The Chapters

When Mary awakened the train had already stopped at a small station, and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her shoulder.

"You've slept a good piece," she said. "It's time to rouse yourself."

Mary opened her eyes and looked about her. The rain had stopped and the station lamps burned yellow through a thin mist. Mrs. Medlock was gathering up her parcels with the brisk air of a woman who did not intend to be left behind by her own train, and Mary, stiff and cross with sleep, stumbled after her onto the platform.

There were not many people about. A tall man was standing near the door of the waiting-room, and it was toward him that Mrs. Medlock moved at once, with a change come over her manner which Mary was sharp enough to notice--she became suddenly less brisk and more careful, as a person becomes in the presence of someone they must mind their words with.

"So this is Mrs. Lennox's girl," the man said. His voice was not loud, but it was the kind of voice that seemed to come from a long way inside him, as if he did not use it often. He was not so very tall after all, Mary thought, looking up, but he stooped, and one shoulder was higher than the other, so that his black clothes seemed to hang on him unevenly. His face was dark and had a look upon it as if it were shut up, the way Mrs. Medlock had said the rooms at Misselthwaite were shut up.

"Yes, sir. This is she," said Mrs. Medlock.

Mary waited for him to say something to her, because grown people generally either asked her name over again or told her she was a good little girl or said something of that sort. But Mr. Archibald Craven, for she knew at once that this must be her uncle, only looked at her for a moment with his queer dark eyes, as if he were not seeing her so much as seeing something else that her being there reminded him of. Then he looked away again.

"See that she has what she needs on the way," he said to Mrs. Medlock, and turned and walked out to where the carriage was waiting, and that was the whole of it. He did not take Mary's hand and he did not ask if she was tired from her journey, and by the time they reached the carriage he had already climbed in and settled himself in the corner with his face turned to the window, so that Mary, climbing in after Mrs. Medlock, saw only the crooked shape of his shoulder against the carriage lamp.

Nobody talked at all. Mr. Craven sat in his corner, and Mrs. Medlock sat in hers, and Mary sat between them with her hands folded, feeling smaller and stranger than she had felt even on the ship, and watching the dark go by outside the glass. After a while there were no more house-lights to be seen, and the carriage went on and on through what seemed to be a blackness with nothing in it at all, though now and again the wind rushed against the carriage window and made a sound like something flapping.

"That's the moor," said Mrs. Medlock, when Mary had been staring out for a long time. "There's naught to see now, but you'll see it plain enough tomorrow."

Mary pressed her face nearer the glass but could make out nothing except that the carriage lamps showed a little strip of road, and beyond that, darkness that seemed to have no end to it, and a sound of wind that never stopped, a wild, low, singing sort of sound quite unlike any wind she had heard in India.

They had been driving a long time--it seemed to Mary hours, though she could not tell--when the carriage gave a lurch and stopped so suddenly that she was nearly thrown from the seat. She heard the coachman's voice, and another voice answering him, and then the door of the carriage was opened and a gust of cold, wet-smelling air came in.

"What is it?" said Mr. Craven, without moving from his corner.

"Summat in t' road, sir," the coachman called down. "Sheep got through the fence again, likely. I'll have to get down and shift it."

Mrs. Medlock made an impatient sound in her throat, but Mr. Craven said nothing at all, only sat with his face to the window as before. Mary, who had been sitting so still and stiff for so long that her legs ached with it, found that she wanted more than anything to get down out of the carriage, if only for a moment, and before Mrs. Medlock could stop her she had opened the door on her side and slipped out onto the road.

"Miss Mary! Come back in, do--" Mrs. Medlock began, but Mary did not come back at once.

It was the queerest moment she had ever known. The carriage lamps threw only a little light, and beyond them there seemed to be nothing at all--no houses, no trees, no walls, nothing but a great black flatness that went on in every direction until it met a sky that was almost as black, except that far off at the edge of it there was a thin gray line where the clouds had broken. The wind came across it in long breaths, cold and smelling of wet earth and something else, something growing, that Mary had never smelled before. It was not like any dark she had known. In the bungalow the dark had always had walls to it, and voices behind the walls, and now there seemed to be no walls anywhere at all, and the wind went on making its low, strange sound, almost like breathing, almost like something a very long way off calling out, though when she held herself still and listened it was only wind.

"Get in, get in," said Mrs. Medlock's voice, sharp with the cold. "You'll catch your death standing about on the moor at this hour. There's nothing to see."

Mary got in. She did not know why she had wanted to get out at all, except that the blackness had seemed to pull at her in some way she could not have put into words. Mr. Craven had not turned his head the whole time. In a few minutes the coachman climbed back to his place, there was a cracking of his whip, and the carriage went on again, jolting over the road, with the wind streaming past the windows as before.

It was a long time after that, and Mary had begun to feel so heavy with sleep and strangeness that she scarcely knew when the carriage at last turned in through big gates and went on under trees, until it stopped before a great door in a long, low front of a house with many windows, though only one or two of them showed any light. Mr. Craven got down first, without a word, and disappeared almost at once through the door and was not seen again, and it was Mrs. Medlock who took Mary by the hand--the first time anyone had touched her the whole evening--and led her up a shallow flight of steps into a great hall lit by one lamp, and hung about with pictures Mary could not see clearly, and a staircase going up into darkness.

"You'll not see much of the house tonight," said Mrs. Medlock, "and you're not to expect to. Come along up."

She led Mary up the staircase and along a passage and up a few more steps and along another passage, until Mary had entirely lost any idea of where she was, and at last opened a door into a room where a fire was burning and there was a supper laid out on a table.

"Well, here you are," said Mrs. Medlock, not unkindly, though in a great hurry. "This an' next to it's your rooms and you must stay in them. Don't you forget that!"

She went away almost at once, saying something about being wanted, and Mary was left standing by the fire looking about her at the room, which had heavy curtains and a great dark wardrobe and did not seem to belong to her at all, when there came a knock at the door and a manservant came in carrying a tray.

He was not a young man, and he set the tray down on the table with a good deal of clatter, and then straightened himself and looked at Mary in an odd, considering way, as if she were something that had turned up that he had not expected and was not sure what to make of.

"Well, tha's coom, then," he said. "Sit thee down and sup while it's warm. It's naught much, but it'll do thee no harm."

Mary stared at him. She understood perhaps one word in three of what he had said, and she was not accustomed to being spoken to in a voice or a way of speaking she could not follow at once.

"I don't understand you," she said, rather stiffly. "You must speak so that I can understand."

The man looked at her a moment, and something moved at the corner of his mouth as if he might have laughed if he had thought it worth his while.

"Eh, tha doesn't understand Yorkshire, I'll be bound," he said, a little more slowly, though it was not much plainer to her for that. "Well, tha'll learn it fast enough, happen, if tha bides here long enow. Get on wi' thi supper, that's all I meant."

He went out and shut the door, and Mary was left alone with the fire and the tray, on which there was bread and butter and a bowl of milk and a little cold meat, and she ate some of it, though she was too tired and too strange to herself to be very hungry, and all the while she was thinking that everyone in this house spoke either not at all, like her uncle, or in words she could not properly understand, like the manservant, and that no one seemed to trouble themselves in the least whether she was comfortable or not, which was, after all, very much what she was used to, though she had never before minded it quite so much.

When Mrs. Medlock came back it was to take her into the next room, where there was a narrow white bed already turned down, and to tell her to make haste and get into it, for she would be tired out.

"I'll be back to put out your candle in a few minutes," said Mrs. Medlock, and went away again, and Mary undressed herself, as she had always been used to having done for her, fumbling rather with the buttons, and got into the strange bed in the strange room, and lay looking at the fire, which had been lit here also and was sinking now into red embers, and at the shapes the firelight made upon the ceiling.

She had almost begun to grow drowsy when she heard it--a sound that was not the wind exactly, or not only the wind; a low, thin, wandering sound that came and went, now nearer, now farther, somewhere off beyond the walls of the room, as if it went a long way through the house.

She sat up in bed and listened with all her might, her heart beating rather fast, until Mrs. Medlock came in to see to the candle.

"What is that?" Mary asked. "Do you hear it? What is that noise?"

Mrs. Medlock stood still a moment with the candle in her hand, and Mary thought her face looked queer in the light, though she answered readily enough.

"That's naught but the wind," she said. "It blows fierce and lonesome up here on the edge o' the moor of a night. You'll get used to it." And she put out the candle and went away and shut the door, and her footsteps went off down the passage.

Mary lay quite still in the dark, listening. The sound came again, faint and far off and then nearer, rising and falling in a way that did not seem to her, the longer she listened, altogether like wind at all. She lay with her eyes open, wide awake now, staring into the blackness of the strange room, and made up her mind, in her stubborn, contrary little way, that whatever Mrs. Medlock might say, she meant to find out for herself, sooner or later, exactly what it was.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Oh, do let's go to the Select. I can't face Montmartre and I haven't a cigarette left and I want to see Frenchmen who aren't tight."

"We just left a whole table full of people who weren't tight."

"Don't be foul, Jake. I can't stand my own crowd tonight." She had her eyes closed still, and she was smiling. "Take me to the Select."

I leaned forward and told the driver, and sat back. Brett found my hand and held it, but we did not look at each other. I suppose I loved having her hold it about as much as I have loved anything. The streets were dark and wet-looking under the arc-lights, and we went through the Montparnasse crossing fast, the lights of the Rotonde swinging by, and on up the boulevard.

"I met a most extraordinary chap last week," Brett said. "Count Mippipopolous. Comes from Greece. Awfully rich."

"Never heard of him."

"You wouldn't have. Turned up out of nowhere with a case of champagne and insisted on sending it round to my hotel because he'd heard I was thirsty, or some such rot. Perfectly serious about it, too. Gave the concierge a hundred francs to bring it up."

"Sounds like a good man to know."

"He is rather. Says he wants to take me to Biarritz. I told him I couldn't think of it."

"Why not?"

"Darling, don't be tiresome." She opened her eyes and looked at me, and then closed them again. "You know quite well why not."

I did not say anything. The cab swung round by the Lion de Belfort and started up toward Montparnasse, and I watched the streets, the shuttered shop-fronts, a man selling roasted chestnuts at a corner with his cart and its glowing brazier, though it was much too warm a night for chestnuts.

"Aren't you going to ask me anything about him?" Brett said.

"No."

"You are an ass, Jake."

"I know it."

She laughed, and I felt her hand tighten on mine.

"You're the best of the lot, you know. I don't know why I say that. I do know."

"You don't have to say it at all."

"No," she said. "I don't, do I." She let go of my hand.

We came into the lights of the boulevard and I could see her face for a moment, very handsome and cool and a little tired-looking, and then it was in shadow again as we turned in toward the curb at the Select.

The terrace was crowded, all the little tables jammed close under the awning, and it was very bright out there compared to the darkness of the cab, and noisy. We got a table near the edge and Brett ordered a brandy and soda and I had a beer, and a very thin American girl came by whom Brett knew and stopped and talked about somebody named Sylvia and somebody named the Duke, and then went on. Brett watched her go and made a face.

"God, what a war that was," she said, meaning nothing at all, I think, just something to say, and lit a cigarette from the one the waiter had lit for her and let it go out unsmoked in the ashtray, and lit another.

"You're not smoking that one," I said.

"Wasn't I? I forget things."

We sat and did not talk for a while, and the crowd went by, and somebody at the next table was arguing about Picasso with a great deal of violence and very little knowledge, and a fat woman went by selling roses, and Brett bought one from her and gave it to me without any particular reason, and I did not know what to say, so I put it in my buttonhole and we both looked at it there.

"You are a fool, you know," Brett said.

"Not more than usual."

"I don't know why I like you so."

"Neither do I."

"You're the only person that never asks me anything."

"I ask you things."

"You never ask me things that matter."

"Perhaps I don't want to know the things that matter."

She looked at me then in a way I have tried since not to remember, and put her hand up and touched my cheek, quite lightly, the way you would touch something to see if it were real, and then took it away.

"You are sweet," she said, and it was not at all what either of us meant, and we both knew it, and let it stand.

I felt as though I would do anything on earth to have her stay at that table with me all night and never get into another taxi and never go anywhere with anybody else at all, and I could not say any of that, so I did not say anything.

We sat there until nearly four, and the crowd at the Select thinned out and came back in a new form, other people we knew, a Greek who painted and a Hungarian who wrote for a Vienna paper, and Brett was very charming to all of them and I sat and drank and watched her be charming, and after a while it did not hurt so much. It only hurt in the way that things hurt that you have stopped expecting to be any different.

Finally she said, "I ought to go home," and stood up rather suddenly, gathering her things.

"I'll get you a taxi."

"No. Send for one. I don't want you coming."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't, that's all. Be a good chap and send for one."

I sent the waiter, and we stood on the curb waiting, not saying anything, and when it came I opened the door for her and she got in and turned and looked at me out of the window.

"Don't come and see me for a bit, Jake. I'm off to San Sebastian with Frances Thursday or Friday, or whenever it is."

"Are you?"

"Yes. Do you mind?"

"Why should I mind?"

"I don't know. You looked odd for a second."

"I'm not odd," I said. "I'm perfectly all right."

"Of course you are," she said, and she smiled the way she had smiled at the Bal, and I shut the door, and told the driver where to take her, and stood on the pavement and watched the taxi go off down the boulevard and turn at the corner and disappear, and it left me feeling exactly as though I had been hit, though nobody had touched me at all.

I stood there for a while. Then I remembered the fifty francs, and thought I might as well go and collect it, since I was up and it was not far, and there did not seem to be anything else worth doing with the rest of the night.

I walked back down toward the river and up through the quarter, the streets nearly empty now except for the carts coming in with vegetables, big two-wheeled carts drawn by tired-looking horses, and the drivers half asleep on the seats, and a smell of the market starting up somewhere ahead of me. It was that hour when the night is over but the day has not started, and everything looks grey and used.

The Bal was still going when I got there, though there were only a few couples left on the floor and the accordion man was playing something slow, and the policeman had gone from the door. Georgette was sitting at a table with the tall blond one, called Zizi, or something near it, and two others I did not remember, and there was an empty champagne bottle upside down in a bucket, which meant somebody had paid for it, and it was not going to be me.

"Well," Georgette said when she saw me, not getting up, "here's my fiancé."

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Wonderful. These are my friends. This is Zizi. Zizi, this is Jacob, my fiancé, who abandoned me."

"Good evening," Zizi said, with great seriousness, and put out a limp hand.

"I came for my money," I said. "I left an envelope with the patronne."

Georgette laughed, not unkindly. "Go on then and get it. Nobody's touched your money."

The patronne found the envelope under the zinc and handed it over without comment, as though people left envelopes of money with her every night, which perhaps they did. I put it in my pocket.

"You're not staying?" Georgette said.

"No. I'm going home."

"You're a funny one," she said. "You bring a girl to dinner and then you leave her with strangers all night. Is that how you do in America?"

"Something like that."

"He's sick," she explained to Zizi, quite seriously, as though it accounted for everything, and Zizi nodded gravely as if it did. "Come round and see me sometime, when you're not sick," Georgette said, and gave me her hand to shake, very correct about it, as though we had only just met, and I shook it and said good night to the table in general, and went out.

Outside it was getting light, the sky over the roofs down toward the river gone a sort of pale grey-green, no color to it yet, and the street lamps still burning but looking useless now, like something left on by mistake. I did not want a taxi. I walked down toward the Seine, past the shuttered book-stalls along the quai, their green boxes chained shut, and the river running full and grey below the bridges, with a little mist lying on it in patches.

A few of the vegetable carts were crossing over from the Left Bank, the iron wheels loud on the stones, and one driver called something down to me, cheerfully, that I did not catch, and I lifted my hand to him. Downstream the towers of Notre Dame stood up out of the mist looking heavier than they did in daylight, and a tug went by with a string of barges, its running light still on though there was no need for it now.

I walked along the parapet for a long way, not thinking about anything in particular, or thinking about too many things to call it thinking about anything, with the grey light coming up steadily over the city and a smell of the river and of the wet stone coming up from below, and by the time I crossed over to my own side and started back toward the flat, it was, for all purposes, day.

The rain had stopped by the time Eve emerged from the offices of the Ada Clarkson International Employment Bureau, but she had the umbrella, and a well-brought-up girl does not make away with the property of strange young men, however obligingly they may have thrust it upon her. She therefore retraced her steps along Shaftesbury Avenue, along Piccadilly, and so to the gloomy building into which her benefactor had vanished, revolving as she went the interesting question of what one says to a hall-porter under such circumstances.

The hall-porter of the Drones, when she found him, proved to be a large, comfortable man with the outlook on life of one who has seen every possible variety of foolishness perpetrated by the young gentlemen of his club and has long since given up being surprised by any of it.

"I wonder if you could help me," said Eve. "A gentleman--I don't know his name--lent me an umbrella this morning, just about opposite here. He's tall, and very well dressed, and he wears an eyeglass. He came out of this club, so I suppose he must be a member. I've brought the umbrella back, and I wondered if you would give it to him."

The hall-porter, who had had umbrellas restored to him by young women in the course of his professional career, but never before with quite such an air of urgency, took the article in question and turned it over as though hoping it might have a name inscribed on it.

"I couldn't say offhand which gentleman that would be, miss, not from the description. We get a good many gentlemen coming in of a morning. But I'll make enquiries and see he gets it."

"Thank you so much. Could I leave a note with it?"

"Certainly, miss. There's paper on the table there."

Eve went to the small table by the door, and, borrowing the porter's pen, which spluttered in a manner suggesting that it had not been designed with a lady's hand in view, wrote as follows:

*Thank you so much for the loan of your umbrella. It was extremely good of you to rescue me, and I hope you did not get very wet crossing the road. I am returning it with a thousand thanks.--E. H.*

She sealed this in an envelope which the porter, entering into the spirit of the thing with a fatherly benevolence, produced from a drawer, and, having directed that it should accompany the umbrella wherever the umbrella went, took her leave, feeling that she had discharged an obligation in a thoroughly correct and businesslike manner.

* * * * *

It was some twenty minutes later that the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, a cheerful young man with a face like a well-intentioned but not particularly intelligent horse, came bursting into the smoking-room of the Drones in a condition closely bordering on frenzy.

"I say," he announced to the room at large, "some low hound has pinched my umbrella!"

This statement, delivered with the passion of a man who has discovered that his ancestral castle has been carried off bodily in the night, met with the sympathy such calamities usually meet with at the Drones, which is to say, practically none whatever. Two or three of the more compassionate spirits looked up from their papers long enough to say "Hard luck," and returned to their reading.

It was at this point that the porter, who had been going from room to room in a spirit of conscientious enquiry, put his head in at the door.

"Beg pardon, sir. Was it your umbrella that's missing, Mr. Walderwick? A young lady's just brought one in, with a note, and from what she says it might answer to the description."

"Note?" said Mr. Walderwick, brightening. "What sort of note? Give it here."

"It's addressed to the gentleman himself, sir, whoever he may be. The young lady didn't know his name."

At this moment Psmith, who had been reposing in the window-seat with the air of a man at peace with all created things, rose with the unhurried grace of a large and beautifully-mannered cat, and strolled across the room.

"I rather fancy," he said, "that this small matter is one that concerns me. Might I see the umbrella, Comrade--I don't think I caught the name?"

"McTurk's the name," said the porter, who had got it wrong the first two dozen times he had heard it and saw no reason to alter his practice now.

Psmith took the umbrella and, with the air of a connoisseur examining a rare piece of porcelain, turned it over in his hands. He then extracted the note, read it with a faint, private smile, and slid it into his breast pocket.

"Here!" said Mr. Walderwick, who had been watching these proceedings with mounting suspicion. "That's my umbrella."

"I fear, Comrade Walderwick," said Psmith gently, "that you labour under a delusion which does you credit as a man of sunny and trusting nature, but little as a man of business. This umbrella, though it may resemble in its outward and visible aspects the one you have so tragically lost, is not that umbrella. It is, in point of fact, mine."

"It's got my initials on the handle."

"A coincidence which I confess had not previously struck me, but which need not detain us long. Initials, Comrade Walderwick, are cheap. Any tradesman in London will supply you with a fresh set for a matter of a few shillings. I should be delighted to further recommend a stationer's near Piccadilly Circus who does excellent work in this line."

"Look here, Smith, that's simply barefaced--"

"I will give you," said Psmith, producing his pocket-book with the calm decision of a man closing an important business deal, "five pounds for this umbrella."

Mr. Walderwick's jaw fell several inches and remained suspended in that position.

"Five--"

"Five pounds," repeated Psmith, extracting the notes and pressing them with quiet firmness into his interlocutor's unresisting hand. "I have taken, if I may say so without wounding your feelings, an unaccountable fancy to this particular umbrella. There is a something about its lines, a *je ne sais quoi*, if you will permit me to draw on my slender resources of French, which appeals to me in a way that mere umbrellas as a class have never before succeeded in doing. Five pounds, I am aware, is a large sum to pay for an umbrella which, if I recollect your habits correctly, you purchased for something under a guinea; but a man must be prepared to pay for his caprices, and this is mine."

The Hon. Hugo Walderwick looked from the notes in his hand to the umbrella under Psmith's arm, and back again to the notes. He was not a young man of profound intellect, but even he could perceive that there are certain transactions in this life which it is wiser not to examine too closely, particularly when they result in a clear profit of some four pounds odd on an article one had believed lost beyond recall.

"Well," he said at length, "I suppose that's all right, then."

"You have," Psmith assured him, "acted throughout with the ripe wisdom of a Solomon. I feel sure that whatever misunderstanding may have existed between us is now completely dissolved, and that we part, as we should, the closest of friends."

And, tucking the umbrella under his arm with the satisfaction of a man who has concluded a delicate piece of diplomacy without loss of dignity to either party, he withdrew to the window-seat, leaving Mr. Walderwick to explain to a small but derisive audience exactly how it was that he had contrived to sell his own umbrella back to the man who had stolen it.

* * * * *

The afternoon found Psmith, the business of resigning finally and for ever from the fish trade having occupied the greater part of the morning in a series of interviews with his uncle which he afterwards described as spirited without being wholly pleasant, walking in the direction of Miss Clarkson's bureau with the settled purpose of a man about to take the first deliberate step of a new career. He had slept, dined, and breakfasted on the resolution to place his sword--or, more accurately, his multifarious talents--at the disposal of the general public through the medium of Miss Clarkson's books, and he saw no reason to delay the enterprise.

He was passing along Shaftesbury Avenue, deep in pleasant speculation as to the nature of the employment which might befall a young man of good appearance, athletic proclivities, and a total inability to add up a column of figures correctly, when he became aware of a young woman in a black hat with a bird of Paradise feather, standing before a shop window some yards ahead of him, absorbed, to all appearances, in the contemplation of a display of gentlemen's socks.

Psmith came to a halt beside her with the unhurried ease of a man who has all the time in the world and means to spend a good deal of it exactly where he is.

"A singular exhibition," he observed, following her gaze into the window. "I have often speculated as to what manner of man buys socks of that precise shade of heliotrope. One pictures him--elderly, possibly a Justice of the Peace, with a secret passion for the tango."

Eve turned, startled, and found herself looking up--a good way up--into the solemn, monocled countenance of the young man who that morning had thrust an umbrella into her hand and vanished without a word of explanation across a crowded street.

"Oh!" she said. "It's you!"

"It is," Psmith agreed. "I have frequently observed the same phenomenon myself on getting up in the mornings, and have never yet succeeded in growing accustomed to it."

"You're the man who gave me the umbrella!"

Psmith regarded her with the mild, patient interest of one confronted with an agreeable but slightly baffling proposition.

"An umbrella," he said. "Now that is curious. I have myself but recently become the possessor of an umbrella, under circumstances which I will not weary you by relating, for they reflect little credit on human nature generally and the aristocracy of England in particular. But I fear I must disclaim the honour you do me. I have not, to my knowledge, presented an umbrella to a lady in the street. It is the sort of exploit I feel I should have remembered."

"But it was you! Outside the coal place in Dover Street--I was sheltering from the rain, and you came across from that club and gave me your umbrella and walked off without saying a word!"

"A romantic narrative," said Psmith, "and one which does credit to your descriptive powers. I can only say that I envy, without in the smallest degree resembling, the gallant unknown of your story. Had I been blessed with the presence of mind to think of so neat a manœuvre, I feel confident I should have employed it myself, being, as I am, a devoted admirer of resource in my fellow-men. But alas, the honour is not mine."

Eve looked at him closely. There was, she felt tolerably certain, no mistaking that face, that eyeglass, that air of a graven image which has just been complimented on a good tailor. And yet there was in his manner such a large and tranquil sincerity, such a complete absence of anything resembling guilt, that she found herself wavering.

"Well," she said at last, "you're extraordinarily like him."

"I have frequently been told," said Psmith, "that I have one of those faces. It is a great convenience in some ways and a considerable embarrassment in others. Only last week a total stranger accused me with some heat of owing him money at Kempton Park, a racecourse I have never in my life visited, being one of those unfortunate persons who cannot tell a horse from a bicycle without a programme."

Eve laughed in spite of herself.

"It's a most extraordinary coincidence, then."

"Life," said Psmith gravely, "is little else. May I ask whether the umbrella, in the hands of its rightful and more courageous owner, served you well?"

"Perfectly. I've just given it back to him, as a matter of fact--or rather to his club, since I never learned his name."

"A pleasing touch of mystery which I have no doubt he will treasure. And now, if you will forgive my mentioning it, I fear I must be tearing myself away. I have an appointment of the first importance with a lady who deals in situations, and it would be fatal to my prospects to arrive late and give an appearance of that instability of character which employers so justly deplore."

"Are you looking for work too? So am I--at least, I have a post already, but I'm on my way to be interviewed about it."

"Then I will wish you," said Psmith, raising his hat, "the very best of fortune, and take my leave, in the fervent hope that our paths, having crossed twice in a single day with such gratifying results, may be induced to cross again."

And he passed on down the Avenue, leaving Eve to stare after him with the uneasy conviction, which she could not entirely shake off, that she had just been told a large and elaborate untruth with the most perfect and disarming courtesy in the world.

* * * * *

The interview, when at length it took place that afternoon at the house of Mr. Joseph Keeble in Ovingdon Square--for it was Mr. Keeble himself, as Constance's husband and the practical head of the household in all matters connected with the library, who had been deputed to look over the applicant before her final engagement was confirmed--did not go entirely according to plan.

Eve had prepared herself for questions about the classification of books, the sorting of catalogues, the general dusty routine of the post she had been engaged to fill. She had not prepared herself to find, seated behind Mr. Keeble's desk in a condition of obvious and painful embarrassment, a stout, kindly-looking gentleman who appeared far more interested in extracting from her, with a series of anxious and roundabout questions, some assurance that she was a young woman of discretion who could be trusted to keep a secret, than in anything remotely connected with the Blandings Castle library.

"You would be residing at the Castle itself?" he asked, for perhaps the third time.

"Yes, Mr. Keeble."

"And you would--that is to say, in the course of your duties, you would naturally come into contact with--with all the members of the family?"

"I imagine so."

"Including," said Mr. Keeble, with the air of a man walking delicately among eggs, "my wife?"

"I should hope so," said Eve, a little bewildered. "I understood Lady Constance was most anxious to have the library catalogued."

Mr. Keeble mopped his brow with a large handkerchief, appeared to wrestle for a moment with some proposition of great delicacy, and then, to Eve's considerable relief, abandoned it, taking refuge instead in a hurried and rather incoherent account of the number of volumes to be dealt with and the salary attaching to the post. The interview concluded with nothing whatever settled as to the one subject Eve had actually come prepared to discuss, but with the distinct understanding, twice repeated by Mr. Keeble in a voice husky with some private emotion, that she was on no account to regard the position as anything but secure, and that he looked forward--here his voice grew huskier still--to seeing a good deal of her during her time at the Castle.

Eve came away with the curious impression that she had been engaged not so much to catalogue books as to be, in some fashion she could not define, a friend at court; and it was in a thoughtful frame of mind that she took herself off to write, as she had promised, to Cynthia at the Cadogan Hotel.

* * * * *

That evening, in the smoking-room of the Drones, now sparsely populated and mellow with the peace of six o'clock, Psmith sat in the window-seat he had occupied that morning, the umbrella across his knees, and re-read for perhaps the sixth time the note which he had extracted from its handle. He had just refolded it with the reverent care of a collector handling a first edition when the Hon. Hugo Walderwick, still faintly resentful but too naturally amiable to sustain a grievance beyond its natural life, wandered up and dropped into the neighbouring chair.

"That the umbrella?" he said. "I say, Smith, who was the girl, anyway? The porter said she was a stunner. Black hat, feather and all that."

"I have not," said Psmith, "the felicity of knowing the lady's name."

"Porter took the note from her, though, didn't he, before he brought it up? Bound to have got her name off her somewhere--they always do, women like that, giving their names to porters and such. I'll ask him."

He did not need to go far. The porter, appealed to a few minutes later in the hall, remembered perfectly.

"Halliday, sir, she said her name was. Miss Halliday."

Psmith, left alone once more with the umbrella, sat for a long moment looking at nothing in particular, a smile of singular and private content spreading slowly across his solemn face.

"Miss Halliday," he said softly, to the empty room. "I rather fancy, on the whole, that this promises to be a very good summer."

*Letter, Herr Hildesheim, Bistritz, to Miss Wilhelmina Murray.*

“*22 June.*

“Dear Madam,--

“I write to you at the request of nobody known to you, but I think you will pardon a stranger when I tell you my reason. I am a forwarding agent in this town, and it was through my hands that certain boxes and parcels passed for a foreign nobleman who has lately taken up residence not far from here. Some weeks since there came to my office a young English gentleman, a solicitor, by name Mr. Jonathan Harker, who was travelling on business connected with this same nobleman, and who was to have returned home by now, as I understood from him. He left with me, in case of any mischance, your name and direction, saying that you were his betrothed, and that if he did not write for some time you were the person to whom application should be made.

“I have waited longer than I like before troubling you, in the hope that he would write for himself, but no further word has come to me from him, and I think it is my duty to tell you what little I know, lest you should be anxious without cause, or, worse, anxious without knowledge.

“It is only this: that Mr. Harker went up into the mountains beyond the Borgo Pass to complete his business, and that he is delayed there longer than was looked for. Such delays are not uncommon in these wild parts, where the roads are poor and the post most irregular, and I do not myself apprehend anything worse than inconvenience. I have made such inquiry as a plain man of business can make, and I am told the roads by the Pass have been bad with the late rains, so that a return might well be put off from week to week without any ill cause.

“I would not have you alarmed, dear Madam, but only informed, which I think is a kindness one stranger may do another. If I hear further I will not fail to write again.

“I am, dear Madam, with much respect,

“your obedient servant,

“HERMAN HILDESHEIM.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*25 June.*--I have had the strangest letter, from a Herr Hildesheim of Bistritz, a person I never heard of, telling me that Jonathan is delayed beyond the Borgo Pass and has not written for some time. I do not know what to make of it. Jonathan is the most punctual of men, and even amid the business of his journey he has never let a week go by without some word to me, were it only a card. I have gone over his last two letters a dozen times, and there is nothing in them, not the least thing, to prepare me for this. He wrote so cheerfully of the Count’s courtesy, and of the strange wild beauty of the country, and said he hoped to be starting for home very soon.

I will not let myself be foolish about it. Roads in such places must be very bad, and posts irregular, as this Herr Hildesheim says; and Jonathan himself told me before he went that I was not to be anxious if his letters came seldom, since he might be far from any town. I have written to Mr. Hawkins to ask if he has heard anything, for it may be that Jonathan has written to him on business and said more of his plans than he thought needful to write to me. I shall not write anything of this to Lucy, poor dear, for she has troubles--no, *joys*--enough of her own just now, and I would not cloud them.

I am to go down to Exeter on Thursday, and perhaps by then there will be a letter waiting to make me ashamed of all this scribbling.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*26 May.*--Better spirits to-day. Work is indeed the thing. I have been the better part of the afternoon with Renfield, and I begin to think my note-book will be the fatter for it before the year is out.

He was quiet and almost sly in his manner, sitting very upright on his bed with his hands on his knees, and would not be drawn on the subject of the flies, which he has lately taken to catching and storing on his window-sill with a persistence that I cannot yet account for. I asked him, to try him, whether he had had visitors, knowing well he had not.

“No visitors,” said he, “but I am not without my correspondents, doctor, in a manner of speaking.” And then, with no leading from me at all, he looked up sharply and said: “Is it true, sir, that Mr. Holmwood is to marry Miss Lucy Westenra?”

I own the question startled me, coming from him and in that place, and I asked him, as lightly as I could, what he knew of Miss Westenra, or of Mr. Holmwood either. He only smiled in that curious closed way of his, and said, “A man hears things, doctor, even here. The walls are thin for news, though thick enough for other purposes.” And more than that I could not get from him, though I pressed him twice. He returned at once to his flies, muttering some arithmetic over them under his breath, and would not be drawn further.

I confess it has left me uneasy in a way I cannot justify on any scientific ground. How should such a name come to such a man, in such a place? I must ask Art, when I see him to-morrow night, whether he has ever had occasion to visit the asylum, or whether any of his people have connections here; it is far more likely to be some such homely channel than anything stranger. I will not let myself build mysteries out of an old man’s gossip. And yet--I put the fact down accurately, as I resolved I would, and let the theorising wait.

*Telegram, Arthur Holmwood to Quincey P. Morris.*

“*26 May.*

“Detained by mother. Will be with you both by nine. Keep the good wine corked till then.

“ART.”

*Letter, Dr. Seward to the Hon. Arthur Holmwood.*

(Not sent.)

“*27 May.*

“My dear Art,--

“I sit down the morning after to give you some account of last night, since you left us so early that you missed the worst--or the best--of it, according as one is virtuous or not.

“Quincey had got up a supper for us in his rooms that would have done credit to any camp-fire he ever boasted of, and better wine than we have any right to at our years and salaries. He was in tremendous form, and told us the story of the horse-thief and the padre at Fort Concho a second time, embellished, I think, beyond even his usual liberal allowance of fact. You will have had your own health drunk so often last night, old fellow, that I wonder your ears are not burning yet; we drank it standing, and then sitting, and then, I believe, a third time for good measure, by which time neither Quincey nor I could have told you with any confidence which leg we were standing on.

“You had scarcely gone before Quincey grew, in that quiet way he has, quite serious, and said that a man who could win such a girl and such friends in the one year had more to be thankful for than most men see in a lifetime, and that he for one grudged you nothing of it, which I know to be true, and which does him more honour than all his slang put together. I will not set down what I said in reply, for I do not clearly remember it, save that it was heartfelt, and that Quincey filled my glass again before I had finished saying it.

“We spoke, too--and here, Art, I set it down only for my own eye, and shall most likely burn this rather than send it--of poor Renfield, one of my patients, who asked me yesterday, quite unprompted, after Miss Lucy by name. I made light of it to Quincey, and lighter still of it to myself, but I own it sits oddly with me still this morning, sober. I mean to ask you, when next we meet, whether any of your people, or hers, have dealings with this asylum, for I can find no way the name should have come to him else, and I would rather have a dull answer than none.

“We drank your health once more before we parted, near upon three, and Quincey walked me the length of two streets arguing that no Englishman knows how to make a punch, which is possibly the truest thing either of us said all night.

“Yours, with a thick head and a whole heart,

“JACK SEWARD.”

*Telegram, Peter Hawkins, Exeter, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*30 June.*

“Word from agent Bistritz. Jonathan safe. Delayed by illness. Coming home.”

"Well," I said, when I had got my breath back, and my legs under me once more, "if this isn't a surprise, Mr. Franklin, I don't know what you'd call one! Here's my lady expecting you at teatime, and here's you dropped out of the sky four good hours before your time, like a shower of rain in the middle of a fine day!"

Mr. Franklin laughed, and took my arm, and walked me off along the sands towards the plantation, as if the beach belonged to him.

"The plain truth, Betteredge, is that I couldn't stop in London another minute after the post came in this morning. I had a letter—" here he clapped his hand to his breast pocket, as a man does when he has something there that he doesn't forget the whereabouts of—"a letter that turned me clean out of my comfortable habits, and put me into the first train to this place, without so much as a change of gloves to bless myself with. I left my portmanteau to follow by the slow train, and I posted here from the station like a man flying from the constable. You may well stare. Read that, and tell me if you wonder at me."

With that he pulled the letter out, and put it into my hand, and told me to read it there and then, on the spot.

I have my spectacles about me, as a general rule, wherever I go; and, having them handy on this occasion, I set them on my nose, and gave my mind to the letter, feeling a good deal of curiosity, I don't mind confessing, as to what it might contain. It was dated from Mr. Franklin's chambers in London, and it was signed by a lawyer, a Mr. Septimus Luker, of whom I had never in my life heard before, and have not since heard much good. Here it is, word for word, as well as I can now call it to mind, for I only saw it that once, and Mr. Franklin didn't leave it behind him for me to take a copy.

"Sir,—Having reason to believe, from information which has reached me through channels which I am not at present at liberty to disclose, that an attempt may shortly be made upon your person, or upon property in your possession, by natives of India now in this country, I think it my duty, as your late father's man of business, to communicate my suspicions to you without delay. I would strongly advise that whatever article of value has been committed to your charge (if any such there be) should be placed, without loss of time, in a place of absolute security; and that you yourself should exercise more than ordinary caution in your movements, until the article in question has been disposed of, according to the wishes of the testator. I remain, sir, your obedient servant, Septimus Luker."

I took my spectacles off again, after I had made my way (not without stumbling once or twice) through this extraordinary letter, and I looked at Mr. Franklin, and Mr. Franklin looked at me.

"What do you make of it, Betteredge?" says he.

"What does the writer mean, sir," I asked, "by 'the article in question'? He might mean anything, for all I can tell, by the way he's put it."

"He means the Diamond, Betteredge, as plainly as if he had said the word."

"Then why in the name of wonder doesn't he say the word?"

"That," says Mr. Franklin, "is more than I can tell you. He is my late uncle's lawyer, if you must know—a highly respectable man in a highly respectable line of business—and why he should write to me like a conspirator in a melodrama, instead of writing like an honest attorney, is a mystery I haven't had time to unravel between London and this place. All I can say for certain is, that the moment I read it, this morning, in comes my man with my chocolate, and out I went, chocolate and all, to catch the first train."

Now, I am not (I hope) a man to be easily upset by a mystery. I have lived long enough in this world to know that mysteries mostly mean nothing more than somebody's carelessness, or somebody's love of making himself out to be of more consequence than he is. But I own that this letter, coming as it did on the back of Penelope's story about the jugglers, and the boy in the trance, and the message that the English gentleman had "got It about him," gave me a sort of a turn. I said nothing about the jugglers to Mr. Franklin, however, having made up my mind that it was his business, and none of mine, to tell him of that matter, if it wanted telling at all. So I only said—

"Well, sir, and what do you propose to do?"

Mr. Franklin's face, which had been all laughter and holiday spirits a minute before, turned suddenly serious. He put the letter back in his pocket, and out of another pocket—the breast pocket on the other side—he took a little parcel, sealed up in brown paper, about the size of a good handful of cigars, if you understand my way of putting it. He turned it over once or twice in his hand, as if he was in two minds whether to speak or hold his tongue; and then he made up his mind, and out it came.

"Betteredge," he says, "I want you to do me a favour, and I want you to do it without asking me any questions about it, if you can find it in your good old heart to trust me so far."

"Mr. Franklin," I said, "I have carried you in my arms when you were a baby, and I have loved you and served your family, one branch and another, for fifty years and more. Ask me what you like, and I promise you I won't distress myself, or you either, with any more questions than the business makes needful."

He seemed relieved to hear me say that. "It's only this," he said, giving me the little parcel. "I want this locked up for tonight, in the safest place in the house. Your plate-room, now—is it a strong-room? Bars to the window, and all the rest of it?"

"Bars to the window, sir, and two locks on the door, and my own self sleeping within call of it, night after night, these last twenty years."

"That will do excellently well. Lock it up tonight, Betteredge, in your own hands, and give me back the key, and let no living soul but you and me know that it's there. Tomorrow, in the morning, we'll settle what's to be done with it next."

"Very good, sir," I said, taking the parcel from him, and feeling the weight of it in my hand as I spoke; a light weight, and yet, if you'll believe me, it seemed to pull down my arm more than many a heavier thing has done since. "I ask no questions, Mr. Franklin; I only say the thing shall be done."

"That's a good fellow!" says he, brightening up again all in a moment, in his old way. "Don't look so solemn about it, Betteredge! It's nothing that need trouble either of us, if we're only careful. Come along, and let's see how my aunt's roses are getting on since I saw them last."

And with that he was off again, whistling, and switching at the sandhill grass with his stick, as light-hearted as if he had never had a lawyer's letter in his pocket in his life; while I followed after him, at my own pace, with the little sealed parcel buttoned safe inside my coat, thinking my own thoughts, and liking the business less the more I turned it over in my mind. Here was the family paper, that I have heard tell of, and the Indian officer's story, and the vengeance that was to follow the Diamond and the man that took it, all stirring themselves up together at the back of my head, along with the jugglers on the terrace that morning, and Penelope's frightened face, and the boy in the trance saying the gentleman had got It about him. I am not a superstitious man, as I think I have said before; but there is a time and a season for everything, and it did strike me, walking behind Mr. Franklin Blake along them lonesome sandhills, that things were beginning to close in, in a way I didn't altogether like the look of.

We went in by the shrubbery, and so round to the terrace, my lady being still out at her lunch, as I have already told you, along with Miss Rachel. It fell to Penelope to be the first to see us coming, she having run out, on hearing the gate-bell, under the notion that it was the fly with Mr. Franklin's luggage. Instead of the fly, she found herself face to face with Mr. Franklin himself; and I leave you to imagine whether she stood staring, or whether she dropped her best curtsey, at that surprise.

"Is my lady back?" says Mr. Franklin.

"Not yet, sir," says Penelope; and then, dropping her voice, and giving me a look which I understood well enough, having a father's knowledge of my own daughter's face, she says to me, "Have you seen anything of Rosanna, father?"

"I left her on the sands," I said, "not ten minutes since."

"She's not come back to the house," says Penelope. "Nancy went out again to look for her, thinking she might have been taken bad, out there alone by herself; and Nancy says she's not on the shore at all now, high or low. She's gone on to Cobb's Hole, Nancy thinks, to see Limping Lucy, as she calls her; and no time asked for it, and no leave given!"

Now Cobb's Hole, I ought to tell you, was our fishing-village, a mile or thereabouts along the coast beyond the sands, where Rosanna had her one friend, a fisherman's daughter, a poor cripple girl by the name of Lucy Yolland, that the boys in the place had christened Limping Lucy, out of the thoughtless cruelty natural to boys. It was no great matter, in a general way, for Rosanna to slip off there of an afternoon, when her hour for going out came round. But this, if you remember, was not her hour for going out; she was late for her dinner, and out of her place, and out of her senses too, as it seemed to me, judging by the state I had left her in—and it did not please me, I confess, to hear that she had gone wandering off, in that state, further away from the house, instead of coming dutifully back to eat her dinner in it, as any sensible young woman would have done.

"Let her be," I said to Penelope, more sharply than I need have spoken, but the sealed parcel inside my coat was pressing rather heavy on my mind just then. "She'll come to no harm at Cobb's Hole. Let her be till she chooses to come back."

Mr. Franklin, who had walked on a step or two ahead of us while this was going forward, turned round here, and asked what all the whispering was about. I told him it was nothing but a little matter among the servants, not worth troubling him with; and, my lady's carriage driving up to the door at that same moment, the subject was well got rid of, one way and another, for the time being.

My lady's meeting with Mr. Franklin I leave to your own fancy to fill up. She was heartily glad to see him, that I can vouch for, and surprised at his early coming, as was but natural; and when he told her, in his light way, something of the same story about the lawyer's letter that he had told to me on the sands—though not showing her the letter itself, I noticed, nor mentioning the little sealed parcel at all—my lady's face changed, and grew grave, and she looked at her nephew for a moment as if she would have liked to ask him a good many more questions than she thought it prudent to put into words before the servants.

"You have brought it with you, then, Franklin?" she said at last, very quietly, when we were left, she and Mr. Franklin, and I with the tea-things, in the library.

"It's safe enough, aunt," says Mr. Franklin, just as quietly, "and it shall not trouble you, nor Rachel either, one hair's breadth more than is needful, while it's under this roof."

"I will have no more said about it," says my lady, with something of her old decision coming back into her voice, "here, or anywhere else in this house, than needs must be said. It has been trouble enough to those it came from, and trouble enough to us already, without our sitting here and making a fireside talk of it, on the very day of your arrival. Understand me, Franklin—I forbid the subject, from this evening, under my roof; and I ask you, as you love and respect me, to help me keep to that resolution."

"With all my heart, aunt," says Mr. Franklin, and took her hand, and there was an end of it, so far as words went, between them, that evening. And a good end too, in my opinion; for nothing but harm, first and last, has ever come, in my experience, of dwelling over-much on matters of that sort, when once they are safely put away out of reach of doing further mischief.

Well, the parcel went into the plate-room that same night, along with the family plate, snug behind the two locks, and the bars over the window that I have told you of already; and I put the key of it under my own pillow, as safe a place, I take it, as any in England, seeing that I am a light sleeper, and have a loaded pistol besides, left me by Sir John, hanging handy on a nail at the bed's head. What was in the parcel I did not know then, and will not pretend to you now that I guessed—though a man doesn't carry about a lawyer's warning in his breast pocket, and hand over a sealed packet with such a face on him as Mr. Franklin had, for nothing that a plain old servant, with fifty years' experience of the family, couldn't very well put two and two together about, if he had a mind to.

Rosanna never came back to her work that evening at all. Nancy grumbled over it at supper, and had a right to grumble, the extra work falling, as usual, on her share; and I own I grumbled a little myself, in my own mind, though I said no more about it out loud, not wishing to make more of the matter than it deserved. Cobb's Hole is no great way off, and Limping Lucy no bad company for a girl in low spirits, if company was all the poor soul wanted; and I persuaded myself, as the evening wore on, that she would come limping home along the cliff path her own self, before the house was well shut up for the night.

But she never came. Ten o'clock struck, and eleven, and the house grew quiet, room by room, as a house does at the day's end; and still no Rosanna. I sat up the last of any of them, as is my custom, with my pipe and my dear old friend Robinson Crusoe to keep me company in my beehive chair, and the key of the plate-room safe under my hand, and my mind going, I don't mind owning to you, a good deal oftener to the sands and the Shivering Sand, and the girl's queer talk about her grave being ready for her there, than it had any business to go, at my time of life, over a kitchen-maid's love of moping by herself. It was long past midnight before I gave up the watch, and went up to my bed, no wiser than I sat down, and Rosanna Spearman, for anything I knew to the contrary, out on the dark coast-road still, with the sea on one hand of her, and the lonesome fields on the other, and never a soul, so far as I could tell, to keep her company home.

"Do you know, Adèle, I sometimes think Mrs. Pontellier will end by making a genuine, an out-and-out fool of herself?" Robert had said this laughingly, as they went up from the beach, Madame Ratignolle leaning upon his arm. He said no more than that, and Adèle, occupied with her own weariness, had let the remark drift by without reply. But it had lodged somewhere, as such things do, and worked its way loose again later in the day.

It was after the early dinner that Madame Ratignolle came over, without her needlework for once, and settled herself in the rocker on Edna's gallery. The heat had somewhat spent itself. There was a pleasant tumult of dinner-table talk still going on in the house behind them, and the children could be heard scuffling and laughing under the fig-trees.

"Robert said the drollest thing of you this morning," said Adèle, fanning herself, and smiling as at a thing not worth repeating and yet too amusing to keep back. "He said he supposed you would end by making a genuine, an out-and-out fool of yourself. I don't know in what connection; we had just left you and the children."

She laughed a little, expecting Edna to laugh with her; but Mrs. Pontellier only looked out toward the water, where the sun made a broad, dazzling pathway, and said nothing for a moment. There was something in the speech, and in the manner of it, and in Robert's having said it at all, that stirred her unaccountably.

"What made him say that, I wonder?" she said at last, half to herself.

"*Mon Dieu*, who can ever tell why Robert says anything? He talks a great deal of nonsense. You mustn't take him seriously, *chère amie*. I think nothing of it."

But Edna was thinking of it, and continued to think of it during the rest of the afternoon, turning the words this way and that, as one turns a small coin to see if it be counterfeit.

It was while they still sat there that a boy came around the corner of the house bringing a telegram for Mrs. Pontellier. She opened it with the mechanical composure which such messages, however unlooked for, nearly always seem to bring, and read that her husband would not be down until the following week; that he found himself very much occupied with business.

Adèle expressed the disappointment which she thought must be Edna's own.

"How unfortunate! And I know you had counted on his coming Saturday. Won't you be lonely with the children through the week?"

"I shall get on," said Edna, folding the yellow paper into a small, hard square. She was not conscious of any keen disappointment; indeed, if she examined her feeling at all, she was aware of something like relief, a loosening, as if a hand she had not known was resting upon her had been quietly withdrawn. She did not attempt to name the feeling; she was learning, that summer, to let a good many things go unnamed.

Madame Ratignolle stayed a while longer, talking of the children and of a new pattern for a *bareges* wrapper which she meant to cut out that evening, and then went off to her own cottage with her slow, satisfied walk, leaving Edna alone upon the gallery.

The afternoon wore away in a kind of idleness that was not restful. Edna could not fix her attention upon the novel she had brought out with her; she read the same page twice and could not afterward have told what was on it. Robert's words kept recurring, not painfully, but with a persistent, teasing repetition, like a phrase of music one cannot drive out of the head. She wondered, without much heat, in what connection he could have said such a thing, and why it should have been repeated to her at all, and why, being repeated, it should have taken such hold upon her.

Toward five o'clock, when the heat had broken and a light wind had come up off the Gulf, she rose abruptly, went into the house for her bathing-suit, and walked down to the beach alone.

There were a few bathers still in the water, far down toward the point, but just there, before her own bath-house, the beach was deserted. She had not thought, in coming down, to trouble herself about the distance; she only wanted the water, the coolness of it, the forgetfulness it seemed to offer. All summer she had gone in with the others, had dabbled and shrieked and splashed like the rest, timorous, and always a little ashamed of her timidity, for the veriest little novice among them could swim, while she, grown woman that she was, remained helpless, clinging to whatever chance rope or hand was nearest.

To-day she went in resolutely, as if she had made up her mind to a thing and meant to see it through. The water was deliciously cool, and she stood a while, waist-deep, feeling the small waves lap against her, before she gathered herself and struck out.

She had tried a hundred times through the summer, always with the same result: a splashing, ineffectual flurry, ending in a sort of terror that sent her hands groping for support. But this time, without any thought of it, without any conscious command to her body, she found herself moving, actually moving, through the water, her arms beating the small waves aside, her feet somehow keeping her afloat. A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second she believed she was going to sink; but the very fright of it seemed to nerve her, and she went on, a stroke, another, another—a little distance, a very little distance, and then she stood up, breathless, exultant, in water that barely reached her chin.

She looked back at the shore, at the little bath-houses, at the empty stretch of sand, and laughed aloud, alone there in the water. She had done it. No one had seen her; she told no one. It seemed to her, in that first moment, too much her own, too newly and strangely her own, to be given over to any other keeping. She wanted to try again, and could not; a swift ebbing of the little strength she had spent left her suddenly tired, and she waded in to the shallow water and stood there a while longer before going up to dress, saying nothing to any one, hugging the thing to herself as a child hugs a bit of forbidden sweet.

She dressed slowly, and walked back up the sandy path in the last of the light, feeling extraordinarily light and free, as though some ordinary and unremarkable bond had been quietly slipped.

On her way she passed the bath-house of the lady in black, who sat, as she so often sat, alone upon the little gallery, her rosary glinting faintly in her thin fingers. Edna had passed her a hundred times that summer with no more than a bow, for the lady in black kept herself apart, wrapped in her devotions and her mourning, and seemed to ask nothing of any one.

But this evening, as Edna went by, the lady in black looked up and spoke.

"You have been in the water late, Madame," she said, in her low, even voice. "The evening damp is not wholesome after bathing. You should not linger so long undressed upon the beach."

Edna thanked her, a little startled at being addressed at all, and said something about the beauty of the evening, and went on. It was such a small thing, and yet it seemed to fit itself, obscurely, into the same strange, expanded feeling that the swimming had left with her, as though the whole day had conspired to loosen some seldom-touched part of her being.

The children were long asleep when she came up to the cottage. Léonce's telegram lay where she had left it, on the table under the lamp; she did not trouble to reread it. She sat out on the gallery a long while in the dark, not thinking connectedly of anything, yet with Robert's words turning over and over in her mind, as they had turned all the afternoon: that she would end, he had said, by making a genuine, an out-and-out fool of herself. She could not say why the words stayed with her so, nor whether they angered her or pleased her, or did neither; only that they stayed.

Lady Russell was more anxious and more accurate on this subject than Mr Shepherd. She had thought much upon it, walked about her own grounds in Kellynch lodge many a solitary morning in consideration of the subject, and turned it in her mind in every possible light, before she brought it forward to Sir Walter in a scheme of retrenchment which she drew up in writing and carried with her to the Hall.

She had spent a great deal of time in composing it, and it was a very rational one. Her list of reductions was drawn up with all the exactness of one who had considered every item with a scrupulous and impartial hand: the carriage horses reduced, the number of servants lessened, dress and the table put upon a plainer footing, the unnecessary journeys to London wholly given up, and the whole establishment brought, by degrees, within the compass of what a gentleman's income ought to bear. If Sir Walter would but follow it faithfully for seven years, she was persuaded, the estate might be freed from every incumbrance and the family stand where it ought to stand, without any sacrifice of dignity whatsoever.

Sir Walter heard her through with a countenance of increasing displeasure.

"What!" said he, "every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table—contractions and restrictions every where! To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, I would rather leave Kellynch at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms."

"Leave Kellynch!" cried Lady Russell, catching at the word, though Sir Walter had used it only for the horror of the comparison, and meant nothing by it.

"Aye, leave Kellynch, if the alternative is to stay in it stripped of every gentlemanly appearance, and known to all my neighbours for a distressed man. It is not to be thought of." And he pushed away her paper as though the sight of it hurt his eyes, and would hear no more of a plan which he considered as an insult offered to his rank and his necessities together.

Mr Shepherd's scheme, produced the same afternoon, was in effect very similar, though drawn with the caution of a man of business, and expressed rather in hints and questions than in direct proposals; but the sum of it came to as little in Sir Walter's approbation. He would speak of "a residence perhaps less expensive than Kellynch might for a time"—here Sir Walter's face changed so alarmingly that Mr Shepherd thought it wisest to leave the sentence unfinished, and pass, with all speed, to a review of accounts which required no opinion at all.

Both plans, therefore, were laid before him in the course of the same day, and both were rejected: the one, he said, would degrade him; the other, so far as he could make it out, would banish him: and having said as much to Elizabeth, and being still in some heat upon the subject, he was surprised, on going in to the drawing-room before dinner, to hear the matter opened again, and by a voice which had never, in his memory, presumed to offer him counsel on any weighty concern.

Anne had come in from the village, where she had been calling with some trifling errand of Elizabeth's, just as Lady Russell was taking her leave; and something in her father's flushed and injured look, and in Lady Russell's expression of quiet, unhappy perseverance, told her, before a word was spoken, what had been passing. She had long known, better perhaps than any of them, how little either plan would answer, and how much more would be wanted than either her father or her father's friends were yet willing to allow; and it was this knowledge, and not any wish to be conspicuous, which gave her, that evening, a courage not natural to her.

"I wish," said she, when the subject was renewed at the fireside, and her father was declaring, for the third time, that he saw nothing for it but to go on as they were, and trust that something would turn up—"I wish my opinion were asked, though I do not expect it to have any weight; but if it were, I should feel it my duty to say that I think both Lady Russell's plan and Mr Shepherd's fall short of what is really wanted. I think a much stricter line ought to be taken; a much bolder reduction; something that would be felt at once, and have done with it, rather than a lingering, half-measure economy which mortifies without relieving. If my father would but consider what is due, in mere honesty, to the people he owes money to, I cannot think any hardship to himself too great to be borne, till it is paid."

There was a short silence, in which Sir Walter looked at his youngest daughter with an astonishment too great, at first, for anger; and Mr Shepherd, who had remained after the discussion of the accounts under pretence of some paper still unsigned, glanced at her with a civil surprise that had in it something of respect. It was Elizabeth who spoke next, and what she said astonished the room yet more than Anne's speech had done.

"Anne is right," said she, slowly, as though the words cost her something in the uttering, but were not the less sincerely meant. "I do not like it—I like nothing about it—but I had rather do more, and have it over, than go on being told, twice in every year, that things must be retrenched a little further. I would rather know the worst at once, and pay it off, than live in the way we are living now, always expecting to hear of some new distress."

Sir Walter looked from one daughter to the other as if he scarcely knew them. That Anne should have an opinion was surprising enough; that Elizabeth should support it, was almost more than he could credit.

"You are both of you," said he, at last, with as much dignity as he could summon, "very ready to talk of reductions and retrenchments, and I am sure I do not know where you have learnt such notions, for they were never encouraged in this house; but I do not find that either of you has proposed any thing which does not, in the end, amount to exactly what I have already refused to hear from Lady Russell and from Mr Shepherd: namely that Sir Walter Elliot is to give up the state of a gentleman, that his tradesmen may be the sooner satisfied. I am not aware that I am called upon to ruin my own comfort that Mr Shepherd's clients may sleep the easier."

"It is not ruin, sir," said Anne, gently but not giving way; "it is only living within what we have, which every one who is not a baronet is expected to do, and which, I am persuaded, would in a very few years restore us to a situation of real, not merely apparent, credit."

Sir Walter made no answer to this, beyond a look which he intended to be quelling, and which, upon any other occasion, might have silenced her; but having once found courage to speak, and finding it, moreover, seconded where she had least looked for support, Anne said no more only because she saw that nothing more would be listened to that evening.

Mr Shepherd, who had sat through this exchange between the sisters with an attention he was careful not to display too openly, now judged it a fit moment to bring forward what he had, in truth, been turning over in his mind for some weeks past, and had hitherto wanted courage, or opportunity, to introduce.

"If I might presume, Sir Walter, to suggest a measure which need involve no alteration whatever in your own habits or establishment"—he began, with the deference of a man treading on doubtful ground—"there is a mode by which gentlemen, situated as you are, sometimes contrive to make their income answer their wishes, without any personal sacrifice at all; I mean, by accepting a tenant."

The word was hardly out of his mouth before Sir Walter turned upon him with a look of such affronted amazement, that Mr Shepherd, man of business as he was, felt himself sensibly discomposed.

"A tenant! In Kellynch Hall! Mr Shepherd, you forget yourself. Do you suppose that I would suffer any creature, of no name, no blood, no pretensions whatsoever, to install himself in the house of my fathers, to lounge in my library and shoot over my grounds, that I might have the honour of calling him my tenant? I will not hear the word again, sir, if you please; I desire it may not be repeated in my presence. Kellynch Hall has never yet been let, and while I remain in possession of it, it never shall be."

Mr Shepherd bowed, and said no more upon that head; he had ventured the word, found how it was received, and was too prudent a man to press what could, for the present, only give offence. He gathered his papers together with an air of a man who has other business waiting, made his compliments to the ladies, and took his leave, promising Sir Walter that he should turn the whole matter over yet again, and see whether some further reduction of a less objectionable kind might not be devised.

Sir Walter, left with his daughters, continued for some time to declaim upon the impertinence of men in business who could suppose a Baronet of Kellynch capable of entertaining so degrading a proposal; and Elizabeth, though she had spoken her mind on the subject of economy with more spirit than usual, said nothing in Mr Shepherd's defence, nor returned again that evening to the plan she had, for one surprising moment, appeared to countenance. Anne sat by, saying little more, sensible that she had ventured as far as she dared, and that the debts, after all this talking, remained exactly where they had been in the morning: unallowed for, unprovided for, and unresolved.

It was while they were still sitting together, the candles not long lit, and Sir Walter not yet done with the subject of Mr Shepherd's presumption, that a letter was brought in for Anne, forwarded that day from Uppercross. She knew the hand before she broke the seal: it was Mary's, and Mary's letters were seldom without their complaint.

"I am very unwell," it began, with the customary vigour of Mary's style whenever her own sensations were in question, "much worse than I ever let any body know; and it is very odd that I should not have had one line from Kellynch all this week. I thought Elizabeth would have written, but nobody thinks about me. I have been very ill all this morning, and it is quite ridiculous to be so continually unwell, and not have a soul to feel for one. Charles is going out shooting all day long, by himself, and takes no notice of me, and I do not think it is at all right of him. Little Charles will not mind a word I say, and the girl is quite good for nothing. If you knew how ill I have been! I did not intend to say any thing about it, but I cannot help telling you how poorly I am. I do think I am worse than any body ever gives me credit for. I wish you would come to us, Anne; I always feel a great deal better when you are here, and it would be a great comfort to me to have you at Uppercross just now, for I really believe I am going to be very ill indeed."

Anne read this letter with the mixture of feeling which Mary's letters always produced in her—a smile at what was over-coloured, and a real, steady tenderness beneath it, for she loved Mary, poor management and all, and did not think a sister's complaints, however exaggerated, a thing to be laughed at and forgotten. She said nothing of it at the moment, folding the letter and putting it by; there had been enough said and unsaid in that room already for one evening, and her father's temper, ruffled as it still was by Mr Shepherd's unlucky word, was in no state to hear of Mary's nerves.

But when she was at last alone, in her own room, with the candle burnt low and the house grown quiet about her, she took the letter out again, and read it once more; and before she lay down that night she had quite made up her mind. She would go to Uppercross. There was, in truth, little enough that she could do at Kellynch: her plan of economy, generously as Elizabeth had seconded it for the length of one evening, would in all likelihood be heard no more of, and the debts, and the disgrace of them, would go on accumulating, unacknowledged, unarrested, just as they had done before Lady Russell and Mr Shepherd had ever been called in to advise; while at Uppercross there was, at least, a sister who wanted her, imperfectly and unreasonably perhaps, but still with something like real need. She resolved, therefore, to write in the morning, and offer herself for as long a stay as might be wanted; and having settled this much, she put out her candle with the comfortable feeling of one who has, in the midst of a day of much talk and no conclusion, found at last one thing clear and certain to be done.

The First National Bank was a granite building on Broadway with brass grilles and a smell of floor wax. I sent my card in to nobody in particular and told the platform man I wanted to know about a check.

He was a narrow, gray-mustached man named Albury, and he had the look of somebody who had spent thirty years being careful.

"A check of Donald Willsson's," I said. "Drawn yesterday afternoon, probably on this bank, for five thousand dollars. I want to know who cashed it."

Albury frowned at his blotter as if the check might be lying there.

"Nobody's cashed it," he said. "Nothing in that amount from Mr. Willsson has come through this bank at all, either yesterday or today. I can promise you that. We've had our people alerted since the news came this morning—Mr. Willsson's accounts are being watched, naturally, until the estate is settled. Nothing on five thousand, nothing near it. No check of his has been presented or certified since Tuesday, when he drew eleven hundred for the payroll of the mechanical department."

"Could it have gone through another bank and come here for collection later? Be a day or two behind?"

"It could," he said, "but I doubt it would take that long between local banks, and there aren't more than three others in the city he'd likely use. I can check with them for you, if you like, quietly."

I told him I'd like that, and thanked him, and gave him the hotel as a place to reach me. He wrote it down in a small stiff hand and I went out into Broadway with the check still nowhere.

That put a new wrinkle in it. A man doesn't draw a check for five thousand dollars, carry it out of his office for twenty minutes, and then not cash it, not unless something happens to keep him from cashing it, or unless the twenty minutes were spent somewhere other than a bank. I turned that over without getting anything out of it worth keeping, and went back to the hotel to think it over with a sandwich in front of me.

The clerk stopped me at the desk.

"There's a lady waiting for you," he said, dropping his voice the way desk clerks do when they think they're handling something delicate. "In the lounge."

She was in a green-covered chair by the window, in a dark dress with a small dark hat, and she saw me before I saw her. She was the slender blonde from Mountain Boulevard, without the slight accent showing in her face now, only in the tightness around her mouth. Mrs. Donald Willsson, sitting alone in a hotel lounge where any Personville eye could see her, which told me something about how far past caring for appearances she had got in less than a day.

"You are surprised," she said, standing, giving me her hand for a second. "I should not have come. But I did not know what else to do."

"Let's find somewhere quieter," I said, and took her up to my room, which wasn't the sort of thing I made a practice of, but the lounge had too many chairs with people-shaped things in them, listening.

She sat on the edge of the one chair the room had and pulled her gloves through her fingers without taking them off.

"The police were at the house all morning," she said. "And Mr. Elihu telephoned three times. He is saying I killed Donald. You have heard this?"

"I heard it from him this morning. Did you?"

"No." She said it steadily enough, looking at me. "I did not kill him. I did not like him always, and he did not always like me, and that is a different thing from killing. But I am afraid, and I do not know of who to be afraid, and I thought—you saw me come in with the blood on my shoe, you have already the worst thing there is to know about me, so perhaps you are the one person I can talk to without lying."

"Where'd you go when you got the phone call?"

She looked at her gloves.

"I cannot tell you that. It has nothing to do with Donald's death, I promise you that, but I cannot tell you, because it is not only my secret."

"That's a fine time to be careful of somebody else's secrets," I said. "Your husband was shot ten minutes before you got back that night. You want to be cleared, but you won't say where you were. The police are going to want a better answer than the one you're giving me."

"The police have not asked me anything yet that I could not answer," she said, "because the police do not know about the ten-twenty telephone call, or that I went out. Only you know that."

"And Max Thaler," I said. "I saw him going into your house this morning."

Something moved behind her eyes, quick and gone.

"Max is a friend," she said. "An old friend. He came to see if I was—to see how I was."

"Sure," I said. "Friendly of him. You didn't happen to see him last night too, on your twenty-minute trip?"

"I have told you I cannot say where I was." She stood up, working the gloves tighter. "I thought perhaps you would help me, since you saw already what you saw and did not run to the police with it. I see I was wrong to hope so."

"I haven't run to the police with it yet," I said. "That doesn't mean I won't. I'm not your lawyer and I'm not your friend. I'm being paid to find out who killed your husband, and right now you're the nearest thing to a fact I've got. If you didn't do it, the smartest thing you can do is tell me where you were, and let me decide whether it matters."

She shook her head, a small tight motion, and moved toward the door.

"I am sorry I came," she said. "I thought—" She didn't finish it. She went out, and I let her go, because there wasn't anything in the room to hold her with except talk, and I'd used up what talk was going to do.

I sat by the window a while considering her visit. She hadn't told me anything I could use, but she had told me she was scared, scared enough to walk into a public hotel lounge and ask a stranger for help rather than go to the police, which was either the behavior of an innocent woman with something else to hide, or a guilty one hoping to find out how much I knew. I put it away without deciding, the way you have to put away most things in the first day of a job like this one.

A boy from downstairs knocked and brought up an envelope, plain, with my name typed on it, no other writing anywhere on it.

"Who left this?"

"Fellow left it at the desk," the boy said. "Didn't leave no name. Little guy, brown suit. Didn't say nothing, just left it and went on out."

I gave him a quarter and opened the envelope after he'd gone. Inside was a single sheet of hotel stationery, the message typed, no signature:

_Personville is no health resort for tourists who ask too many questions about the wrong people. A man who minds other people's business sometimes finds he hasn't got any of his own left to mind. Think that over._

I thought it over. A little guy in a brown suit fit Max Thaler the way his shadow fit him, and Max Thaler didn't need to sign his name to a note for me to know his mark when I saw it. He hadn't come up himself. That was worth noticing too—a man who sent a boy with a warning instead of bringing it himself either didn't think the job was worth his own trouble, or wanted it on record that he'd never been near me at all.

I put the note in my pocket, decided it wasn't worth an answer yet, and thought about the check some more, and about a French wife who wouldn't say where she'd spent forty-five minutes on the night her husband was shot to pieces two blocks from where I was likely to have to go looking for the answer.

Along in the evening I went down to the telegraph office and sent the Old Man in San Francisco a report. I wrote it standing at the counter, in the flat wire English the agency likes, and I hadn't much yet to put in it, but the Old Man liked to know what little there was, as soon as there was any of it:

DONALD WILLSSON SHOT TO DEATH TEN FORTY LAST NIGHT HURRICANE STREET BEFORE I COULD SEE HIM STOP NATURE OF JOB HE WANTED DONE STILL UNKNOWN STOP LOCAL SITUATION FOUND TO BE COMPLICATED BY LABOR TROUBLE AND CRIMINAL ELEMENT HOLDING BALANCE OF POWER AGAINST ELIHU WILLSSON DEAD MANS FATHER WHO OWNS CITY STOP WIDOW UNDER SUSPICION ACCOUNT UNEXPLAINED ABSENCE FROM HOME AT TIME OF KILLING BLOOD FOUND ON HER SHOE STOP SHE REFUSES ACCOUNT FOR HER MOVEMENTS STOP DEAD MAN DREW CHECK FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS YESTERDAY AFTERNOON PAYEE UNKNOWN CHECK NOT PRESENTED AT HIS BANK STOP LOCAL GAMBLER MAX THALER APPARENTLY INTIMATE WITH WIDOW AND HAS WARNED ME OFF CASE BY ANONYMOUS NOTE STOP WILL CONTINUE INVESTIGATION UNLESS ADVISED OTHERWISE STOP WIRE INSTRUCTIONS

I paid for it, watched the girl count the words over twice the way they do when a wire runs long, and went back out into Broadway, where the arc lights were on now and the smoke that never quite left the sky over Personville had turned the same color as the light.

Upstairs in my room I sat by the window with my shoes off and the note from Thaler—if it was from Thaler—on the table under the lamp, and turned the day over the way you turn over a hand of cards you already know you can't win with as it stands, looking for the one you've missed.

A five-thousand-dollar check, written and carried out of an office and never cashed anywhere, was a small dead-end fact sitting in the middle of a day that hadn't given me much else solid to hold onto. A woman with blood on her slipper who'd rather be suspected of murder than tell where she'd spent three-quarters of an hour. A gambler too careful to bring his own warnings in person. An old man who wanted his son's death charged to his daughter-in-law before the body was cold, and wouldn't talk politics with the smoke still hanging over his own hired guns.

None of it added to anything yet. I put the lamp out and sat a while longer in the dark with the window open, listening to Personville being noisy about its evening, and no closer than I had been at breakfast to knowing where that check had gone.

I did not stay for anything more, but crammed my hat on my head and set off at a run for the village. I found Poirot already dressed, and standing at the window of his little sitting-room, looking out over the peaceful street as though he had not a care in the world.

"Poirot!" I cried. "Thank God I have found you! The most terrible thing has happened. Mrs. Inglethorp has died in the night!"

Poirot's face changed. It grew grave, and a look of sadness crept into it. Then, to my astonishment, he said quietly:

"Ah, yes. So I have heard."

"You have heard? But how—"

"Your little page-boy from the farm, who runs my errands, told me not ten minutes ago. It seems the news is already the property of the village. These things fly."

"But which page-boy? Who told him?"

Poirot raised his shoulders in his own peculiar fashion.

"I did not inquire so closely into the pedigree of the rumour, mon ami. It is enough that it has reached me. What I am waiting to hear is the manner of it, from your own lips, since you have run all this way to tell me. Sit down, and compose yourself. There is no hurry now, alas."

"You will come back with me at once?"

"Assuredly. The instant you have told me your story. But a moment—let me get my hat." He was gone but a few seconds, and returned equipped, brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve. "Now, we will walk, and you shall relate to me everything, in order, and without omission."

As we set out along the road, the morning mists still lying low over the fields, I told him all that had happened in the night—the locked door, the broken panel, the convulsions, Mrs. Inglethorp's last strangled words, the absence of her husband, and the ominous conference of the two doctors. Poirot listened without interrupting, his little bright green eyes fixed thoughtfully on the road ahead.

"Tetanic convulsions, you say. That is a strong word, and Dr. Bauerstein is not a man, I think, to use it lightly. Strychnine would produce such symptoms. You did well to come to me at once, Hastings. But tell me—the key of the room. It was found?"

"I don't know. I did not stay to hear."

"It must be found. Everything depends on that. And Monsieur Inglethorp—he has not yet returned, you say?"

"No. It's a most extraordinary thing. He seems to have vanished into thin air."

"It is curious," said Poirot meditatively. "But not, perhaps, so very extraordinary. A man who spends the night from home, when his wife is dying not a hundred yards away, may have an explanation quite simple, or one very much the reverse."

We had come now within sight of the lodge gates, and it was at this moment that a tall figure emerged from them and came towards us with a quick, uneven stride. It was Alfred Inglethorp himself. His face, always sallow, was ghastly pale this morning; his black beard seemed by contrast almost theatrical in its darkness; and there was in his eyes a look of confusion, or of something that might have been mistaken for grief, had one been disposed to credit him with the emotion.

"Good God!" he cried, seeing us. "Is it true? Hastings—John telephoned to the farm where I was staying. Is she—is she really——?"

"Yes," I said gravely. "She died early this morning."

He gave a kind of groan, and covered his face with his hands. Poirot's eyes never left him.

"This is the most terrible blow," he said brokenly. "We had, of course, our little differences, but never for one moment—I loved my wife, Hastings, whatever they may say of me in this house."

I said nothing. It was not a moment for arguing the point, whatever my private feelings.

"You had better tell us where you were, Mr. Inglethorp," said Poirot quietly. "It will save time and—forgive me—unnecessary speculation later."

Inglethorp turned to him almost gratefully, as though relieved to have something definite asked of him.

"I was at the Villett's farm, over beyond Marston. I had a business matter to discuss with Mr. Villett regarding some of the estate timber, and as the discussion prolonged itself, and the night was so oppressively hot, he suggested I should stay over rather than walk back so late. I agreed. I have been there ever since. I heard nothing of this dreadful business until John's message reached me an hour ago."

"You went there directly from the village, after leaving Dr. Bauerstein?"

"Yes—yes, directly."

"At what hour would that have been?"

"I could not say precisely. Somewhere about nine, I imagine."

We walked on together in silence, and came at length to the house. In the hall, Dorcas met us, her eyes red with weeping, and it was she who, in the course of a few broken words of sympathy addressed to her master, let fall the observation that was to fix itself so firmly in my memory.

"And to think, sir, you not even in the house! Baily see you go out the side gate before ten, so Manning tells me, and not by the Marston road at all, but across the fields towards the village!"

Inglethorp started, and for a fraction of a second something flickered behind his eyes—there and gone again almost before I could be sure of it.

"Baily is mistaken," he said stiffly. "It must have been someone else he saw."

"Very possibly," murmured Poirot, but I saw that he had taken note of the discrepancy as carefully as I had, and I felt a little thrill of excitement. It was the first small thread in what I already suspected would prove a tangled skein.

John came out to us at this point, his face drawn and haggard, and after a few words of greeting—strained enough on his side, considering the circumstances—he led us upstairs. Poirot asked at once for the key of Mrs. Inglethorp's room, and this John, producing the two keys Dr. Bauerstein had given him, handed over without demur.

"The room has not been touched since last night?" Poirot inquired, as we mounted the stairs.

"Nothing has been moved. My mother's body was carried into the other room this morning, but the boudoir remains exactly as it was."

"Good. Then, Hastings, we will go in alone, if John will permit it."

John nodded, and turned away down the corridor, and Poirot, fitting the key with a curiously delicate precision, unlocked the door.

The room, in the clear light of that summer morning, presented a strange and rather dreadful appearance. The little table by the bed lay overturned still, exactly as Mrs. Inglethorp had left it in her convulsions; a lamp, an eiderdown, and a small quantity of cocoa in a cup lay scattered upon the floor beside it. An armchair had been pushed back against the wall, as though thrust aside violently in the struggle to reach the door. In the middle of the room stood the big four-poster bed, its coverings disordered and flung back.

Poirot stood for a moment on the threshold, and I saw his eyes travel swiftly and methodically round the room, missing, I felt certain, no smallest detail—the overturned table, the stain of spilt cocoa on the carpet, the ashes in the grate, the row of ornaments on the mantelpiece, the great bunch of keys lying on a small table near the window, and, on the writing-desk, a despatch-case with a key protruding from the lock.

He went first to the connecting door which led to Alfred Inglethorp's room, and I saw him examine the bolt closely.

"That was shot on this side, you say?"

"Yes."

He nodded, and turned his attention next to the door leading into the passage, and after that to the third door, communicating with Cynthia's room, trying the bolt with the same careful, unhurried scrutiny.

"And this one, also bolted from this side?"

"Yes."

"Extraordinary," he murmured, half to himself, "that a room so carefully locked and bolted upon every side should nevertheless permit of—" He broke off, and did not finish the sentence.

He crossed then to the bed, and knelt down, examining the carpet beneath it inch by inch, and I saw him pause once, and pick up something so small that I could not at first make out what it was. He turned it over between his fingers, held it a moment to the light from the window, and then, without a word, slipped it into an envelope which he took from his pocket, and put the envelope away inside his coat.

"Poirot," I said, unable to contain my curiosity any longer, "what is it? What have you found?"

He straightened up, dusting his knees with his handkerchief in his fastidious way, and looked at me with a curious expression—half whimsical, half grave.

"Since you ask me, mon ami, I will show it to you." He drew the envelope out again, and shook a small object into the palm of his hand. I bent to look. It was nothing more, so far as I could see, than a tiny fragment of dark green material, no bigger than a thumbnail, with a few threads frayed at one edge as though it had been torn.

"Well?" I said, when he did not offer any explanation. "What does it mean?"

"That," said Poirot, folding it carefully back into its envelope, "you shall discover in due course, my friend, along with myself."

"But surely you have some idea——"

"I have several ideas. That is the difficulty. They point in more than one direction, and until I know a little more, I would rather not commit myself, even to you. It is a fault of mine, perhaps, this discretion, but it is safer so. A theory expressed aloud has a way of becoming a fact in the minds of those who hear it, and I have too much respect for the truth to expose her to that risk before she is ready to appear."

I was obliged to content myself with this, though I confess it irritated me a little, as it always did, this refusal of his to share the workings of that extraordinary mind of his until the moment he judged fit.

He continued his examination of the room a little longer, glancing into the cold ashes of the grate, and standing for a long moment before the mantelpiece with its row of prim ornaments, exactly as Lawrence had stood transfixed before it in the night—a coincidence which struck me disagreeably, though I said nothing of it. Then he went to the door and called softly for Annie, and afterwards for Cynthia, who came in looking pale and heavy-eyed, as though she had not yet thrown off the effects of whatever had ailed her in the night.

"Mademoiselle," said Poirot gently, "forgive me one small question only. Last night, did you sleep well?"

Cynthia looked faintly surprised at so simple an inquiry in the midst of so much horror.

"I slept—dreadfully heavily," she said. "I don't understand it at all. Mary was shaking me and shaking me before I could properly wake up, and even then everything seemed to come to me through a kind of fog. I've never slept like that in my life, and I'm ashamed of it, with poor Mrs. Inglethorp in such straits so near me all the time."

"It is not a matter for shame, mademoiselle," said Poirot kindly. "Rather the reverse, perhaps. Thank you, that is all I wished to know."

She went out, glancing back at him once with a puzzled expression, and Poirot stood looking at the closed door for a moment with an air of quiet satisfaction that told me he had learned something of value, though what that something was I could not for the life of me imagine.

The door into the corridor was locked once more, and we two were left alone together in the room, the small envelope with its scrap of green stuff lying now upon the writing-table between us where Poirot had laid it down. Outside, I could hear the subdued murmur of the household below, and somewhere in the garden a bird sang on, indifferent to tragedy. Poirot sat looking at the little fragment for a long while without speaking, an odd, arrested look upon his face, as though it had told him something he had not expected.

"Poirot," I said at last, "won't you tell me what you make of it?"

He looked up at me, and there was in his eyes that gleam I had come to know so well, of a mind working upon some problem far in advance of my own comprehension.

"It is strange," he said slowly, "that it should not be there."

"That what should not be there?"

But he did not answer me.

It was on the night of the first falling star that I first noticed anything remarkable in the sky. I had come out from the house about eleven, after finishing some work I had in hand, and my wife had gone up to bed. I was looking idly at the stars, thinking, I dare say, of very little beyond the paper I had been writing, when I saw a greenish streak flash across the sky. I supposed it to be an ordinary shooting star; I have seen a dozen such in a night and thought nothing of them. It fell somewhere to the north, over towards the direction of Horsell, Ockham, and Woking, and I remember remarking to myself that it was a big one, and wondering idly whether it would be picked up in the morning by anyone who took the trouble to hunt for it. I did not go in for some minutes, and then, the night growing chill, I went indoors and thought no more of the matter.

The next morning I heard, before I had finished my breakfast, that something curious had dropped upon Horsell Common in the night. It had come down, said the man who told my cook, "with a shock you could feel in your boots," and had buried itself, or very nearly buried itself, in the ground near the sand-pits, upon the low, marshy edge of the common where the pools of rain-water lie among the gorse. I own I was interested. I remembered my green shooting star of the night before, and, being disinclined for work that morning, I resolved to walk over and see what had happened.

I found a little group of people already gathered at the place—carters and labourers of the neighbourhood, a curate, and one or two idlers from Chertsey—and as I came up over the ridge I could see the object itself lying in the pit it had made, half sunk in one of those shallow pools that gather on the common after rain. It had made a great irregular crater, flinging the gravel and heather roots in a ring about it, and the yellow sand at the lip of the pit was still smoking faintly at the edges, as sand will smoke when a hot cinder is dropped upon it. The Thing itself was scarcely to be seen, so deeply had it ploughed into the sodden ground and so much of it was under the brown water of the pool; but what was visible had a curious effect upon me, an effect I find it hard now to convey. It did not look like a stone at all. It had a shape—cylindrical, I should say, though the end that was above the water was rounded—and a colour, a sort of dull, dirty-grey, quite unlike the brown and grey of the flints and gravel about it. And all about the rim of it, where the water lapped against the hot surface, a thin whitish steam or vapour rose up and drifted away on the light wind, so that the whole pit seemed to smoke gently like a dying bonfire.

"It's a meteorite, you know," said a man near me, in the confident tone of one repeating something he had heard, "a shooting star." He seemed rather proud of the word.

I stood at the edge of the pit for some time, looking down at the Thing, and I found myself sharing something of the excitement of the little crowd, though I could not then have told you why. There was, I think, a quality of strangeness about it that struck below the level of reasoned observation—a sense that the shape was not the shape chance and combustion give to falling stones. But I put the feeling from me as fanciful, and it was in this state of mind that I saw Ogilvy.

He came across the heather with his long, awkward stride, in his shirt-sleeves and with his coat over his arm, evidently in a state of some excitement himself, though of a different sort from the crowd's.

"Ah, you've come to see my meteorite," he said, when he saw me, and laughed a little self-consciously. "A fine one, too—the biggest fall I've heard of in England for years."

"Is that what it is?" I said. "I confess it seems to me an odd sort of meteorite."

"Odd how?" said he, cocking his head.

"The shape of it. Meteorites are not commonly cylinders, with rounded ends, are they? This has the look almost of a shell, or a canister."

Ogilvy laughed outright at that. "My dear fellow, you're thinking of Jules Verne and his moon-gun. No, no—the shape is easily enough explained. It has been rotating as it fell, you see, and softened by the friction of the atmosphere; that would account for a certain—regularity, if you like, without there being anything artificial about it at all. I dare say if we could dig it out you'd find it a very commonplace lump of iron and stone, for all its looks. The strangeness is only in the eye of the beholder, my friend—we are primed by our fancies to see contrivance in every unfamiliar shape. Depend upon it, that is nothing but chondrite, or some such stuff, cooling in the water there."

"But the size of it," I said, "and the way it lies—so nearly whole, and not shattered as I should have thought a mass of that size must be, striking the earth at a meteor's pace."

"The sand's soft here, and there's the water besides—it may have checked the shock more than you'd think," he said. But I fancied there was a shade less certainty in his voice than in his words, and he went on rather quickly, as though to close the discussion: "In any case we shall know more when it has cooled enough to be got at. I've sent word to Ogilvy—that is, to the people who ought to hear of these things—and I dare say a party will come out from London to look at it properly. In the meantime it is no more than a nine days' wonder for Horsell, and will be carted off to a museum before the week is out, mark my words, and labelled and forgotten like all the rest of them."

I did not press the argument further, for it seemed to me churlish to dispute with a man so much more learned than myself upon his own ground, and, besides, the sight of the thing, smoking there in its bed of steaming mud, was after all no more than curious, and not, on the face of it, alarming. We talked a little longer of the fall—of the flame Ogilvy himself had seen the night before through his study window, and of the shock that had rattled the windows of half Horsell village—and then he went back to his lodging, still, I think, more shaken in his own confidence than he cared to own, while I remained a while longer at the pit's edge among the growing crowd.

By the time I got home it was past midday, and I told my wife the whole business over our belated luncheon—the pit, the steaming metal, Ogilvy's meteorite and his talk of cylinders and rotation. She was more interested than I had expected, and pressed me with a woman's practical questions—how big was it, and was it dangerous, and had anyone been near enough to be hurt—questions I could not very well answer. In the end nothing would do but that she should come and see it for herself, and, the afternoon being fine and my own curiosity by no means satisfied, I was glad enough of the excuse to walk over again.

We found a much larger company gathered when we came up over the ridge the second time—forty or fifty people, I should think, standing about the rim of the pit in the loose, disorderly way of a crowd that has nothing in particular to do but stare, with a pony-cart or two drawn up on the road, and small boys from the village running in and out among the gorse bushes in great delight at the holiday the thing had made for them. The steam still rose from the pit, though I fancied it thinner than in the morning, and the strange dull-grey curve of the cylinder showed a little more clearly above the water, as though the pool about it had begun to shrink from the heat.

My wife stood at my side a little apart from the others, holding my arm, and looking down with a kind of wondering distaste that I think was only the ordinary distaste of a sensible woman for a crowd and a mess and a smell of hot mud, rather than any presentiment of what was to come. "It looks very ugly," she said, "lying there. I don't wonder the children like it, but I should not care to touch it."

Even as she spoke there was a sudden movement and a cry from the further side of the pit. A young fellow—one of the carters, I fancied, or perhaps a groom, a big red-faced man in his shirt-sleeves—had scrambled down the loose sandy slope, more from bravado, I suppose, than anything else, egged on by his companions, to get a closer look at the Thing than the rest of us cared to venture; and, steadying himself, he had put out his hand and laid it for an instant against the exposed curve of the metal.

He gave a kind of shout, more of astonishment than pain at first, and then a sharp cry, and scrambled back up the slope holding his hand against his chest, his face gone white and then red again. "Burnt me!" he said, in a high, aggrieved voice, to anyone who would listen. "Burnt me proper, it did—look at that!" And he held out his palm, on which was a livid, blistering mark, for the crowd to see, with the air of a man exhibiting a grievance rather than an injury.

There was a great deal of talk after that, as you may imagine—some pressing forward to see the man's hand, others drawing back from the pit's edge with a new and more respectful caution, and a little knot of them abusing the fellow for a fool for meddling with what didn't concern him. But it had its effect; the steaming grey curve of metal, which a minute before had seemed no more than an oddity to be gaped at, took on of a sudden a more sinister character in the eyes of the crowd, and I noticed that even the boldest of the boys kept their distance after that, and contented themselves with throwing clods of turf towards it from a safe way off, which fell short and hissed faintly upon the hot sand.

My wife had gone rather pale, and her hand tightened on my arm. "I don't like it, George," she said. "I wish you would not stand so near it yourself. Let us go home."

I own I had no great inclination to linger either, once I had seen the burn upon the man's hand, red and angry and already beginning to blister at the edge; and yet there was a pull in the thing, a kind of fascination in that grey smoking mass in its bed of mud that I did not care to examine too closely even in my own mind. I persuaded her, however, that there was no sense in her waiting about in such a crowd for nothing, and that I would follow very shortly, when I had seen a little more of it; and after some hesitation, and a last uneasy look down into the pit, she consented to go home without me, walking off along the road towards Ottershaw with the quick, resolute step of a woman glad enough to be quit of an ugly sight, and only a little unwilling to leave her husband among it.

I stood among the gorse at the rim of the pit and watched her go, and then turned back to the crowd, which was growing, if anything, every quarter of an hour, as word of the fall spread through Horsell and Ottershaw and even, I heard someone say, as far as Woking. The sun was well past noon now, and hot upon the common, and the steam still rose, thin and wavering, from the grey curve of metal in its pool of steaming mud, as though the Thing were only biding its time.