The Chapters

“Poor Brett,” I said.

The driver had turned down the Rue Monge and we were going toward the river. The street was dark and the lights of the taxi went along the shut fronts of the houses. Brett opened her eyes. She had her hat off and her hair was pushed back from her forehead.

“I say, Jake, do you know the Select?”

“It’s on the Montparnasse.”

“I don’t want to go to the Parc Montsouris. It’s a park. Nobody goes to a park at night but the police.”

“You said drive around.”

“I said a lot of things. Tell him the Select.”

I leaned forward and told the driver. He shrugged his shoulders, and at the next corner swung the cab around and went up the hill toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Brett lay back again. We went past the closed cafés and the dark front of the Lycée and came out at the light and noise of the Boulevard, and the cab turned down toward Montparnasse.

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“No.”

“Good. You’re a dear. I can’t tell you anyway. I only want a place with lights and people who don’t know one.”

“There will be people who know you.”

“Not the right ones. Not tonight.”

We passed the Closerie des Lilas and the statue of Marshal Ney in the trees, and the cab went on down under the arc-lights. She put her hand on my arm and left it there. It was a small hand, thin, with the rings pushed round.

“I had a rotten week,” she said.

“Go on.”

“Oh, nothing. It was all with people. There was a man from Cannes, Count Something. Then there was another one. A Mr. Harris Loomis. Perfectly enormous money, Jake. He does something with tinned goods in Ohio, I believe. Or it may be tires. I met him last Thursday at the Ritz. He was frightfully kind.”

“I never heard of him.”

“No reason you should. He’d never heard of me, either. That was the charm.”

“Is he in Paris?”

“He went to Deauville. He wanted me to go. He said he would buy me a horse.”

“What would you do with a horse?”

“Exactly. That’s what I said.” She laughed, but it was not much of a laugh. “Rather a sweet man, really. He kept asking if I was comfortable.”

“Were you?”

“Not particularly.”

The cab stopped at the Select. There were people on the terrace under the awning and the lights were bright on the white tables. I paid the driver and Brett got out and stood on the pavement looking at the terrace. She put her hat on and pulled it down.

“I don’t think I can do it, after all.”

“You wanted lights.”

“One does, in theory.” She took my arm. “Let’s sit inside. At the bar.”

We went in and sat on the high stools. The barman was polishing glasses. There was nobody in the room except an old man asleep over a saucer and two Swedes at the end of the bar. Brett ordered a whiskey and I ordered one. She held the glass in both hands and did not drink it.

“You’re awfully quiet.”

“I’m listening.”

“You needn’t be so damned tactful.”

“I’m not tactful. I’m tired.”

“Poor Jake. It’s a wretched thing to be, tired. Do you know, I nearly rang you up last night?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought you’d be asleep. And besides, I thought you’d be busy.”

“I was asleep.”

“There you are, then.”

“I’d have got up.”

“Would you?” She looked at me and looked away at the bottles behind the bar. “Don’t, darling. It’s only the whiskey talking. Mine, I mean. I haven’t had any.”

“It’s in front of you.”

“So it is.” She drank some of it. “It’s a bore, being like this. People say it passes.”

“Does it?”

“Oh, one gets up in the morning and has a bath. I’m told that’s the thing.”

“That’s the thing.”

“And then one goes and sees somebody.”

“Yes.”

“How marvellous to have it all so simple.”

“It isn’t simple.”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it a pity.”

She turned the glass on the zinc. I watched her hand. The Swedes had begun to argue about something quietly. I thought that I would like to sit there and never say anything and never have her leave, and I was very glad she could not read what I was thinking, and I knew she could.

“I say, you’ll have to be a lamb,” she said. “I’m going to be dreadful company. Go and get your fifty francs. Go on. You’ll never forgive me if Georgette’s young men get it.”

“I gave it to the patronne.”

“Then she’ll drink it. Go and see. I’ll sit here and be good. I’ll have another and do nothing at all.”

“You want me to go?”

“I want you to come back.”

“It’s a long way.”

“Take a taxi. Take my last five francs, for that matter.”

“Keep them.”

“Jake.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. Go along.”

I went out and found a cab by the Rotonde. It was after one and the streets were empty and the cab ran fast up to the Panthéon. I felt better in the air. I did not want to go back and I did not know why I was going, except that she had asked me to, and that it was something to do.

The Bal was still going. The accordion was playing and the policeman had gone. The two taxis that had brought them were gone too, and the crowd of young men with them. There were the workmen now, in caps, dancing with their girls, close together, hardly moving, and the daughter of the house was dancing with a boy in a sweater. The patronne was behind the zinc. She saw me and smiled.

“Ah, Monsieur. It is you.”

“Has the girl asked for me?”

“The little one? She is there.”

Georgette was sitting at a table at the back with a glass of white wine and a plate of sausage. Her hat was on the bench beside her. She saw me and did not get up.

“Well,” she said. “Here he is. The fiancé.”

“Hello.”

“They went away. All of them. Very chic, those. One of them wanted me to come to Montmartre and I said, with all of you? Not for a thousand francs.”

“Sensible.”

“I’m not a fool. They only wanted to laugh.” She cut a piece of the sausage. “Sit down. It’s good, this.”

I sat down. The patronne brought the envelope and put it on the table in front of me without a word. I opened it and looked at the fifty-franc note. Then I pushed it across to Georgette.

“What’s that?”

“Yours. I left it for you.”

“You left it so I could not ask you for it?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re a funny type.” She folded the note small and put it in her stocking. “You went with the English one. The one with the hair.”

“Yes.”

“She’s pretty. She’s not happy.”

“No.”

“It’s easy to see. Me, I’m happy when I have eaten.” She grinned, with her mouth open this time. “You want to dance?”

“No. I have to go back.”

“Of course. Good night, then. You’re not a bad type. It’s a shame.”

“Good night, Georgette.”

I gave the patronne a franc for the trouble and went out. The taxi waited with the meter running. I gave the address of the Select and sat and watched the wet street go by.

The bar was empty when I came in. The old man had gone from his saucer and the Swedes had gone. The barman was stacking chairs. Brett was not on her stool. I asked him, and he said the lady had left with a gentleman, a while ago, and then had come back, and had left again, alone, a few minutes before. She had said I would understand. I did not understand. I stood there.

I went out and she was on the pavement with her hat in her hand, under the arc-light, looking up the boulevard.

“There you are. Did you get it?”

“I got it.”

“And the little girl?”

“She was eating sausage.”

“Good for her.” She put on the hat. “I think I want to go home now. I feel rather better. It was silly.”

“All right.”

“You’ve been awfully decent.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“That’s what I mean.”

A taxi came slowly down from the Rotonde with its flag up. I raised my hand and it drew in. It was getting light over the roofs at the end of the street, very faintly, gray, so that the arc-lights looked yellow and unnecessary.

“You won’t come?” she said.

“No.”

“No. Better not.” She got in and leaned out of the window. “I’ll ring you up.”

“Do.”

“Good night, darling. Don’t look like that.”

“I’m not looking like anything.”

“No,” she said. “That’s just it.”

She gave the driver an address in the Rue Saint-Honoré, or so I think, I did not listen. The cab went off up the boulevard and turned at the corner. I stood a while. I was in love with her, and there was nothing to be done about it.

I walked. I went down the Boulevard Raspail and out along the Rue de Rennes, and crossed to the river by the Pont des Saints-Pères. The sky was paler now. On the quay the vegetable carts were coming along from the country, the drivers asleep on the loads, the big horses walking slowly, with their heads down, on the wet stones. A man was washing the pavement in front of a café. The river was gray and quiet and the plane trees dripped over it. I stopped on the bridge and looked at the Louvre, long and pale in the light, and then went on along the quay, walking, with the water on my left, and the bookstalls on the parapet still shut and padlocked, and the first bus going over the bridge behind me, empty, with its lights on.

Lady Russell was the first to be heard. She came to Kellynch Hall on the morrow, by appointment, and Mr Shepherd, who had been requested to come at the same hour, was found already in the library, with a roll of papers on his knee, and the look of a man who has been a good while considering how to say a disagreeable thing agreeably. Sir Walter received them standing, with his back to the fire, though there was no fire, it being August; but it was the position in which he felt himself most at home in a difficulty, and he was not disposed to give it up because the season was against it.

Anne had meant to be out of the way. She had been used all her life to be out of the way whenever any thing of consequence was to be discussed, and had taken up her work, and a chair in the window of the adjoining drawing-room, with the door standing open only because nobody had thought it worth while to shut it. Elizabeth, on the contrary, had a chair placed for herself near her father, and sat with the air of one who was to be consulted, though not yet aware that she had nothing to say.

Lady Russell, who had thought of the matter a great deal, and had put it upon paper with her own hand, went first. She was a woman of steady judgement, and had a great respect for arithmetic; and her plan was one that a person of sense would have thought moderate. It was, that Sir Walter should set apart a fixed portion of his income, before any other claim was admitted, to the clearing of his debts; that the carriage-horses should be reduced by two; that the establishment in London be given up for the present year, and that the family be content with the few weeks at a lodging, or none; that the household be lessened by a footman and an under-gardener; and that a certain number of years, which she named, and which was not a small one, should be given to a perfect regularity of living, at the end of which Kellynch would be free.

Sir Walter heard the whole of it with a countenance that grew longer at every article. At the mention of the horses he coughed; at the footman he turned to the window; and when the lodging in London was pronounced, he looked at Lady Russell as if she had proposed to him to go there in a hackney-coach.

“My dear Lady Russell,” said he, when she had done, “you are very good; you always are. But I must say, that I cannot conceive how a person who has seen the manner in which Sir Walter Elliot has been used to live, can suppose it possible. Two horses! What would be thought of the Elliots on the Bath road, or any road? And to give up London, at a time of year when every body is there, or, what is worse, to appear there in a lodging! I will not say what the world would say. I would rather not suppose that it could say any thing. No; it will not do. It is quite out of the question.”

“It is a question of what can be paid, Sir Walter,” said Lady Russell, gently.

“It is a question, I believe, of what can be borne,” said he.

Mr Shepherd, who was a civil, cautious lawyer, and had heard this doctrine before, thought it a favourable moment to be brought forward, and unrolled his papers with a little cough, meant to be conciliating. His scheme was of another sort. He thought that something might be done by an improved management of the land; that the rents might be looked into, and some farms put on a better footing; that the timber in certain quarters might be judiciously thinned; that the mortgages might be renewed on easier terms, if Sir Walter would but allow him to treat with the parties; and that in the mean while some small retrenchments in the kitchen and the stables, quite unnoticeable to the neighbourhood, would answer every purpose of appearance.

“Thin my timber!” cried Sir Walter. “Mr Shepherd, you forget yourself. I have not so far forgotten what I owe to my ancestors as to strip their trees for the sake of a tradesman’s bill. And to go about the country with hat in hand to gentlemen who hold my paper, and ask them to be so obliging as to hold it longer!—I am not to be told that this is management. It is a very good way of being talked of. No; I shall not hear of it.”

Mr Shepherd bowed, and looked at his papers, and, after a decent silence, looked up again with the resolution of a man who has one card left, and dislikes it.

“Sir Walter, I would not press any thing that is disagreeable to you. But there is one course, which, in such circumstances as these, gentlemen of the first consequence have not thought beneath them, and which I have sometimes wondered has not been thought of at Kellynch. I mean, that—the house being, as it is, so very much larger than a reduced establishment could require—it might be found advisable, for a time, to look out for a respectable *tenant*——”

“Sir,” said Sir Walter, in a voice which made Mr Shepherd stop short, “I will thank you not to pronounce that word again in my presence. I do not know what you have been accustomed to hear in Westgate Buildings, or wherever you may have taken it up; but at Kellynch Hall it has never been spoken, and I shall not have it begin now. Kellynch Hall is not to be let, sir, nor is any person whatever to be spoken of as—as what you have said. I hope I make myself understood.”

Mr Shepherd said that he was perfectly understood, and that he begged pardon; and Lady Russell, who had her own opinion of the word, though she was too wise to say so, looked at the carpet.

There was a general pause, and it was in this pause that Anne, who had not intended to be heard, and who had been for some minutes more uncomfortable than she could well express, laid down her work, and spoke.

“Perhaps,” said she, and the colour rose in her face as she saw them all turn, “perhaps it may be thought that neither plan asks enough. I have been trying to reckon, while you were speaking, how much Lady Russell’s scheme would clear in a year, and I am afraid it is very little; and if there be any thing in the other, it can only come, I think, after a length of time. If we are really to pay what we owe, and not merely to talk of it, I believe we must do more than reduce. We must give up a great deal that is not, strictly speaking, necessary. The carriage-horses might be lessened by more than two; the wine, the hot-house, the second table, and all the new expenses of the season, be laid aside; the yearly sum to my father’s own use be fixed, and not exceeded; and every article of expense be set down in a book, and looked over every week. It would be a very different way of living; but I do not see that it need be an uncomfortable one, and it would be an honest one. I would rather that we were called saving than that we were called in debt.”

Nobody spoke. Sir Walter looked at her with the astonishment of a man who hears a chair address him. Mr Shepherd looked at Lady Russell, and Lady Russell, with a smile of the most affectionate surprise, looked at Anne. But the greatest surprise was still to come; for Elizabeth, who had never in her life been known to agree with her sister before her father had done so, said, with some deliberation,

“I think Anne is right.”

“Elizabeth!” cried Sir Walter.

“I do think so, papa. We have talked of economy, and done nothing; and I am sure I do not wish to be pitied by every body. If we are to retrench at all, I had rather do it thoroughly, and be done. It would not be for ever. And I should not mind the hot-house, if the carriage were kept.”

This last condition, which somewhat weakened the effect of what went before, was not observed by any but Anne; the rest were too much occupied in wondering. Lady Russell, who could scarcely have been more pleased had it been her own plan, began to say something of the good sense of the proposal; but Sir Walter, recovering himself, put a stop to it.

“I am very sorry,” said he, “to see my daughters so ready to reduce their father to the condition of a country attorney. Anne means well; she has always meant well. But she can know nothing of what is required. As for you, Elizabeth, I can only suppose that you have been led. A book, and a weekly inspection! I should be ashamed to have it known in the house. We will say no more upon the subject to-day. I have been more harassed this morning than I have been for years, and I shall take a turn in the shrubbery.”

He went out accordingly, taking his hat and his cane with a great deal of dignity, and Elizabeth followed him, saying that she was sure he was not well. Mr Shepherd, gathering up his rolls of paper, observed to Lady Russell, in the doorway, that Sir Walter was naturally much fatigued, and that these things were best left to ripen; and Lady Russell, having pressed Anne’s hand with something more than her usual warmth, and said that she would call in the evening, was obliged to go home, having a person to see on business of her own.

The letter came in the afternoon. It was brought over from Uppercross by a man on a cart-horse, and laid, with two or three others, upon the hall table, where Anne found it as she came in from a walk to the village, which she had taken chiefly to be quiet. She knew the hand, which was Mary’s, and which was always a little larger when Mary was more than usually ill.

“MY DEAR ANNE,

“I hope you are all well at Kellynch, for I am sure I am not. I have been very poorly this whole week, with a headache and a pain in my side which nobody will take seriously, and I was so bad on Tuesday that I was obliged to send for Mr Robinson, who said it was nothing, which is what he always says. Charles went out shooting the next morning, as if I had never been ill; and the children have been so noisy that I have not had a moment’s peace, and little Charles has not been at all obedient since his nurse left us. I have not seen a creature but the Musgroves since Sunday, and they are not at all sympathising. I am sure I do not know what is to become of me. Now, my dear Anne, I do wish you would come to me. You are so much better than any body at being useful, and I know Elizabeth can spare you, for she has never wanted you for any thing. Pray do not say you cannot, and do not be long about it. I am sure I shall be worse if you do not come.

“Yours affectionately, “MARY M.

“P.S. I hear Uppercross Cottage is always damp in the autumn. I have not felt it yet, but I dare say I shall.”

Anne read it standing, and then read it again, and smiled a little, and then was grave; for she knew Mary well enough to be certain that a good part of it was not true, and that a smaller part was. She did not carry the letter to Elizabeth. It was not a house in which Mary’s letters were often called for, and she had, at that moment, no wish to be asked what was in it.

The evening passed as such evenings do in a family which has disagreed about nothing in particular. Sir Walter came in from the shrubbery in a state of injured composure, and dined without mentioning his difficulties, or suffering them to be mentioned; Elizabeth, having done him the justice to say that she did not wish to press him, took up her novel, and began to think, as it seemed, of the hot-house; and Lady Russell, who called as she had promised, was received in the drawing-room with a great deal of ceremony, and only found time for a few words apart with Anne, in which she said that the thing was not lost, that Sir Walter must be given time, and that Anne had spoken better than she knew.

When she was gone, and the candles were carried away, and the house had grown quiet, Anne went up to her own room, and sat down for a while by the open window. It was a mild, dusky night; the park lay dim below her, with its old trees standing about it in masses, the trees which nobody was to thin; and beyond them a light or two in the village. She had done what she could, and it had come to nothing. The bills were in Mr Shepherd’s papers, and the mortgages in Mr Shepherd’s keeping, and her father had walked in the shrubbery; and nothing whatever was altered, unless it were that Elizabeth had for one quarter of an hour been reasonable, which Anne was not so foolish as to build upon.

She could do nothing more at Kellynch. It was a melancholy thought, but not an entirely unhappy one, since it set her free. There was Mary, who wanted her, however unreasonably, and who would want her the less unreasonably for being answered; there was the road to Uppercross, which was only three miles, and the cottage where she would at least be of use. She did not think that she was running away. She would tell her father in the morning, and he would say that she might go, for it would not occur to him that she could be missed; and she would speak to Lady Russell before she went.

She drew the letter from her pocket, folded it small, and laid it on the table beside her, and sat a little longer looking at the dark trees, and the debts, which nothing had touched, seemed to lie about the house like the night itself, quiet and entire, till the morning.

“He is a child, that Robert,” said Madame Ratignolle, when they had gone some little way along the sandy path and the voices of the children had grown faint behind them. “He does not mean the half of what he says. But I was watching you both yesterday, and I do not think you were quite asleep, either of you, to the little scene of the afternoon.”

“Oh, I sleep very soundly when I am with Madame Ratignolle,” returned Robert, laughing, and shifting the weight of her hand upon his arm. “It is the only place in Grand Isle where one is quite safe. You are my old devotion, *chère madame*; you know that. Only, one grows tired of a devotion that has been so long settled and so well provided with a husband.”

“Then you have found another.”

“I have found nothing,” said he, more slowly. He kicked a shell out of the path and watched it roll among the camomile. “But Mrs. Pontellier is not like the ladies who come down from the city. She does not look at one as if she had already made up her mind what one is going to say. I think she has not yet found out what she is. It would be a pity if anyone were to tell her too soon.”

Madame Ratignolle glanced up at him quickly, but said nothing more, and they went on to the house in silence, save for her occasional complaint of the sun.

Edna, meanwhile, sat with the children under the tent and made a great business of sand. She built a fort for Raoul, and when the tide of his interest ebbed she was left alone with it, turning a shell over in her fingers. The nurse-maids sat at a little distance, disagreeable and resigned. At half-past ten the whole procession trailed back to the house, the little ones dragging their feet and clamoring for the bread and jam that was always to be had at that hour.

The day advanced in the usual way. There was the midday dinner, at which Madame Lebrun presided with her keys at her belt, and the long, drowsy interval afterward when every one was supposed to lie down and no one did. Edna went to her room, but she did not lie down. She stood at the window and looked through the slats of the blind at the yellow glare.

It was about three o’clock that the boy from the office at Klein’s came up the path, carrying a yellow envelope, and asked for Mrs. Pontellier. She took it from him on the gallery. It was from her husband, and had been sent from New Orleans. He had been detained by business of some importance, and would not be able to come out to Grand Isle on Saturday; he hoped that she was well, and that the children were not troubling her. He would write. It was all in the stiff, economical language of the telegraph, and the word “regret” was the only one which seemed to have any life in it, and that was doubtless because he had been obliged to pay for it.

She read it twice, folded it small, and put it in her pocket. She waited to discover what she felt. She was surprised to find that it was neither disappointment nor relief, but something like the sensation of a door quietly closing in another part of the house. Then she thought of the box of *bonbons* and the pâté which he had sent her, and that he was always most generous when he was absent, and she gave the boy a coin and sent him away.

When Madame Ratignolle came by later, fresh from her own children and her needlework, Edna showed her the telegram, and Adèle read it with a little sigh of sympathy that would have done for any calamity, great or small.

“Ah, well, the poor Léonce! And you, *chérie*, you will be lonely.”

“I do not think I shall be lonely,” said Edna, and was faintly astonished at the readiness of her own reply.

Madame Ratignolle folded her hands over her sewing. She was silent a moment, and then she seemed to decide that the thing had better be told, since it was of no importance whatever. “Robert said a curious thing of you this morning as we walked home. I would not repeat it, only that it is so like him to say a thing and forget it. He said that you had not yet found out what you are, and that it would be a pity if any one were to tell you too soon.”

“Did he say that?” asked Edna. A little color rose in her face, and she turned her head to watch a mocking-bird that was swinging upon a branch of the live-oak. “He knows a great deal, then, for a clerk who talks of Mexico.”

“Oh, he talks,” said Madame Ratignolle, and bit off her thread.

The afternoon wore on. At five the heat began to break, and the shadows of the cottages stretched long and blue across the sand. Robert had been claimed by the Farival twins and a game of croquet; Adèle had gone to lie down, in accordance with her condition; the children were at their supper under the eye of the quadroon. Edna took her straw hat from its peg and went down alone to the beach.

There was hardly a soul upon it. The lady in black had gone, and the children’s tent flapped empty. The water had fallen calm since morning and lay in long, low, glittering swells that folded themselves upon the sand with a sound like breathing. She had always been afraid of it. She had waded, and let it lap about her ankles, and had watched others go out with their confident arms; but the great expanse had for her the terror of things which one does not understand.

She undressed in her bath-house and put on her bathing suit, and stood a while on the gallery. Then she went down and walked into the sea. It rose about her knees, her waist; it lifted the lightness of her body and seemed to take her weight upon itself. She stretched her arms before her, as the little girl had done in the meadow of the tall grass, and pushed forward with her feet from the bottom. For an instant she was borne. Her body lay level upon the water and moved, of its own will, and her arms, which had been beating without direction, found a stroke. One, two, three—she counted them like coins. Then fear rushed in; her feet sought the ground and found it, and she stood, gasping and laughing, with the salt running into her eyes.

She did it again, and again, no more than a few strokes each time, and each time she stood up trembling with a strange elation, as if she had been let into a secret. She looked along the beach. No one had seen. She dressed slowly, with wet hair clinging to her neck, and walked home in the last of the light. When Madame Lebrun remarked upon her color, she said only that the wind had been fresh.

The night was warm and very still. The children had been undressed and put to bed, and Raoul had said his prayers with a sleepy mumble and gone off in the middle of a word. Edna sat on the gallery in the wicker chair, in the shadow of the vine, and heard the music from the main house come faintly across the grounds, and the sea beyond it, murmuring at its own affairs. The telegram was still in her pocket. She did not take it out.

*She has not yet found out what she is.* It was strange to have been read so, and by one who leaned his head against her arm like a child. She could not tell whether the words had been kind or impertinent. She turned them over as she had turned the shell that morning, and they would not be still. Out on the black water there was no sail now, nothing but the small, moving lights, and the sound of the swell in which she had, for the first time, been held up.

When she opened her eyes again the train had stopped, and Mrs. Medlock was shaking her by the arm.

"You've had a good sleep, I must say," she said. "Now get up and look sharp. We've a long drive before us, and it's near dark."

Mary got up. The rain was still falling, and the platform of the little station was a shining black puddle under one lamp. She stood blinking while Mrs. Medlock gathered up her bundles, and it was not until they had come through the wicket that she saw a tall man standing under the lamp with the water dripping from the brim of his hat.

He was not at all what she had expected. She had thought of a hunchback as something small and twisted, like the beggars in the bazaar, but this man was thin and dark and stooped in the shoulders as if he carried something heavy upon them. His face was white and very still. He looked at Mrs. Medlock, and then he looked at Mary, and his eyes rested on her a moment as they might have rested on a parcel he had been told to expect.

"This is the child, sir," said Mrs. Medlock, and she dropped a sort of curtsy, so that the purple flowers on her bonnet shook. "I didn't look to see you at the station, I'm sure."

"No," said Mr. Craven. "The carriage is outside."

That was all he said to Mrs. Medlock. To Mary he said only, "You are Mary," which was not a question, and when she answered "Yes," he nodded once and turned away. He did not put out his hand and she did not want him to. She had made up her mind, in the railway carriage, to dislike him, and she was rather annoyed to find that he did not seem to notice whether she did or not.

He handed Mrs. Medlock into the carriage and then stood aside for the child to climb in after her. Then, to Mary's surprise, he did not get in himself. He spoke a word or two to the coachman, which she did not hear, and walked away into the rain toward the end of the platform.

"He'll go by the other road, on his horse," said Mrs. Medlock, settling her mantle. "Or he'll not go at all tonight. It's never any use asking."

The carriage was large and smelled of wet leather. The lamps at each side of it threw two yellow patches on the road, and beyond them there was nothing. For a while there were the lights of a village, and a low stone bridge, and a church with a dark tower; then even these were gone, and the horses went slowly up a long hill between hedges.

"There's the moor now," said Mrs. Medlock presently. "You can't see it, but it's there."

"I don't see anything," said Mary.

"That's because there's nothing to see. It's miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep."

Mary pressed her face to the glass. The blackness on either side was different from the blackness of the hedges. It was wider and emptier, and it seemed to go on without an edge. There was a great wind in it, too. She could hear it rushing past the carriage with a low, steady sound like the sea, though she had never thought that a sea could be a thing that was not there to be looked at. She did not like it. She drew back and pinched her lips together.

They had been driving a long time, and she was beginning to nod again, when the carriage gave a lurch and stopped so suddenly that she was thrown against Mrs. Medlock's shoulder.

"What is it?" demanded Mrs. Medlock sharply, letting down the window. "Why are you stopping, Parker?"

"There's summat in t' road, missus," the coachman called back. "Can't tell what. I'll have to get down."

The lamp swung, and Mary heard his boots on the wet stones. She heard the horses blowing and stamping. Mrs. Medlock muttered something about sheep, and she was still muttering when Mary, who was tired of being shut up, opened the door on her own side and got down.

"You come back here this minute!" cried Mrs. Medlock.

But Mary did not come back. She stood on the road with the rain blowing against her face and looked at the darkness. It was so very large. In India the night had always been full of noises, the tom-toms, and dogs, and the servants talking low in the compound, but here there was only the wind and beyond the wind a kind of deep, wide silence. She took three steps off the road, and her boots sank in something springy and wet that was not grass. It smelled of earth and of some sharp, sweet plant she did not know. It was heather, she supposed. She stood in it, and for the first time in her life she felt very small, and she did not know whether she disliked the feeling or not.

Something moved a little way off. It was low and pale, and it looked at her out of the lamplight with two round eyes, and then it was not there at all.

"It's nowt but a ewe that's got herself wedged," Parker called. "I've shifted her. Get thee in, lass, thou'll be drenched."

Mrs. Medlock caught her by the shoulder and pushed her up the step. "Never in my life!" she said. "Wandering off on the moor in the dark, and you not an hour in the county! You'll do as you're bid at Misselthwaite or you'll know why."

Mary sat down in her corner with her wet hem clinging to her ankles. She did not say she was sorry. But she did not feel as cross as she had done before, and she was rather glad that Mrs. Medlock did not know it.

At last the carriage went through a gate and along a drive which seemed to go on for a very long time between trees whose branches brushed the roof. Then it stopped. Mary saw a huge, low house, spreading out on every side, with only one window showing a light. The door was of oak studded with iron, and when it was opened she stepped into a great hall so dimly lighted that she did not care to look at the portraits on its walls. She stood on a stone floor, a small black figure, and she felt as small and lost as she looked.

A thin, elderly man stood near the housekeeper.

"You are to take her to her room," he said. "He doesn't wish to be seen. He'll be going away in the morning."

"Very well, Mr. Pitcher," said Mrs. Medlock. "So long as I know where I am."

She led Mary up a broad staircase and along a passage, and up a few steps and along another, and through a door into a room with a fire burning in it and a supper laid on a table before the hearth.

"Well, here you are!" said Mrs. Medlock. "This room and the next are where you'll live, and you'll keep to them, mind."

She went out, and Mary took off her wet hat. She was standing looking at the tapestry on the wall, where some faded people were hunting in a forest, when the door opened again and a man came in carrying a tray.

She had expected a maid. In India the ones who waited at table had been Ayahs and bearers, and she had supposed that in England there would be tidy women in caps. But this was a short, broad man with a red face and grizzled hair, and a coat that was too tight for him, and he set the tray on the table with great care and stood back looking at her.

"Tha's come, then," he said. "Happen tha's hungry. Here's thy bit o' supper, an' if tha wants owt else tha's but to ring t' bell, though nobbut Martha'll hear it i' t' morning."

Mary stared at him.

"I don't know what you say," she said.

"Eh?" said the man. "It's plain enough. I said th' meat's hot, an' tha'd best eat it while it is."

"I don't understand you," said Mary again, very distinctly, as she had spoken to the servants in Hindustani when they did not do as she told them. "You talk like—I don't know what you talk like."

He scratched his head, and for a moment she thought he was going to laugh, but he did not.

"Tha'll get used to it, missy," he said. "Or happen I'll have to learn thee. Eat up."

He went out and shut the door softly behind him.

Mary sat down and ate a little of the meat and a piece of bread, and drank some milk. It was strange to have no one to help her, but she was too tired to be angry about it. She undressed by herself, clumsily, leaving her damp things in a heap, and got into the great bed, and the fire made red shapes on the ceiling until they began to fade.

She was almost asleep when she heard it.

It was a long way off, and it was not the wind she had listened to on the moor. It seemed to come from somewhere far inside the house, along some passage or through some wall, thin and uncertain, and then it stopped. She sat up in the dark with her heart beating.

The door opened a crack and a candle shone through it. It was Mrs. Medlock, in a nightcap, looking crosser than ever.

"Did you hear something?" said Mary.

"I heard nothing," said Mrs. Medlock. "It's the wind. It gets in the chimneys and the old corridors. It makes all kinds of noises. Lie down and go to sleep, and don't let me have to come again."

The door shut, and the candle went away, and Mary heard the key turn softly in the lock. She lay still. The wind was blowing round the corner of the house, and it did not sound in the least like what she had heard. She lay and listened with her eyes wide open. Mrs. Medlock had not looked at her when she said it.

"It was not the wind," said Mary to herself in the dark. "I know it was not. And I am going to find out what it was."

I saw the first of them myself. It was the night after that walk, and I have thought since how little there was to mark it. I had sat late over my papers on the development of moral ideas, and towards midnight I went out into the garden to smoke a last pipe and rest my eyes. The sky was clear and full of stars. Mars was low in the west by then, and I stood looking at it, and thinking, I remember, of Ogilvy's million to one, when a streak of green fire drew itself across the sky towards Woking and Ottershaw, and was gone.

It was not like a shooting star. It went slowly, or seemed to; it left a train of light behind it that hung for a moment and faded; and it was low, so low that I fancied it must fall within a mile or two. I waited for the sound of it, as one waits for thunder after lightning, and heard nothing but a dog barking somewhere down the road. Then I went in. My wife had gone up, and I did not wake her to tell her. A falling star is a small thing. I put out the lamp and went to sleep, and I dreamt of nothing at all.

It was the milkman who told me in the morning, before I was well through my breakfast. He had it from a carter, who had it from someone else, that a great stone had fallen in the night on Horsell Common, and that Ogilvy was up there already with half the village at his heels. I saw the green streak again, then, in my mind, and I knew that what I had seen was what they were talking of.

I said something about it to my wife. She laughed at me for a schoolboy, and then, seeing that I was already reaching for my hat, said that if I was going she would go too, for the morning was fine and she had not had a walk for days. I confess I was not sorry. I had some idea that it would be a thing worth telling afterwards. We went by the sandy road under the pine trees, and the air was already warm, and smelt of resin and dew.

The fall had taken place beyond the common, near the sand-pits, where the ground breaks and there is a hollow that the rains fill. The place was a pond, or rather a little mere, dark with peat, and lately swollen by wet weather. We came upon it over a rise of heather and I stopped. The object lay in the water at the far side, half sunk in it, with a great trench of torn sand and uprooted heath ploughed out behind, as though it had come in slantwise and skidded. A cloud of steam rose from it, thin and white in the sunlight, and the water around it stirred and hissed faintly. Some of the pines beyond were scorched and blackened on the side that faced it.

I do not know what I had expected: something like a rock, I suppose, a jagged black lump such as one sees in a museum case. It was not that. It was a huge cylinder, its upper end standing clear of the water, crusted over with a dull scale of earthy, dark colour, so caked with mud and burnt sand that one could not tell what lay beneath. It was of great size, thirty yards across, as I judged, and the steam fumed up from it in a way that gave it a horrible life.

“Don't go nearer,” said my wife, catching my arm.

“It's only hot,” I said. “It must be red-hot inside.”

Ogilvy was on the bank, with his coat off and his sleeves rolled, and a knot of men about him, a few labourers and a boy or two, and the landlord of the inn, in his apron. He had a long pole in his hand, with which he had been probing the shallows, and he was in the highest spirits. His face was flushed. He greeted us with a wave of the pole.

“Here's your Mars, then!” he cried. “Here's your signalling inhabitants! Look at it. The finest meteorite that has ever come down in England. I shall have it at South Kensington before the month is out.”

“It does not look much like a meteorite,” I said.

“What should it look like?”

“I hardly know. It looks too regular. Look at the shape of it, Ogilvy. Look at the trench. It seems to me it came down very slowly.”

“It came down at thirty miles a second, and the heat of the passage has fused the surface,” said Ogilvy. “It is quite simple. You have been reading the newspapers. You are in a fever about Mars, like all the rest.”

“You were in something of a fever about it yourself, the other night.”

“About the gas, yes, and I stand by that. This is another matter. This is a stone.” He struck at the crust with his pole, and a flake of it fell away hissing into the water. “There. Iron and nickel, very likely, and a good deal of stone. Look at that fracture.”

I looked, and I saw a dull grey metal under the crust, with no grain that I could name. I said so. He would not have it. He said that meteoric iron had every kind of appearance, that it was the commonest thing in the world for a man to see design in accident, and that I of all people, who had written so sensibly on the delusions of the popular mind, ought to know it. He pointed out, not without reason, that a thing that had come from space would be fused and twisted out of any likeness of itself. I answered that it was odd, then, that it should be so nearly round, and so exactly cylindrical at the end where the crust had broken. He said that nature was often round. I said that nature was seldom so neat. We stood there like two schoolmen, with the steam blowing between us, and the labourers listened with their mouths open, and I am afraid that we both grew rather warm.

“Very well,” he said at last, and laughed. “Wait until it has cooled and we have it out. Then you may apologise.”

“I shall be glad to,” said I, and I meant it.

By this time the crowd was thickening. They came over the heath in twos and threes, and then in families, the women in their Sunday shawls though it was not Sunday, children running ahead, a man with a barrow of ginger-beer who had smelt his opportunity, cyclists from Chertsey pushing their machines through the sand. By nine there must have been a hundred people about the pond, and the talk of them made a continuous murmur, in which I caught the word “Mars” more than once, and once the word “Germans.” Two policemen from Woking arrived, and stood about with the air of men who wished to forbid something and did not know what.

It was a little after this that the accident happened. A lad of sixteen or so, a gardener's boy, I believe, had worked his way along the bank to where the cylinder's flank came nearest to the shore. His friends dared him. He was a bold, red-headed fellow, and to show them he was not afraid he stretched out his hand and laid it flat against the scale, as one might pat a horse.

He snatched it back with a cry that stopped the whole crowd talking. He stood holding his wrist and turning grey about the mouth, and then he began to hop and swear and, in the next moment, to cry like a child. I went to him with Ogilvy. The palm was blistered white from the wrist to the finger-ends, and in one place the skin had come away with the touch. Someone fetched water from the pond, and a woman bound the hand in a wet handkerchief, and the boy was led away, still sobbing, towards the village and the doctor.

“Red-hot,” said Ogilvy, a little sobered. “I said so. It's a matter of cooling.”

“It has been lying in water for ten hours,” I said. “Look at the pond.”

He made no answer. He looked at the steam, that had not thinned by any perceptible degree since we had come, and then he turned and began shouting to the police to keep the people back.

The sun climbed. It grew hot and close. The people crowded on the ridge and on the banks, and the smell of trampled heath and warm humanity mingled with a faint acrid odour I did not know, that came, I suppose, from the thing itself. I was uneasy, and could not have said why. My wife had been very quiet. She had kept close to my side all the morning, and I saw that she was pale, and that she did not look at the object as the others did, but a little to one side of it.

“Come home, Nils,” she said at last, quietly, so that the others should not hear. “I don't like it here. It's nothing to do with us. Let them dig it out.”

I ought to have gone with her, perhaps. I said that it was only that the crowd was tiresome, and the heat, and that I would take her back to the road at least. It was nearly noon, and I said that lunch would be waiting. I said that I should follow presently. I would only wait to see whether they would begin to open the pit, or whatever they meant to do. She looked at me for some time, and I think she saw how it was with me.

“You'll come to lunch?”

“In an hour,” I said. “Less.”

She let go of my arm. I walked with her to the edge of the pines, where the road began, and watched her go down it, a small figure in a light dress, walking under the trees in patches of sun and shade, until the turn hid her. Then I went back up the rise to the pond, and pushed my way in among the people, and stood watching the steam.

Eve's first impulse, on reaching the pavement, was to keep the umbrella. It was a very good umbrella, and she had been brought up by a father who held that what Providence sent should not be haggled over. Her second impulse, which arrived somewhere about the Trocadero, was that the young man with the monocle had been a lunatic of unusually gentle type, and that the umbrella must belong to somebody else. Somebody, no doubt, was at this moment hunting for it in the rain. By the time she reached Piccadilly Circus the second impulse had won. Eve had a conscience, though it had seldom been allowed to interfere with her enjoyment of life.

She returned to Dover Street. The rain had stopped, and a watery sun was making the best of things. The gloomy building looked no more inviting than before, but she went up the steps and addressed the porter, a large man of the sort that seems to have been carved out of something to guard a tomb.

"I think this belongs to one of your members," she said. "It was lent to me. I should like to leave it with a note."

"Yes, miss," said the porter, in the manner of one to whom the lending of umbrellas to young women in expensive hats was a matter of daily routine.

He provided a sheet of club paper. Eve wrote, leaning on the ledge of his box: "Many thanks for the umbrella. It kept me perfectly dry, and my hat still more so. I hope you did not catch cold." She hesitated over the last line, and then, because there was no one to sign for, wrote nothing, folded the sheet, and gave it to him with the umbrella. Then she went away, feeling oddly that she had been at a party.

* * * * *

It was at about half-past twelve that the Honourable Mr. Walderwick came into the Drones. He was a pink, stout young man with the resentful air of one who has been kept waiting by a world which owed him better. He passed through the hall and was stopped by the porter.

"Beg pardon, sir. A young lady left your umbrella."

"My what?"

"Your umbrella, sir. With a note."

Mr. Walderwick took the note and read it. He read it again. His forehead, never a smooth one, became a range of small hills.

"But I haven't lent any umbrella to any young lady," he said. "I've been at Newmarket. I've got the thing at home." He stopped. "Anyway, I left mine in the rack yesterday. Where's the rack? Is it there?"

It was not there. It was in the porter's hands, and Mr. Walderwick, having identified it with a glare, carried it into the smoking-room in the mood of a Crusader who has recovered a relic and proposes to hold somebody accountable. Somebody, as he entered, was already rising from an arm-chair by the window to meet him. It was the tall, thin young man with the monocle.

"Ah, Walderwick," said Psmith. "I was hoping to catch you."

"Look here," said Mr. Walderwick. "Some fellow has been lending my umbrella to girls. Girls in hats. Here's a note about it. It says my hat is dry. I mean, her hat."

"Quite," said Psmith. "It is an admirable umbrella."

"Do you know anything about this?"

Psmith regarded him for a moment through the monocle with something like tenderness.

"Walderwick," he said, "I could explain. I could enter into a long and, I think, moving narrative, in which the rain, a distressed damsel and a stern sense of chivalry would play their parts. But why should I? Let us be practical. How much do you want for it?"

"Eh?"

"The umbrella. I am anxious to acquire it. I have grown attached to it in a brief but intimate association. Shall we say twenty pounds?"

Mr. Walderwick's mouth opened slowly, like a drawbridge.

"Twenty pounds! It cost me twenty-five shillings at the Stores!"

"Then I am robbing you of nothing. Twenty pounds is, I think, in the neighbourhood of what a man of feeling would ask for an umbrella with a history. If, however, you regard it as inadequate—"

"Twenty pounds," said Mr. Walderwick dreamily. He was a man whose finances were seldom out of the picture, and he saw that this was a moment for silence. "Oh, well, if you put it like that."

Psmith produced a cheque-book and wrote. The umbrella changed hands. Mr. Walderwick went off to the bar with the air of one who has been present at a miracle and does not propose to ask for details, and Psmith, sitting down again, stroked the umbrella's silk with a thoughtful hand. From the note, which Mr. Walderwick had left lying on the arm of a chair, he learned that his kindness had been appreciated, and that the writer's name was not stated. He put the note in his pocket-book.

* * * * *

Psmith lunched frugally, and afterwards, since one cannot spend the whole day staring at an umbrella, set out to walk to Miss Clarkson's agency, where he had an appointment. He cut through Bond Street, crossed Piccadilly, and it was in the neighbourhood of the Circus that Fate, which sometimes stirs itself, arranged matters. A girl in a black frock and a wonderful hat was standing at the kerb, looking at a taxi that was gliding past with the coldness of taxis, and at the pavement, and at her purse, in that order.

Psmith raised his hat.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I fear we have met before, but I cannot for the moment place it. Were you at Harrow?"

Eve, who had jumped, looked at him and burst out laughing.

"You are the man with the umbrella!"

"Umbrella?" said Psmith courteously. "Now that you mention it, there is something in the word which touches a chord. But no. You have made a mistake. I am not the man. I am merely a man."

"But you are! I should know that monocle anywhere."

"There are, I believe, many monocles in London," said Psmith gravely. "I have met several, and I cannot say I cared for them. My own is a very retiring one. Tell me about this umbrella. Did the fellow behave in a proper manner?"

"He put it into my hand and ran away."

"A brute," said Psmith. "Though possibly one who had urgent business elsewhere. One would like to think so. Perhaps he was called suddenly to the bedside of a sick aunt."

"I took it back to the club this morning. I hope I did right."

"Beyond question. Nothing could have been more correct. I am sure that the owner of the umbrella, whoever he may be, was extremely touched. I feel it myself, and I have nothing to do with it."

Eve looked at him doubtfully, and then gave it up. It is difficult to argue with a man who not only denies his identity but does it with such an air of regret.

"Well, whoever you are, you're being very kind about a thing you know nothing about," she said. "And now I must fly. I have an appointment."

"May one hope that it is a pleasant one?"

"I don't know yet," said Eve. "I have to be looked over by a peer."

She nodded, and was gone into the crowd. Psmith stood looking after the hat until it had been absorbed by the traffic. Then he put on his own, and walked on with the slow step of a man who has a good deal to think about.

* * * * *

The Carlton Hotel had been named by Lord Emsworth's secretary in a letter of great firmness, and it was at a quarter to four that Eve, a little nervous now that the moment had come, gave her name to a page. She was shown into a small sitting-room, where a fluffy old gentleman in a tweed suit was standing on the hearth-rug with his back to a fireplace that contained no fire, holding a book upside down and looking at the ceiling.

"Miss Halliday?" he said vaguely, when she had been announced twice. "Yes, yes. Quite so. Delighted."

"You wanted to see me about the library, Lord Emsworth."

"The library. Yes. Very interesting place. I am extremely fond of the library. Baxter tells me—that is, my secretary, a most efficient fellow—tells me that it wants cataloguing. I daresay it does. There are a great many books. Some of them, I believe, are very old."

"I should love to do it."

"Quite. Quite." He looked at her with a pale, benevolent eye, and something seemed to strike him. "Bless my soul! You are a very young woman."

"I am twenty-three."

"Ah. Yes. Quite old enough, no doubt. But I had imagined—" He stopped, and seemed to lose the thread. "Have you any experience of, of cataloguing?"

Eve, who had none, and had been coached on the point by her conscience during the ride in the cab, said that she had made a special study of it. Lord Emsworth received this with polite enthusiasm.

"Excellent. And you are acquainted with the works of Ralston McTodd?"

"I'm afraid not."

"No more am I," said Lord Emsworth, with relief. "Poet, I understand. My sister is giving him luncheon. Constance is very keen on poets. I do not care for luncheon, myself, when I can avoid it. Now what was I saying?"

"The library."

"Yes, of course. Miss Halliday, you will find it extremely draughty." He said this with such sad earnestness that Eve barely kept her face straight. "There is a window that will not shut. The last man who was working there caught a chill. It was never known exactly what he was working on. He left, poor fellow. But that is no reason, is it, why you should not go? Not at all. You shall have a shawl."

"I shouldn't mind a draught in the least."

"Splendid! Then that is settled. Or—" His face clouded. "Is it? There is something else. I had it written down."

He began to pat his pockets, with the result that a number of objects reached the carpet, including a seed catalogue, a piece of string, and a pair of pince-nez which he regarded with the amazement of a man meeting a long-lost brother. Eve picked them up. Presently he found the paper, and studied it for some time, holding it at arm's length.

"It says," he announced at last, "that Baxter is to be consulted. That is very unfortunate. Baxter is at Blandings. But I should say, Miss Halliday, that you are exactly what is wanted. I shall write to him tonight. Or telegraph. It is possible that he may be difficult. Baxter has a way of being difficult. He will say that I ought to have asked you about your qualifications."

"You did ask me."

"Did I? So I did. Then that is quite all right." He beamed. "You will hear from me. Good afternoon, Miss Halliday. Good afternoon."

Eve went out into the corridor. She had not been turned down, but neither, when she thought about it, had she been engaged; and she had a feeling that the future held a good deal of Baxter, whoever he might be.

* * * * *

The clock in the smoking-room of the Drones had struck seven, and the room, which at that hour is inhabited chiefly by young men discussing the prospects of the evening, had emptied itself towards dinner. Psmith, in the window seat, was alone. The umbrella lay across his knees. He was regarding it with the affection which one feels for a good investment.

The door opened and Bill Walderwick's cousin, a young man named Ivor Pennefather, who had heard the story at the bar, looked in.

"I say, Smith. Walderwick's told everybody. Twenty quid, what? Who was the girl?"

"I have not the pleasure of her acquaintance," said Psmith.

"Oh, well, she's a pal of young Freddie's, then, or somebody's. I saw her going into the Carlton this afternoon when I was passing. I asked the page. Halliday, her name is. Eve Halliday. Something to do with the Blandings crowd."

"Halliday," said Psmith softly.

"Eve. Well, cheerio."

The door closed. Psmith sat for some time without moving. Then, taking out his pocket-book, he laid the folded note upon the umbrella, and looked from one to the other with a gentle and solemn smile.

"Eve Halliday," he said.

"Betteredge," says Mr. Franklin, "you look as well as ever, and a great deal fatter. Help me up, and I'll help you up, and then we'll neither of us be any the wiser which helped the other."

We got on our legs between us, after a fashion. I brushed the sand off his beautiful fawn-coloured suit, which he took as a compliment, and which he had, I make no doubt, paid for as one. Then I asked him how it came about that he had turned up four hours before his time, and without so much as a boy to carry his portmanteau.

"The portmanteau is at the station," says Mr. Franklin. "It will follow me in the fly. As for the four hours, they are a long story, and a letter. Walk up with me, and I'll tell it. Don't let me hurry you. I remember your pace."

I ought to have been offended. But there is no being offended with Mr. Franklin. He had the same way with him as a boy of thirteen, when he used to beg my pardon for having put a frog in my hat, in such an agreeable manner that I was obliged to beg his for having found it there.

We took the path through the firs. Half-way up it, Mr. Franklin stopped, and felt in his breast-pocket.

"I stole a march on the whole household by coming by the early train," he said. "I asked my way at the lodge, and was told you were gone to the sands after a housemaid. Betteredge, you are a good deal more of a character in this county than you know. Now, will you read something for me? Read it slowly, and tell me what you make of it."

He handed me a letter. I put on my spectacles—which took time, my spectacles being at that period of my life in the habit of hiding themselves in the last pocket I tried—and read what follows. I copy it out here word for word, having the letter itself by me, as Mr. Franklin was good enough to leave it in my keeping afterwards.

"Sir,—You will probably be surprised to hear from a person who is a stranger to you. I write at the desire of my late employer's solicitor, and I beg to say that my only reason for troubling you is a matter of some consequence. I am bound to tell you that I have had cause to believe, for some days past, that you are watched. Three men of a foreign appearance, whom I have reason to know, have twice been seen in the neighbourhood of your father's late house, and once, in the street, following a gentleman who answered your description. If you are in charge of any article which has been placed in your keeping by a relative, I would strongly advise you not to keep it about you, nor in any house that is not your own, one hour longer than may be needful. Deposit it, if you can, where it will be safe. Then deliver it, on the day, with your own hand, and to no other. I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, SAMUEL BLAKE-GRAY, Clerk."

I read it twice over, and turned it about to look at the back, which is what a man does with a letter when he can make nothing of the front.

"Well?" says Mr. Franklin.

"Well, sir," says I, "if you'll excuse an old servant, it reads to me like a begging-letter, with the begging left out."

"You think it a hoax?"

"I think, sir, that a man who signs himself Clerk, and can't be got to say whose, might be a hundred things, and every one of them out of my way."

Mr. Franklin took the letter back, and looked at it, much as I had done, only with more of his foreign air of seeing through it. "I thought so myself, for about an hour," he said. "Then I remembered where I had seen three men of foreign appearance before. I made up my mind to go by the early train, on the spot. Say nothing of this to the ladies, Betteredge. And say nothing to anybody about the jugglers of the—" He stopped himself. "But I am running ahead. What were you going to tell me? You have something on your face."

I had. It was Penelope's Indians, and the boy, and the ink. I told the whole story, from the hand-drums on the terrace to the words "It" and "English gentleman," and I told it (I am proud to say) without one flourish. Mr. Franklin heard me out without a smile. He asked what day the boy had said, and what hour, and whether Penelope was a girl to be trusted with her eyes. I answered for my daughter's eyes, and, upon my life, when I came to the end, I wished I had held my tongue. For our young gentleman, who had come down the path laughing, was grave as a judge.

"That will do," he said. "We'll talk it over another time, when I know more. Now, I have a favour to ask you. Have you a place in this house where a thing can be locked up, and the key kept by one person only?"

"There is the plate-room, sir. The key of it never leaves my own pocket, except at night, when it goes under my own pillow."

"Then I want to lock something in it."

He took from the breast of his coat a small packet, sealed in three places with red wax, and tied about with tape. It was no bigger than would go into a man's waistcoat-pocket, and about as heavy as a snuffbox. There was writing on the cover, but he kept his thumb over it, in a manner more polite than I liked.

"You are not to ask what is in it," says Mr. Franklin. "And you are not to guess. I must beg you to put it where nobody can put a finger on it until I ask for it again."

I have lived seventy years in the world, and I know when a gentleman has given me an order that I shall be the better for obeying and the worse for questioning. I took the packet. I confess I weighed it in my hand, once, on the sly; and I can tell you that it told me nothing, except that it was there.

We got up to the house at last, and there was Penelope on the steps, with her cap on one side, looking for me. Being a girl who cannot see a young gentleman without curtseying, she curtseyed to Mr. Franklin, and blushed, and whispered to me, as I went by, that my lady was in the drawing-room and expecting him.

My lady received her nephew in the drawing-room; and I had the honour of standing by, in my character of head of the household, to see the meeting. I have seen a good many sisters' sons come in at that door, but I never saw my mistress look at any of them as she looked at Mr. Franklin. She gave him both her hands, and kissed him; and he kissed her hand, in his foreign way, and said she was younger than ever, which is the sort of lie that a man of the world is bound to tell, and a woman of the world is bound to be pleased with.

"You are early, Franklin," says my lady. "I am so glad. Rachel will be sorry to have missed you. She is at Mr. Ablewhite's, with her cousins, and will not be back till evening."

I set this down to show that Miss Rachel was not present, and that I do not, in this place, mean to say a word about her, having plenty to say of her later.

"I have come," says Mr. Franklin, "to be as much trouble to you as I can, and to keep a birthday."

"You shall be as much trouble as you please," says my lady, "on one condition. There is a subject, Franklin, that I will not have named in this house—not by you, not by Betteredge, not by anybody. I mean your uncle Herncastle. I have my reasons, and I will not give them. I know what he was to my sister, and what he was to the family; and while you are under my roof, I ask you never to speak his name, nor to hint at any of the stories that hang about it."

I saw Mr. Franklin change colour, ever so little, as a man does who has been asked to leave at the door a thing he had in his pocket.

"Aunt," he said, "you have my word. It shall be as if I had never had an uncle."

"Thank you, my dear," says my lady, and rang for tea.

The rest of the day I need not trouble you with. Mr. Franklin was shown to his room; the fly arrived with the portmanteau; and the dinner-bell rang for the gentry, and I had the pleasure of seeing our young gentleman eat like a Christian, which foreigners, I am told, seldom do. But before that, I took the packet to the plate-room, and locked it in the strong chest, behind the old tankards, and turned the key twice, and put the key of the plate-room in my waistcoat. I did not once look at the writing on the cover. I say so, because I should like to be believed, and because I was, God help me, sorely tempted.

It was Penelope who brought me the other news. She came to my sitting-room at tea-time, with her eyes very round.

"Father," says she, "Rosanna has not come back."

"Not come back!" says I. "She was walking up to the house before Mr. Franklin was fairly out of the plantation."

"So Nancy thought," says Penelope. "But Cook says she went by the back of the kitchen-garden, and took the path over the hills to Cobb's Hole. She had her bonnet on and her cloak. She's gone to Limping Lucy's, Father, I'm sure of it; there's nowhere else."

I need not tell you who Lucy was, for you will hear enough of her by-and-by. I will only say that she was the one friend Rosanna had in our neighbourhood, and that she had a crooked leg, and a tongue as sharp as a knife.

"Let her alone," I said. "She has a turn out, and it's not for me to stop it. But she is to be in by ten, my dear, and you may tell her so from me."

Ten o'clock came, and eleven. The servants went to bed. The house was locked up, all but the little door at the back, which I left on the latch for our second housemaid, as I had done on other occasions, when she was late.

Now, I put it to you, whether a man of my years, having had the day I had, with the jugglers and the letter, and the packet, and the young gentleman who took it all so gravely, is not entitled to a little peace at the end of it? I took my chair out into the back court, where the warmth of the sun was still lying on the stones, and lit my pipe. I took Robinson Crusoe out of my pocket, and opened it at the place where the man finds the footprint in the sand. I have read that page, I suppose, fifty times, and I never come to it but I look up from the book and over my shoulder.

I looked over my shoulder that night, and there was nothing behind me but the wall. The plate-room key was against my ribs. The packet was behind two locks. The house was still. Yet the little door at the back stood open, and the light I had left burning in the passage fell out across the stones; and no Rosanna came in at it, though I sat, and read, and listened, till the stable clock struck twelve.

*Letter from Mr. Samuel Billington, Solicitor, Klausenburg, to Miss Mina Murray.*

“*Hotel Royale, Klausenburg.*

“*14 June.*

“Dear Madam,--

“You will forgive a stranger for addressing you, and I trust you will forgive still more the liberty I take in doing so without your leave. I am an English solicitor travelling upon business of my own in this country, and I write at the request of your friend Mr. Jonathan Harker, whom I had the good fortune to meet upon the road, and whose acquaintance I made at the table d’hôte of the hotel in Bistritz some weeks since. Let me say at once, for I know how a lady’s mind runs in such matters, that he is not ill, and that there is no cause for alarm.

“Mr. Harker desired me, if I should pass again toward the west, to send you word that his business with his client is more protracted than he had supposed. He is detained for some weeks beyond the time he named. I understand that the papers are voluminous, and that his client, who is a gentleman of the old school and much occupied, cannot be hurried. The post in these parts is a wretched thing. Letters go astray in the mountains, or wait for a carrier who comes when he chooses, and I believe this to be the whole reason why you have had nothing from him. He begged me to say that you are not to fret, that he thinks of you daily, and that he will write the moment he can find a safe messenger.

“I have ventured, Madam, to give you the plain truth, as I should wish to have it given to a sister of my own. I will add only that the country is very fine, the people civil though superstitious, and that a young man of Mr. Harker’s sense will take no harm in it. I shall be at the above address until the twentieth, should you desire to write me.

“I have the honour to remain,

“Your obedient servant,

“SAMUEL BILLINGTON.”

*Mina Murray’s Journal.*

*18 June.*--Had Mr. Billington’s letter this morning. I have read it four times. It is very kind and very correct, and I do not know why it should make me so uneasy. Jonathan said a week; now it is weeks. He never mentioned a Mr. Billington in his little note. But then he would not, perhaps, for a man met at a table d’hôte. I have written to thank him, and have asked for the name of the hotel at Bistritz, and whether Jonathan looked well. I will not write to Lucy of it yet. She is so full of her own happiness that I will not cloud it with my fancies. I have copied the letter fair in my shorthand book, and it looks quite different in cipher, more like a fact and less like a fear. Went to school; the girls trying. Miss Hunter says I am pale. I am not.

*Dr. Seward’s Diary.*

(Kept in phonograph)

*26 May.*--Quincey’s dinner last night. Will set it down while it is fresh, for I feel that I shall want to remember it, and, more, that I shall want to be honest about it.

Morris had taken a private room, and had, in his own phrase, “fixed up the camp.” There was a great deal of good food and rather more good wine. He had also, I noticed, put the three chairs a little apart from the fire, so that none of us should have to sit at the head. That is Quincey all over. He has the tact of a man who has slept much in the open and knows how much room another wants.

Art came late and looked, God help him, like a sun. I had promised myself that I should not mind. I did mind, for perhaps the space of one glass of claret; then he took my hand, and Quincey’s, and said, “I know what you two have done for me. Neither of you has said a word, and I know it.” After that there was nothing to mind. We are all three of us the lady’s suitors, and two of us are her friends, and I think in a week it will be three. Quincey made a speech, very short. “Boys, here’s to her. She’s got the pick of us, and she’s picked the best. I’d have been sore if she hadn’t.” We drank standing. Art could not speak. I said something, I hardly know what, about the lady’s happiness being the only thing that could compensate us. Then Quincey told a long story of a horse in Texas, which nobody believed, and Art laughed till he wept, and then wept in earnest, and we let him.

We sat late. Toward two o’clock Art said we three were never to be parted by any woman, not even by the one; that we were to stand by each other, as on the Marquesas, whatever came. Quincey and I gave our word. It was foolish, and sentimental, and I would not undo it.

I walked home. It was raining a little. I do not think I have ever felt so lonely or so little sorry for myself.

*27 May.*--Back to work. Renfield, I find, has been restless since the morning. The attendant Hennessey reports that he was at the window of his room for an hour, watching the drive, and would not take his breakfast till he had been promised that his flies should not be disturbed.

*28 May.*--Something happened to-day which I must record exactly, for it interests me more than I care to say.

I went in to see Renfield at about eleven. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, quite calm, with his sugar spread out on the window-ledge for the flies. I had said nothing. I had not so much as sat down. He looked up, and with that formal and courtly air he sometimes puts on, asked me:

“Doctor, is Miss Westenra well?”

I was, I confess, considerably startled. I have never spoken the name in this house. I have never had occasion to speak it. I asked him what he meant. He said, quite civilly, “Miss Lucy Westenra, of Chatham Street. I hope she is in good health. It is a comfort to hear of a young lady in good health.” I asked him where he had heard the name. He looked at me with a kind of mild puzzlement, as if I had asked him where he had heard the word “Tuesday,” and said that it had been mentioned. I asked by whom. He said, “By you, Doctor,” and went back to his flies.

I did not mention it. I am nearly certain that I did not. Yet I have been talking a great deal lately, to myself, to the phonograph, and doubtless to the walls. It may be that I have said it aloud in the corridor, and he has heard. The man has the ears of a cat. And yet the address! I cannot remember that I ever used the address. I have asked Hennessey and the other attendants whether they have spoken of any lady to the patient. They swear not. I have put a note in the day-book that the patient’s letters are to be looked over, and that any visitor’s name is to be reported.

I shall not tell Art. There is nothing to tell.

*Letter, Mina Murray to Samuel Billington, Esq.*

“*Exeter.*

“*19 June.*

“Dear Sir,--

“I thank you from my heart for your kind letter. May I ask where in Bistritz you met Mr. Harker, and on what day? I ask only because I wish to write to him there. Believe me, I am not alarmed.

“Yours very truly,

“WILHELMINA MURRAY.”

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

“*22 June.*

“Have heard nothing from Billington in Klausenburg. Hotel says no such guest. Harker’s letter of twelfth is not his hand.”

The First National Bank was a gray stone box at Broadway and Union Street, with tall windows and a doorway that had been built to make borrowers feel small. I went in a little before noon. A guard with a gray mustache pointed me to a railed enclosure at the rear where a brass plate said ASSISTANT CASHIER. The man behind the plate was named Albert Keough. He was fifty or so, plump and pink, with rimless glasses and the tired politeness of a man who has said no to a great many people.

I told him who I was, and that I was looking into Donald Willsson's death. He took his glasses off, wiped them, put them on again, and said it was a terrible thing, a terrible thing. He said it twice more while I got out the check-book stub.

"Yesterday afternoon, a little before three," I said, "Willsson wrote a check for five thousand dollars. I want to know who cashed it."

"Five thousand." He pulled a pad toward him. "You'll understand these are the depositor's private affairs, Mr.—"

"The depositor's dead. The police will be asking the same question before the day's over, and they won't be as polite about it."

That did it, or something did. He went away with the stub number and was gone eight or ten minutes. When he came back he had a ledger sheet and a puzzled look.

"It hasn't come through," he said. "It hasn't been presented here at all. Not cashed, not deposited, not certified. Nothing on it."

"You're sure? He could have had it certified for somebody, and the somebody could have taken the certification away."

"Certifications go through my window or Mr. Hanley's, and Mr. Hanley was out sick yesterday. I'd know." He tapped the sheet. "Mr. Willsson's balance stands where it stood Monday night. If the check was written, it's outside the bank."

"Could it have gone through another bank this morning?"

"It could have reached the clearing house this morning. It wouldn't have come to us until this afternoon, and I've had no notice of it." He hesitated. "I'll telephone you if it turns up, Mr.—"

I said the Great Western Hotel would do, and left him with his ledger sheet and his pink worry.

I ate a sandwich and drank a glass of beer in a lunchroom across from the bank. Five thousand dollars had left Donald Willsson's hands at about three o'clock, in an errand that took twenty minutes and didn't take him to the bank. Somebody had it. Nobody had spent it yet, or nobody had spent it where anybody in Personville would see.

At the hotel the clerk gave me a message slip and a look of curiosity. The slip said a gentleman had left word that Mr. Thaler's compliments were extended, and that Mr. Thaler would be glad to see me at any time at the Elite Bar on Ash Street, if I cared to drop in for a drink. There was no signature. The clerk said the gentleman had been a thin one with a cauliflower ear, and had walked out again without waiting for an answer.

"Know him?" I asked.

The clerk said he did not, in a way that meant he did. I tipped him a dollar he hadn't earned. It seemed a cheap price for learning that Whisper Thaler knew my room number, my hotel and my business, and had learned all three inside twenty-four hours. I put the slip in my pocket and didn't go to the Elite Bar.

I went up to my room, took off my coat, and was lighting a cigarette when somebody knocked.

Mrs. Willsson stood in the hall. She wore black, a small black hat, and a black coat with a gray fur collar, and her face above them was as white as it had been the night before. Her eyes were red around the rims, but they were steady.

"May I come in?" The accent was slight, as I remembered it.

I said she could. She came in, glanced at the one chair, and sat on the edge of it with her gloved hands together in her lap. I shut the door and stayed on my feet.

"You are the man from San Francisco," she said. "My husband's man."

"His and the Continental's."

"You have been to see Elihu Willsson." It wasn't a question. "He telephoned my house this morning, when you had gone. He told my maid what I was. He told her a number of other things about me. She is a good girl and she repeated them all, because she thought I should know." Her mouth twisted slightly. "He has told you I killed Donald."

"He mentioned it."

"And you believe him?"

"I don't believe anybody yet."

She looked at me for some time. Her eyes were gray-green, and she had the kind of composure that comes in one piece, like a coat.

"That is sensible," she said. "I came to tell you what I did last night. I would rather you had it from me than from him."

"Go ahead."

"The telephone call was from a woman. She would not give a name. She said that Donald was hurt and lying in Hurricane Street, and that if I wished to see him alive I must come quickly. I went. I did not know the number of the block, only the street. I drove up and down. I found nothing, no one. There were people on the sidewalk in front of a house, and a policeman, and I understood." She stopped a moment. "I did not stop. I drove home."

"That's a long time for driving home. You were gone forty-five minutes."

"I drove a great while. I could not go into the house at once." She lifted her chin. "You are thinking of the shoe."

"I'm thinking of a lot of things."

"I stepped in something on the street when I got out of the car, to look at a house number. I do not know what it was. That is all."

"You told me your husband wouldn't be home."

"Because I had seen the police. Because I wished to be by myself before I said it aloud." She moved her hands. "You do not believe me."

"I haven't said so." I sat on the bed. "Who'd want him dead?"

"Everyone in this town who steals," she said, "and that is many. I do not know their names. Donald did not tell me these things. He told me very little, these last weeks." Her lips tightened. "He was not kind to be silent."

"Was he seeing another woman?"

She was quiet so long that I thought she wasn't going to answer.

"I think so," she said at last. "I do not know. It is what one thinks."

"Max Thaler went to your house this morning."

"Yes."

"What for?"

"To say he was sorry." Her voice was dry. "He is a man who says such things. He sat in Donald's chair. He was very polite. He asked if he could be of service." She looked at her gloves. "I told him that he could go away."

"Did he?"

"He went. But he will come again. I think he is not a man who comes once."

"If he does, you might let me know."

"Then you will work for me?"

"I'm working for your husband, Mrs. Willsson. He's dead, but the check cleared."

She didn't understand that, and I didn't explain. She got up, and at the door turned and said with the first sign of feeling I had seen in her:

"I did not kill him. I would have liked to be kinder to him. That is all I have to be sorry for."

She went out and shut the door quietly. I stood a while at the window looking down at the street. She came out of the hotel, got into the Buick coupé at the curb, and drove off without looking back. Either she was telling the truth, or she was better at lying than anybody I had met in some time.

I got a pad of telegraph blanks from the desk, sat down, and worked on the wire for half an hour, tearing up three drafts. The one I finally took down to the Western Union office read:

CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE AGENCY SAN FRANCISCO ATTENTION OLD MAN. ARRIVED PERSONVILLE MONDAY. DONALD WILLSSON PUBLISHER WHO SENT FOR US SHOT DEAD TEN FORTY MONDAY NIGHT BEFORE I COULD SEE HIM. NO ARREST. CITY RUN BY GANG HE WAS ATTACKING IN HIS PAPERS. FATHER ELIHU WILLSSON OWNS TOWN AND IS HOSTILE AND ACCUSES DAUGHTER IN LAW. HER STORY ODD BUT NOT DISPROVED. MAX THALER GAMBLER ALREADY IN TOUCH WITH ME AND WITH WIDOW. DONALD WROTE FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR CHECK FEW HOURS BEFORE DEATH. NOT PRESENTED AT BANK. PAYEE UNKNOWN. STAYING TO LOOK INTO IT UNLESS YOU ORDER OTHERWISE. CLIENT DEAD SO EXPENSES MAY HAVE TO COME FROM US. ADVISE.

The clerk counted the words, and I paid him and walked back through streets that had gone the color of dishwater. Personville was lighting up. On Ash Street a man in front of a pool hall watched me go by, and afterward another man on the next corner did. I went past the Elite Bar without turning my head.

I ate dinner at the hotel, read the Evening Herald, which told me nothing the morning one hadn't, and went up to my room at nine. I took off my shoes, lay across the bed with my coat over the chair, and smoked.

There was a five-thousand-dollar check somewhere. A dead man had written it for somebody at about three in the afternoon, and had gone out for twenty minutes and come back without it. Seven hours later he was on a sidewalk with four bullets in him. If the check had bought something, I didn't know what. If it had been a payment, I didn't know to whom. If it was blackmail, the blackmailer had been either patient or dumb. If it was a bribe, it had been taken and not banked, which didn't sound like anybody in Personville.

Downstairs an automobile went by with its cut-out open. Somewhere in the building a woman laughed. I put the cigarette out, lit another, and looked at the ceiling, where the check wasn't either.

Armed with the book, I hurried through the park and down the long chestnut avenue to the village. The morning was already warm, and a white mist lay along the meadows, promising heat. I had scarcely turned in at the gate of the little cottage where Poirot lodged with his fellow-refugees, when I saw a familiar figure standing on the doorstep, neat as a pin, and carefully brushing an invisible speck from his sleeve.

“Ah, my friend Hastings!” he cried. “I was about to come to you.”

“Then you know?” I gasped.

“That Madame Inglethorp is dead? Yes. It is very sad. Poor lady.”

“But who told you? I have run all the way to tell you myself.”

“It was Mademoiselle Dorcas’s young man, no? No—pardon. It was the gardener, Manning. He passed at half-past six with his barrow, and he spoke to my landlord across the fence, and my landlord to me, while I shaved.” He smiled a little sadly. “In a village, Hastings, the news travels faster than the motor-car. He said that madame had died in the night, in great agony, and that Dr. Bauerstein was in the house. Then I put on my coat.”

“There is more than that,” I said, and, drawing him a few paces along the lane, I told him all: the locked doors, the convulsions, the doctors’ private conference, the post-mortem. I did not conceal my own conviction. I produced the medical book from my pocket and showed him the passage on strychnine.

He listened without a word, his head a little on one side, his eyes on my face. When I had finished he took the book, glanced at the page, and handed it back.

“It may be so,” he said. “It may be so. But we shall not build a house on a chapter of a book. Come. We go to Styles. Give me but one moment, that I fetch my little case.”

He was gone scarcely a minute, and we set off at a good pace, though Poirot, with his short legs and his precise little steps, took some keeping up with. He asked me a number of questions on the way, most of which appeared to me irrelevant: what time the household had gone to bed; whether the night had been hot; whether the windows of Mrs. Inglethorp’s room had been open. The last I could not answer, and I felt slightly humiliated.

“Never mind,” said he. “We shall see.”

We had reached the lodge gates, and were passing up the long drive, when a man came round the bend of the path from the house, walking quickly, and with him came a little fluster of maids. I recognized the black beard, and the somewhat theatrical figure, at once. It was Alfred Inglethorp. He was in the clothes of the previous evening, and there was mud upon his boots.

“Dreadful, dreadful!” he cried, as soon as he saw me. “I have only this moment heard. My poor Emily! Old Baily met me at the gate; he tells me she is dead. And I was not there!” He passed a hand over his forehead. His voice, I thought, had its usual honeyed and studied quality, but he looked haggard enough.

I introduced Poirot, and then, since the man was evidently expecting some explanation of what he saw, I said awkwardly that Mr. Poirot had come at the request of Mr. Cavendish.

“Where were you, Mr. Inglethorp?” I could not help adding. “We searched for you everywhere.”

“I will tell you.” He seemed relieved rather than offended. “I walked down to the village with Dr. Bauerstein, as I told you all. We went to his house, and he showed me some of his collection of beetles—he has a very fine one, of the Coleoptera—and we talked till it grew late. It came on to rain a little, and we thought better of the walk back. Then I remembered that I had left the latch-key with—no, that I had it in my pocket, of course. But I had said not to wait up, and I did not wish to disturb the household at so late an hour. The doctor was good enough to give me a bed on his sofa. I slept there, and I have come straight back. That is all. Ah, my poor wife! If only I had returned!”

“You went to Dr. Bauerstein’s house?” said Poirot gently.

“Yes, monsieur. To his lodgings, at the end of the village.”

“And you stayed until——?”

“Until the morning, as I have said. I woke a little after six.” He made a gesture of despair. “I must go to her.”

“I regret, monsieur,” said Poirot, “that the room is locked, by the wish of the doctors. Mr. Cavendish has the keys.”

Inglethorp bowed his head and went on towards the house. The maids, who had hung upon every word, went after him, whispering.

It was Annie, the housemaid who had fetched the brandy, who lingered behind. She was a stout, red-eyed girl, and she twisted her apron nervously.

“Beg pardon, sir,” she said to me. “But I’m sure I don’t like to say, and I daresay it’s not my place. But Mr. Inglethorp said it came on to rain. It never did. Not a drop. Cook’s had the washing out on the line, and she left it all night by mistake, and it’s as dry as a bone this morning. And Manning says the ground’s baked.”

“Indeed?” said Poirot, and his eyes gleamed in a way I knew well. “That is most interesting, mademoiselle. You have said this to no one else?”

“Only to Cook, sir.”

“Then say it, for the present, to no one at all. It is a small thing, and small things are easily made large by the tongues of women. You understand?”

The girl, rather frightened, bobbed a curtsey, and fled.

“Poirot,” I said excitedly, “what do you make of that? He lied!”

“I make of it, my friend, that the washing is dry. Nothing more—at the moment. It is possible that it rained at the village and not at Styles; the storm, it is capricious. Do not run so fast. Come.”

John Cavendish met us in the hall, with a face grey with fatigue. He shook hands with Poirot, and thanked him briefly for coming. He then handed over the two keys, and I saw that he was glad to be spared the errand.

“You will want to see the room, of course? I will not come up with you, if you don’t mind. I—I have had enough of it.”

“Assuredly. And Mademoiselle Cynthia, is she awake? Later, I should like a word with her.”

“I’ll send her to you.”

We went up the stairs together, and along the gallery to the right wing. The corridor was very quiet. I unlocked the door of the death chamber, and we passed in, closing it behind us. At Poirot’s request I turned the key again.

The blinds had been drawn up, and the full light of a summer morning poured through the windows, showing the room with cruel plainness. The figure on the bed had been decently covered with a sheet. I did not look at it long. Poirot, after a single bow in that direction, stood in the middle of the floor, turning slowly on his heel, and his eyes seemed to take in everything: the burst door with its broken bolt, the overturned bedside table, the fragments of a cup on the carpet, the small ornaments upon the mantelpiece, the cold grate. He went to the window and examined the catch. He knelt by the broken table and touched the spilled stain on the carpet with the tip of one finger, and smelt it, and wiped the finger with his handkerchief.

“The window, it was open, or shut?”

“I don’t know. Shut, I think, when we came in. The curtains were drawn.”

“Yes. It is now shut, and fastened.” He went from one thing to another with his quick, birdlike movements, while I stood uselessly by the door. Once he stopped at the mantelpiece and stared, for a long moment, at the row of ornaments, and I remembered Lawrence’s strange look. I told him of it. He nodded, but said nothing.

Presently there came a tap at the door. I opened it, and Cynthia stood there in a loose wrapper, her hair hastily pinned up, and her face pale and heavy-eyed. She would not look towards the bed.

“Mr. John said you wanted me, M. Poirot?”

“Only for a moment, mademoiselle, and I ask your pardon for it. I will ask you but one question. Last night, when the house was in such tumult, you did not wake. Tell me, is it your habit to sleep so heavily?”

“Yes,” she said, wonderingly. “Always. They have to shake me to wake me in the morning—Mary says it’s like waking the dead. Oh!” She put her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean—” And, with a little sob, she turned and ran.

“Poor child,” said Poirot softly. He closed the door and turned the key again. “She has answered me, and truthfully. Now, Hastings, we shall look at the last things.”

He went first to the writing-table, then to the little table by the bed, then, with a peculiar intentness, to the hearth. He bent over the ashes, and then, with a small pair of tweezers from his case, he picked something from among them, and, holding it up against the light, examined it for some time. Then he wrapped it carefully in a fold of tissue paper and placed it in his pocket-book. I thought he had finished, but he returned to the bedside table, and, from the litter on the floor beside it, he took up some small thing, which I could not see, and slipped it likewise into his waistcoat pocket.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Patience.” He crossed to me, and opened his hand. On the palm lay a tiny thing, no larger than a lentil, of a dull, dark colour. It might have been a fragment of glass, or a splinter of some hard stuff. “You see it? Look well.”

I looked. “What is it?”

“That I do not tell you.”

“But surely——”

“No, Hastings. Not yet. If I say it now, you will make of it a beautiful theory, and then you will not look at the facts, only at the theory. I know you.” He closed his fingers. “Only remember that I took it from this room, and that it was not, I think, where it ought to have been.”

I stared at him, baffled and a little hurt. The morning sun lay warm on the carpet; somewhere below a door closed, and voices murmured. The clock upon the mantelpiece, I saw, now pointed to a quarter to eleven.

He opened his hand again and gazed at the little object, and then his eyes travelled slowly, and with a strange gravity, to the cold grate and back to the bed.

“It is a curious thing, Hastings,” he said quietly. “The one who was so careful about the fire was not careful enough about the candle.”

“The candle?” I said. “What candle?”

But he only shook his head, and slipped the little object into his pocket.