home Farm lease settled, and he had begged me to look in. We sat over the papers far longer than I intended. Then, somewhere about midnight, it came on to rain—a regular downpour—and Denby would not hear of my walking back in it. He found me a bed. I had the key, of course”—he drew the latch-key from his pocket and laid it upon the hall table, as though in proof—“but I did not care to come blundering in at one in the morning and wake Emily. She sleeps so badly. I came away the moment I was dressed.”

Nobody spoke. Into that silence came a voice that none of us had expected. Dorcas had come through the baize door at the back of the hall, a tray in her hands, and had plainly heard the last of it.

“Rain, sir?”

Inglethorp turned his head. “I beg your pardon?”

Dorcas went rather pink, but she held her ground.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but there wasn’t any rain last night. Not a drop. It was that close I couldn’t get off to sleep, and I sat at my window till gone one o’clock. There was lightning all round, over Tadminster way, but the rain never came near us. I said as much to Annie this very morning. ‘We shall have it to-night instead,’ I said.”

There was a short pause.

“It may very well have been dry here,” said Inglethorp coldly. “It was raining in the village. Denby will tell you so.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dorcas, and went back through the baize door. But her lips were pressed very tightly together.

I too said nothing. But I thought of the road I had walked twice that morning, which is no more than a mile between Styles and the village. I remembered the white dust that lay thick upon it and had risen at every step I took. And I wondered what manner of downpour it could have been that kept a man indoors until morning and left no trace behind it.

Inglethorp rose.

“I must go up to her.”

“The rooms are locked,” said John. “Both of them. The doctors wished it. Bauerstein gave me the keys.”

“Locked? My own room?” For an instant something flickered in his eyes. “By what right——” He checked himself. “I see. As you please, of course.”

He turned, went into the library, and closed the door very quietly behind him. John let out his breath in a long sigh. Lawrence had not uttered a word. He was looking at the latch-key where it lay upon the table, as though he had never seen such a thing before.

Poirot arrived a few minutes before half-past seven. He was spotless from head to foot and his moustaches were waxed to two magnificent points. The only thing that visibly distressed him was the white dust upon his patent-leather boots, and he removed it with a silk handkerchief before he would consent to cross the threshold. John received him with a grave courtesy which I thought did him great credit. Poirot’s condolences were brief, but so evidently sincere that I saw John’s face soften, and he handed over the two keys without a word. As we crossed the hall I told Poirot, in a rapid undertone, of Inglethorp’s return and of what Dorcas had said. He heard me in silence. His eyes, I noticed, went for an instant to the latch-key, which still lay where Inglethorp had put it down.

In the dining-room we found Mary Cavendish pouring out tea, with Cynthia beside her. The agitation that had overcome Mrs. Cavendish upon the stairs had left no trace. She was pale but perfectly composed, and she gave Poirot her hand with a grave little smile. Cynthia looked wretched. Her face was still flushed and her eyes heavy, and while we stood there she yawned twice, apologized, and yawned again.

Poirot bowed over her hand.

“Mademoiselle, forgive me. I shall ask you one question only, and then I leave you in peace. Last night, did you sleep as you are accustomed to sleep?”

Cynthia put a hand to her forehead.

“No. That’s the queer thing. I always sleep like a top, but last night was different. It was like being at the bottom of a well. Mary had to shake and shake me, and even when I was on my feet I didn’t properly know where I was. My head feels like cotton-wool still.”

“I thank you, mademoiselle.”

That was all. I had expected a dozen questions to follow, but he asked none, and presently he and I went upstairs together. He unlocked the door of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room, stood aside for me to enter, and turned the key again behind us.

I shall not easily forget the hours which followed. Someone, one of the doctors I suppose, had drawn back the curtains. The grey light of the morning fell full upon the broken door hanging awry from its hinges, upon the table lying on its side by the bed, and upon the still shape beneath the sheet. Poirot stood for a moment beside the bed with bowed head. Then he took a little notebook from his pocket and set to work.

He began with the doors. He examined minutely the one through which we had burst from Mr. Inglethorp’s room, fingering the bolt where it had been wrenched from its socket. The door to the corridor, which I had unbolted with my own hands, he opened and shut twice. Before the third, which gave upon Cynthia’s room, he stood a long time. He touched the bolt with the tip of one finger and wrote something in his book, but he said nothing.

From the doors he went to the overturned table. Round it on the floor lay a reading-lamp, two or three books, a box of matches, a bunch of keys, and the fragments of a coffee-cup crushed into the carpet beside a dark stain. Poirot went down upon his knees and looked, bending very low. When he got up again his face told me nothing whatever.

“The coffee——” I began.

“Patience, mon ami. Patience.”

Next came a splash of candle-grease upon the carpet near the broken door. I explained that it had dripped from Lawrence’s candle.

“He stood here, Monsieur Lawrence? And while his candle dripped, where did he look?”

I showed him. Poirot crossed to the fireplace and stood gazing at the mantelpiece exactly as Lawrence had gazed: at the clock, at the pair of brass candlesticks, at the prim little row of china ornaments. He touched nothing. Then he looked down at the grate.

“A fire,” he said softly. “In July. Upon a night when one could not breathe.”

“Perhaps she felt the cold,” I suggested.

“Perhaps.”

After that I lost count. He passed through the broken door into Inglethorp’s room and back again. He took measurements, and lay flat upon the floor to peer beneath the bed. He examined the washstand, the writing-table, and the despatch-case which stood upon it, where I supposed Cynthia had set it down the night before. The stable clock struck eight, and nine, and ten. I grew hungry, and then restive, and then, I fear, a little sulky. But Poirot worked on, as calm and methodical as though he had the whole of eternity before him.

It was close upon half-past eleven when at last he knelt upon the hearth-rug, took up the tongs, and began with infinite delicacy to sift the grey drift of ash in the grate. Paper had been burnt there, I thought, for the ash was fine and light and crumbled at a touch. Suddenly the tongs checked. Poirot laid them down, put in his fingers and drew out something small. He blew upon it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and held it out to me upon his palm.

It was a little brass key, no longer than the top joint of my thumb, blackened at the edges by the heat.

“The despatch-case!” I cried.

Poirot said nothing. He picked up Mrs. Inglethorp’s bunch of keys from among the litter by the bed, looked at it for a moment, and laid it down again exactly where it had lain.

“Madame’s own key to her case,” he observed, “is upon her ring, where it should be.”

“Then this is a second one! Poirot, what does it mean? Whose is it? How did it come——”

He shook his head.

“Not yet.”

“You mean you won’t tell me?”

“I mean, my friend, that I will not tell you what I do not yet know myself. That is a very different thing.”

He laid the little key down upon the corner of the writing-table between us, very precisely, as a man lays down a card whose value he has not yet decided. For a long moment he regarded it with his head a little on one side. When at last he spoke, it was softly, and more to himself than to me, I think.

“Someone lit a fire in this room on the hottest night of the summer, Hastings, in order to burn something. And it was not this.”

I looked from him to the little blackened key lying between us, and back again. For all my talent for deduction, I confess that I could make nothing of it whatever.

Getting up off the slope of a beach, at my time of life, is a longer job even than sitting down on it; and I was glad of Mr. Franklin's two hands to haul me on to my legs. When he had got me there, he stood off a pace and looked me over, and I stood off a pace and looked him over in return. The last time I had seen him in this house he was a boy, with a round face, a hole in the knee of his trousers, and an appetite for my lady's gooseberries that no gardener in Yorkshire could keep pace with. What I saw now was a slim young gentleman with a foreign shrug to his shoulders, and a way of flourishing his hands when he talked, as if the words wanted helping out of him. He said I was not a day older. I said he was a good many inches taller. And there, for the moment, we left it. As for the seven-and-sixpence, I may as well mention at once that I have never seen it from that day to this. But that's neither here nor there.

“And now, sir,” says I, “how comes it you are here at this time of day? We weren't to look for you till the evening. My lady and Miss Rachel are out at lunch, and the sheets in your room are not so much as aired——”

“Nor is there any luggage in it,” says Mr. Franklin. “My luggage is travelling by the train you expected me by. I came by an earlier one, and walked over from Frizinghall, and asked at the house for the one man in it I could be sure of—and they sent me to the sands. Here, Betteredge; give me your arm, and read this as we go.”

He took out his pocket-book, and gave me a letter out of it. We turned our backs on the Shivering Sand (and I, for one, was not sorry to do it), and I got my spectacles on my nose, and read as we went up among the sandhills, with his arm to keep me straight.

It was a half-sheet of common paper, written in a stiff clerkly hand that might have been anybody's, and there was no name at the end of it worth calling a name. I have it before me as I write, Mr. Franklin having put it into my hands again for the purposes of this statement; and here it is, word for word:

“Sir,—You will not know this hand, and you need not trouble yourself to try. You have given out among your friends that you travel into Yorkshire on Thursday, by the afternoon train. Do not travel by that train. You have been watched in the streets these three days past, and the persons who watch you know the hour you have named. Go earlier. Go without telling any one of the change, and do not stop by the road. When you come to your journey's end, do not keep what you carry about you through the night. You will do well to burn this.—A WELL-WISHER.”

Mr. Franklin had not burnt it. I set that down to his foreign education, which (so far as I understand the matter) teaches young gentlemen to keep everything and believe nothing.

“It was left at my lodgings by hand, at eleven o'clock last night,” says he, “and nobody in the house could tell me who brought it. I laughed at it for half an hour. Then I lay awake over it for three. At six this morning I was off to the railway with nothing but a hand-bag; and my portmanteau, with my name painted large on the lid of it, is coming north by the afternoon train, for the satisfaction of anybody who cares to keep an eye on it. That's the whole story. Now, then, Betteredge—am I a fool?”

“That depends, sir,” I said, “on whether anybody has been following you.”

“I can't swear to it,” says Mr. Franklin. “I fancied, once or twice last week, that I saw the same face at the corner of my street. But a man fancies a great many things in London.”

That was what he said. What I thought, I may as well tell you, having promised to put things down as they actually happened, inside my head as well as out of it. I thought of my daughter Penelope, not so long since, standing before my beehive chair with a face as white as my lady's best table-cloth. I thought of the little English boy, with the ink in the hollow of his hand, saying that the English gentleman would travel to this house to-day, and had got It about him. And, above all, I thought of the one thing the boy could *not* say—whether the gentleman would come at the close of the day. Here was the gentleman, come four good hours before the close of the day, because a letter without a name to it had warned him off the hour he had given out. I declare I felt a sort of creeping at the roots of my hair, what there is left of it.

Now you will ask me (I know you will, for I should ask it myself) why I did not out with the whole story of the Indians then and there. I will be honest with you. I had called it a rehearsed trick to my own daughter that very afternoon; and a man of my years and experience does not like to be caught, before the sun is down, taking seriously the very thing he laughed at over his pipe. Besides which, I wanted time to turn it over. And besides *that*, Mr. Franklin gave me no chance.

He stopped short at the edge of the fir-plantation, where the path goes in under the trees, and looked about him—up the path, and down it, and back at the sandhills—as if the Shivering Sand itself might have ears.

“Betteredge,” says he, “have you got a strong place in the house? I don't mean a bedroom drawer. I mean a place with a lock to it that you would trust with your own savings.”

“There's the plate-room, sir,” I said. “An iron door, a lock that came down from London, and the key of it never out of my pocket, day or night, these thirty years.”

“Then take charge of this for me to-night,” says Mr. Franklin, “and give it back into my own hand to-morrow morning. Don't open it. Don't ask me what's in it. And if anybody asks *you*, you will be able to say, with a clear conscience, that you don't know.”

He put his hand into the breast of his fawn-coloured coat, and brought out a small packet, done up in white paper, tied round with tape, and sealed with red wax in three places with the seal of his own ring. It was a little thing, that lay easily in the palm of my hand; and I own it lay there rather longer than was needful before I put it away in my waistcoat-pocket and buttoned my coat over it. I am not a curious man. My daughter Penelope says otherwise; but in that particular Penelope takes after her poor mother.

At the house, Mr. Franklin went upstairs to wash off the dust of the road, and I went straight to the plate-room. I put the packet on the top shelf, behind the great silver soup-tureen which only comes out when the county dines with us; I turned the key on it twice; I tried the door; and I put the key back in my pocket. Then I tried the door again. I will confess that I turned the packet over once before I put it on the shelf; and I learnt exactly as much from the back of it as I had learnt from the front.

Coming out into the passage, I ran against Penelope.

“Well, father,” says she, “where's Rosanna? Nancy says you went to fetch her in yourself.”

I told her how it had been: how Mr. Franklin had come on us all of a sudden among the sandhills, and how the girl had gone as red as fire, and taken herself off without so much as a curtsey or a word. Penelope said nothing. But she looked at me in a way I did not altogether understand at the time—the way her mother used to look at me when I had said a thing she thought stupid and I thought clever.

“And did you ask Mr. Franklin about the Indians?” says she.

“Not yet, my dear.”

“You promised, father.”

“I promised to ask him,” says I. “I didn't promise when.” With which piece of reasoning (sound as a bell, in my opinion) I sent her about her business.

In half an hour she was back again, and this time with a grave face.

“Rosanna isn't come in, father,” says she. “And she isn't coming in yet, it seems. One of the lads from Cobb's Hole has just brought up the crabs to the kitchen door, and he says he passed her on the shore, walking fast, with her head down, and saw her go into the village, to that friend of hers. She has gone on to Cobb's Hole, and sent no word to anybody.”

“She'll be back by tea-time,” I said. I said it cheerfully enough. But I did not repeat to Penelope what the girl had said to me on the sands about her grave waiting for her there. It was not a thing to put into a young woman's head; and, to tell the truth, I did not much like the sound of it in my own.

Between four and five the carriage came round the drive, and my lady got out of it alone. Miss Rachel, it appeared, had gone on from the luncheon with some young friends of hers, to a concert at Frizinghall, and was to sleep at their house and come home in the morning—an engagement of long standing, made before anybody knew what day Mr. Franklin was to come. Mr. Franklin (so my lady told him, laughing) had kept his cousin waiting a good many years; Miss Rachel's opinion was that he might wait one night more for her. You will see from this that our young lady had a will of her own. You will see a great deal more of it, I am sorry to say, before I have done.

My lady took both his hands, and held him off to look at him, and said he had his mother's eyes; and then she kissed him, and then she looked at him again. I stood by with her cloak over my arm, and I saw her face alter, as I have seen it alter before when she has made up her mind to a disagreeable thing.

“And now, Franklin,” says she, “before you have been a day under my roof, there is one thing I wish to say to you, and then to have done with for good. You were taught, as a child, to call my brother John your uncle; and you have been living since then in places where I dare say he has been talked of freely enough. In this house he is not talked of. I will not have his name spoken under my roof—not to me, not to Rachel, and not before the servants. I ask it of you as a favour. I would rather not have to ask it as anything else.”

The Colonel, I should tell you, had been shut out of my lady's doors these many years past, for reasons which are not mine to set down. She said what she said before me, knowing I had held my tongue about him for longer than I care to count.

Mr. Franklin did not answer at once. I saw his hand go up, quite of itself as it seemed, to the breast of his coat, where the packet had been, and find nothing there. I saw his eyes come round to me for the quarter of a second, and go back to my lady.

“You have my word, aunt,” says he. “I will not speak of him under your roof.”

My lady thanked him, and kissed him again, and went upstairs to take off her bonnet, as easy in her mind, to all appearance, as if nothing particular had passed. I was not so easy in mine. It struck me that Mr. Franklin had promised exactly what he was asked, and not a hair's-breadth more. And it struck me, with the plate-room key lying heavy in my pocket, that there may be a good many things in this world which are never *spoken of* under a roof, and are kept under it for all that. But I am getting before my story. Bear with an old man, and let us take things in their places.

Mr. Franklin's portmanteau came up from Frizinghall in the carrier's cart at seven, with nobody following it that I could discover, excepting the carrier's dog. My lady and Mr. Franklin dined together alone, and he talked enough (I am told) for a whole table-full—French one minute, Italian the next, and some German gentleman's philosophy with the cheese. When my lady had left him to his wine, I went in to see to the decanters, and kept my promise to Penelope at last. What Mr. Franklin said to the story of the Indians, and how he looked when I came to the words “It about him,” deserves a chapter to itself, and shall have one. I will only say here that he did not laugh, and that I came out of the dining-room a good deal less proud of my “rehearsed trick” than I had gone into it.

At half-past ten Penelope came down to my room with her candle, to tell me what I had pretty well guessed already: Rosanna was not in. Nancy had been to the back door and back a dozen times since tea, and had a dozen things to say about it, none of them charitable. My lady had not asked for the girl, and I saw no call to go and tell my lady. I sent Penelope to bed, and said I would sit up myself and let Rosanna in; and I put the back door on the latch.

And there I sat, at the end of that long Thursday, in my beehive chair (I carry it in from the back court at sunset, as my custom is), with the window open on the court, the candle at my elbow, the plate-room key in my waistcoat-pocket, and Robinson Crusoe on my knee. The packet was behind the soup-tureen, safe as the Bank of England; I had been to try the door twice since dinner, which I set down as a matter of fact and not of nerves. I opened my Robinson Crusoe at random, which is what I always do when my mind wants settling. And what do you think he gave me?

“It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.”

Sand again! I don't pretend to say what it meant. I only say that I did not turn over for another. I shut the book on my finger and sat listening. Somewhere out beyond the fir-plantation, in the dark, the tide was coming back over the Shivering Sand. The stable clock struck eleven. No step came up the path from Cobb's Hole. The back door was still on the latch, and Rosanna Spearman had not come home.

It was not until she had come out into Shaftesbury Avenue, and found the sun shining brightly on the wet pavements like someone who has had his little joke and is ready to let bygones be bygones, that Eve began to think seriously about the umbrella. It hung from her wrist, a slim and aristocratic thing with a narrow gold band below the handle, and it seemed to her to have a faintly reproachful look, like a well-bred dog that has followed the wrong person home.

Eve's principles about hats and safety bets were admittedly elastic, but on the subject of umbrellas her views were almost Puritan. A man may lend a girl an umbrella. If he is tall enough and solemn enough and wears a monocle, he may even press it into her hand without a word and vanish across the road like the good fairy in a pantomime. But that does not make it hers. She turned towards Piccadilly, stopping at a post-office on the way to write a note with one of those pens which the authorities provide for the discouragement of correspondence. She did not sign it. On reflection there seemed something a little forward about signing it, and in any case her name could mean nothing to him.

The gloomy building opposite Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe's turned out, on closer inspection, to be the Drones Club. In its doorway, massive and benevolent, stood a hall-porter of the old school.

"I wonder if you would be kind enough to give this to one of your members," said Eve. "He lent it to me this morning when it was raining."

The porter received the umbrella with the grave composure of a man whom nothing can surprise. Inwardly he was a good deal shaken. In eleven years at the Drones he had seen umbrellas go out under every conceivable circumstance, but he had never before known one to come back.

"Certainly, miss. Which gentleman would it be?"

"I'm afraid I don't know his name. He is very tall and very thin, and he wears an eyeglass."

A look of respectful despair came into the porter's face. In his experience the members of the Drones Club were, almost without exception, tall and thin, and those who were not were doing their best to become so. As for a monocle, in that institution it was about as distinctive as a pair of boots.

"And would you give him this note too? I expect he will know it's meant for him."

"Very good, miss."

Eve went on her way with the pleasant glow of one who has done the right thing at the cost of a mile's walk. The porter examined the umbrella and recognised it. Being a man of method, he laid it and the note side by side on a shelf in his cubby-hole to await developments.

* * * * *

They were not long in coming. At a quarter to one the Hon. Mr. Walderwick, a pink young man with a small moustache and a large appetite, came down to the cloak-room on his way out to lunch. He was pained to find that the place in the rack where he had left his umbrella was empty, and he was still expressing his views on this in a high, complaining voice when the porter arrived with the missing property and the note.

"Returned by a young lady, sir, about an hour ago."

"Returned? What do you mean, returned? Who had it?"

The note was addressed, in a round, clear hand, "To the gentleman who lent me this umbrella." It seemed to Mr. Walderwick that since the umbrella was his, the note presumably was too. He opened it.

"Thank you so very, very much. It was the kindest thing, and it saved my hat, which matters more than you would think. I do hope you didn't get dreadfully wet running back."

Mr. Walderwick read this twice and was no wiser. He had lent no umbrella to any girl, and he had saved no hats. At this point the cloak-room attendant, who had been waiting for an opening, mentioned that Mr. Smith had taken the umbrella out at about half-past ten.

Psmith was in the smoking-room, reclining in a deep chair like a man at peace with the world. When Mr. Walderwick burst in upon him he looked up with a kindly and encouraging smile.

"Ah, Walderwick! Draw up a chair. You look like a man with something on his mind."

"I say, Smith, look here! Did you take my umbrella?"

"Take," said Psmith, "is a harsh word."

"Well, did you? Because the chap in the cloak-room says you did, and now some girl has brought it back and left a letter thanking me for lending it to her, and I never lent it to any girl, and what I want to know is, what's it all about? I mean to say, what?"

For a moment Psmith studied the umbrella in silence through his monocle.

"What would you take for it?" he asked.

"Eh?"

"For the umbrella. I have grown attached to it. I will give you five pounds."

Mr. Walderwick's jaw fell. As nearly as he could remember, the umbrella had cost him a guinea and a half.

"Five pounds!"

"You are quite right," said Psmith gravely. "Five pounds is an insult, and I withdraw it. Let us say ten."

"But, I say . . ."

"Guineas," said Psmith firmly. "I will not haggle. Haggling is for Oriental bazaars." He took out a note-case and counted its contents on to the arm of Mr. Walderwick's chair. "And the letter, I think. It goes with the umbrella, as the goodwill goes with a business."

Like a man in a dream, Mr. Walderwick handed over the umbrella and the letter, gathered up the money, and went out to lunch. All that afternoon he told everyone he met that old Smith had gone off his onion. But the ten guineas let him say so over a much better lunch than he had intended to have, so he said it without rancour.

Left alone, Psmith read the letter and turned it over in the hope of a signature. There was none. He placed it thoughtfully in his breast-pocket.

* * * * *

The Senior Conservative Club in Northumberland Avenue makes grudging provision for the reception of females in a small room on the ground floor, furnished with six stiff chairs and a steel engraving of the late Lord Beaconsfield. At three o'clock a page showed Eve into this room, and she explained to him that she had come to see Lord Emsworth about the cataloguing.

It must be explained that Lord Emsworth had that morning received a letter from a firm of seedsmen in Covent Garden, saying that their representative would call on him during the afternoon with their new catalogue. Baxter's memorandum about Miss Halliday was in his pocket, but it was not in his mind. So when the page announced a young lady about the catalogue, his lordship's mind leaped nimbly to the only conclusion it was at that moment capable of reaching.

"Ah!" he said, ambling in and beaming. "Capital! Sit down, sit down. You've come about the catalogue."

"Yes," said Eve.

"Good. Excellent. Then what I want to know, what I particularly want to know, is this. Hollyhocks."

Eve blinked.

"Hollyhocks?"

"Your people list a double white. Now, is it really double? The last lot I had from your people came up as single as . . . as . . ." Lord Emsworth looked for a simile and could find none adequate. "Single," he said. "Perfectly single. McAllister was most offensive about it."

Eve had not been brought up by her father for nothing. As a child she had held the fort against many a man with a blue paper, and she had learned that in any crisis the great thing is to keep talking and trust to Providence. She said she was sure this year's double white was extremely double. She said it with such warmth that Lord Emsworth, who had braced himself for an argument, was charmed. He went on to delphiniums, and Eve thought well of delphiniums. He passed to slugs, and she agreed that slugs were a menace. By the end of twenty minutes she had, as far as she could make out, pledged an unknown firm of seedsmen to deliver two hundred of something at Blandings Castle before September. Lord Emsworth, for his part, had come to regard her as the only sensible person he had met in London.

At this point he felt for his pince-nez so that he could look more closely at her hat, whose bird of Paradise he had been eyeing with a naturalist's interest. With the pince-nez came a folded slip of paper, and on it he read, in Baxter's neat hand: "Miss Halliday. 3 p.m. Library. Cataloguing."

He stared at the paper for some moments. Then he stared at Eve.

"Bless my soul!" he said. "You're not the seed people at all. You're the library."

"I'm afraid I am," said Eve.

"But you know all about hollyhocks."

"I know nothing whatever about hollyhocks," said Eve, whose conscience had been troubling her. "I don't think I should know one if I met it."

Lord Emsworth thought this the most engaging admission he had heard in years. McAllister knew everything about hollyhocks, and look at him.

"Well, well," he said vaguely. "The library. Yes. Quite so. You'll come down, of course. Baxter will write to you. Baxter writes to everybody."

So Eve went out into Northumberland Avenue as probably the first person in the history of the Senior Conservative Club to secure a post as a cataloguer of books without once being asked whether she could read.

* * * * *

Almost of their own accord, her feet took her to Shaftesbury Avenue. Clarkie had been so unhappy that morning at having nothing to offer that it seemed only kind to tell her the news. Eve climbed the stairs, tapped on the window marked "Enquiries," and went into the waiting-room. There, in the far corner, sat a very tall, very thin young man with a monocle in his eye and an umbrella across his knees.

Eve stopped short. The young man rose and bowed with grave friendliness.

"Why, it's you!" said Eve. "You're the man who gave me the umbrella this morning. And that's the umbrella!"

Psmith looked down at it as though they had just been introduced.

"This? Oh no. This is my umbrella. I bought it only today."

"It's the very same one. It has a little gold band."

"Many umbrellas have little gold bands. It is one of the few democratic touches about the modern umbrella."

"But you gave it to me! In Dover Street! Outside a coal-merchant's!"

"Dover Street," said Psmith musingly. "A street of clubs and coal. I can well believe that someone did something of the kind there. Some impulsive fellow, no doubt."

"You aren't going to pretend it wasn't you?"

"I pretend nothing. I merely suggest that a man who did such a thing would prefer to be left alone with his conscience. He would not wish to be thanked, and least of all in the waiting-room of an employment agency." He waved a hand at the magazine-covered table, the framed testimonials, and a large, silent woman in black who might have been a cook in search of a duke or a duchess in search of a cook. "It lacks romance."

"I left a note for him," said Eve.

"Then I have no doubt it reached him, and that he read it with the deepest gratification."

"Won't you at least tell me who you are?"

"A man in search of employment. Beyond that, nobody in particular."

"Miss Clarkson will see you now, miss," said Enquiries at the inner door, with promptitude and courtesy.

Eve turned in the doorway.

"I shall find out, you know."

"I should be the last man," said Psmith, "to discourage research."

She laughed, and the door marked "Private" closed behind her. Psmith sat down again, and something in his breast-pocket crackled faintly. He gazed solemnly at the Bureau's motto. He felt he had shown promptitude, and courtesy. Whether the third quality had been equally in evidence, he was not on the whole prepared to say.

* * * * *

It was a little after seven, and the smoking-room of the Drones was empty, when a page came to tell Psmith that he was wanted on the telephone.

"Hullo! That you, Psmith?"

"Comrade Jackson! An unexpected pleasure."

"Look here, did you shove an umbrella on to a girl in Dover Street this morning?"

Psmith paused.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because a pal of Phyllis's came to tea and talked about nothing else. Long, thin chap with an eyeglass who bolted across the road into a club, and then turned up at some agency this afternoon and swore it wasn't him. The girl at the desk wouldn't give her his name. I knew it must be you. Nobody else would do a potty thing like that."

"Did you tell her so?"

"No. I thought you might have some footling reason of your own."

"Comrade Jackson, you have a soul of rare delicacy. Who is she?"

"Her name's Eve Halliday. She was at school with Phyllis."

Psmith hung up the receiver and went back to the smoking-room. It was still empty. Across the road the awning of Messrs. Thorpe & Briscoe had been rolled up for the night, and in the soft evening light the shop-front had gone back to its usual austerity, improved by no one at all. Psmith settled into the window with the umbrella across his knees and took the note from his pocket.

He had paid ten guineas for an umbrella worth one and a half, and a considerable part of the club now held that he was off his onion. On a calm review, he could not remember a time when he had spent money better.

"Eve Halliday," he murmured, and polished his monocle.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*27 May.*--Came down from town by the first train, and found that the house had got on very well without me. That is a lesson in humility, and I seem to be taking a whole course of them just now. Before the day’s work takes hold of me I shall set down last night. I have resolved that this record shall be an honest one, and honesty costs little when there is no listener but a cylinder of wax.

Quincey had taken a private room at his hotel, and had made of it the camp-fire he promised, as far as a London hotel will permit. There was a great fire in the grate, though we are all but in June, and a lamp with a red shade. Over the chimney-piece hung the big bowie-knife that he carried through the Korea, crossed with his old quirt. I have seen him put that knife to better purpose than carving. Art came late and flushed, and would not sit down until he had shaken each of us by both hands, as though we had been parted a year instead of a week.

We dined well, and we drank better. Quincey would have the Marquesas out of us: the landing, and how Art bound up his arm with the tail of his own shirt and called him a clumsy Yankee the whole while. Then nothing would do but that I must tell of the night at Chemulpo when the pair of us lost our way among the junks, and came back at daybreak with a pig which neither of us could account for. We laughed a great deal. I think we all laughed more than the stories deserved, and I think we all knew why.

Then Quincey stood up. I shall try to give his words as he said them, for they are worth keeping:--

“Boys, I’m going to give you a health, and I want it drunk standing, and I want the glasses broke after, so that no man ever drinks a meaner toast out of them. Here’s to Art, the luckiest man that ever threw a leg over a horse; and here’s to the lady who has made him so. God bless her, and keep her, and give her back all the happiness she has been handing round so free.”

We drank it, and we broke the glasses in the grate. The waiter must have been listening at the door, for he came in with three more without being rung for. Quincey’s voice had not shaken once. I tried to add something of my own, and gave it up, and I cannot say as much for my voice.

After that Art delivered his messages, and they did make our ears tingle, as he had promised. The first was that Mrs. Westenra has given her consent with all her heart. The marriage is to be in the autumn, after Miss Lucy has had her twentieth birthday and her friend Miss Murray can be with her. The second he gave standing, rather red, and looking at neither of us. Lucy had bidden him say that she holds us two the dearest friends she has in the world after himself, and that she will not be married unless we are both there to see it. Then I knew that Art knew. I think I honour him more for the way he said it than for anything I have known him do. Last of all he asked us both to stand by him in the church. Quincey said, “Try and stop me, old man.” I said yes. What else is there for a man to say?

Quincey walked me to my club afterwards, though it was out of his way. At the door he put his hand on my shoulder and said:--

“Jack, I reckon you and I have drawn the best wages two men ever drew, with no work to show for it. It ain’t the pay we asked for; but it’s sound money, and it won’t lose its value.”

He is right, and I shall try to believe it. In the meantime there is work, which at least asks no questions. I shall go down to Renfield.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Lucy Westenra.*

“*29 May.*

“My dearest Lucy,--

“Three! and all in one day, and you ask me not to tell the girls! I promise faithfully, though it is very hard, for I should dearly like to see their faces. I read your letter through twice, and then a third time for the postscript, which is the best of it. I cried a little over poor Dr. Seward and his lancet, and over Mr. Morris walking out without looking back. I think you were quite right in everything, dear, and quite honest, which is the great thing. As for your heresy about marrying three, I shall pretend I never read it, and shall tell Jonathan only the parts that are fit for a solicitor. I am so glad it is Mr. Holmwood. I have never seen him, but I know him already from the way you do *not* describe him.

“I wish I had news as happy to give you back. I have heard nothing from Jonathan since those few hurried lines I told you of. In them he said a week, and it is now three. I ventured to write to Mr. Hawkins, and he answers very kindly that affairs of this kind abroad always take longer than one reckons, and that the posts from those parts are slow and uncertain. I say this to myself every morning when the post comes and there is nothing for me, and I dare say it is quite true. It is foolish of me, I know. The girls say I have grown cross in class, and I am afraid that is true also. But you must not let my little worry spoil any of your great happiness. Write me everything, what he says, and what you say, and what your mother says, and I shall live on it till I have letters of my own.

“Your loving

“MINA.”

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

*5 June.*--A small thing happened to-day. I set it down while it is fresh, and with some vexation at myself.

Renfield has been very quiet since the day I pressed him so hard. Hardy thinks him too quiet, for he used to rage at the attendants when his gloomy fits were on him, and now he only watches them. I went to him last on my rounds this morning, and found him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands upon his knees, like a man in a railway waiting-room. He rose when I entered, which is not his habit, and bowed, which is still less so. We spoke of his food, and of the weather, which he said was “very well for those who have a use for it.” I had my hand on the door when he said, quite quietly, and without the least preface:--

“Tell me, doctor, is Miss Westenra coming here to live?”

I have schooled myself for years to keep my face before these poor creatures, and I believe I kept it; but I kept it badly. He smiled a slow, contented smile, like that of a chess-player who sees his adversary’s hand hesitate over the wrong piece.

“Who told you that name?” I asked.

“Nobody tells me anything, doctor,” he answered. “I have to find things out for myself. You found out a great deal about me the other day. It is only fair.” Not another word could I get from him on the subject. He sat down again with his hands upon his knees, and began to hum.

The thing worried me all day. He has no visitors and no letters, and Hardy and Simmons, whom I questioned, had never heard the name. It was not until this evening, when I took out my pocket-book to enter a dose, that I found the explanation, and a humbling one. Between the leaves lay a card, “Mrs. Westenra. Miss Westenra. At Home. Thursdays.” I have carried it since the spring, and have not had the heart to throw it away. I had that pocket-book open in my hand on the 25th, making notes as I questioned him. He has quick eyes. For the rest he had only to read my face, and on that day, God knows, it was not hard reading. She told me once, laughing, that I looked at her as though I would read her thoughts. It seems that mine is the easier book.

*Mem.*--His powers of observation are far beyond what I had credited. He saw the name, kept it by him for eleven days, and chose his moment with something very like malice, or very like humour. Which? His mind is fixed upon its one idea. If it still has room in it for curiosity about the affairs of others, then he is nearer sanity than I had supposed, and by so much the more dangerous.

*Mem.*--Burn the card.

I have put it back in the pocket-book.

*Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray.*

“*17, Chatham Street,*

“*10 July.*

“My dearest Mina,--

“You are *not* to be downhearted, and you are not to scold yourself for being downhearted, which is a great deal worse. Only think: you had his letters all through June, each one saying he was nearly done, and then the last saying that he had got as far as Bistritz and was on his way. Arthur found Bistritz for me on the big map in the library. It is such a long, long way off, dear, right at the very edge of everything, that I do not wonder at a week more or less. Arthur says that trains in those countries start when the guard has finished his pipe, and not before. So there!

“We are fixed for the twenty-eighth of September, and you and Jonathan are to be there, *both* of you, and I will take no excuses. Mamma is busier than I have seen her for years, and says it does her more good than all the doctors. Dr. Seward dined with us on Sunday. He was very kind and very grave, and looked at me in his old way, as if he were reading me; and I let him, and did not mind it a bit any more. He asked after you and Jonathan most particularly. He remembers everything I have ever told him, which is so like him. Mr. Morris has gone north to catch salmon, which he says are the only creatures in these islands that fight fair. He sends me the most ridiculous messages by Arthur.

“Now, if you have no news by the time your school breaks up, you are to come straight to us here, and we shall wait for him together. Promise me.

“Your loving

“LUCY.”

*Letter, Ferencz Szabó, Proprietor of the Hotel zur Goldenen Traube, Buda-Pesth, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*11 July.*

“Honoured Madam,--

“I write at the desire of an English gentleman, Mr. Jonathan Harker, of Exeter, who is lodged in my house since four days. He begs me to say to you that he is well, and that he is delayed, and that you are not at all to be anxious. He is delayed by a fever of the kind which strangers take in this country from the river in the hot season, and which is nothing, for my own nephew has had it, and is now in Manchester in the cotton trade. The doctor of our quarter, who is a good doctor and has been in Vienna, has seen him and says rest, and quiet, and no journey for some weeks. Mr. Harker cannot himself write, because his hand is not steady from the fever, and he prays you to forgive the strange hand. He wishes me to say one thing more very particularly, which is that you shall not come, because the journey is long and the heat is great, and that he will write to you himself so soon as his hand permits it. He asks also that you will tell to Mr. Hawkins of Exeter, with his respects, that he is detained. My nephew being in Manchester, I write this with the help of the grammar of Herr Ollendorff, and I ask the indulgence of Madam for my faults.

“With the most profound respect, I am, honoured Madam, your obedient servant,

“FERENCZ SZABÓ.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*16 July.*--I had meant to begin this journal when I was with Lucy, and to fill it with interviews and descriptions, like the lady journalists. I begin it to-night instead, because I must tell somebody, and there is nobody awake to tell. A letter came this morning from Buda-Pesth. It is not in his hand, and I kissed it all the same, which was very foolish. The head mistress saw me do it, and was very kind, and pretended she had not. He is ill; but it is only the fever which all strangers take there, “and which is nothing.” I have read the letter so often that I catch myself saying “which is nothing” in the voice I have made up for Herr Szabó, a stout, slow voice, with a kind face behind it. I wrote at once to Mr. Hawkins, as Jonathan wished. He has telegraphed that I am not to fret, and that he will write to Buda-Pesth himself. Jonathan says that I am not to come. It is the first thing he has ever asked of me that I do not want to do, and I shall do it, because he asked it. But the school breaks up on the twenty-fifth. If there is still no line in his own hand by then, I shall go to Lucy, and we shall wait for him together.

*Telegram, Sister Agatha, Hospital of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, Buda-Pesth, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*24 July.*

“Harker brought here from hotel gravely ill, not merely delayed. Calls for you constantly. Can you come?

“AGATHA.”

Then came the night of the first falling star. Many people in the south of England saw it, I learned afterwards, as a line of flame high in the atmosphere. I think, though, that I was among the few who saw it come down. I had sat late over my paper on the moral ideas of the future. I was taking some trouble, I recall, to prove that cruelty would presently become as unintelligible to civilised men as cannibalism. A little after one o'clock, my wife having long since gone up, I went out into the garden to smoke a last pipe. The night was warm and very still, with no moon. I had scarcely struck my match when the whole garden was lit, as if someone had flung open a door upon a lighted room. Looking up, I saw a streak of greenish-white fire drawn swiftly down the sky towards the low ground where Chertsey lies. It left behind it a trail of faint luminosity that hung for some seconds after the thing itself had gone. I stood with the match burning down to my fingers, waiting, I know not why, for a sound. Presently, when I had quite given up expecting it, there came a dull and distant concussion, such as a heavy door makes in some remote part of a house. A moment after, a sort of shiver seemed to pass through the ground beneath my feet. A dog began barking towards the road, and then another; then all was still again.

I thought of it, I confess, as nothing more than a meteorite, larger than common. It did not occur to me to connect it with those flashes upon Mars that the papers had been making merry over. I remember only a certain boyish elation at having seen what I supposed so few had seen. I resolved to go in search of the thing in the morning, for I had a notion it had fallen not three miles away. Then I knocked out my pipe and went to bed, and slept very soundly.

I told my wife of it at breakfast, and to my surprise she would hear of nothing but coming with me. I had half a mind to take the bicycle, but I could not yet manage it with a companion walking beside me. We set out on foot a little before eight, across the heath and down the lanes. It was already a hot, bright morning, with a haze lying in the hollows and the larks up over the heather. A woman at a cottage gate told us that her husband had been woken in the night by a noise "like a gun going off." She said a carter had gone by an hour since, saying that something had fallen into the old gravel workings below the Ottershaw road.

The place, when we came to it, was a pit that had been dug for gravel many years before and long since given over to the water. The water had risen in it from below until it made a little lake, perhaps a hundred yards across, green and stagnant, fringed with reeds and a few pollard willows. I had passed it often and thought nothing of it. Now, while we were still some way off, I saw a column of white vapour going straight up from it into the windless air. As we drew nearer I heard a continuous seething and hissing, like a kettle on the boil.

The Thing lay at the nearer end of the pit, where the bank shelved steeply into deep water. It had struck the bank a glancing blow, I think. The turf and gravel were torn open for twenty yards along the edge and flung in a great fan over the heath, and a willow had been split, its branches scorched and smouldering. Then it had plunged forward into the water. It lay there half-submerged, canted a little to one side, with steam rising from it in dense rolling masses that thinned and drifted as they rose. All round it the water simmered, and a scum of dead weed and mud had risen and floated on the surface. The heat struck up at one's face from a dozen yards away.

What could be seen of it above the water was a great rounded mass of a dull dun colour. It was crusted over with a thick, scaly incrustation that had here and there cracked and flaked away. Through the steam it was difficult to make out its shape. But where its upper edge rose out of the water it was curved, and the curve was very true. It was far truer, I thought, than any mass of stone or iron shaped by accident had any right to be, and I remember that the sight of it gave my mind a queer little check. The part below the water I could not see at all.

There were a few people there before us: two labourers from the brickfield, a boy with a milk can, and the carter, whose horse stood cropping at the edge of the heath. They talked together in low voices, as men do in the presence of something they do not understand. My wife took my arm and we stood with them. Now and then a larger bubble broke with a louder spit and hiss. Once, from somewhere within the mass, there came a faint sharp sound, like the crack of a stone put into the fire.

It was about half-past nine when Ogilvy came. He had seen the fall from his observatory and had spent the early morning searching the wrong side of the common. He came hurrying down the lane with his hat in his hand, his face red with heat and exertion. He was greatly excited, but it was the excitement of a man of science who has had a stroke of luck, and I saw at once that he had no other thought in his head.

"An aerolite!" he cried, as soon as he was within speaking distance. "And fallen into water, of all places! Do you know how rarely a fall is observed and the thing recovered the same morning? We must keep these people off it. What a size it is!"

He went as near the edge as the heat would allow and stood peering into the steam, shading his eyes. I went with him.

"Ogilvy," I said, "have you looked at the edge of it?"

"I have looked at all of it there is to see."

"It is curved," I said. "It is curved as if it had been turned in a lathe."

He laughed. "My dear fellow, you have been reading the newspapers. You will be telling me next that it has come from Mars."

"I was going to ask you," I said, "whether it might not have."

"It might not," he said, "and it has not. Consider."

He laid the matter out for me with a kind of genial impatience, as a man explains a thing to a child. Meteorites, he said, fell upon the earth by the thousand every year. Most were consumed in the upper air and a few came down. Of those few some were stone and some were iron, and this, by its colour and its crust, was plainly an iron. The crust was nothing but the skin of fused metal that every such body acquired in its passage through the air. As for the shape, a mass rushing through the atmosphere at many miles a second was worn and rounded as a pebble is rounded in a brook. The wonder, he said, would be if it had kept any sharp edges at all.

"They come to us rounded," he said, "bullet-shaped, pear-shaped, like a loaf, like a turtle's back. There is one at South Kensington you would swear had been cast in a mould."

"And the flashes on Mars?"

"Volcanoes," said Ogilvy, "or a shower of meteorites falling on Mars itself, as I told you that night. What have they to do with this? You would have me believe a thing was fired off from a planet forty millions of miles away and came all that way to drop into a gravel pit at Chertsey. Have you considered the aim of it?" He waved his hand at the pit, the heath, and the willows. "The chances against it are a million to one."

"You said the same of the Martians," I said.

"I did, and I say it again."

I pointed out that it had not shattered, as I understood meteorites commonly did on striking the ground. He answered that it had struck the bank only a glancing blow and then the water, which had broken its fall, and that iron was a very different thing from stone. I said the heat of it seemed very great and very long sustained for so short a passage through the air. He said that was precisely what one would expect of a large body. Small meteorites might be picked up cool, but a great mass of iron heated through its outer parts would hold its heat for hours. That sharp sound came again as we stood there, and he said it was nothing but the crust cracking as the water chilled it unequally. He had an answer for everything, and they were good answers, and I could not meet them. Yet I went on looking at that too-regular curve of metal in the steam, and I was not satisfied.

I do not set this down in any spirit of triumph over Ogilvy. He reasoned as any competent man of science would have reasoned in his place, from the facts he had and the probabilities he knew. I proved right in the end, but I had had nothing better to go upon than a fancy and an uneasiness. It is only that I have thought since how completely all our minds were shut against the possibility. We took refuge in the familiar explanation, and the most learned of us took it first.

Meanwhile the news had gone abroad. How news travels in the country I have never understood, but by ten o'clock there were perhaps twoscore people about the pit, and they were still coming. There were men from the brickfield and the farms, women with their aprons still on, and a knot of boys who ought to have been at school. There were a couple of young men on bicycles from Chertsey, a butcher's cart, and presently a policeman, very hot. He stood among them with an air of authority but without, so far as I could see, any clear notion of what he had come to protect. The boys had begun pitching stones at the thing to hear them ring and hiss, and Ogilvy went among them begging them to stop. He wanted the thing left undisturbed until he could get word to the proper people in London. He wrote a telegram on a leaf of his pocket-book and sent one of the cyclists off with it to the post office at Chertsey.

By this time the steam had grown a good deal less. The water about the thing had stopped boiling, though it still steamed in the sunlight. Where the crust had cracked away from the upper part, a dull grey metal showed beneath. It was this, I think, that brought about the accident. Among those who had come was a young fellow of about twenty in a straw hat and a very high collar. I heard afterwards that he was a draper's assistant from Chertsey. Since his arrival he had been loudly declaring the whole business a great fuss about a lump of iron. Whether for a wager or merely to show his contempt for the rest of us, he got hold of a plank lying among the reeds. He laid it from the bank, where the flung-up gravel stood nearly level with the top of the thing, across to its crust. Before Ogilvy or the policeman could stop him he had run out along it, arms spread for balance, crouched, and laid his hand flat upon the metal.

He screamed. I have heard many cries since then, and worse ones, but I have not forgotten that one, with the sheer astonishment in it. He snatched his hand away and the plank tipped under him. One leg went into the water to the knee, and he scrambled back to the bank, howling, holding his right hand out before him by the wrist as though it did not belong to him. The palm and the insides of the fingers were already white and blistered, and there was a smell of scorched skin. The crowd surged forward at his cry, fell back, and then closed about him. Ogilvy got there before me and had the hand wrapped in a wet handkerchief in a moment. A woman from one of the cottages ran up with a pot of goose-grease, and between them they did what they could. Then two of his friends took him off in the butcher's cart to the doctor at Chertsey. He was very white and said nothing more about lumps of iron.

"You see," said Ogilvy to me, a little shakily, "it is exactly as I told you. Hot right through. It will be hours yet."

But I think the thing had shaken him, as it had shaken all of us. After that nobody went nearer the pit than the edge of the torn gravel, and the talk of the crowd, which had been loud and jocular, sank to something lower.

My wife had seen it all. She had borne the heat and the waiting very patiently through the morning, but when I came back to her she was pale, and I felt her hand trembling on my arm. It was close on noon, with the sun almost overhead, and there was no shade on that side of the pit but what the scorched willow gave. The crowd was growing every minute. The news had got to Addlestone and Ottershaw, and people were coming along every lane and path across the heath. A fly had come up from the station with a fare, and at the front there began to be a good deal of pushing and jostling. I told her she had better go home.

She did not want to go. "And you?" she said.

I said I would stay a little longer with Ogilvy and be home by tea-time. There was nothing more to see, I told her, but a hot lump of metal cooling in a pond. She was tired, she had had a fright, and the sun was too much for her. I found myself giving her Ogilvy's own arguments, and giving them, I dare say, with more conviction than I felt. She looked at me as if she would say something more. Then she looked past me at the pit, where the steam still rose, thin now and almost invisible in the sunlight.

"I do not like it," she said. "I cannot tell you why."

"It is a stone out of the sky," I said. "People will come down from London and put it in a glass case."

At that she laughed a little and let me go. The carter was going back our way and offered her a seat as far as the crossroads. I handed her up beside him and watched the cart go jolting up the lane. She turned once at the bend to look back, and I waved my hat to her. Then I turned to the pit, where the crowd had thickened while my back was turned, and pushed my way through to Ogilvy's side. There I stayed.

The path back to the house seemed a good deal longer than it had seemed in going down, and Madame Ratignolle made the most of every yard of it. She stopped at intervals to declare that her knees were turned to wood and her ankles to lead, and that she would certainly never reach home alive; and each time Robert offered gravely to carry her the rest of the way, and each time she refused him with a little shriek of laughter and went on. The camomile gave out a warm, bitter smell in the sun. A lizard ran across the sand before them and was gone into the tangle at the side.

Robert had walked for some moments without speaking, which was not his habit.

“Mrs. Pontellier will never learn to swim,” he said presently.

“After all your lessons! Poor Robert.”

“Oh, the lessons are well enough. She does everything I tell her. But she will not let go of my hand. It is not that she is afraid of the water; I don’t believe she is afraid of anything. It is something else.” He kicked at a clump of weed that had crept out into the path. “I think she would sooner go under than be seen to flounder.”

“Edna!” cried Madame Ratignolle. “But she is as simple as a child!” And then, “*Mon Dieu!* my knee!” She clutched his arm with both her hands, and the subject was lost in the knee, which took all his attention as far as the Ratignolle cottage. There he left her upon the gallery, in the care of her nurse and her fan.

The telegram came a little after dinner. A small barefooted boy brought it over from Klein’s and waited at the foot of the steps, digging his toes into the sand, until Mrs. Pontellier had found a coin for him. It said that business detained Mr. Pontellier in the city; that he could not come out on Saturday; that he would write. It was signed with his full name, as though she might otherwise have mistaken it for a message from some other husband.

Edna read it through twice, standing at the top of the steps. She had not been counting the days until Saturday. She tried to feel that she had been, and that she was disappointed. When the quadroon came out with the little Pontelliers, freshly washed and fretful, to put them down for their nap, Edna told her that Monsieur would not be coming this week. To her own ears her voice sounded very composed, more composed, perhaps, than the occasion warranted. The nurse said it was a pity, and took the children in. Edna folded the yellow paper into a small square and slipped it into the pocket of her muslin, where she presently forgot it.

Grand Isle slept in the afternoons. The heat lay upon the island like a heavy hand; the blinds were drawn at the main house and in all the cottages. Mrs. Pontellier could not sleep. She lay for a while upon her bed, listening to the breathing of the children in the next room; then she rose, took her key, and went down to the beach alone.

The stiff wind of the morning had fallen. The sea lay nearly still, pale and glittering, and broke upon the sand in long, lazy folds that hardly troubled to foam. There was no one in sight. The children’s tent stood empty; the galleries of the bath-houses were deserted; even the lovers had carried their vows elsewhere.

She put on her bathing suit and went down into the water. It was warm, warmer than she had ever felt it, for she had never before gone in at that hour. She waded out until it reached her waist, and then her breast, and there she stood a long time with her arms spread upon the surface. Always before there had been something: Robert’s hand beneath her, or the voices of the others about her, or the shore at her back full of people who might look. Now there was nothing but the water and the sky and herself.

She did not decide to do it. She let herself fall forward, as one lets oneself fall asleep, and struck out.

It was not far. Five strokes, perhaps six; clumsy, violent strokes, with more of battle in them than of swimming. Then a sudden terror seized her. Her feet went plunging down in search of the bottom and found it, and she stood upright with the water streaming out of her hair into her eyes. But she had done it. For the space of those six strokes nothing had held her up but herself. She laughed aloud, a short, startled laugh that sounded strange upon the empty beach, and looked quickly about her, as if some one might have heard.

She tried again, and again after that, each time a little less afraid, each time beating the water less as if it were an enemy. When at last she came out she was trembling in every limb, and it seemed to her that she might have gone out as far as the sails, had she chosen.

The lady in black had come down while she was in the water. She sat upon the gallery of the neighboring bath-house, her book of devotions open upon her knee and her beads slipping through her fingers. Edna did not know how long she had been there. She went into her own compartment and dressed. When she came out again, with her wet hair twisted up anyhow beneath the straw hat, the lady in black lifted her eyes and spoke. In all the weeks at Lebrun’s she had never addressed a word to Mrs. Pontellier. So far as Edna knew, she had never addressed any one but Madame Lebrun and the saints.

“Your husband does not come on Saturday,” she said. It was not a question.

Edna was so taken aback that for a moment she could say nothing at all. The folded paper was still in her pocket, and she had spoken of it to no one but the nurse.

“No,” she said at last. “He is detained in the city.”

“They are always detained.” A bead slipped through the black-gloved fingers. “The week is long for the wives. One comes down to the water to pass the time.” And after a little pause: “You were in a long while.”

“Only a little way,” said Edna.

The lady in black considered her a moment with her faded eyes, then let them fall again upon her book, and her lips resumed their soundless motion. Edna went up the path with her wet hair heavy upon her neck. She did not know whether she had been watched or had merely been talked about, and she was half inclined to think it made no great difference.

Madame Ratignolle, quite restored, came over after supper and sat with her upon the gallery in the dusk. Some one was playing the piano at the main house. Now and then Robert’s voice could be heard above it, singing or arguing with the player.

“So Monsieur Pontellier does not come,” said Adèle. “Every one knows it. Madame Lebrun had it from the boy, and the boy had it from Klein’s. You must not mind, *ma chère*. They are all like that when they get into the city.” She unrolled her needlework, looked at it in the failing light, and rolled it up again. “But I have been saving something for you all day. Robert said the drollest thing of you this morning, when he was taking me home. He says you will never learn to swim. He says you would rather drown than let a soul on earth see you struggle. Imagine!”

“Did he say that?”

“Something very like it. I told him you were as simple as a child.” She laughed her soft laugh. “Robert is always saying things.”

Edna laughed too, and said that very likely he was right. For a moment the afternoon was at her lips: the warm, empty water, the six strokes, her own laugh upon the beach. She did not speak of it, and she could not have told why. She knew only that once it was spoken it would be a thing that Adèle knew, and then Robert, and then every one at Lebrun’s, from Madame Lebrun down to the barefooted boy from Klein’s; and that it would not be hers any more.

Madame Ratignolle went home early, pleading her knees. The children had long been asleep. The music at the main house ceased, and the lights there went out one by one until only the lamp in Madame Lebrun’s window was left, and then that too. Edna remained alone upon the gallery.

She did not go in. She sat with her hands lying idle in her lap and the sound of the sea in her ears, and turned the words over as one turns a shell to see what may be living inside it. *You would rather drown than let a soul see you struggle.* It was Adèle’s voice she heard saying them, with Adèle’s little laugh after. She had never heard them in Robert’s voice, and she found that she wanted to very much. She wondered whether he had spoken them in jest or in earnest, and whether he had meant them as a reproach or (it was possible) as something else. She wondered whether they were true. She thought that they were. And yet that very afternoon she had struggled, and gasped, and beaten the water like a child beating the grass, and no one had seen her; and she had not drowned.

The night was warm and very still. She sat on in the dark long after there was any reason to sit, with the words going round and round in her mind like the slow wash of the water on the beach below.

The First National Bank was two blocks up Broadway from the Herald building, on a corner. I sent in a card that told the truth about me. After a while a boy in a gray uniform took me through a gate in the brass railing to the desk of an assistant cashier named Kimball.

He was a pink, round man of fifty or so, with rimless glasses and a gold pencil. He kept taking the pencil out of his vest pocket and putting it back again, as if he had to be sure it was still there. He read my card twice and laid it face down on his blotter.

"A distressing thing," he said. "A very distressing thing. What can the bank do for you?"

"Donald Willsson wrote a check for five thousand dollars yesterday afternoon, a little before three. I want to know if it has come in."

The pencil came out of his pocket.

"The bank's relations with its depositors," he began, "are, as you will understand⁠—"

"Sure. So are the bank's relations with Elihu Willsson. I'm not asking what's in the account. I'm asking whether a check with a dead man's name on it has been paid. If it hasn't, you'll want to know where it is as much as I do."

He looked at the pencil, put it back, and thought that over. Then he said, "Will you wait here, please?" and went away through a door with frosted glass in it.

He was gone ten minutes. When he came back he sat down carefully, as if somebody might have changed the chair while he was away.

"The check has not been presented," he said. "Not at any of our windows, and not through the clearing house this morning. Nor has anyone asked to have it certified."

"You'd know if it had been?"

"Certainly. A certified check is charged against the account at once. There is no such charge." He hesitated. "I took the liberty of asking the tellers whether Mr. Willsson was in the bank yesterday afternoon. None of them saw him. He did not come to my desk."

"Thanks. That was going to be my next question. What happens now if somebody walks in with it?"

"Now? We were notified of Mr. Willsson's death before we opened this morning. Nothing will be paid against his account until the estate is settled. Whoever holds that check"⁠—the pencil came out, was looked at, went back⁠—"holds a piece of paper."

"And a claim against the estate."

"Possibly. That would be for the courts."

"If it turns up, will you let me know? I'm at the Great Western."

He fingered my card on the blotter without turning it over.

"I should have to report it to Mr. Elihu Willsson."

"Report it to him," I said. "He'll bawl you out for bothering him. Then let me know."

"Mr. Willsson does not bawl me out," Kimball said with some dignity.

"You don't know what you're missing," I told him, and went out.

On the sidewalk I stood for a minute and looked up and down Broadway. Donald Willsson had written five thousand dollars into a check and gone out with it for twenty minutes, and he hadn't spent any of them in his own bank. In the twenty-odd hours since then nobody had tried to turn the check into money. Maybe nobody had had time. Maybe it was in the dead man's clothes, wherever the police were keeping them. I thought about going to the City Hall to ask, and decided not to. Noonan's department wasn't likely to show me what it had just because I asked, and I didn't want to show it what I had until I knew what that was worth.

I bought some cigarettes and walked back to the hotel.

Mrs. Willsson was sitting in the Great Western's lobby, in a leather chair that faced the street door. She wore a black dress, a small black hat and black gloves, and none of it had been bought for mourning. She didn't look as if she had slept any more than she had to, or cried at all. When she saw me she got up and came across the tiled floor, and every loafer in the lobby turned his head to watch her do it.

"I have been waiting nearly an hour," she said, as if I owed her the hour.

"Nobody told me you were coming."

"Nobody told me that you would go to my husband's father with stories about me."

There were too many ears in the lobby. I took her up to the mezzanine, to a corner behind the writing desks where there was a settee, a brass ashtray and nobody else. She sat on the edge of the settee and didn't take off her gloves.

"He telephoned me," she said. "Before noon. He called me things that⁠—He said you had told him I killed Donald."

"I didn't tell him that. He told me that. All I told him was that you went out last night at ten-twenty after a phone call, and came back at five minutes after eleven with blood on your slipper."

"It was not blood."

"What was it?"

She looked at me with her chin up.

"You are impertinent."

"I'm a detective. In my business it comes to the same thing. What was it?"

"I do not know what it was. I did not see anything on my slipper. If you saw something, you saw it in a bad light."

"The light was all right. Where did you go?"

"To find my husband."

"Find him?"

"No." Her mouth tightened. "I waited, and he did not come, and I came home."

"Waited where?"

"That is my affair."

"It'll be the police's affair when they get around to it."

Her gloved hands closed on the bag in her lap.

"You have told the police?"

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"I haven't got anything to sell them yet," I said.

She took that the way I had half expected her to. She opened the bag, looked into it, and shut it again without taking anything out.

"My husband sent for you," she said. "I do not know why. He is dead, and whatever it was is finished. How much did he pay you?"

"He paid the Agency. I get wages."

"How much would it cost for you to take your wages back to San Francisco?"

"You're the second one today who's wanted me back in San Francisco," I said. "The old man offered to see to it for nothing."

Color came into her face and went out again. I gave her a moment with it and then asked:

"What did Max Thaler want this morning?"

She didn't move at all. It was a good job of not moving.

"You are watching my house."

"I was walking toward it. So was he. He got there first."

"He came to say that he was sorry about Donald."

"Was he?"

"He said so."

"Did he say who shot him?"

"He said that he did not. He said that nobody with any sense would think he had, because it would be a stupid thing to do, and he is not stupid."

"And you believe him."

"I believe that he is not stupid," she said.

"Did your husband give you five thousand dollars yesterday?"

That was the first thing that got through to her. Her eyes widened. She said, "Five thousand⁠—?" and stopped, and then said: "No. Why?"

"Did he give it to anybody?"

"I do not know. Donald did not tell me what he did with his money. Donald did not tell me anything." She said it quickly and bitterly. "He was to have dinner with Mr. Lewis last night, not with me. I did not know that he would be⁠—where he was."

"Where was he?"

"Where the newspapers say." She stood up. "In Hurricane Street."

I stood up with her. She looked at me for a while as if she were adding up a column of figures and didn't like the total.

"You will not go back to San Francisco," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Not today."

She went down the stairs without saying anything else. From the mezzanine rail I watched her cross the lobby and the sidewalk and get into the Buick coupé at the curb. She drove it away as if it had done something to her.

I ate dinner in the hotel dining-room and took my time over it. Afterward I stopped at the desk for my key, and the clerk gave me an envelope with it.

"A kid brought that in around seven," he said. "Didn't wait for an answer. Said there wasn't going to be any."

The envelope was plain white, with my name printed on it in pencil in small neat capitals. I opened it standing at the desk. Inside was a folded railroad timetable, the kind they stack beside ticket windows. In the westbound column a train that left at eight-forty the next morning had a neat pencil ring around it. Tucked into the fold was an engraved card. It said Max Thaler and nothing else. I turned it over. There was nothing on the back.

It was a quiet way of saying something, which fitted a man they called Whisper. I remembered the Stutz at the curb outside this same hotel the night before, and Quint's word for the man in it.

I put the timetable in my pocket. The eight-forty was probably as good a train as any other. I didn't intend to find out.

Up in my room I sat down at the table with a pad of telegraph blanks I had got from the clerk. I spoiled three of them before I had what I wanted, which was this:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT DEAD LAST NIGHT BEFORE I SAW HIM. FATHER ELIHU WHO OWNS CITY ACCUSES WIDOW BUT WILL NOT TALK POLITICS. WIDOW WAS OUT OF HOUSE AT TIME OF MURDER AND WILL NOT SAY WHERE. LOCAL GAMBLER MAX THALER CALLED ON HER THIS MORNING AND TONIGHT SENT ME A TIMETABLE. DONALD DREW FIVE THOUSAND CHECK AFTERNOON OF MURDER PAYEE UNKNOWN NOT PRESENTED AND NOW BLOCKED UNTIL ESTATE SETTLED. AM STAYING ON BALANCE OF RETAINER UNLESS YOU WIRE OTHERWISE. SUGGEST PARIS CORRESPONDENT LOOK UP WIDOWS HISTORY THERE.

I read it over. It left out the green slipper, and the old man's opinion of French women, and a pretty young man in three shades of brown going into a dead man's house the morning after. The Old Man could fill those in for himself. He had been reading operatives' wires for a good many years, and he generally knew what was missing from them before they did.

I signed it and carried it around the corner to the telegraph office. A thin girl with a cold counted the words twice with the end of her pencil, told me what it came to, and took my money. When I got back to my room it was half-past ten. In ten more minutes it would be twenty-four hours since Donald Willsson went down on the sidewalk in Hurricane Street.

I undressed, turned out the light, and lay in bed smoking in the dark.

Yesterday afternoon a check for five thousand dollars had gone out of the Herald building in Donald Willsson's pocket. It hadn't gone into his bank. Nobody had brought it into the bank since, and anybody who brought it in now would get nothing for it but questions. Maybe it was in the dead man's clothes, where Noonan's people had it and weren't saying so. Maybe somebody had it who hadn't reached a teller's window before the bank got the news, and knew better than to try one now. Or maybe somebody had it who had never meant to take it to a bank at all.

I smoked another cigarette over that, and it came out the same way every time. Somewhere in Poisonville there was a slip of paper with a dead man's name at the bottom and somebody else's at the top, and I didn't know whose. I put out the cigarette and listened to the street for a while. Then I went to sleep.

“Have you?” I said.

“Rotten. You don’t know how rotten.”

The taxi went up the hill and around behind the Pantheon, big and dark against the sky, and then down the long straight Rue Saint-Jacques. Brett sat back in her corner with her eyes shut. The lights from the street came in through the window and went across her face and were gone again. She had put her hand out on the seat between us and I held it. The window was down and the air coming in was warm and smelled of the chestnut trees.

“I thought it would be better, coming back,” she said. “It isn’t better. It’s worse.”

“It’s always worse.”

“Don’t be clever, darling. I can’t bear it just now.”

We crossed the Boulevard de Port-Royal and the driver kept on straight for the park.

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to go to any park. I couldn’t stand it. All those trees standing about in the dark. Take me to the Select.”

“You said to drive around.”

“I know what I said. Take me to the Select, darling. I want lights, and a lot of people I don’t have to know.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He shrugged his shoulders and turned at the next corner and brought us back onto the Boulevard de Port-Royal, and we went along past the Closerie des Lilas, where a few people were still sitting out under the trees, and on down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The Dôme and the Rotonde were lighted and the people spilled out over their terraces nearly to the curb. Brett took her hand away and opened her bag and got out a cigarette. I lit it for her. She did not look at me.

“How have you been, Jake?”

“Fine.”

“Truly?”

“I’ve been working. There’s plenty of work.”

“That’s good. One ought to work.”

“I like it all right.”

“I’ve been having a lovely time,” Brett said. “Simply lovely. Everybody’s been so sweet.”

“That’s fine.”

“Isn’t it?”

She looked out of her window and I looked out of mine. I had missed her every day she was gone, and I was in love with her, and it was not any good.

The terrace of the Select was crowded and the waiters were going in and out between the tables with their trays held up high. We went inside and found a table against the wall near the end of the bar. There were some people Brett knew standing at the bar. She waved to them and two of them started over, and she shook her head, and they laughed and went back. The waiter came and Brett ordered a brandy and soda.

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

“I’m not. This is for my nerves.”

“How are your nerves?”

“Shot to hell, darling.” She drank half the glass and set it down and turned it around on the saucer. “I say. I met a man last week. A man named Wetherby.”

“Who’s Wetherby?”

“Lionel Wetherby. You must know him.”

“No.”

“But everybody knows him. He’s got simply pots of money. It’s nitrates, or is it jute? Something one digs up or grows.”

“I never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have, darling. He never comes over on this side of the river. He stops at the Crillon and he’s never read a book in his life, and he thinks I’m the most extraordinary woman he ever met.”

“You are.”

“Don’t. He wants to take me down to Cannes. He says what I want is the sun.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know what I want.” She drank some more of the brandy. “He’s awfully kind. He’s so kind it’s like being back in hospital. One simply lies there and lets them bring things.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“He says so. He’s very correct about it. He sends round flowers in the morning with little notes.”

“That’s something.”

“It isn’t anything,” Brett said. “It isn’t anything at all.”

“Then why see him?”

“Because he asks me, darling. Because one has to see somebody.” She looked at me and then looked away at the bar. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I wasn’t looking at you any way.”

“You were. You always do.”

We sat there and did not say anything. The people at the bar were talking loudly about somebody’s show that was going to open at a gallery in the Rue de Seine. Brett finished her drink and I ordered her another and a whisky for myself.

“What happened to your girl?” Brett asked.

“She’s back at the Bal. Or she’s gone.”

“With your fifty francs.”

“That’s right. I think I’ll go back and see.”

“Whatever for?”

“I want to know if she’s gone.”

I did not know why I wanted to go back. It seemed like something to do that was simple.

Brett laughed. “You are an odd one. All right. I’ll come along in the cab. But I shan’t go in. I’ve had that place.”

We got a taxi on the Boulevard and went back along it to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and up the Rue Soufflot to the Pantheon and down the steep street. I could hear the accordion from the corner. The policeman was still sitting by the door. He looked at me and smiled, the same as before.

It was not so hot inside now. There were only four or five couples on the floor and the proprietor was playing slowly on his high stool with his eyes shut, beating the time with the bells on his ankle. Braddocks’s table was empty and nobody had cleared away the glasses and the saucers. Georgette was sitting by herself on one of the long benches against the wall. Her hat was on the bench beside her.

I went over to the bar. The patronne took the envelope out of a drawer under the zinc and gave it to me. It was still sealed.

“She did not ask for you, Monsieur,” she said. “And she did not go out with any of those gentlemen.”

“Where are the gentlemen?”

“Gone up to Montmartre. All together. They are always all together, that sort.”

I thanked her and went over to Georgette.

“Tiens,” she said. “It’s the fiancé.”

“I came back.”

“I see that.” She looked at me without much interest. “Where did you go?”

“Out for a while.”

“With the tall English one.”

“Yes.”

“Your friends danced with me,” Georgette said. “All of them, one after another. They dance very well. Then they all went away to Montmartre together and nobody asked me, and nobody bought me anything. I had a lemonade. I paid for it myself.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“No? Whose friends are they, then?”

“Hers.”

“Ah,” Georgette said. She thought about that. “Then she is a funny one, your English.”

I put the envelope on the table in front of her.

“What’s that?”

“It was for you if you asked for me.”

“I didn’t ask for you.”

“I know. Take it anyway.”

She opened it with her thumbnail and looked at the note and folded it small and put it in her bag. She did not say anything about it.

“It isn’t much of an evening,” she said.

“No.”

“Still, the dinner was all right.” She picked up her hat and put it on and looked at herself in the little mirror and pushed her hair in under the brim. “You’re not a bad type. It’s a shame about you.”

“Yes.”

“Is she sick too? The English one?”

“In a way.”

“Everybody is sick in this town,” Georgette said. “I’m going home to bed.”

I paid the patronne for the lemonade. When I looked back from the door Georgette had not gone. She was sitting on the bench in her hat with her bag in her lap, watching the couples go around on the floor.

Brett was in the taxi, smoking.

“Well?”

“She was there.”

“Poor little beast. Did you give it to her?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve lost your fifty francs after all.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I lost it.”

“I told you you would.”

“You told me.”

We did not go up to Montmartre. Brett said she could not face them, and we drove down to the river and across it and along the quais on the other side, and sat for a long time in a café on the Boulevard de Sébastopol where there was nobody but the waiter and a man asleep over his newspaper, and later, when it was after three, we were in the Halles. The carts were coming in from the country and the streets were full of them, big wagons piled high with cabbages and carrots and leeks, the horses standing quiet in the shafts, and men unloading under the lights and throwing the vegetables down in heaps on the stones. It smelled of earth and horses and wet pavement. We went into a place full of market porters and butchers with blood on their aprons and ate onion soup with the cheese burned on top of it, standing at the counter. Brett said it was the first thing she had eaten all day. She was very gay with the porters and they liked her. One of them gave her a bunch of radishes, washed, with the leaves still on them, and she carried them out with her.

“I’d like to live like this,” Brett said. “Up at three and in bed by nine, and never see anybody but porters.”

“You’d hate it.”

“I’d love it. For a week I’d love it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’d want a bath and somebody to take me to dinner,” Brett said. “That’s the hell of it.”

When we came out it was getting light. The sky over the roofs was grey and then lighter than grey, and the street lamps looked yellow and useless.

“I must go home,” Brett said. “I’ve a luncheon.”

“With Wetherby?”

“With Wetherby.” She looked down at the radishes. “Don’t mind, darling.”

“I don’t mind.”

“That’s good. You mustn’t ever mind.”

I found a taxi at the corner of the Rue du Pont-Neuf and put her into it. She gave the driver the name of her hotel. Then she leaned out of the window and held on to my hand.

“Good night, Jake.”

“It’s morning.”

“So it is. Good morning, then, darling.”

The driver let in the clutch and she let go of my hand, and the taxi went off and turned into the Rue de Rivoli and was gone.

I walked down the Rue du Pont-Neuf to the river. There was nobody on the bridge. From the middle of it I watched a tug come up under the arches towing three barges, low and black in the water, and a man in a blue jersey stood at the tiller of the last barge smoking his pipe while a dog ran up and down the deck. I crossed over and went along the Quai des Grands-Augustins. The bookstalls on the parapet were shut and padlocked. There was a little mist lying on the water close in under the stone of the quai, and the trees had their new leaves on them, and ahead of me, beyond the Cité and the two towers of Notre Dame, the sky was yellow and cold where the sun was going to come up. A man with a hose was washing down the sidewalk and he turned the water away while I went by. In a café across the quai a waiter was taking the chairs down off the tables and setting them out.

I thought about Brett going away in the taxi with her bunch of radishes, and about the man with the nitrates, and then I did not think about anything. I was tired and it was a fine morning. I walked on along the river toward home.