Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: short stories
Description: Edgar Jepson wrote many short stories in his career, and this is a collection gathered from Australian newspapers, all of which were published in UK and/or United States magazines first. Wheever possible, I have given the details of the first publication. The stories range from humour to the creepy, with several detours into romance. 1: The Humanising of the Bishop 2: The Wrong Man's Daughter 3: The Dead That Wept 4: The Burglar, The Twins, and Ernestine 5: The Carling Cure 6: The Rejuvenation of Bellamy Grist 7: Jerry Bilder's Mistake 8: The Thing in the Two-Pair Back 9: Daffy 10: Lady Drysda

THE DEAD THAT WEPT
and other stories

Edgar Jepson

2020

Contents

1: The Humanising of the Bishop

2: The Wrong Man's Daughter

3: The Dead That Wept

4: The Burglar, The Twins, and Ernestine

5: The Carling Cure

6: The Rejuvenation of Bellamy Grist

7: Jerry Bilder's Mistake

8: The Thing in the Two-Pair Back

9: Daffy

10: Lady Drysdale's Theft

11: Priscilla's Poaching

12: The Tea-Leaf  (with  Robert Eustace)

13: Mr. Belton's Immunity (with  Robert Eustace)

14: The Emerald Celt

15: The Bechut Mystery

16: A Criminal Freak

________________

1: The Humanising of the Bishop

The Strand Magazine Dec 1927

BRUISED and beaten, the Bishop clung to the sand, lest the wind should blow him across the island out to sea again, and wished that he had entered his diocese, if it was his diocese, in a less undignified manner and with more clothes on.

The nightmarish events before that entry were still disjointed visions in his confused mind; the crash that had been followed by his swoop across the cabin; the bang with which he had fetched up against the opposite wall; the panic-stricken steward who had howled to him to dress; the second panic-stricken steward who had dragged him, clad only in his pyjamas and a sock, to the deck of the foundering steamer; the journey in a boat, buffeted by the wind and lashed by the spray of waves whose hugeness in that darkness was rather an impression than actually perceived; the screaming, so thin through the roar, of the children; the upsetting of the boat; the utter, breathless helplessness in the grip of those hammering waves; the being rolled over and over on the sand in the shallows; the struggle out of the clutches of the sea.

Slowly he recovered his breath, and then became aware that he was lying on a row of pebbles and that they were hurting his chest. Shifting his body to one side, clear of them, he found that they were the buttons of a gaiter. That it should be there did not seem to him so very odd; the church was his one absorbing thought; in his surprise and confusion he had instinctively caught up a garment which was also a badge of his ecclesiastical dignity. He wished that he had instinctively caught up his breeches.

He grasped the gaiter and began to crawl inland. Forty yards further on he bumped his head, not hard, against the trunk of a tree. Groping, he found other tree-trunks. Two minutes later he crawled into a hollow. The wind roared above him, but he was out of it. In an immense relief and thankfulness he stretched himself out at full length and relaxed. In three minutes he was asleep.

He awoke in the bright light of the tropical dawn, to find a light breeze blowing over a settling sea. Also he awoke stiff, hungry, and very thirsty. He sat up, surprised "to find himself on land, and in such light attire. Then the memories of the night before came rushing back.

He saw the gaiter and picked it up and came out of the clump of coconut palms to see, ten yards away, a woman in a white frock. He shivered a little. That was the effect the sudden sight of a woman always had on him— not quite a painful effect, but uncomfortable. As a man he did not like women; as a churchman he was one of the most eloquent and violent advocates of the celibacy of the clergy that the Anglican Church had ever known. Then he saw that the woman was drinking the milk out of a coconut in which she had knocked a hole with a stone. He stepped forward hastily and thirstily to find a coconut for himself, and remembered his light attire. He was slinking back into the clump when she turned and saw his vanishing back.

"What a relief! I thought we were all drowned," she cried, in warmly thankful accents.

There was nothing for it. Blushing painfully, he came out into the open to find that she was Mrs. Lissington, the young widow who had sat opposite to him at the captain's table, of whose cigarettes, clothes, and conversation he had so strongly disapproved.

"Oh. it's you, Bishop?" she said, and a less earnest man would have ob-served that much of the thankfulness at finding a companion in misfortune had passed from her voice.

"Yes," said the Bishop, stiffly.

"There doesn't seem to be anyone else saved," she said, ruefully. "What are we going to do?"

She did not seem to be aware of anything unusual in her attire or that of the Bishop, but he was uncomfortably aware that she was without shoes
and stockings.

He could not tell her what they were going to do. He did not know. He said: "I'm very thirsty. I should like some coconut milk," and looked about him rather helplessly.

He expected to find, lying about, neat brown coconuts, of the kind he had seen in shops. With very small toes she touched a cluster of large green objects that lay between them, and told him that, since they had no knife with which to strip it, he must find a coconut the outer husk of which had been split by its fall. In helpless fashion he hunted for one under several trees. With a rather contemptuous air she moved about five feet and found him two. Before she could stop him he had broken the first with a small boulder that smashed it to pieces and wasted the milk. To the second he took a small stone, and at the first shot caught his thumb-nail a crack that caused him to drop the coconut, say "Bother!" with immense vehemence, and put his thumb in his mouth. She took the stone from him, knocked in a neat hole between the eyes of the coconut, and handed it to him.

Then she looked at him thoughtfully, plainly weighed him, and much to his distaste, found him wanting, took the matter into her own hands, and said: "We must get off this beach into the shade of the wood before the sun gets up. We shall be scorched here. And we'd better take some coconuts with us, though probably we shall find something else to eat in that wood. We must have the milk to drink."

"But surely we shall find people. The island must be inhabited," he protested.

"It isn't," she said, positively. "I feel in my bones it isn't. About five minutes ago a gull let me pick him up and stroke him."

She hunted for coconuts through the clump of trees which had been nearly stripped by the storm, and found seven, then she picked up her vanity bag and led the way towards the wood which covered the sides of the cone-shaped hill, about six hundred feet high, which formed the centre of the island.

The Bishop followed her gloomily. He felt that he ought to be pleased that he had a companion who had ideas about how to handle the situation, since he had none himself, but he still took it hard that that companion should be a woman.

When they came to the edge of the wood she stopped, looked into it with suspicious eyes, and said: "There may be something in it. You go first."

A hundred yards from the top of the hill the trees ceased, and Mrs. Lissington and the Bishop climbed over rough and crumbling rock on to the rim of the crater of an extinct volcano. The sea was empty. They turned and looked down into the crater. It was a basin, about a quarter of a mile across, and in the middle of it was a small lake. Cliffs a hundred feet high formed its sides, and here and there were fissures in them, affording more or less easy descent to its floor. At the foot of the cliffs was a belt of vegetation about 40 yards deep, trees and shrubs and herbs.

"There's water, at any rate, and plenty of it," said Mrs. Lissington, in tone of satisfaction.

"A drink of it would be very refreshing," said the Bishop, looking at the lake thirstily.

They moved round the rim to the first fissure that afforded an easy de-scent into the basin, and over the rough, crumbling rock to the little lake. The still water was very clear They found it sweet and, indeed, refreshing.

Mrs. Lissington rose from drinking looked round, and said thoughtfully. "I should think we'd better stay in this crater. If there's anything but coconuts to eat on this island we shall find it among those trees. But the first thing to do is to make myself some shoes, if I'm to have any soles on my feet."

On the shores of the lake only a few coconut palms grew. She walked to the nearest, sat down, and took from her handbag a pair of nail-scissors. She got to work, binding on her feet strips of dried husk with strands of the fibre Then she asked him whether he had brought anything ashore in the pockets of his pyjama jacket.

"Only my glasses— the glasses I use for reading," he said, gloomily "And a handkerchief."

"We may be able to light a fire with those glasses if ever we find anything to cook and something to cook it in," she said, not hopefully.

He watched her for a few minutes, then moved a few yards away and began to bind up his own feet. He made a much poorer job of it.

Thus shod, they went into the belt of vegetation at the foot of the cliffs and began to explore it. Presently they came upon a patch of plantains, loaded with fruit, and made a meal.

Half-way round the basin they came to a broad fissure in the cliff affording an easy access to the crater's rim. He said that they must go up to see if there was a ship in sight. The sea was empty. Half a mile away on the edge of the sea was a flock of gulls in the air, or on the sand round a dark object.

"Look! A drowned man— a sailor or he wouldn't be in dark clothes. He may have a knife on him. Come along!" she cried.

In spite of the heat and their clumsy foot-coverings they hurried down the hill. The gulls round the drowned man paid no heed to them. Twenty yards away Mrs. Lissington stopped short and bade the Bishop strip the drowned sailor of everything he had.

The Bishop went forward to do her bidding, but at the sight of the gulls' work he stopped short. Then, sickened he got to his task. All the while he had to keep beating off the fearless and greedy gulls. He could not bring himself to strip off the trousers and singlet because of them, but he came away with the jacket, the shirt, the socks, and the shoes. He came pale and looking sick, and dropped the garments and shoes at her feet, and sat down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands. She picked up the garments and waited sympathetically for him to recover. Presently he rose; they climbed up the hill and down into the shade of the trees in the basin. Then, with an easier mind, now that she was so far from the dead man, she began to search the pockets of the dead man's clothes. The side pockets of the jacket were large, and out of the first she took a big clasp knife.

"This is what we wanted above everything," she said, joyfully.

Then she took out a thick chunk of plug tobacco and a pipe, and raised the tobacco to her nose and took a long, wistful sniff at it and said that she was missing her cigarettes dreadfully. The Bishop frowned. Further search produced: item, a large red silk bandanna handkerchief; item, an oiled silk tobacco pouch, and among the cut tobacco in it seven pound notes and a book of matches as dry as a bone; item, a large hussif well stocked with needles, cotton, and thread; item, two hairpins; item, sodden, "The Gipsy Queen's Book of Dreams."

At the sight of the matches the Bishop's face had brightened, and he said: "Now we shall be able to light beacons— at night There's plenty of dry wood about."

"We mustn't use more than one a week." she said, firmly, and put them into her vanity bag.

She made a really becoming turban of the bandanna; then she looked from the sailor's shoes to the Bishop's feet.

"THEY'RE much too small for you and much too large for me, but I can get into them, and they'll be a bit less clumsy than these coconut things," she said and padded them with grass and put them on. Then she stamped on the ground and added ruefully: "I hate to admit it, but they're not so much too large for me after all."

The Bishop frowned; his austere face assumed an expression of almost for-bidding austerity; vanity— foolish vanity on a desert island.

The full heat of the day was on them; they drew into the thickest shade under the cliff. She pulled off the shoes, pillowed her head on the jacket, and presently fell asleep. The Bishop lay about fifteen feet away, pondering sombrely; this was a very painful affair. Here he was, buried on a desert island, probably for months; it might be for years. All the while the Church in the Palaman Islands, by far the largest and most important diocese in Polynesia, would be suffering for lack of his organising powers.

At intervals the Bishop looked at his unwelcome companion. Of course, with the inveterate levity of her sex, she was sleeping in an utter carelessness of their dismal plight. He blinked drowsily. Then he found himself looking at her toes and thinking how very small they were. Angrily he averted his eyes and returned to the consideration of the details of that organisation. Presently he, too, fell asleep.

About two hours later he was awakened by her prodding him in the ribs with her toe. It seemed to him to show a lack of respect. She said that she was hungry and that they were a long way from the patch of plantains, where they had left their coconuts. The Bishop found that he also was hungry, and  rose gloomily. It was a long three hundred yards in that heat. They ate plantains and drank the milk of a coconut. During the meal she expressed a hope that a vegetarian diet would not turn her nose red. The Bishop frowned; vanity again—vanity on a desert island.

The slow hours ebbed away; twice he mounted to the rim of the crater. At half-past four, now that the sun was down the sky, she rose and said that they must be getting to work.

"We ought to find calabashes and breadfruit trees and wild yams, if only we knew where to dig for them, and sweet potatoes," she said. "But the first thing to do is to fix up a place to sleep in to-night."

The Bishop said, coldly and firmly: "The first thing to do is to collect dry wood and make a beacon on the rim of the crater to light as soon as it grows dark."

"You'll find plenty of wood," she said, dryly. "But I'm going to find a lair that I can make a bed in."

With that she left him and began to explore the foot of the cliff. She was not long finding an overhanging ledge about six feet from the ground, and she was not long making a thick bed of leaves under it. Now and then she saw the Bishop ascending the fissure to the rim of the crater with a load of dry wood on his shoulder.

When she had made her bed she went to him and said that they would now explore the resources of the island. The Bishop objected that his task was far more important; but after a short discussion he found himself irritated but exploring the resources of the island.

They found more plantains and guavas; but for him exploring the re-sources of the island chiefly meant digging for yams with the knife. He was very tired of digging when at last he did dig up a yam, a horn yam about eighteen inches long. He dug up seven more; presently they returned with them to the patch of plantains, and she said that now he might have a match for his beacon, since there were yams to cook in the ashes of it. He had a strong and unpleasing impression that, had they not found the yams, there would have been no match for the beacon.

There was still half an hour of light and he carried up several more loads of dry wood. When the sun set and the sudden darkness came down she lit the fire herself, for she would not trust him to light it with a single match. It was a splendid fire, but the Bishop was distressed by the quickness with which it burnt itself out. He was too tired to keep it going with fresh wood. It was a long while after it had burned down before its ashes were ready for the yams, and even then the Bishop roasted himself, thrusting in among them with a long stick. By the time they were baked he was dead beat; he had hardly the strength to get to the lake to refresh himself with a drink and a bathe. He slept that night as he had never slept before, on a bed of leaves about twenty yards from that of Mrs. Lissington.

He awoke next morning stiff and aching, but in the enjoyment of an appetite strange to him at that hour. He stretched himself and rose and looked about him and down at the lake. In it he saw Mrs. Lissington, swimming lazily in a diaphanous garment. Hastily he averted his eyes, and mounted to the rim of the crater in a great hope that he would see a ship, drawn thither by the beacon fire, sailing to the island. The sea was empty. Presently he saw Mrs. Lissington coming up from the lake, and descended. She had brought four coconuts with her, and said that the water was delightful. They got to their breakfast of plantains, yams, and coconut milk— a simple meal, but how the Bishop did enjoy it!

They talked little, for neither the island nor the prospect of escape gave them much to talk about.

Towards the end of the meal she said, thoughtfully: "It looks as if your beard will grow quickly."

The Bishop clapped his hand to his bristly chin. He had not thought about his beard.

"It will suit you quite well," she went on; then added, in explanatory accents: "Your chin, you know."

The Bishop took his chin between his thumb and first finger and felt it carefully. It seemed to him a good chin.

"What's the matter with my chin?" he said

"Nothing. It's a very good chin," she said, a little too hastily.

The Bishop looked at her suspiciously. Was it merely levity again? Again he felt his chin; perhaps it was a little pointed.

They drowsed away the heat of the day. But between sunrise and sunset, during the heat and the cool, the Bishop climbed to the rim of the crater to look for a ship at least ten times. At about half-past four, when the sun was down the sky, they got to their work again and worked till the quick darkness came down. Presently the moon rose and they made their evening meal by its light. After it they took their mats up to the rim of the crater and sat looking across the sea. They talked little; they had so few common subjects.

That was the pattern of their days. Slowly they explored all the island; they drowsed through the heat; they worked in the morning and evening. But hot or cool the Bishop might have been alone on the island, so little was he aware of the presence of Mrs. Lissington.

She took no more  interest in him than he did in her. She had been used to wholly different men, men interested in life and affairs of the world, politics, diplomacy, women, sport, gambling. She had loved her husband, and his death two years before had been a blow from which she had not even yet quite recovered. In the last year she had been finding relief in the fast section of the polite world, but, her nerves having proved unequal to the strain, her doctor had prescribed a sea voyage, and she was making the return trip to the Palaman Islands in the ill-fated Cappadocia. Her placidity formed a strong contrast to the usually disgruntled air of the Bishop.

This air of his at times annoyed Mrs. Lissington. But she observed that the painfully simple life they were leading was doing him a world of good; at the end of ten days his skin was clear, his eyes were brighter, his stride was longer and firmer, his stoop was straightening out.

It was in the third week she perceived that the atmosphere of the island was beginning to soothe him; he no longer climbed up to the rim of the crater to look for ships more than five times in the whole day; he no longer worked with the same excessive energy during the cool hours. Yes; the island life was telling upon him as it was telling upon her; her nerves were nearly repaired, and she was feeling fitter than she had felt for years. For the most part he tolerated her civilly, but now and again he would grumble at her refusal to let him have more than one of their precious matches a week for the beacon fire.

By the end of the fourth week the Bishop had lapsed to the point of climbing to the rim of the crater only twice during the heat of the day, and  that he did with manifest reluctance. He showed himself also more aware of her presence; he talked to her. She found it better than listening to a sermon in a church, because she could argue and protest.

One day she said idly: "Of course, what you are is the modern Savonarola."

Taken aback, he protested: "I'm afraid you have been misunderstanding me entirely. Savonarola was a foe  of the Church."

"Oh, no— not really," she said, firmly. "He only suffered, just like you, from too much zeal. If you'd been alive in those days and gone on as you do,  you'd have been burnt, too. It was the only way they had of getting rid of people who were a nuisance. Nowadays they get rid of you by making you a Colonial Bishop."

He stared at her blankly. Certain facts began to come back to him— gentle remonstrances and less gentle remonstrances from ecclesiastical superiors for many years, remonstrances that had increased in number as the controversies which he had started or into which he had flung himself, had grown more frequent and more violent. Then he remembered the manner in which the See of the Palaman Islands had been pressed on him, the number of dignitaries of the Church who had made it their business to see him to point out the extreme importance of that See in the structure of the Church, to discuss its parlous condition, to assure him that he was the only man available who could make it what it should be, the number of dignitaries of the Church who had written to him to the same effect. They had worn down his resistance to the idea of leaving England by convincing him that it was his duty to the Church to accept the bishopric, and he had accepted it.

He had discarded his coconut foot coverings because they kept his feet insufferably hot, and after watching her plait mats and baskets of grass he plaited small grass mats and tied them round his feet. Though more comfortable, they were a poor protection, but his feet were harder. Then, as they were strolling one evenings to the guava trees in hope to find the fruit ripe, a long thorn ran into his left foot. He pulled it out but refused, somewhat testily, to wrap her handkerchief round the wound, though she told him that there might be tetanus germs in the soil. Tetanus germs did not find their way into the wound, but some other germs did, and in three days it festered and rendered him helpless.

The burden of both their lives fell on her. She fed him and she nursed him. For the first time the Bishop won some respect from her by showing himself a good patient. He never complained, he never winced when she dressed his wound. There was indeed no little of the Spartan about him, and she liked it. He began to talk to her from a less lofty height.

For her part the having had him helpless in her hands insensibly changed her feelings about him; it awoke her interest in him as hardly anything else could have done; it awoke in her the desire to know him. She led him on to talk about himself, his early life, his tastes, his desires other than his ruling ambition.

To her surprise he responded almost from the beginning. In all his life no one had ever taken a keen personal interest in him, for he had been an orphan and not of a temperament to excite warm affection in the cousins who had brought him up. He had been a lonely child; and neither at Winchester nor Oxford, had he made a really intimate friend. It seemed only natural that the Church should fill his life.

At first he was shy of telling her about himself. But, without knowing it, he was flattered by her interest in him, and as that interest grew manifestly keener the flattery grew sweeter, while she found his slow but quickening response no less flattering. So either fed the other's vanity.

Naturally she talked at times about her own life and her friends and acquaintances, their successes and misfortunes, their virtues and their frailties. He was hard on their frailties, and his judgments on them were those of a man immune from temptation, unable to appreciate its strength. Being rather of the opinion that to know everything is to forgive everything, she would protest against those judgments. But he could find no excuse for their misdoings; their duty had been plain; temptation only comes to us to be resisted.

"That's all very well," she said. "Wait till you're tempted."

"I shall never be tempted in those ways," he said, confidently.

"You're very sure," she said. "But wait till you fall in love. I shall be interested to see what happens to the celibacy of the clergy then."

"I have never fallen in love and I never shall. I'm past the age for it," he said, with yet greater conviction.

She laughed gently, and then she looked at him more closely. For the first time she saw that he was looking uncommonly handsome; his tanned skin was very clear; his eyes seemed to have grown bluer; he wore a rather lazy air that she found attractive. In some curious fashion, though he had lost his hard austerity, he looked more of a man. She had a fancy that, could she see it, she would find that under his beard his chin had grown squarer and less pointed.

A few days later she bethought herself to count the matches, and found that they had used eleven. This was indeed distressing. They debated the matter.

Then she became thoughtful, and presently said: "Those glasses you brought ashore with you, are they strong?"

"Not very," he said.

She said that they might as well try them, and he fetched them from his sleeping place. She gathered some dry leaves and grass and tried to use the glasses as burning glasses, but they were not strong enough. Then she said that since he had nothing to read, they were of no use to him, and broke the bridge. For some minutes she manipulated the two lenses, trying to get them at an angle that gave them their greatest magnifying power. Few people could have watched an operation like that without itching to try it themselves. The Bishop was one of them; he had no desire to try it himself. But he watched her hands, and of a sudden perceived that they were beautiful, small, firm, admirably shaped; and then he perceived that they were rather pathetic— browned by the sun, none too clean from lack of soap, still roughened by the work she had done when the whole burden of their life had fallen on her. He stared at them.

Then she found the right distance at which to hold the glasses apart at the right angle to the sun; the leaf shrivelled and smoked, a tiny flame burst from it, the leaves round it caught fire. With a little cry of triumph she set down the lenses and gently dropped handful after handful of leaves on those that were burning, and handfuls of small twigs on those. At her sharp command the Bishop bestirred himself to bring bigger dried sticks, and in a few minutes they had a good fire burning.

"And that's that," she said, in a tone of great satisfaction. "We're independent of matches now, and you can have as many beacon fires as you like."

"You are surprisingly intelligent," he said, with thoughtful conviction.

"Thank you so much," she said, smiling at him.

They moved away from the fire and sat down out of the range of its heat. She talked fitfully; the Bishop seemed disinclined to talk; he looked at her hands. Then, with the air of a man under an irresistible impulsion and not knowing what he was doing, he bent forward and stroked her left hand. Mrs. Lissington did not stir; she looked at the two hands, and her lips parted a little.

Of a sudden tho Bishop seemed to awaken. Hastily he withdrew his hand; an expression of horror filled his face; he said, in accents of dismay: "I― I beg your pardon! I― I can't think what I was thinking of! They looked— they looked—so pathetic!"

"They are rough, and they do want cold cream," she said, lightly.

A FEW days later, one afternoon when he had fallen asleep, she was annoyed and a little disturbed to find herself looking at his hand and wishing that he would stroke hers again. It was a good hand, she thought, of the right size for his height, well shaped and strong, the hand of a man of action. Once more she considered his face carefully. Yes; the lines of it had softened; much of the hardness had gone from it; yet it seemed to her that its going had in some odd manner made it stronger. He looked so much more a man who could get his own way, so much more a man a woman could rely on.

About a week later she had proof that her nerves had fallen into their natural, wonted rhythm; as she lay wakeful one night there came upon her a strong desire to cry; she did cry— luxuriously. Nevertheless she awoke next morning with a troubled mind. She did not look at the Bishop much or carefully that day; twice she was short with him. He seemed more than a little bewildered by it.

That night they had sat silent on the rim of the crater for a long time when she said, almost petulantly: "I do wish a ship would come."

"Yes," he said, thoughtfully. "But I'm not nearly so impatient for its coming as I was."

She looked at him sharply, and said even more petulantly: "For goodness' sake, don't get patient! Patience is a woman's virtue. It has to be."

"It is also the virtue of the strong man," he said, sententiously.

"I should never have thought it had been yours," she said, in captious accents.

"It hasn't been. But this long rest I've had has made a great difference to me," he said, thoughtfully. "I think that my nerves were very often on edge."

The next day she found herself still captious, for no reason that she could think of, and an odd impulse came to her to shun him— to get away from him. She acted on it. Just before the heat of the day came on them she slipped away into the belt of trees along the foot of the cliffs. It was some time before he missed her; then he rose and began to look for her. Presently he saw her halfway round the crater, plucking guavas and eating them. Well, he might as well join Mrs. Lissington and eat guavas. He set out briskly, considering the heat, keeping in the shade. But when he came to the guava patch she was not in it, and he could not see her anywhere. With a good appetite, but listlessly, he ate half a dozen guavas, then searched for her. But he did not find her, and presently returned home— they had fallen into the habit of calling the corner of the basin in which they ate and slept home— feeling unreasonably annoyed, and feeling, even more unreasonably, that Mrs. Lissington had somehow let him down.

SHE returned for the midday meal. Her impulse to shun him had not abated, but in the afternoon she did not withdraw to so great a distance, but merely to her bed of leaves, which was as cool as any other place on the island, and as far from him, for there was a tacit understanding that he should not go near it. She did not drowse away the afternoon successfully; she was restless; she began to suspect that the island was getting on her nerves. The Bishop was also restless. But he did not lay the blame on the island. He did not know on what to lay it.

At their evening meal he was not sulky, nor was his attitude that of an important dignitary of the Church; it was rather humble. Mrs. Lissington was somewhat spiritless and inclined to be captious; she did not seem interested in him or in the subjects he broached. In the middle of the meal he made a discovery; he discovered that she had changed. She had landed on the island thin and palish and rather haggard, with her eyes and skin rather dull. Now the contours of her face were charmingly rounded, her tanned skin was clear, her eyes bright. For the first time he perceived also that they were beautiful eyes, violet and of a depth. Since his eyes had fallen into the way of not resting on women, the beauty of her eyes and face made the deeper impression on him now that he did see them. He did not inform her of this discovery; but he did find his eyes often drawn to her, and often he removed his gaze from her hastily lest he should seem to stare.

It was quite late in the meal that he remembered that woman is a snare of the devil, and that the more beautiful the woman the more dangerous the snare. It occurred to him that St. Jerome might possibly be speaking without an exhaustive knowledge of the subject; and certainly anything less like a snare than Mrs. Lissington he had never seen; he was sure that she was as harmless a creature as he had ever met. At any rate, she had never shown any sign whatever of desiring to ensnare him.

Her conduct during the next few days strengthened this conviction. The impulse to shun him was still strong, and she could not account for it, for he was as harmless a creature as she had ever met. That stroking her hand had been the act of an impulsive child and meant nothing. It must be some unreasonable, subconscious prompting that urged her to shun him. Whatever it was, she acted on it, and he saw very little of her except at meals; during the heat of the day and now in the evenings she disappeared.

She did not only shun him; her attitude when they were together pained him. For a long while she had been indifferent; she had become friendly; but now she was captious, almost harsh, with him. Had he been the man he was when he landed on the island, he would have been now and again inclined to rebuke her for a lack of respect to a dignitary of the Church, but in some odd way he had become less conscious of being a dignitary of the Church. The fact did not seem relevant.

On the evening of the fourth day of her shunning him they had finished their evening meal, and the sun was about to dip quickly into the sea. They rose, and she turned away, once more about to disappear.

"Won't you come up on to the rim of the crater and sit by the beacon?" said the Bishop, and his voice had no note of Episcopal authority in it.

Listlessly she said "yes," and with a listless air she came. He set the two mats they had carried up close beside one another, and they sat down. She let him do the talking. He did not talk much. The sun dipped with the usual local suddenness; half an hour later the stars were shining brightly.

"It's astonishing how attractive I'm beginning to find the stars," he said. "I never used to take any notice of them."

" 'The brilliant leprosy of Heaven.' " she quoted, captiously.

"Oh, no! No!" he said, as if the phrase hurt him.

She did not defend it, and they sat silent while the red moon came up out of the sea and turned silver. The sea was so still that the sound of the breakers on the reef was just a gentle crooning. They had an impression of being lonely together in a vastness. He found the impression pleasing; she did not. The sense of being alone— she could not count the Bishop— frightened and oppressed her. He shifted his position so that he could see her face; it was better to look at than the stars.

Then she said, rather wildly: "Oh, I do wish a ship would come to take me away!"

Startled, he said, quickly: "I― I thought you were quite reconciled to being here."

"Reconciled? I might be reconciled if I'd been shipwrecked with another human being," she said.

She did not mean to say it; she did not know that it was in her mind, an underthought, as it were; the words just seemed to come out of her. Then she burst out crying.

The mouth of the flabbergasted Bishop opened wide in his consternation; he quivered. She was shaking with sobs. Reason failed him; he was wholly at a loss. Instinct came to his aid; he put his arm round her, and thrilled. She did not thrust it away.

He drew her to him and said: "Hush— hush!"

It had no effect; she sobbed on. Each sob gave him a painful little jolt. He must stop them. But how? They grow more painful, and he looked round wildly with harried eyes, nearly desperate. Instinct again came to his aid; he bent down and kissed her cheek, timidly and gently, and thrilled again. She jerked slightly when his lips touched her cheek, but she did not thrust him away.

HIS mind was in a whirl, but she seemed to relax a little against him and sob with less violence. He thought that it must be the kiss that had done this, and he kissed her again, less timidly. The sobs abated in violence. He sat thrilling to the quick beating of her heart. Then he kissed her again, on the lips. She thrust herself out of his arms that would have held her, and withdrew a couple of feet. The sobs were ceasing.

"I'm awfully sorry. It was very stupid of me. I oughtn't to have bored you— like this," she said in penitent accents.

"It didn't bore me," he said, quickly. "It distressed me."

"It needn't have. It was only an attack of nerves. The loneliness in all this emptiness got at me."

"You're not lonely— at least you shouldn't be— not quite lonely. I'm here," he said.

She said nothing, and they sat in silence. He was still thrilling with strange emotions, pity and tenderness and a craving. Presently she said quietly that bed was the best place for her, and they went down the cliff and she left him. He did not go to bed at once; he sat staring down at the pool without seeing it. His mind was still in a whirl; he had suffered an upheaval of his being. The fact that he, vowed to celibacy, had kissed a woman troubled him very little.

Nevertheless, when they met next morning he was embarrassed. But she was so wholly at her ease that she set him at ease also, and at once. It was so plain that she had taken his kisses as soothing measures and thought no more of them. He was not relieved nor pleased; he was immensely disappointed and not a little hurt. But he could say nothing and do nothing.

That day the impulse to get away from him had gone, and she did not shun him. During the heat of the day they talked, as had been their wont, idly and fitfully. Not once did he even drowse, though she slept now and again, and he made more discoveries about her— that she had long eye-lashes and delicate ears, that her nose was straight and the nostrils exquisitely cut.

If he found her radiant, she found that he had developed greatly during the last twelve hours, that he looked at her with the eyes of a man. She was aware that the island had played its part in working this change in him; but she knew that she had played a greater part, that her lips had worked the crowning change. A cheaper woman would have been triumphant; she was profoundly thankful.

That evening he was not called on to ask her to come with him to the rim of the crater; she went as a matter of course, and they watched the stars come out. They talked little; though he felt that there were a thousand pregnant things to be said, he did not know what they were. She was aware that he was gazing at her face all the while. Then he laid his hand gently on hers. She let it rest on it for perhaps twenty seconds, then drew hers gently away. She would not have things hurried; she wished to savour every moment, every step of the progression of love; she desired that progression to be slow.

For his part, he found it delightful to be sitting there beside her, but he was not content. He did not know, he did not even dream that her heart and mind were full of him. He was in a great uncertainty, and his hope was but faint. He had to lay his hand on hers, and thrilled to its warm softness. When she drew it away, he felt oddly baulked. His instant instinct was to seize it and hold it firmly. But he refrained. He felt that such a demonstration of his superior strength would be wrong; he was afraid, greatly afraid, of offending and hurting her. Besides, he did not desire to seize; he desired her to give.

DURING the next few  days they seemed to have reverted exactly to their old relations. She displayed her old indifferent friendliness to him; he could perceive in her attitude and manner no sign of any remembrance of his kisses, and how to bring home to her the fact that he himself had a thrilling and poignant remembrance of them he did not know. But he did know now that he was in love with her, and the fact that he who had so disliked and despised women was in love with one caused him no surprise or concern whatever.

But though he was not distressed by the fact that he had fallen in love, he was distressed by the certainty that she was not in love with him, and never likely to be. He knew that he was not the kind of man who appealed to her, and he knew himself to be so inexperienced in this matter that he could not conceive of his finding a way of awakening love in her. He was in love, and desperately in love; but it was hopeless.

Then, on the fifth day, she disappeared soon after breakfast. During her earlier absences he had been disgruntled enough; this time, when she did not return for their midday meal, he was fairly distracted. He had never imagined that the absence for a few hours of another human being could make life such a hopeless blank. Early in the afternoon he became afraid that some accident had happened to her, and went in search of her.

She was not far away; indeed, she had been near enough all the while to observe his impatience. It did not seem to occur to her that she was treating him unkindly, for at intervals she smiled with a tranquil satisfaction that would have persuaded anyone who saw her that she believed that she was doing him good. He passed near her, calling to her; she lay back out of his sight till his calling grew faint; then she went to sleep.

About the time of the evening meal, when he was in the lowest depths of his gloom, she came. He did not know that she was there till she spoke from behind him. He started up to find her enframed by green shrubs in the glowing, golden light of the westering sun, more beautiful than ever. Dazzled, he blinked at her.

Then a sudden sense of injury came on him; he said, huffily: "I've been looking everywhere for you. I thought you'd come to some harm. Didn't you hear me calling?"

"I must have been asleep," she said.

But for an accident they might have remained on these terms for days. But as they came down from the rim of the crater that night, she stumbled against him and would have fallen had he not thrown an arm round her with a quickness that would have been impossible to him when he first came to the island.

She laughed gently and said: "Thanks so much. You were quick."

His arm tightened round her, and he held her to him tightly. Then something gave in him— the repression of years. He lifted her off her feet, and raised her in his arms and, holding her closely to him, kissed her passionately and fiercely.

"I love you! I love you!" he muttered.

She uttered a faint cry, and for a few seconds tried to thrust herself out of his arms. Then she relaxed to his kisses.

In his exaltation he carried her to their mats and sat down with her in his arms. Then he found voice. Years of speaking had given him the power to say what he wanted, and he told her how he loved her, with a passionate eloquence that thrilled and thrilled her. She told him that she loved him.

IT was late when they said good-night and went to their beds, and they awoke to a golden day, and golden days followed. But love is a progression, and marriage is its natural end. One morning he was in a brooding mood and absent-minded, with very little to say.

Then of a sudden he said: "Will you marry me, Mary?"

"How can we get married? There's no one to marry us," she said, in a tone of surprise.

"I can— at least, I believe I can," he said, thoughtfully. "Considerable concessions are made by the law in the case of persons in our situation, and I believe that a mere declaration that we take one another as husband and wife would be legally binding. Of course, we ought to make it before witnesses; but, since there are no witnesses, a written declaration that we do so should suffice. We could write it on a piece of stuff with my blood."

"With mine!" she said, quickly.

"No. With mine!" he said, firmly. "And I certainly believe that if I marry us according to its prescribed forms, the Church will hold the marriage valid, which is all that really matters. At any rate, I can pronounce the Church's blessing on our union."

"Then I suppose I must!" she said, smiling at him.

When he had done kissing her they got to work on the marriage contract. It was a simple matter. She washed and dried the handkerchief he had brought ashore. He cut it in half, then pricked his arm with the knife, and with a very finely-pointed piece of hardwood wrote the declaration slowly and carefully on half the handkerchief, in long, thin letters, as clearly as that simple stylus would allow.

She signed it and then he. He gave it to her. She folded it and put it in her handbag.

The religious ceremony did not take long. She found it impressive, for his heart was in it, and he invested it with an uncommon solemnity. It did not seem odd to her when he addressed himself and made the responses to his own questions. His signet ring served as a wedding ring, and it fitted her finger. Then, on the other half of the handkerchief, he wrote the certificate of their marriage and signed it and gave it to her.

"I ought to be properly married. I've got two sets of marriage lines," she said, smiling.

Their simple marriage feast was hot baked yams, guavas, plantains, and the milk of green coconuts.

FOR the next three days they lived in a golden dream. They might have sought the whole world over and failed to find a more delightful place for a honeymoon.

On the third night they were sitting on the rim of the crater. His arm was round her, and their talk was broken by many kisses.

In the middle of a sentence the words died on her lips, and she stiffened in tense attention. Startled, he looked out over the sea to find out what so held her.

Then she said, sharply: "Look! It isn't a star. It moves. It's a ship!" and she threw out her hand towards the horizon on the left.

He looked with all his eyes, and presently saw a light that moved.

"It is a ship!" he said.

"The matches! They're in my handbag!" she cried.

He sprang up and scrambled quickly down the fissure. She rose and stared at the moving light, her lips parted, and her hands tightly clasped. It stood for so much.

He seemed to her a long while coming. Surely he could not fail to find the handbag. Then she heard him mounting the fissure, and wondered at his slowness. When he reached her, she dropped on one knee beside the beacon and held out her hand for the matches.

"I haven't brought the matches!" he said, slowly in a firm but troubled voice. "It is too soon. The world can wait a while. Another ship will come."

She rose slowly, then turned sharply and threw her arms round his neck.

__________________

2: The Wrong Man's Daughter

The 20-Story Magazine Jun 1930

IT was no fault of mine that Susie married Bellamy Tong. I was away doing business in the South Seas— pearls. I came back to find her desperately in love with him— and he with her, for that matter. Love is a ticklish thing; and it is best to leave it alone. It would have been quite different if

Susie had been a robust young woman. I should have stepped in briskly. A heart-break or two does not seem to do that type much harm. But she was not a robust young woman; she was delicate, almost fragile, and very tender-hearted and affectionate. A heart-break might almost be the death of her. I thought it wiser to sit tight and do nothing and say nothing.

I did not like Bellamy and I trusted him even less. He was altogether too beautiful to be true. Of course I knew that a man who is really fond of his daughter is apt to be prejudiced against anyone who wants to take her away from him. But Bellamy was most certainly not the type of man I should have chosen for a son-in-law. He was tall and slim and dark and pale with large brown eyes and black hair, brushed straight back without a parting, and when he laughed he showed a row of long white teeth. And he had had a fond mother.

That was why he had not gone to a public school or to the war. He had spent the last three years of it in Ireland, the home of the safe.

And it was why he was always full of noble talk. It seemed to run out of him, and anything would turn on the tap. And when he talked he used to run his long white fingers through his hair, and his beautifully polished nails used to shine out against the black. He talked and talked and talked— mush. But how should a girl know it was mush? Susie thought it the most beautiful talk in the world. I dare say, as talk goes, it was. She couldn't know that you can tell next to nothing about a man from what he says. It's what he does. As far as I could make out Bellamy did nothing except talk nobly.

I hate sentimentalists. At bottom they are generally as hard as nails. I had very little doubt that the base of Bellamy Tong's beautiful nature was good hard diamond. If things didn't go exactly his way, his eyes would go nearly as hard as any I ever came across. And doing business— my kind of business—about the Seven Seas and in the bad lands. I have seen some hard ones.

But, as I say, I came back from the South Seas too late to do anything. Bellamy had been talking to Susie for six weeks, pushing his fingers through his hair, languishing at her with his large brown eyes. He could have talked the hind-leg off a horse for a small bet, and he talked the heart out of her. The harm was done.

So I let her marry him.

But I gave him his warning. He came to me to ask my consent. He really seemed to like the job, and he did it in many of the noblest words I have ever heard. I did not hurry him. Why should I? I heard him out and gave my consent.

Then I said quite quietly: "From my point of view you're in the world just to make Susie happy. If you don't I'll give you hell."

He looked at me hard and with astonishment. He had lived too much in drawing-rooms ever to get much straight talk in his young life; and I feared that he did not know it now he had got it. Then he looked nobly hurt and said that it was the one desire of his heart.

"That's all right," I said. "It's the right desire; keep on desiring it."

He said that he would, and meant it, for at the time Susie's happiness and his own coincided. But all the same I had a feeling that he did not really understand me. My guess was that he was marrying the wrong man's daughter.

Susie came back from her honeymoon very fit, stronger than she had ever been, and as happy as the day is long— a bit too happy for my liking. It is dangerous to be too happy. You have to pay for it.

HOWEVER, it seemed to be lasting quite well, so two months later I went off on a business jaunt to Mexico— gun-running— with a fairly easy mind. I came back three months later, pleased with myself and with a good deal of money. When I set eyes on Susie my heart sank plumb and fetched up with a jolt. She wasn't happy any longer.

She was fragile again, and pale, and in very poor spirits; and I did not like her eyes. They were large in her face, and frightened. I have seen something very like that kind of fright in the eyes of a man devilishly hard hit and hearing the wings of Azrael coming up. Susie was very hard hit. I was scared— absolutely scared.

I got busy and made inquiries. Of course women were Bellamy Tong's weakness, or, rather, not his weakness— Bellamy was that— but his diversion. There were two of them, a rackety girl and a cultured woman— married, and thirty, of course. He hadn't been careless about his philanderings; he simply hadn't tried to hide them from Susie. He had told her that he was expanding his emotional nature. Susie, who was much too proud to admit that she minded it, had told my sister that that was what he was doing.

I did not need telling that it was a perfectly infernal mess. It is always a very ticklish business to interfere between husband and wife; and this particular husband made it harder. It was my guess that if I made it hot for him the young hound would take it out of Susie. I decided to say nothing. After all, action is my long suit.

But that matter was so important to me that I did not feel quite sure of myself, and I took advice— at least I asked it. I went to my brother William, who is the parson of one of the most fashionable parishes in London, and used to being consulted about just such things, and I went to my brother, Tom, who for ten years had been colonel of a crack cavalry regiment and used to handling young men, and asked their advice.

They were both of them frightfully sick about the business, for they were fond of Susie, but they were as hopeless as they were sick. Both of them said the same thing in different words— that when a man had once fallen out of love with a woman all the kindness in the world is no use and drastic methods no better.

Drastic methods gave it me. I had had something of the sort in my mind. In fact, I had been stopping myself from thinking that Susie would be much happier as a widow. It seemed to me that though the base of Bellamy's noble nature might be good hard diamond, there must be softer strata between that and the top. Besides, if his emotional nature could be expanded one way it could be expanded another. Drastic it was!

For most men it is practically impossible to be drastic with other people. But, naturally, I have not knocked about the bad lands and the Seven Seas for all these years without making some useful acquaintances. Some of the toughest live east of Aldgate, and they will do quite uncommon things for surprisingly little money. I thought at once of Billy Pride. What that weazened old crimp doesn't know about shanghaiing isn't worth knowing. I had him meet me at the Carter's Rest at Shadwell, told him what I wanted, and where to find Bellamy. He did not make any notes in a book. He just nodded. He arranged to hand Bellamy over to me at the corner of Chipperfield Common at 2.45 a.m. on the following Tuesday. I did not bother my head about what measures he would take. But I was pretty sure that from the time Bellamy left home next morning till 2.45 a.m. on Tuesday morning he would not walk twenty yards with-out Billy's hearing all about it.

As it chanced, two evenings later I saw Bellamy walking down the Cromwell Road. One of his diversions lived in Cromwell Gardens I slowed down the car and looked round for Billy Pride's friend. The friend was a lady, a strapping wench who looked like a gipsy— it would be quite like Billy to farm out the job to gipsies— very shabby, but with a brisk stride that could carry her over the ground two feet to Bellamy's one, even if he were walking for a wager. I was amused— the last person in the world any one would guess to be shadowing them. Also I was pleased; I should have my Bellamy all right on Tuesday morning. I followed them. Sure enough, at the bottom of the Cromwell Road Bellamy took a taxi; the lady took the next taxi that came along, and followed.

FOR the next few nights I took Susie out to dinner and the theatre, and on to sup and dance at the Midnight Follies. She did not want to go; she wanted to mope at home. But I put it that I had been having a hard time on the Mexican border and needed refreshments. So she came, and Geoffrey Franks came with us. I thought that he was good for her. He had been in love with her for donkey's years, and he was still in love with her, and showed it. I could have done with him as a son-in-law very well. He's a first-class soldier and a good deal more than a soldier. There's a lot of wounded vanity to these broken hearts; and I was sure Susie would find it soothing to have it dinned into her that she was still uncommonly attractive. Geoffrey would din it in all right. He did do her good— a little.

I was shaving on the Monday morning when she came round to the house and burst into my room in a devil of a state. Bellamy had not come home the night before.

That was just like Billy. You could always rely on him to be on time.

"Well, what about it" I said. "He's probably got caught in a poker or chemmy game, and at it still."

She wouldn't hear of it— Bellamy was not like that.

"Well, do you know how much money he had on him?" I said, considering.

"Money?" said Susie. "About three pounds. He asked me for some; and he made rather a fuss because it was all I had."

He would.

"Then there's nothing in the world to bother about," I said, with absolute certainty. "He's bound to turn up in the course of the day. A man can't stray any distance on three pounds― not a man like Bellamy."

She said in a rather heated way that Bellamy wouldn't want to stray. So I agreed with her; and she said I never had appreciated Bellamy. I agreed with her again and said that those noble natures always were above me. I was used to coarser types. She looked at me suspiciously. I stood it all right. I was in a good temper. Things were moving.

She stayed to breakfast— for comfort. Then I fairly dragged her off for a motor drive in the country, and we lunched at Canterbury. It was eight o'clock when we reached their flat.

She fairly dashed into it, asking for Bellamy. He had not come home. She was in a terrible state.

I helped her. I said: "I expect that the silly young ass has been dipping into the underworld— it's the fashionable thing to do, you know— with only three pounds in his pocket, and is in pawn somewhere."

She was furious, like a furious sucking-dove, and gave me a fine dressing down. That was what I wanted— anger could not do her any harm. I said I would go and find him at once. I went. I drove to my club, rang up Mrs. Clavering-Clayton, the cultured one, and asked whether Bellamy was there. She was rather tart with me, and said he wasn't there, and hadn't been. He had been coming to dinner the night before and never turned up. She rang off. I wondered whether Billy's friends had culled Bellamy from her doorstep, or his own. I rang up Enid Cooper-Calhoun, the rackety one. Mrs. Cooper-Calhoun came to the telephone, and she, also, seemed peeved by my inquiry. She said that she didn't know where Mr. Tong was, in such a tone that I gathered that she didn't care.

"I understand that he was having tea with Miss Cooper-Calhoun," I said at a venture.

"He never came!" she snapped, and rang off.

Another poor parent who had bitten off more daughter than she could chew!

I rang up Susie and told her that Bellamy was not at the Claytons or the Calhouns, and had not been there. That, of course, was what she really wanted to know. It did not sound like it, though, for she asked me quite fiercely why I had gone to those horrible women.

"Horrible?" I said. "I thought they were very cultivated and he saw a good deal of them."

"Cultivated!" she said, and rang off. That was all right. Anger was much better for her than sorrow. Besides, such a blundering effort would get her still further away from suspecting that I had a hand in Bellamy's vanishing. I dined at the club, and made an excellent dinner. If I hadn't yet earned it, I was going to— between then and breakfast. After dinner I went up to the card room and played poker. The others were rather shirty because I went away as early as half-past one with quite a little lump of their money. But I had made up my mind to give myself plenty of time to get to Chipperfield Common. It would never do for Billy Pride to be on time with the goods and me not there to receive them.

It was easy driving. The streets were clear; the road was clearer; and no haze dimmed the November moon. I was at the corner of the Common at 2.35. At once I heard faintly in the stillness the slow beat of hoofs and the creaking of a cart on the Sarratt Road. At 2.44 there came round the corner a gipsy van drawn by a fat horse, and driven by a lady. A shawl hid quite as much of her face as my muffler and goggles hid of mine. But I recognised her by her build. It was the strapping wench of the Cromwell Road.

She pulled up the horse and said: "Is it Mr. Brown, of Islington?"

"Yes," said I.

"I've brought the pretty gentleman," she said, and got down.

I got out of the car to help her. She needed no help. She opened the door of the caravan, took the pretty gentleman by the ankles, lugged him out, snoring, hoisted him on to her shoulders, stepped across to the car, and tumbled him into the tonneau, for all the world as if he had been a sack of potatoes.

"Thank you, my dear. Here's some thing for your trouble," I said, and gave her a tenner.

She looked at it by the light of the lamps, gulped, and blessed me.

I said good-night, and drove off.

I had a long run across country before me. I have a country house, Bostocks, on a hill near Pullborough. I found Mrs. Whitcomb and her son Harry, who run the house and garden for me, asleep in the kitchen, sitting up for me. They are trustworthy people. Once on a time I had pulled Harry out of a devil of a mess. If he showed his face in the West Riding the police would have him in twenty-four hours. He only shows his face, and that not too freely, on that hill near Pullborough. They did not show any surprise at Bellamy's sleepy condition. He was still snoring, doped with some effective drug I did not recognise, though he smelt of it. Mrs. Whitcomb got to work, making coffee and frying bacon and eggs, while Harry helped me with Bellamy.

Bostock's has a big, high roof. Under it is an attic, the length and width of the house, with sloping walls, lighted by one small dormer window. We carried Bellamy upstairs, hauled him up the ladder, through the trap-door, into the attic, took off his overcoat, and laid him on a small mattress on the floor in a corner.

Then I handcuffed him, and with a safety razor shaved all that fine black hair off his head. Even by the poor light of the candle he did look an extraordinary person. It seemed a pity that he should lose such an amusing sight; and I sent Harry down for a mirror. He hung it on a nail by the window. Then I covered Bellamy with the blanket and his overcoat, and went down to my coffee and eggs and bacon. I enjoyed them very much.

I TOLD the Whitcombs not to go near Bellamy unless he shouted so loudly that it seemed likely to attract someone's attention. In that case Harry might go up and gag him. Then I drove home. It was nearly six when I arrived, and I had not been in the house five minutes when the telephone bell rang. It was my guess that it had rung often during the night.

Of course it was Susie.

I did not wait for her to get in a question. I said in a bitter voice: "I've been up all night looking into the matter of that silly young ass of yours."

She accepted the description and said meekly, but eagerly: "Have you found him?"

"I've found him," I said. "He's got himself into a devil of a mess and you won't see him for at least a fortnight. I'm not going to tell you what the mess is, or where he is. But he's quite safe; and not a woman in the world can get at him. Don't come round. You won't see me. I'm going to bed and I'm not going to be disturbed till two o'clock."

With that I put the receiver back. Relieved of anxiety, she should sleep herself till two o'clock.

At a quarter past two she found me at breakfast. I told her that the less she said about the silly young ass's scrape the better. She was not pressing. I think that she had tumbled to it that the one place in the world in which a woman can't get at a man is prison.

"It's really only a fortnight?" she said.

"Thirteen days now," I said.

"It's terrible," she said. But she did not say it as if she meant it very much. I fancied that that complete absence of women had sunk in.

"Not a bit of it. It will do the silly young ass good," I said.

She did not say that it would not.

I told her that I would call for her at half-past seven to take her out for the evening, and on to the Midnight Follies, and she was to ring up Geoffrey Franks to come along with us to dance with her.

She began: "Oh, I couldn't! With poor Bellamy in—"

"Stop! You don't know where Bellamy is!" I said sharply. "Bellamy has gone into the country for a fortnight.

She saw at once that I was right, and went away fairly cheerful. I was pleased not to have deceived her at all. What Bellamy was exactly getting was fourteen days without the option of a fine.

I finished my breakfast and drove down to Bostock's.

Mrs. Whitcomb told me that the gentleman had made a great fuss for an hour or so that morning, but was quite quiet now. I took a jug of water, a slice of bread, and a cane I had brought with me, up to the attic. When I came up through the trapdoor I found Bellamy standing over it, waiting for me.

When he saw who it was he said huskily: "You? You've found me, thank God!"

"Found you? I put you here," I said. He stepped back sharply. Then he saw the jug of water, howled, "Water!" and came for it.

The jug of water bucked him up a bit, for he looked feeble murder at me, got into something of an attitude, and croaked: "What does this mean?"

"Well, if you ask me, I should say it meant that you'd married the wrong man's daughter. But I gave you your warning." I said quietly.

"Warning?" he said.

He had actually forgotten it.

"I told you if you didn't make Susie happy I'd give you hell," I said.

"Oh— that," he said.

"Just that," said I.

"But it's all nonsense," he croaked indignantly. "Why can't she be happy? It's these middle-class prejudices that rob life of its beauty."

"They've certainly robbed you of some of yours," I said, and laughed.

He was the funniest-looking object. At once he went, croaking, up into the air. He was going to do lots of unpleasant things to me— with the help of the law. I laughed again and took him by the arm. He is taller than I am but not half as thick; even if he had not been handcuffed he could have put up no kind of fight. Then I caned him just as I used to be caned at school. I gave him rather more than the average caning because he was older. I was not afraid of his showing the bruises to any one, not even to the law. They were not romantically placed. When I had finished he was blubbering— what a son-in-law for a man to have!

I told him a dozen things about himself he had never before realised. Then I apologised for leaving him so soon.

"But I'm taking Susie and Geoffrey Franks out to dinner and the theatre and the Midnight Follies," I said. "But you can rely on me to come down and cane you to-morrow."

With that I left him blubbering.

Susie and Geoffrey and I had a very pleasant time. I fancied that she felt that she was getting a holiday. She had nothing to be really anxious about— no rackety Enid, no high-brow vamp.

The next day I went down to Bostock's and had another painful interview with Bellamy. When the more painful part of it was over, I repeated a good deal of what I had told him about himself the day before. I wanted to get it into his head.

Then I said: "We  had a ripping time last night. I don't think I ever ate better caviar— the small-grained kind, you know."

He gave me a murderous look; and I went on: "I didn't bring you down here entirely for the good of your soul. I also wanted you out of the way. I want Susie to see a lot of Geoffrey Franks. He's very much in love with her, you know; and she was very fond of him till you came along. Absence makes the heart grow stronger, and I'm hoping that hers will grow strong enough to appreciate him again. He'll run away with her like a shot— any man in his senses would— if she'll let him. There'd be a devil of a scandal, of course; but it would be worth it to get rid of you. You're pretty well off your pedestal, you know. I've seen to that."

"You blasted fiend," he said quite fiercely.

I laughed and said: "I'm taking them round the town again to-night."

With that I left him. I had given him something to think about and I wanted him to start to think. My guess was that he could be as jealous as the next man. It would be an occupation.

Susie and Geoffrey and I kept holiday again that night. She was looking better and eating more; her eyes had lost that look of fright, and she was not so pale. It is wonderful what a complete change and freedom from anxiety will do. Of course she must be sorrowing over Bellamy in his cell; but the cell was woman-proof.

NEXT day, after the usual bamboo formula and telling Bellamy some more things about himself I had thought of, I chatted to him about some chicken Mary and I had eaten the night before, and how much better and happier Susie was looking, and of my hopes of her and Franks. I said I thought that in a day or two she would be ready enough to go about with him alone, for all these late hours were not particularly good for me. He took no part in the chat. He was looking most morose.

I kept up that treatment for three more days. On the fourth day I dropped the caning. But I took the cane up with me, and a couple of thick beef sandwiches. After he had eaten them, and he did enjoy them, I took off his handcuffs and set him to run round and round the room. I wanted to return him to Susie in good condition. When he flagged I encouraged him with the cane. After his exercise I chatted with him about an entrecote of almost pre-war excellence I had found at the Cafe Royal, and of Geoffrey's progress with Susie.

I had learnt at school that sorrow's crown of sorrow was remembering happier things, and I did not think that it would take any of the crown off his sorrow to know that somebody else was enjoying them. It did not seem to. Also I took it that, when he did come out, he would want more than anything else in the world to be cosseted— for about six months, and hard— and Susie could cosset. I handcuffed him again before I went.

I kept that treatment up for five days. I had no need to use the cane after the first three days of it; he was becoming quite a sprinter. Also his face was no longer all eyes, but what eyes there were in it were very much clearer and brighter than I had ever seen them, and his lips were thinner and redder and more set. Also, I had no longer any need to tell him those things about himself. I had got them into his head. He admitted as much. He did not seem to bear me any particular malice. But, then, I had made a point of feeding him myself. A dog is about as sentimental a creature as there is in the world, and it likes to lick the hand that beats and feeds it.

There were three days to go. After his exercise I gave him a cup of tea, strong, and with plenty of sugar in it. It was almost touching to see him drink it. He made nearly as much noise over it as one of the lower classes.

After he had drunk it I began to talk very hopefully about Susie and Geoffrey Franks.

Suddenly his nostrils twitched queerly, and he said: "Stop it! Stop it, or I shall try to strangle you!"

"I'm surprised at you," I said in a grieved voice. "You know you couldn't."

"I know I couldn't! But I shall try!" he said, still twitching.

"I can't for the life of me see what's troubling you," I said. "You'll be able to spend all your time with Enid Cooper-Calhoun and Mrs. Clavering-Clayton now."

"Damn Enid Cooper-Calhoun! Blast Mrs. Clavering-Clayton!" he said. It sounded harsh, but it was certainly fervent.

"And that's a man's love," I said in a grieved voice.

I left him feeling rather pleased with myself.

ON THE morning of the fourteenth day she came round to see me in a state of intense excitement. Her spirits were rather dashed when I told her that Bellamy would not be back till tea-time. It would take some time to make him presentable. He was not the extraordinary looking creature he had been; but he still looked odd. The hair on his head was not more than a sixteenth of an inch longer than the hair on his chin; and that was not any length to speak of. She went away to shop to keep herself quiet. I drove round to their flat and got a suit of his clothes and under-linen and his motor coat. Then I chose a black wig at Clarkson's and ordered it to be sent round to his flat.

I got to Bostock's fairly early. Bellamy had no notion that his sentence expired that day. He had an idea that it ran for another three months. I sent Mrs. Whitcomb to make coffee and fry eggs and bacon. Then I went up to Bellamy. I was in great spirits. I told him that I was practically sure that Susie had fixed it up with Franks, and of course there was no need to keep him at Bostock's any longer.

We started for home. It was a November day, and a bad one. But he seemed pleased enough to be out in it, though silent— nothing about the scenery. He looked as he had never looked In his life— as hard as nails. Sleeping cold and sprinting hard had hardened him.

As he came nearer London he grew very fidgety. But when I suggested a shave and a Turkish bath he agreed, saying rather drearily that after all there wasn't any hurry. He had them; and I drove him home.

Just as we came near the house I said: "Now, don't go and make a silly fuss if Franks is there."

He looked at me and shivered, and his lips and nostrils twitched.

"I'll try not to," he said, as if he wasn't sure that he would succeed.

I was quite sure that Franks would not be there.

"And if by any chance you and Susie do make it up, don't tell her about Bostock's. If you do, she'll never forgive me, and I shall have nothing to live for but vengeance," I said.

"I shan't," he said.

He had his key; and when we came to the door of his flat I said: "Let's go in quietly. They're probably having tea together."

He seemed to swallow something— quite a lot, in fact— and we went in quietly. There was a smell of muffins on the air. He opened the drawing room door. Susie was sitting in front of the fire, looking at it. She was wearing the prettiest frock I ever saw her in. She looked round, screamed, jumped up, and howled: "Whatever have they done to your poor hair?"

Then she rushed at him; and he made one jump for her.

I went out and shut the door.

WE have never spoken of Bellamy's unfortunate scrape till the other day. His hair explained everything so clearly. And, after all, it is not of any real importance to a really nice woman that her husband has done a paltry fourteen days without the option.

But the other day Susie said to me: "I really think that— that little episode has improved Bellamy."

Why not? He eats out of her hand; he talks less; and the fact that she has the most jealous husband in London does not seem to cause her any dissatisfaction. Perhaps, after all, he did not marry the wrong man's daughter.

__________________

3: The Dead That Wept

Telegraph (Brisbane) 25 Oct 1898

I ALWAYS had a hearty contempt for my cousin George, and for his part he had a very lively hatred of me.  When relations are thus affected towards one another, they seem to go to greater lengths than those united by no tie of blood. George, too, had a great capacity for hating; all the force of his nature seemed to centre in it; and in our case the ill-feelings were strengthened by our seeing so much of one another, for his estate— he was an orphan— marched with my father's.

How our enmity arose I cannot remember; it seems to me to have always existed. The first thing I can recall at all is his pushing me— from behind, of course, that was George's way— into the content tank by the boiling-house. I think his ways of showing his hatred for me first aroused my contempt. As small boys we fought with varying success. At school we did not fight; for one reason, fighting was abhorrent to the spirit of our Barbadian schoolfellows; for another, when once aroused to take the trouble to fight, I could not have enough of it.

But we became rivals at cricket. It is our one game out there, and we played it all the year round. He grow up a magnificent bat; a big, broad-shouldered follow with a tremendous reach. Even on those fast treacherous wickets he could collar the fast bowling. I could bowl more than a little, and I could bowl George. He hated me the worse for it. Cautious against other howling, his inveterate passion for scoring off me turned him into one of those players who will have their hit, when playing mine. I knew his weakness, and kept one unvarying ball for him, medium pace, straight, and pitched a little short. If need were I bowled it to him over after over, but he generally put the ball into the hands of the long-field about the middle of the second. In the end he grew to dread my bowling: fancied, I believe, that there was a fatality about it, and that rendered him an easy victim.

He vented his hatred on me in a number of mean tricks. If he could got hold of anything he thought I prized, he would spoil or destroy it, and lie about it afterwards. Once he let my pony down and cut its knees.

Outwardly, indeed, we were on good terms. I could not take tho trouble to be on terms of open hostility, I did not care enough about him. He, I think, was of the opinion that he could do me more harm by keeping up the appearance of friendliness. As boys we drove every morning into Bridgetown to school together; and I had to keep a sharp lookout on my books, or he would contrive to drop them out of the buggy. When he succeeded he lied about it. When the masters or the boys looked shyly upon me I know that George had been at work behind my back. It was scarcely worth the trouble of inquiring into; they came round after a while. My more intimate friends, between whom and me he was always trying to provoke quarrels, after a while grow to disbelieve him.

He tried to provoke me, too, by outshining me in every way. He was never happy unless he had smarter clothes, a better pony, and finer bats than I. He had much more money, because his estate was larger than my father's, a hundred acres larger. It does not seem much to English people, but in Barbadoes, where the largest estate is about five hundred acres, it is a great difference. Besides, a hundred acres in sugar meant, in the good times, between fifteen hundred and two thousand a year. In this effort he failed signally; I did not care whether his possessions wore better than mine or not. But one way or another, he made my school life far more disagreeable than it might have been.

He had a pretty turn for cruelty. I have known him in the holidays take overseer's work, for a day purely for the pleasure of cowhiding the little negroes. He always took the third gang, the little boys and girls who do odds and ends of work about the estate, being too weak for the heavier field labour. I have not much sympathy for the negroes, having lived amongst them; but, riding out one day, I came upon him by a cane piece mercilessly lashing a wretched little negro girl for some trifling fault or other. I stopped him quickly enough; we had one of our rare open quarrels, and I thrashed George.

He used to beat his servants, too, till he was fined ten pounds for knocking down his groom. His horses and dogs he treated shamefully. Still he was popular with his neighbours, for he was open-handed and full of animal spirits.

Above all, he was a great favourite with women. There was a masterfulness about him that they liked. He was good-looking, too, dark, with regular features, and a devil-may-care expression. He exercised, as well as I could make it out, a physical fascination upon them that they could not resist. Women seem to like men who look as though they would maltreat them. They spoiled him, and he despised them.

One woman he did not despise, and that was his sister Margaret. He feared and hated her. He feared her because when as a boy he tried to bully her, her finer and more fearless spirit had mastered him, and he had never freed himself from that mastery.

My fondness for her was reason enough for his hatred. I had always loved Margaret, and always shall love her. Afterwards he hated her more, because, whatever the yield was, he had to pay her five hundred a year out of his estate. She had, too, a valuable little estate of a hundred and fifty acres on the opposite side of my father's, and was reckoned an heiress. I know well enough that he would do everything he could to prevent my marrying her, for if the estates were joined I should be in the better position. But I had such implicit trust in Margaret that I did not fear anything he might do.

As children Margaret and I were always together, and in the holidays during my school years. Indeed, I am inclined to think that Margaret was the chief factor in the formation of my character. Certainly I should never have thought half the things worth taking trouble about that I do, had it not been for her power of inspiring me.

We played together and quarrelled together— at least she did. I believe she found me a disappointing person to quarrel with, I could not, except on rare occasions, take the trouble. She had fits of rage of amazing intensity. She would tug at my hair, till I got hold of her hands and hold them firmly. Then she would kick my shins, whereupon I would lay her on the ground, still holding her hands till she grew quiet. Elsie used to stand by, looking scared out of her life, saying, "Don't hurt her, Tristram, she can't help it."

I, too, had an idea she could not help it, and used to sit patiently holding her. Site was ashamed of these fits; I think the contrast of my coolness shamed her, and they grow less frequent as she grew older. However angry she was, she never hurt Elsie.

Elsie McClaren, the daughter of our Scotch overseer, was my foster-sister, and our companion and pet, being a year younger than Margaret, and three years younger than I.

My mother died a few days after I was born, and Mrs. McClaren reared me along with her little boy. By way of return my father arranged for Elsie to share Margaret s governess. Playmates as children, when I was at school the girls never left me alone. After I had got home, and had my tea, in the middle of my evening debate as to whether it was not too much trouble to prepare my lessons for the next day, I used to hear a scurry of footsteps, and in they ran, demanding help in their evening work. I had to help them, and then Margaret would insist on my doing my own.

EIsie was thus always our companion. She was a pretty, fragile little thing, and we mode a great pet of her; the best of everything was for Elsie. In return, I am afraid we made her the butt of our youthful wit. she took it in excellent part, she never thought we could do wrong, and was entirely dominated by our stronger natures.

George rarely joined us. When he did, there was sure to be a quarrel; he would bully Elsie. I am pleased to remember it was the one thing I always thrashed him for. So we all grew up together, Margaret into a beautiful girl of a fine high spirit, Elsie into a pretty dreamy girl with a passion for music, and I into their very obedient servant.

When she was fourteen Margaret went to England to school, and spent all but three months of the cool season every year there. Every year she returned prettier and more charming, with a colour in her cheeks which was all that was needed to make her ravishing, and my boy's passion for her grew stronger and stronger. It was now she who became the teacher, having so many things to tell me, and at sixteen she began to develop ideas; then it was she began to teach me how many things were worth taking trouble about. One of them was Elsie's education. I had my doubts about the use of it, for Elsie was not bright, but she worked patiently at what she was told.

At last the time came for me to go to the university. George, being my older, went six months before me to Cambridge, as I was going to Oxford. Those six months were the happiest of my life, I think, for Margaret was at home, we were always together, and I was bowling better than ever. Margaret went over with me to England to stay with friends in London. To my surprise I got a scholarship at one of the smaller colleges; and it procured my entrance into a congenial set. I did a certain amount of work, read a great deal that was more interesting to me, played my cricket, and became a noted speaker on colonial matters at the union.

Of George I saw a good deal in the vacations. Margaret had another idea, the idea of making us friends. I had the strongest doubts as to its being worth while. I heard of him us living a very fast life at the university. Only his cricket prevented its being faster— he got his blue in his second year— and I knew that he went the pace in town. He had got into a set of men with money, whose occupation was to put it to a bad use. He could stand the pace very well. He had the accumulations of a long minority to spend, and he spent them.

Two years after I had gone to Oxford my father died, and when all the affairs were settled I bethought myself of doing something for Elsie. I knew that she was dull and unhappy in Barbadoes, when both Margaret and I were in England, and I determined to bring her over, and let her cultivate her musical talent.

I wrote out to her parents, the arrangements were soon made, and she came. George sneered at the scheme once or twice, but was disregarded. She was placed at a good school in Kilburn, and made excellent progress. In the vacations I took her to concerts, and she taught me a finer appreciation of music than all the critical dissertations of my Oxford friends. I had a protecting, brotherly fondness for her, greater indeed than the fondness of most brothers for their sisters. Everyone, indeed, was fond of her; for she was a creature of an innocent gentleness of nature that charmed her way into their hearts.

In the next year I got my blue. Our chance of beating Cambridge was small. George had been in splendid form all the summer, had made four centuries, and carried out his bat twice. On the way up to town we were discussing our chances; and I happened to say I had taken his wicket scores of times. It seemed to set the captain thinking. I knew he did not think much of my bowling; indeed, I think he underrated it. I had got my blue for my fielding; and I was a useful bat. However, he said nothing.

Cambridge made fifty for no wicket, George had hit five fours, and had the bowling collared. To my surprise, I was put on to bowl. I began to bowl him the old ball. The first over was a maiden, the first in the match. The second over George faced me again, and it was a maiden. The third over he hit me for two, and the other man hit me for two. The third ball of the fourth over he put into the hands of cover point. His score was sixty-seven short of the century. I got three more wickets, and made a painstaking thirty-five.

I opened the second innings with a ball which George drove into the hands of the man over my head in the long field; and we just won the match. After it was over, and we were all in the pavilion, he said with a pleasant smile which did not reach his eyes, "I'll be even with you, old man, for taking my wicket in both innings," and I believed he would do his best.

At the end of the year, owing to the development of the beet-sugar industry, the price of cane-sugar, which had been steadily falling, fell very low indeed, and our incomes fell with it. I had plenty of money in English investments, so I did not mind very much. George, who had had much more, had spent most of it.

We were both living in town now, having left the universities, and he began to say he would have to live in Barbadoes. Margaret had gone out there for a few months, and wrote to say that the prospect was alarming; and my attorney urged me to come out, and look into things for myself. I was leading a very pleasant life among my friends in town and was going to marry Margaret in the summer. I thought it hardly worth the trouble.

One morning I was startled by a telegram from Elsie's school saying she had disappeared, having gone to her master in town the day before and never returner. Of late she had gone by herself, being old enough and knowing her way very well. I was in it state of great dismay ; but it seemed no very difficult thing to find her, and I set the usual agencies to work, keeping the matter very quiet.

But the days went by and they proved useless. I set others to work, and threw myself into the search with an energy that surprised me. I wouldn't for worlds have had any harm befall the dear child, and I was responsible for her. Even George, when he heard of it, showed a greater concern than I had ever known him show about anything that did not immediately affect him; and it was all the more strange since he had always treated her with a contemptuous indifference, while she had shrunk from him and avoided him.

He helped me greatly in my search, and was fertile in excellent suggestions. But it was all in vain; whoever had arranged the disappearance was a master hand, and had taken precautious that effectually baffled discovery. It was so well done that it was impossible she could have arranged it herself. But there was no clue either to anyone who could have helped her in the matter or to her motive. All I could think of was that at the last concert I had taken her to she had been rather absent minded, and there was a light in her eyes I had never seen in them before. George's hypothesis that there was a man at the bottom of it was the only tenable one; even Margaret said as much in her letters.

I was grieved, amazed, and angry. Months rolled on, and I never abandoned the search though every fresh effort grow sickening in its hopelessness. My marriage with Margaret was postponed, and she went out again to Barbadoes with George, to keep house for him. She had an idea that she had her duties to her brother and her negroes. Further than asking her what good she expected do to either, knowing them as she did, I didn't reason against her purpose, having learnt by experience that reasoning was useless; but if I told her my way of thinking and left her alone she would work around. Then I went on with my search, and began to see more of my friends again.

Six months later Margaret's letters all at once ceased. Six weeks, three mails that is, passed by and no letters. When the third mail had come, and I was again disappointed, I said goodbye to my friends, shut up my rooms, and started for Barbadoes. I had not been in the island for five years, and my old friends were very glad to see me. But on all sides I was met by the cry of "ruin."

Sugar had fallen to the lowest, and would never rise again. However, it seemed to me that there was at any rate a living to be made out of it still.

I found George grown a thorough Barbadian. He had always been more of a Barbadian than myself, though both of us were English by birth and parentage. He had always been more proficient than I in that curious corruption of English, the Barbadian language, and now he spoke it habitually. His old hatred of me, which I thought had lessened somewhat in England, had, under the influence of old associations, recovered its old virulence. His first act was to stick me with a bad horse, and great was his joy.

But what was my distress and dismay to find that Margaret would have nothing to do with me; treated me with icy, contemptuous coldness; was barely civil to me when it was necessary; but otherwise avoided or ignored me. I could get no opportunity to speak to her alone, so I wrote and asked her to explain. She wrote back, "I know all."— not a word more.

It was certain that it was George's doing. He had borrowed large sums of her to increase his plant of machinery. That was a good reason for his trying to separate us. But what possible means could he have employed? I could not guess; I had believed that nothing could separate us.

After a month I began to despair, and to eat my heart out. My life was wasting under my eyes. Life without Margaret was hardly worth while; she had been my life all through the years. My only consolation, and selfish enough, God knows, was that she was growing listless and hollow eyed.

One evening as I sat brooding, after my lonely dinner, my anger and wretchedness rose to the pitch of desperation. I made up my mind to have it out of George that night, if I had to go near killing him in the process. I knew that Margaret was out; for I had met her at tennis that afternoon, and heard her agree to spend the evening with our hosts. I was eager for a quarrel, and all the injuries he had ever done me kept rising in my memory, and aggravating my dangerous mood. It was only half a mile, and calling my terrier, Nipper, I set out to walk. It was a still, stifling night, at the end of the hot season; the moonlight was an intense silver blaze that silhouetted everything in black and the air rang with the shrill notes of hundreds of whistling frogs.

I walked deliberately enough. My purpose was too set for hurry. I was pondering my plan of action. The way lay along intervals, as the paths between the canefields are called. About midway the ground dipped, and the interval narrowed till the canes brushed the wayfarer on either side, and here and there met overhead.

I had gone a few yards down it when I missed Nipper. Looking back I saw him on the edge of the dip, and gave him a whistle. But he stood stook still. I gave him a call; he came a few steps towards me, then with a whine turned and bolted for home with his tail between his legs.

I had never known him do such a thing before. Going on, I presently noticed that there was something curious about the path, and all at once it struck me that it was strangely silent. There were no whistling frogs near it; I could not hear a single note. Speculating on the reasons for this I had almost reached the bottom of the dip when the low wail of a baby broke upon the stillness; and it had not died, when there came a burst of a woman's weeping, a storm of heartrending, heart-broken sobs.

I have always thought a woman's weeping a dreadful sound , but this was full of so intense a misery, so inexpressible, so hopeless a despair, that it absolutely unmanned me. An inexplicable terror kept me unable to move. The conviction that it was no human weeping filled me. There was the peculiar quality in it that it rang in the air all round me, and I could by no means fix the spot whence it came.

It seemed that it would never stop, and when at last it died away in the same low baby's wail among the cane's on the left, the cold sweat was streaming from my pores. I make no pretence to be a man of extraordinary courage, and it was minutes before I could collect my spirit, and master my trembling lips to call out.

There was no reply. I dashed in among the dense cane growth on the left, pushed backwards and forwards among the stiff plants, and found no one. I did not expect to. I narrowly escaped falling into one of those great dry wells, thirty or forty feet deep, that drain the canes in the heavy rainfall. The shock restored me to myself, and I came out of them.

The silence was over; the air was vibrant with the whistling of the frogs. I set off for George's as hard us I could walk. The horrible feeling of someone being behind me was strong upon me, sending cold shivers up and down my spine. Several times I thought I heard the weeping behind me, and stopped to listen. It was my imagination. The worst of it was that tho voice of the weeping woman was known to me, but I could not recall whose it was. It was not a negro woman's.

I fairly ran up George's drive, and into tho veranda, where he sat drinking whisky and soda.

"Hullo!" he said. "What the devil's the matter? Seen a duppy?"

"Practising sprinting," I said, falling into a chair and reaching for the whisky.

I talked to him for an hour of sugar boiling. I had no heart left in me for a quarrel. I was struggling all the while to recall whose voice it was. I went home round by the road. Nipper came scampering down the drive and yelped and barked round me in extravagant joy.

I passed a horrible night; every time I closed my eyes the weeping awoke me. There seemed to have passed into its sorrow a tone of plaintive remonstrance at my not recalling whose voice it was.

At breakfast I made cautious inquiries of the butler, who knew everything that happened for miles round. No strange sound had been heard in the dip.

That day I had to drive into town, and all along, the weary white road, there and back, the weeping haunted my imagination. I even fancied I heard it above the din of Broad street. I knew the voice so well, but I could not recall whose it was.

I returned to dinner, and after dinner I felt I must have society, or it would drive me mad. I walked to the neighbour's on the opposite side to George's, and us I drew near the house, I heard Margaret's ringing laugh in the veranda. I had not heard it for months; and she never laughed again that evening. Irritable as I was from harass and want of sleep, this angered me greatly. About eleven our hostess was called away mid came back with a vexed air.

"A message from your brother to say your horse is lame, and the buggy can't come. I'm awfully sorry, my dear, I'm. afraid I can't put you up; the house is full with all the children home from school, and our grooms are all gone home," she said to Margaret.

"Oh, I shouldn't think of such a thing," said Margaret. "I can walk perfectly well. Why, it isn't a mile."

"Will you? Don' t you mind? And Tristram will see you home. Your ways are the same."

"No, I don't mind at all; I shall enjoy it in the delicious moonlight," said Margaret; but she frowned. I know it was at the thought of my seeing her home, and grow angrier still. Presently we set out, and went on our way saying very little. If she was afraid I was going to pester her for an explanation, she need have no fear. I was far too angry.

When we came to the path through the intervals I said; "Hadn't you better go home by the road?"

"No!" she said.

"You may get a nasty fright going this way," said I.

"I prefer it," she said, in the tone she would use to a disobedient dog.

"Very well, have your own way," I said, angrily.

When we came to the edge of the dip I led tho way into the narrow path, pushing aside the canes for her.

It was deathly still. There was no sound of the whistling frogs, no sound but the brushing of the canes against us; then in, the middle the baby's wail rang out, and the weeping began.

Margaret sprang to my side with, a low, frightened cry of "Tristram!" and clasped my arm. I slipped it round her and drew her close to me. The hopeless unhuman weeping rang round us as we stood, rising and falling and eddying through the air; and died away its before in the child's wail on the left. I was not so utterly terrified this time, but Margaret was a dead weight on my arm. I half carried, half dragged her out of the dip, and paused where the path widened again.

She recovered herself with a deep gasp; then tore herself from me, and panting, her face a blaze of scorn and anger, cried, "You cruel coward ! Wasn't it enough for you to spoil my life by your faithlessness, but you must expose me to this!"

"Softly," I said, coldly, my anger had left me as her's rose. "It may be that my faithlessness has spoiled your life, though it seems to me that it is rather yours spoiling mine. But I warned you against this. Whose was the voice?"

"Whose was the voice? Who but you ever heard Elsie cry like that?" she cried.

"Of course, of course. I haven't heard Elsie sob since she was a child, or I should have known it at once," I said, more to myself than to her.

"It is no use your affecting ignorance," said Margaret scornfully. "George showed me her letter to him, telling of your treachery to her and your faithlessness to me, three months ago."

"George showed you a letter from Elsie telling him of my treachery to her and my faithlessness to you, three months ago?" I repeated, dumbfounded.

"Yes, and you've met her here on her way to you, and killed her. Oh, Tristram, you've broken my heart!"

"Margaret," I said, "I swear I've been as faithful to you as ever man was to woman, and I cannot conceive how Elsie can have been induced to write such a lie. But if she were coming to me, how comes she here? It's a mile out of her way from the road to town, the short cut to your house, not mine,"

It was a poor argument, but it told as no more striking one could have done. She was silent a minute, then breathed rather than uttered the word "George."

"George, of course!" I cried, as everything flashed clear to my mind.  "He was the scoundrel who enticed Elsie away, to spite me! He made her write the letter accusing me, to keep us apart and get your money! He could always make a woman do anything he liked. Poor little girl! I'd hoped a better fate for her than to fall into his hands."

"Oh, why didn't I ask her what she was weeping so dreadfully for?" said Margaret, beginning to sob. I was near sobbing myself. Then her mood changed, and taking my arm, she hurried along towards the house.

We burst in upon George as he sat smoking in the dining-room.

"There's somebody calling you from the well in the dip!" said Margaret, in a clear, cold voice.

"What the —— do you mean?" he shouted, springing up.

"Elsie is calling you from the well in the dip," said Margaret.

He faced us with his clear pallor going slowly leaden and livid, and his lips trembling.

"I don't understand," he muttered. "It was an accident— she fell in."

It was a palpable, miserable lie.

We turned and left the house.

Next day they drew up from the well the skeleton, picked clean by the ants, of a girl, and the yellow hair was Elsie's.

How she came there we could never learn. George has sold his estate, and lives in Paris. He is about to marry a rich young American.

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4: The Burglar, The Twins, And Ernestine

The Pall Mall Magazine Jun 1899

JACK FEATHERLEIGH was a scamp of the kind called engaging. He had all the faults which spring from an iron resolve to do no work, and from a private morality founded on a mental twist which made him conceive society as his inveterate enemy, on whom he was bound to avenge himself for fancied, untold wrongs. His career at a public school and his career at Oxford had been equally discreditable; and he had quarrelled coldly and firmly with his father, when that father made the continuance of his allowance dependent on his entering and working at a profession.

He had admirable virtues— a cool, resourceful courage, kindliness, generosity, and a tried loyalty to his friends; he kept even an account of the moneys he had borrowed from them. He was adored by children, to amuse whom he would readily make himself ridiculous; a three-legged dog in a house in a London slum looked for his return in a restless, whining impatience; and when he put himself about, a woman would with an amazing careless cheerfulness surrender to him the peace of her heart. It is possible that if any of them had ever touched anything but his fancy, she might have changed him— might even have broken his resolve to do no work. At the beginning of each month he wrote a charming letter to his mother, on (no matter what his straits) the finest hand-made paper.

For three years he had lived in London, by many shifts; and by good fortune, which he was the last to admit, had never been in prison. It is the barest justice to declare that this was due to no lack of pains on the part of the police: without a hairbreath of exaggeration it may be said that Scotland Yard craved for him.

For he had a passion for aldermen, the aldermen of the City of London— a passion that had begun as a fancy and grown an obsession, until he had become the greatest living authority on the subject. He knew them so well by sight that he could recognise each of them by his back fifty yards away in the midday Cheapside crowd― he knew their ages, their fortunes, their weaknesses; their houses, and above all their coachmen, whom he treated often at bars. He kept new, perfectly cut, fine clothes, and a glossy silk hat to wear in the society of aldermen only. They were the source of his precarious income: he was that unknown man of whom the papers have told us so little at such length, who was sitting in Alderman Pudley's brougham when that fuddled Atlas of the financial world stumbled into it after the Cutlers' dinner; who helped him in with a firm grip on the windpipe; who left him bound, gagged and despoiled of his valuable, pretentious jewellery.

He was the kindly young swell who met Alderman Gutterheim reeling along Holborn, shepherded him home, opened his door, and after drinking with him affably and fairly till he fell asleep in his armchair, left the house in that great banker's fur-lined coat, its pockets, of a convenient amplitude, filled with invaluable portable property. He handled these, his supporters, with as much gentleness as might be; for he had all a nice fellow's reverence for grey hairs.

But all good fortune comes to an end; and it was Lombard street to a China orange that he would spend his vigorous prime and his green old age― he had the constitution of an ostrich— doing time; and not, when the burden of years waxed heavy on him, on his head.

Now, on this sunny June morning of his twenty-seventh birthday, he lay on the lane-side turf in the shade of a coppice surveying the work with thoughtful eyes. Owing to a matter of certain bottles of claret at fifteen shillings each, and, a pretty chambermaid, his pocket held only sevenpence. For, on the tramp from London he had chanced on an out of the way inn, and talking to the landlady while he made a meal of bread and cheese and beer, had learned that there was a bin of fine old claret in the cellar. He had lost no time in convincing her that he was an eccentric gentleman who travelled in rags out of whim, had handed over to her £6 and stayed at her inn six days.

He spent most of these days in a very easy chair set in the shadow of the broad eaves, over against the window where the pretty chambermaid did her work; and a dinner each night had drunk one of the bottles of claret. On the morning of the seventh day the six pounds had been spent; he had given the pretty chambermaid, dissolved in tears at his going, his last sovereign, and he had gone forth on the tramp once more— in his heart pleasant memories, in his pocket one half crown.

That was the morning of the day before; he had slept at the sign of the Beautiful Star; broken his fast on bread and milk; and was surveying the world in his low humour of hostility to his fellow-men, induced by the refusal of two brethren of the road, who had just passed him to give him of their shag. He tugged gently at his beard, passed his hand through it in the fashion of a comb; but it did not soothe his indignation.

Then a girl on a bicycle came slowly down the lane; and a glance from her candid grey eyes brightened the world. He thought that she was a beautiful creature, and gazed after her till she passed round the corner.

Then he rose; picked up his heavy stick and the gay blanket, pierced with a hole for head in the Mexican fashion, which served him for a cloak in the rain, a bed at the Beautiful Star, and went down the road with an easy swing which showed excellent muscle.

He had not gone far when he heard a sharp scream ahead. In a breath he had broken into the long stride of the trained runner, and came over a rise in the road to see at its foot the pretty bicyclist  struggling in the grip of his two churlish brethren of the road. He I came flying down the hill, twisting his blanket round his left arm; the girl saw him, and cried. "Help me! Oh, help me!"

At her cry the two busy tramps loosed her; snatched up their sticks, and faced him. He dashed at them, caught the blow from the left-hand man on his blanket, and gave the other the point neatly between the eyes. The man fell, scrambled to his feet, and ran howling down the road with a laceration that bared two square inches of the frontal bone. Jack got in a lucky blow on the other man's wrist that knocked the stick out of his hand, and he ran after his comrade.

Jack and the girl stood panting and staring at one another with excited eyes. She set her hand on her heart; as though to still its beating, and cried in a broken voice between her gasps, "Oh!— how can I— ever— thank you?"

"Sit down and get your breath," said Jack kindly.

She sank down on the grass, covered her face with her hands, and burst into tears. He turned away, and busied himself picking up the unhurt bicycle; and she watched him through her fingers as she cried. She thought he looked like a lion.

Presently he saw that her tears flowed slower, and said, "Do you feel better?"

She gave herself a little shake, rose to her feet and dried her eyes. She was trembling still. "How brave you are! And how strong!" she said; and her dimmed eyes shone suddenly bright.

"How fortunate, rather, to have been of use to you!" he said quietly, considering her carefully. She seemed to him about eighteen, and of amazing prettiness.

"I was so frightened— oh, so frightened! I don't know what I should have done if you hadn't come. They were saying horrible things— horrible," she said, and shivered.

"Forget them. They were only an ugly dream," he said.

She looked at him, and her quick woman's eye marked his difference from the real tramp: his sound, strong boots, the colours of his flannel shirt and blanket, his air of wholesome cleanliness, the whiteness of the skin through his rags.

"You must come with me— now, at once— to my father. He will try and repay you— though really it is beyond repayment— for saving me from those ruffians!" she said, making an eager movement to the bicycle.

He smiled, waved his hand, and said, "No; it would be impossible. Consider, my dear lady, how uncomfortable your father would be, and how uncomfortable I should be. Besides, why should I be robbed of the pleasure of having helped you?"

"Oh, but you must! Indeed you must!" she said.

He shook his head.

"But you are poor, surely: you are very poor," she said, with a little blush.

"No, I am not. With good health, a clear conscience, and a light heart one is never poor," he said, with a fine air that she thought became him.

Her face fell; she knitted her brow; he watched the troubled working of her beautiful face, her troubled eyes, with a very keen sense of delight. At last she slipped her hand into her pocket and saying, "At least take my purse; there is not much in it only a few pounds," held out to him a little silver chain purse, through whose rings the gold pieces were plain.

"No, indeed," he said firmly.

A faint anger shone in her troubled eyes.. "It isn't fair!" she said: "It isn't fair! And I have lots of money too!"

She seemed almost on the point of tears again, and, touched by her real distress, he said: "Well, I will take something if you will give it me."

Her face shone bright— "give me the rose in your belt." And he looked at her with all his masterful eyes.

The strong impression of being face to face with an extraordinary manliness went tingling down her nerves: her eyes fell; the red deepened in her cheek. She took the rose from her belt, and gave it him without looking up.

"Thank you; I am fully repaid," he said, and fixed it in his ragged coat with great care. "And now I will bid you good-bye." And he held the bicycle for her to mount.

His tone ended the interview. She took the handles submissively, then said: "What— what is your name?"

"Jack Featherleigh," he said.

He did not ask her name, and his lack of interest hurt her. She mounted listlessly. He raised his cap, and said: "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," she said; "and thank you— oh, so much."

She rode slowly on, her head a little bowed, in a dream of romance, all a confusion of keen emotions.

He stood watching her till she passed out of sight; once she looked back.

"A beautiful creature! A beautiful creature!" he said, and sighed.

That afternoon he walked more at random than usual, taking cross-lane after cross-lane; he could not drive the plain image of the girl from his mind; his thought clung to her.

About five o'clock he came upon a little village of a model neatness, on the right of which, embowered in woods, stood a large red-brick house, all windows and gables,

He looked at it a while, and then said to himself, softly: "As I live, that is the house of an alderman; and there is money in it."

He went into the village, found a little inn facing the green; spent his sevenpence on bread and cheese, beer and tobacco; and talking cheerfully with the landlord, learned that the big house belonged to the squire, Mr. Blyde, a gentleman of London, who plainly enjoyed the popularity which attends the lavish cultivation of model villages. Jack was grieved to hear that he was not an alderman: but consoled himself with the thought that he would surely become one in the fullness of time, and he must be content to take him in the green ear. At six he left the village at a brisk pace; and half an hour later was lying in the edge of the belt of woods which ran round the house, studying every step of the way he would take to it. Then, rolled in his blanket, he slept for four hours.

At midnight he was climbing through a pantry window which he had opened with his big clasp knife.

The inside of the house was very dark, for the night was cloudy. His first act was to unlock and unbolt the outer door of the kitchen, which opened into a short passage, and the back door at the end of that passage. Then he went down the back hall to the main part of the house. Heavy curtains hung between the two halls; and parting them gently, he put his head through. He saw a blazing flash of a myriad stars; and | knew no more.

When he began to come to himself, he hovered for a while, in an aching unconsciousness, dimly aware of voices; then of a sudden he could hear, and see, and understand plainly. His head was very sore; he was gagged, and he could not move. He opened his eyes and found himself bound in a chair in the kitchen, which was brightly lighted by a score of candles. A little boy of about twelve, in a blue sleeping suit, sat at the table before him very busy. At the grate beyond stood a little girl in a blue dressing-gown, thrusting a poker into the hottest part of the fire, which was beginning to burn fiercely. There was a stench of paraffin on the air. His eyes wandered from one to the other; then he saw that the little boy was hard at work sharpening the ends of safety matches with a table-knife, and dropping them into a slop-basin. A dismantled lamp, standing beside it, suggested to him that it held the paraffin he smelt. On the other side of the table lay an eighteen-penny life-preserver.

"Are those matches finished yet? This poker is very slow," said the little girl in a high, excited voice.

"They're not matches! They're splinters! Indians don't have matches, stupid!" said the boy, in a voice uncertain with the same thrill of excitement.

"That's three times you've called me stupid! If you call it me again I won't play! So there!" cried the little girl.

"Well, you shouldn't make silly mistakes. If you're a Red Indian, be a Red Indian," said the boy austerely He dropped another sharpened match into the paraffin, looked up and caught Jack's eye.

"He's come to," he said, rising; the little girl ran from the fire, and they stood before their prisoner in the full blaze of the candles.

They were pretty, clear-skinned, dark-haired children, with the parted lips and dreamy eyes of idealists, and their faces were shining in an intense; joyful excitement. The face of the little girl was like a face which Jack knew, but could not call to mind. They stared at him, and of a sudden the boy remembered his part. Portentous gloom spread over his face, and he said, "A fine, strong paleface, Black Bison. He will give us good sport."

The little girl thought for a moment, and then growled a little growl which Jack recognised, with a faint delight for all his aching head, as meant for that fine Fenimore-Cooperism, "Ugh!"

"He will give us good sport," she said in a gruff voice."

"A fine, strong paleface; but I dropped him in his tracks," said the boy.

"You dropped him in his tracks," said the little girl.

They then let fall the mask.

"I wish I could remember the proper order of the torture," said the little boy with an anxious frown.

"I tell you I'm positive we stick the matches—I mean splinters—in his cheeks first, and set light to them ; then we burn the soles of his feet .with the hot irons, and last we put live coals in his eye-sockets," said the little girl. She paused and added, "It seems a pity, though," he has very pretty eyes."

Jack's heart-beats quickened to her words.

"Now, there you go!— being a girl again!" said the boy angrily;

"I'm not! I'm― I'm Red Indian!" protested the little girl indignantly "When I'm a girl, I'm afraid of blood! Now, look here!" And she put, very gingerly, a finger into the thin bloodstream still oozing from Jack's broken head. "And mind, I'm going to have my fair share of torturing."

"Well, I'm going to begin. He's my prisoner. I dropped him in his tracks," said the boy, taking a match from the basin.

"Ladies first,'" said the little girl coldly.

"Not among Red Indians," said the boy, drawing near to Jack.

"Isn't it a pity we cant take the gag out of his mouth just a little, and hear him scream?" said the little girl wistfully.

"It would never do," said the boy quickly. "A burglar is quite ignorant, you know; he'd never understand that prisoners of Indians make a point of honour to be tortured without screaming; he'd wake the house."

"I don't know." said the little girl. "I should think he was quite a superior burglar. He's wearing a rose. But are you going to begin, or aren't you? We shall never get. to the live coals."

"All right," said the little boy, and coming up to Jack, he tried to stick the pointed match into his cheek. It slipped on the skin; he took hold of his hair, and with the better purchase, thrust it slowly in. The match hurt little, indeed; but Jack's blood ran cold. For the first time in his life probably— speechless and helpless in the hands of these little fiendish enthusiasts— fear gripped his heart. He bit on the linen in his mouth; he struggled against his bonds in vain.

"Mind! Mind! You're hurting his poor head where you knocked that hole in it!" cried the little girl.

"Don't make that row!" said the boy, drawing off. and surveying the projecting match with a loving eye. "His skin's tougher than I thought."

"It's my turn now!" cried the little girl, with joyous eagerness; and pressing her left hand against the back of Jack's head, very careful not to hurt his wound, she thrust in her match with infinitely greater dexterity than the boy.

"I don't find it tough. Boys' fingers are all thumbs," she said, faintly contemptuous.

Jack's wild suppliant eyes flew from one to the other. They did not see them; they were looking at the matches, panting, palpitating with the intense joy of realised ideals. The grip of fear tightened on his heart.

The little girl glanced at the fire, and cried: "Oh, the poker's splendidly red hot."

The handle of the door turned; the door opened; a charming voice, pleasantly expectant of amusement, said, "And what are you two little sinners doing now?" And a radiant vision dazzled Jack's eyes: a beautiful face framed a cloud of black hair that fell, waving, over the shoulders; a slender figure in a dressing gown unfastened at the top so that a white throat rose out of a nest of lace; wonderful, candid grey eyes.

It was the girl he had rescued from the tramps; and his chilled heart burned with a shame as strange to it as the fear.

"Oh!" she gasped, at the sight of the bound figure, the white face, and the bloody head.

"There!" said the boy in a tone of deep disgust. It's all up! Ernestine is always spoiling our fun!"

"She always does— always— the only prisoner we ever tortured!" said the little girl mournfully, almost in a whimper.

"Prisoner? Torture? Fred! Dulcie! what is it? What are you doing?" cried the girl, with a scared face.

She came a step nearer, and recognised him; a wave of colour, flowed over her cheeks; she put her hands over her bare throat and cried, "Why! why! It's Mr. Feather...! it's the man who saved me from the tramps!" She ran to him with a little sob of pity, saw the matches in his cheeks; turned on the children with flaming eyes.

"You cruel, heartless, abominable little wretches!" she cried in a terrible, low voice.

"I knew that's how it would be," said Fred, in a very despondent tone, looking at Dulcie.

"Unloose him at once!" said Ernestine.

Sulkily, grumbling that it would be her fault if all their throats were cut.

Fred set about cutting the cords, while Ernestine drew the linen gag from his mouth. It unfolded into the sleeve of a little nightgown, and Dulcie stood with her left arm behind her back.

"Oh, you are a horrid little creature!" said Ernestine, and tossed it to her. The cords fell. Jack, in a revulsion from his fear, swayed limply forward, and fainted.

When he came to, brandy and food were on the table; Ernestine gave him to eat and drink, her eyes filled with an terrible pity. He could not meet them; they were touching strings in his heart that had never been touched before. The brandy set the blood flowing in his veins; and he said to the children, "You wicked little monsters! If you begin by torturing human beings, you'll come to torturing cats and dogs, or even helpless rabbits who can neither scratch nor bite."

"But we were Red Indians; and Red Indians do. Besides, we didn't know you were the man who beat the tramps," said Fred.

"Well, I beg you won't do it again. I'm not a Red Indian, though I fancy I must be rather red," said Jack with poor gaiety.

"I must bind your head up at once! It must be terribly painful!" said Ernestine. And presently she was washing away the blood from his hair with very tender fingers. She rolled her handkerchief into a pad, dipped it in cold water, and pressed it to the wound; then she said to him. "Oh dear, I've no bandage! And I daren't go through the house again. Oh— I know. Hold the handkerchief tight to your head, and don't move."

She took the knife, stooped down behind him; he heard a long, tearing rip, and she rose with a long strip of cambric in her hand, with a fine scarlet in her face— she had torn off the border of her nightgown. She bound the handkerchief firmly over the wound with very skilful fingers,

Her task was done: Jack's head . throbbed still; but his blood flowed no more. Then a change came upon her; she drew away from him with an unquiet movement, and walked round to the other side of the table. She looked at him with eyes filled with a divine pity and a very bitter reproach; and, as she looked, something broke : in him. Unstrung, by loss of blood, to the acutest sensitiveness, he felt, in a horror, his eyes filling with tears, and cried, "Don't! don't look at me like that! What have I done to you?"

"How could you?" she said, with a sob; she had not heard him. "A thief prowling in the night."

"Don't!" he said, in a strange, strained voice. "Don't shame me before these children!"

"Oh, it is a shameful thing!" she cried. "To-day you played the man; to-night you have done this."

He rose to his feet unsteadily, and said hoarsely, "I won't be talked to like this by a chit of a girl! I have played the man: I have gone my own way, on my lone, beholden to no one! What I have wanted, that I have taken; and no one has stayed me. I have fought a fight against all the forces of invincible society; and I have won. I have played the man!"

"I am a chit of a girl, I know," she said, and her piercing eyes were flames searing his heart. "And— and —I can't say what I feel. But your being a man—and brave— and strong and able to do anything, makes it worse. It does! And you know it does!— A thief prowling in the night. Oh, how you have hurt me!" A dry sob shook her.

The two children gazed amazed at these inexplicable emotions of their elders.

Jack stared at her, raging, furious; but his eyes could not beat hers down. Slowly his look changed to a savage supplication; it forsook her, wandered round the room, and came back to her. Then he dropped heavily into his chair, and hid his face in his hands. A silence, broken presently by a single rasping, tearing sob from him.

At the sound of it Dulcie burst into a loud crying; ran to him, put a little arm round his neck, and sobbed, "Don't cry, Mr. Burglar!— please don't cry.' She glared at her sister and said, "Oh! what a beast you are, Ernestine! You called me cruel— and you're worse; you've hurt him m-m-m-more than hun-hun-hundreds of red-hot pokers!"

"I think burglars are fine!" said Fred, in a loud, but thick voice. "They're not thieves! And they don't prowl in the night! And you're a liar, Ernestine! You know you are!"

Ernestine did not hear them; she stood in a torture, twisting her hands, her eyes glued to the bowed head.

Dulcie stroked his hair, glowering at her sister. Fred feigned a sudden discovery of a black beetle in a corner; he seemed to be killing it loudly with sniffs.

Presently Jack got his control; put Dulcie very gently away from him; his contorted face twisted into a thin smile; and he said in jerks, "You're a dear little girl— but your sister— is right. I haven't played the man —I've been a damned, blind fool— a― a thief prowling in the night." He rose, and bent on Ernestine unshrinking, honest eyes: "But by the grace of by the grace of— Ernestine— I'll play the man yet."

He moved towards the door; and as Fred ran to open it, he turned with a sudden bright flame in his eyes that sent once more the impression of his extraordinary manliness tingling down her nerves, and said, "I shall come back in a year, and a day—a man— to —to—apologise."

At the opening of the door the heat of her indignation died out of Ernestine's heart; she felt very cold and sick; and as he turned on the threshold to look his last look at her, by no will in the world of her own she made a step towards him. He took a longer step towards her; for a breath his lips were very close to hers; and she could not, for the life of her, have put up a hand to ward them off. But he jerked himself upright and away; moved backwards on dragging feet, his eyes set intense on her face to the door, over the threshold; turned on his heel in the darkness of the passage; and was gone.

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5: The Carling Cure

The Strand Magazine Dec 1907

THE TWO MEN facing one another across the white and gleaming table presented an uncommonly complete contrast. Halliburton, big, long-limbed, sleek, with the full-fed air of the self-indulgent, was the very type of the Man about Town. Presently his face would grow puffy and bloated, its florid complexion would fade, the nose would thicken, the chin would crease under the heavy jaw, the skin would sag into pouches under the eyes; at the moment he was in the very ripeness of his sleek, hot-house perfection. An idler with ten thousand a year, with no taste for sport or travel, for nearly ten years intrigue had been the main pursuit of his life. It had been a panorama of love affairs, mostly discreditable.

His host, Mr. Carling, was of a very different type. Slight, with clean-cut, small features, lean head, and arresting grey eyes, of a pallor almost ascetic, he looked the man of taste and intelligence report, held him to be.

Halliburton would not have been dining with him but that, loafer as he was, on the pursuit of his life he could spend infinite pains. He believed himself to be in love with Elsie Browning, Mr. Carling's married daughter; and he believed her to be falling in love with him. He had, therefore, accepted her father's invitation to dine quietly with him, boring as such a dinner must be, with alacrity. An acquaintance with her father was likely to give him further opportunities of meeting the daughter.

But the dinner had by no means been the tiresome affair Halliburton had looked to find it. His host had neither wearied him with matters intellectual, nor, enthusiastic collector of Oriental china as he was, with talk of his hobby. He had talked to him as one man of the world to another, keeping the conversation on the subject in which his guest showed himself to be chiefly interested— women. Mr. Carling had not talked much himself, indeed: but he had proved to be an uncommonly appreciative and stimulating listener. Halliburton could always talk well on that subject, and he knew, it. But he had never before known himself so brilliant and illuminating. Mr. Carling's unflagging interest and pregnant suggestions had led him to surpass himself. In his self-satisfaction he felt very kindly towards the old man.

After the butler had brought in the coffee and they had lighted their cigars there came a break in their talk. Halliburton stretched out his long legs with a sigh of luxurious content, for he had dined very well; and the coffee and the cigars were of the proper crowning excellence. He fell into the pleasant, musing mood such a dinner induces, and Elsie Browning's beautiful face, faintly flushed to the tenderness in his tones, as he had seen it in the firelight the evening before, was present to his mind with a very vivid clearness. He assured himself that things were going his way:

Absorbed in his musing, he was but dimly aware that his host-rose, went' quietly to a cabinet on the other side of the room, opened a drawer, and took something from it". But the click of a lock roused him, and he turned his head to see Mr. Carling draw the key of the door of the room from the keyhole and slip it into his pocket.

He started in his chair. Mr. Carling turned quickly and said, in his gentle, precise voice, "Please, sit still, or I shall shoot you."

The electric light glimmered on the barrel of a revolver. Halliburton sat. still; but he sat upright.

"I have fired over a thousand shots from this revolver during the last fortnight, and you would be surprised how accomplished in its use I have grown," said Mr. Carling in an agreeable tone. "I could hit you anywhere. It is a really, trustworthy weapon. The advertisements describe it as 'thoroughbred'— an odd epithet to apply to a revolver, don't you think? And if you do stir, I will shoot you in the stomach― three times. My doctor assures me that some of the complications from such wounds produce excruciating pain."

Halliburton was by now believing his ears. He stared at his host with amazed eyes. There was an undertone of grim resolve in Mr. Curling's gentle, voice that chilled him; his eyes, burning with the glow of a smouldering fire, were even more chilling.

Still covering Halliburton with the revolver, Mr. Carling sat quietly down in his chair and laid on the table a Louis Quinze snuff-box.

"It would disarrange my life very much to shoot you, as you doubtless feel, Mr. Halliburton," he continued in the same even tones. "The action would doubtless he ascribed to homicidal mania, due to my failing faculties, and I should be put under restraint. But I am a rich man and I have no doubt that my captivity could be made tolerable— tolerable."

"B-b-but what s it all a-b-b-bout?" stammered Halliburton.

"Ah, you find me garrulous, I see. But you must make allowances for age. We old men love to prattle like children. None the less I have been speaking to the point. I am trying to make it clear to you that you are going to do exactly as I tell you, or I will shoot you. Do you grasp that fact?"

The undertone of menace suddenly rose dominant and insistent.

"Yes— yes— but what's it all about?" said Halliburton huskily, with a sinking heart.

"I am coming to that," said Mr. Carling; and his tone was again careless and agreeable. "I am an old man. Mr. Halliburton; and old men have their weaknesses. They lack the robust selfishness of young men like yourself. My weakness— one of my weaknesses— is my daughter."

There came a sharp, gasping sigh from Halliburton.

Mr. Carling paused, with an air of polite interest, for him to speak. But he said nothing; his dread was crystallised by the word, and a cold chill ran down his spine.

"For some time I have observed with a distaste you would hardly understand, that you have been making love to my daughter," said Mr. Carling. "I have observed it with some uneasiness, too. Elsie is a charming creature— the tribute of your admiration proves it. But, what with his companies and his politics, Browning is a very busy man, and he is somewhat neglectful of her. But he is a good fellow, as you know, since you are his friend. And I believe Elsie to be very fond of him. Also, there, is the boy. But still there was the neglect; and your assiduity made me uneasy, for, as you know, you have the masterful, conquering air— not at the present moment, perhaps." He paused and considered Halliburton's white face and strained posture with a smile of quiet appreciation. "Well, I made up my mind to satisfy myself whether I had real grounds for that uneasiness; and, if I had, to remove them— to remove them."

The last three words came in a tone of cold resolution, which rang very sinister in Halliburton's ears. He shivered. He strove not to feel that his host had pronounced sentence of death.

"You have satisfied me, Mr. Halliburton, "that the grounds of my uneasiness were very real indeed,'" said Mr. Carling; and his voice had assumed a tone of severity, the tone of a judge summing up. "Your exposition of your methods of assault was masterly in its lucidity— the exposition of a man who knows his subject thoroughly. You have convinced me, too, that you are no mere theorist, but a past master of the practice of your art; that your persistent appeal to a woman's weakness, her emotional craving for the more demonstrative, caressing form of affection, is, in nine cases out of ten, irresistible."

Halliburton ground his teeth. A dull fury at his self-revealing folly mingled with his fear.

"Therefore, I am going to remove you," said Mr. Carling.

He paused to gaze steadily into Halliburton's raging eyes, and held them. Halliburton knew well that his one chance was to spring on the old man and wrench the revolver from him. He knew that it was a good chance, that in the sudden flurry it was odds on the old man's missing him. He could not stir. It was not the revolver that held him, it was the personality behind it. His eyes fell dully to the glimmering barrel. He waited— quivering, tortured, clammy with cold sweat— for the spurt of flame and the crack.

"'However, I do not propose to shoot you out of hand, unless you insist on it," said Mr. Carling, with a return to his suave, agreeable tones. "My intention is to put the matter to the arbitrament of what is called the American duel. I do not know why it is called the American duel, since the true American duel is fought with revolvers. Perhaps a Frenchman gave it the name. The procedure  as you are doubtless aware, is that either of the combatants swallows a pill. One of the pills contains poison; the other is innocuous. Here are the two pills."

As he opened the snuffbox with his left hand and turned the pills on to the table a gasping groan of relief burst from Halliburton. There was yet a chance of life.

"You lady-killers do not seem very brave outside your profession," said Mr. Carling with gentle contempt. "This drug produces exactly the same symptoms as the toadstool, which kills those people who eat it under the impression that it is a mushroom. You will remember that we have eaten mushrooms this evening. One of us, therefore, will die of mushroom poisoning— a quite natural death. Which of the pills will you have? I will give you the choice."

He rolled the two pills across the table.

Halliburton stared at the two little white balls with starting eyes, striving to detect some discoloration, some irregularity of shape which might show him which contained the drug. They danced before his eyes. By a violent effort of will he steadied his gaze. He could see no difference between them; their likeness was hideous to him. He picked up the farthest from him with fumbling, trembling fingers, and rolled the other back across the table.

Mr. Carling picked it up with his left hand, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it. Halliburton tried to swallow his, but it stuck in his throat. His mouth was very dry. He snatched up a glass in which was left a mouthful of champagne, and drank it. The pill went down. It struck him that the champagne had very quickly gone flat.

"The die is cast," said Mr. Carling with gentle cheerfulness.

The two men stared at one another.

Then, in the same gentle, precise voice, with the same meticulous choice of words. Mr. Carling said, "The action of the poison begins about ten minutes after it is taken, with violent cramp— very painful, I believe. The spasms grow more and more violent, racking, as it were, the life out of the sufferer, who eventually dies of exhaustion. I was unable to chose a less painful method of removing you, though your mere removal was all I cared about, for I wished to produce the appearance of mushroom poisoning."

"Shut up, you old devil! Can't you?" cried Halliburton violently.

"I feared you would be unable to brace yourself to die like a gentleman," said Mr. Carling, with gentle contempt.

Halliburton sat with his eyes on the table cloth, his hands clenched, the nails driven into the palms, all his being concentrated in an effort to perceive the first working of the poison. His senses seemed stimulated to an extraordinary, morbid acuteness of perception. The ticking of the clock was a burden. It hammered on his ears. Now and again he raised his fearful eyes to its face, and then turned them on his adversary, in a feverish hope to see his lips twisting with pain.

Mr. Carling was watching him with quiet interest.

Five interminable minutes ticked themselves away with irritating clamour. Every tick jarred Halliburton's nerves.

Then Mr. Carling said, "Perhaps I may tell you now that both the pills contained exactly the same amount of the drug."

A slow, deep flush spread over Halliburton's face as he stared at him with unbelieving eyes. It faded, leaving his skin a dead, lustreless white.

"You fiend! You horrible old fiend!" he said, in a hushed, breathless voice.

"If you had called me vermin-killer, now," said Mr. Carling, carelessly.

Halliburton fell back limp in his chair, and the tears welled to his eyes and rolled slowly down his cheeks. The feminine strain, the basic secret of his success with women, had its way with him. He looked no more at the clock; through misty eyes he saw the beautiful world, so full of pleasures, slipping away from him.

Sir. Carling laughed gently; and Halliburton wondered plaintively at his in human callousness.

"It must seem hard to a man who holds them so lightly to be carried off in his vigorous prime for the sake of a woman," said Mr. Carling with gentle sympathy.

"Curse women! Curse them!" said Halliburton fervently, through his set teeth, and an access of petulant, womanish fury dried his tears.

Of a sudden the first spasm of cramp took him, and drew from him a long-drawn whining moan of terror. Cramp succeeded cramp; he writhed in spasms of pain and fell from his chair to the floor. He rolled and writhed and squirmed, battling furiously against the spasms, but after a while he knew, as Mr. Carling had said, that they were racking the life out of him. He felt it ebbing. Then at last he felt that they were growing less violent, and knew that they had done their work.

He lay very still, exhausted. He could feel death creeping towards the strongholds of his body. Already his hands and feet were cold and numb. Snatches of his life came back to him in swiftly-moving pictures— childhood scenes, scenes from his boring schooldays, love scenes, dinners, poker hands, more love scenes, bridge hands, dances. He plunged into an unfathomable sorrow for himself.

Dimly, with dying eyes, he saw that Mr. Carling was standing over him. A sudden access of hatred of his murderer set the life in him flickering up. Then he was dully aware that Mr. Carling was kicking him in the ribs, and speaking in tones raised high to reach a dying man's intelligence.

"I think we've had enough of the farce," he was saying. "'You're not really poisoned at all, Mr. Halliburton."

To Halliburton his words came faint from far away; they did not concern him.

Again Mr. Carling kicked him in the ribs, and said, "You're not poisoned at all, you ass!"

Halliburton's glazing eyes lost their glaze. Then Mr. Carling, stepping back to get a better length for a kick, trod on his hand; and Halliburton realised that his extremities might be cold, but they were not numb.

Mr. Carling delivered the kick, and cried, with his first display of impatience, "Are you going to lie here all night? You young fellows are so inconsiderate. I want to be getting to bed!"

Halliburton began to understand his brain was grasping slowly the incredible fact of his safety. Very feebly he raised himself on his elbow, blinking at Mr. Carling.

Mr. Carling's voice sank to its wonted gentle tones and. smiling pleasantly, he said, "We have both had a dose— an equal dose— of phenolphthalein. I had prepared myself against it by taking three soda-mint tabloids— a simple remedy. Therefore it did not cause me the discomfort it seemed to cause you. Your contortions amazed me."

Very painfully, very feebly, Halliburton got on to, his feet and stood holding on to the table. His eyes were still faintly incredulous. Then came the full shock of the revulsion from hopeless dread to ecstasy of joyful relief. The tears came streaming from his eyes; and he cried like a woman, with loud, relieving sobs.

A faint compunction passed swiftly over Mr. Carling's face, leaving it wholly contemptuous. He wagged a finger at his weeping guest, and said, dryly, "Ah, you're a terrible fellow— a devil of a fellow, Mr. Halliburton! A sad dog— remarkably sad." He paused and surveyed the crumpled viveur with very scornful eyes. Then he added. "I think you're cured of your passion for my daughter, aren't you?"

Halliburton said nothing; he stared stupidly at him.

"Come, come, don't sulk!" said Mr. Carling sharply. "Is that how you take a joke? I bear no malice. Are you cured or aren't you?"

"Confound your daughter!" quavered Halliburton.

"I thought so— a perfect cure." said Mr Carling, with a chuckle. "The Carling cure for misplaced affection. Begad, I must advertise it!"

He walked to the door, unlocked it, and threw it open.

"Well, good night, Mr. Halliburton," he said, putting his hands in his pockets. "Thank you for a very pleasant and— er— yes— instructive evening. But I think, if I were you, I should leave town. I never could keep a joke to myself— never."

Halliburton made for the door, tottering and swaying.

"At any rate, I shall tell Elsie the joke," said Mr. Carling. "Very likely she will be angry with me; as you have demonstrated with your incomparable lucidity, women are emotional creatures. None the less she will laugh— heartily. She has a sense of humour." He paused, and added, pensively. "I think she gets it from me."

_________________

6: The Rejuvenation of Bellamy Grist

Los Angeles Herald  5 July 1908

THE operation was over, and it had been successful; Bellamy Grist's new heart was beating steadily. I went to the window called down to the reporters "Success!" and watched them dash into the temporary telegraph office on the other side of the road, to send the glad tidings to the anxious, waiting cities of the country that a new lease of life had been granted to America's noblest son, and the golden stream of his poetry would still flow. Then I breathed long and deeply and came back to the operating tables. My work was done; Glaisher and Tobin were putting the final touches to it; and I had leisure to look from the massive face of Bellamy Grist, pillowed in its leonine mane of snow-white hair, to the black, chinless, browless face of Moko the big chimpanzee whose heart now beat in the poet's body.

As I looked, to my surprise the chimpanzee's  ears twitched. He should have been dead an hour. In dismay I looked for Bellamy Grist's heart, the heart which was to be embalmed and deposited in the Pantheon, where should rest the relics of America's great dead. The very movement to build the Pantheon had been set on foot by Bellamy Grist's admirers, who could not endure that his splendid heart should lack a proper resting place; and now that idiot O'Driscoll, with his senseless love of practical joking, had replaced Moko's heart with it. What a fool I had been, brilliant surgeon as he was, to let him take part in the operation! He had, with Bekker's help taken out Moko's heart for me, and while I was absorbed in fixing it in Bellamy Grist, had put the poet's heart in its place.

"O'Driscoll, Where's Bellamy Grist's heart?" I said sharply.

He turned from the window from which he was watching with Bekker the struggle of the reporters, and said, "Sure, it's in Moko. Exchange Is no robbery, Hickman, me boy. And I'm thinking, too, that it's enjoying the new rich blood that it's pumping."

"But, confound you, what about the Pantheon?" I cried.

"It can go there later when the monkey dies, if It's built so soon. Science needed the converse of the operation," he said seriously enough.

That was true; and to the interests of science everything must give way: "Very well," I said firmly. "In that case you will take charge of Moko."

"I'll do that," he said.

Glaisher came across the room and shook my hand, saying, "Hickman R. Shafer, I congratulate you! In the name of American surgery I congratulate you. It was magnificent!"

"Congratulate Chicago, rather," I said. "My masters, Guthrie and Carrell, invented the operation. I'm only their pupil."

"You did it twenty minutes quicker than either Guthrie or Carrell. I've seen them," said O'Driscoll.

"That's so," said Tobin; and he and Bekker also shook hands with me and congratulated me.

I made another examination of Bellamy Grist; and we moved him into his bedroom. Then I went down stairs to my wife, Bellamy Grist's daughter. Her face lighted up at the sight of me, and she stepped hastily forward, kissed me on the brow, and said In a choked voice, "Oh, Hickman, my glorious Hickman, you have given me back a father! But more— oh, far more— you have given back to the greatest of the nations its noblest son!"

"That's so, little girl. If all goes well," I said.

"It will! I feel it will! And oh, how doubly blessed am I to be the daughter of a genius and the wife of a genius! You will be world-famous!"

"Yes, Editha; I guess American surgery will go up one," I said.

She blinked; and I thought that, as often, it was at the idiomatic phrase; but then she sighed and said, "If only it had not been a monkey's heart in my splendid father."

I have always recognized that she is the high-souled, ethereal daughter of a poet, and I said soothingly, "Well, it was a choice of evils. And after all a heart is only a muscle; It's not like a brain; it can't do him any harm."

"No, no; of course not. Still I can't help feeling it. If only it could have been the heart of some brave, simple young Westerner!" she said, clasping her hands.

"No young Westerner applied," I said. "And if one had the law might have kicked up a fuss. But I must get back to your father."

I kissed her and went upstairs; I was thankful that she had not spoken of her father's old heart. I wanted time to think over breaking the truth about it to her.

FOR SOME DAYS she was busy with the sacks of congratulatory letters and telegrams brought to the house by the postal wagons, and cutting out and pasting into large volumes the eulogiums of the Press on Bellamy Grist and myself. O'Driscoll smuggled Moko away as soon as he could be moved; and she was not even aware that the chimpanzee was alive. O'Driscoll had bidden me good-bye and taken a few steps toward the depot when he turned and said "Suppose the heart is the seat of the emotions after all, Hickman, me boy?"

"Not on your life." l said.

Bellamy Grist made a wonderful recovery. The powerful heart of Moko drove the blood in full flood through his veins, and every other organ took on a new lease of life. The years seemed to fall off him; and I had the satisfaction of having given to my country probably a score more years of her noblest son's activity. The Press took the closest warmest interest in his recovery; and his first egg, and even more, his first steak, received an extraordinary meed of recognition.

His recovery was helped considerably by his excellent spirits; he was frequently the prey of fits of child-like glee. At first this startled us, since, as every one knows, before the operation, a great seriousness had been the keynotes of Bellamy Grist's character no less than of his work. I soon grew used to it; but Editha did not She found it hard to adjust herself to this change in her father, since his intense seriousness had been the quality in him she cherished most. One day, indeed, after he had playfully tweaked off his nurse's cap, she came up to me in tears and said, "I have always known, of course, that my father has a wide humanity; but these manifestations of its humorous side, coming so late in life, jar upon me as undignified after his strenuous past. Tell me, Hickman, do you— do you think they are preliminary symptoms of his second childhood?"

I assured her that I had never known an old man less senile than her father.

In other ways, too, he showed this change to youth. His favourite reading had been our serious monthly and quarterly reviews; now he would not look at them himself, nor let Editha read them to him. His taste was all for light literature of the humorous kind, or for records of tropical travel.

I came in one evening towards the end of his convalescence to find that one of our brightest publishers, Richard P. Blick, had been down to see him about his next volume of poems. I was somewhat vexed, for my father-in-law had always been somewhat ineffectual in money matters, and had always made poor bargains with his publishers. It was not likely that he had made a better one on a sick bed. I went upstairs to him, and when I made sure that the visit had not tired him, I said, "So Blick has been down to see you about your next book."

With a grin, which, on anyone else's face I should have called mischievous, he drew a check out of his writing case and handed it to me: It was for fifty thousand dollars!

"Blick talked of fifteen thousand," said Bellamy Grist, and— could I believe my eyes?— he winked. Yes; Bellamy Grist winked!

A few days later he was about again, and we became fully alive to the changes in him. The renewal of his youth, it was indeed almost a renewal of his boyishness, was amazing— sometimes it was very trying. He had been of a distinctly sedentary habit before the operation, spending nearly the whole day in his study. Now he was full of a boyish restlessness, wandering continually from room to room, and spending hours roaming about the woods. Before, he had always been of a grave seriousness; now, he was vivacious; he would even sometimes josh Editha. He began to show a distressing fondness for practical jokes. I observed other changes, too, in his tastes. Before, he had been passionately partial to pie; indeed, I had always believed that pie was chiefly to blame for the failure of his heart; now, he preferred fruit and salads and sweets. In the matter of sweets he was voracious. He seemed to grow more boyish every day.

We were not the only people to notice the changes in him, or indeed, to find them trying. I observed that his admirers, who came by scores to listen to his glorious words, no longer came from their interviews with uplifted, transfigured faces; they looked puzzled and glum. The neighbours, too, before so proud of his dwelling in their midst, now that they sometimes suffered from his practical jokes, began to look at him uneasily. His old friends, America's greatest thinkers and litterateurs, after a while ceased to congratulate us on the wonderful renewal of hi B youth.

These changes in his character were not accompanied by any diminution in his intellectual force; I thought myself that his intellect had grown, if anything, keener and more discerning. He was not working at his new volume with the old steady industry— I have known him write six hundred lines  of poetry in an afternoon— he worked at it fitfully.

He had lost interest, too, in the biography, once his pride, which Editha was writing of him. Curiously enough I liked him far more than I had in his serious days, in spite of my being a serious, scientific man myself; we were now much closer friends. I did not, indeed, see so much of him as I had done, for I was often away from home performing the heart-transference operation in every part of the country. Indeed, my services were so much in demand that there was a run on the greater Simians, the price of them had risen sixty per cent, and Rogers, the purveyor to menageries, was forced to fit out two large expeditions to Africa to supply my patients. Our leading financiers, society women, actors, politicians, and divines were getting me to replace their hearts worn out by our strenuous American life.

Thus I was prevented from observing continuously the youthful changes in my father-in-law; and it was nearly five months after the operation that I became seriously uneasy about them. Then a possibility at once so astounding and uncomfortable that I dismissed it at once as an idle fancy, flashed upon me. I was working in my study and Bellamy Grist was walking up and down it with the boyish restlessness now habitual to him. I raised my eyes from my notes and observed that he wore a very absent-minded air, and his lips were moving as if he were engaged in composition. Suddenly as I looked, without any change in his musing face, plainly without any conscious effort of will, he leapt up sideways, caught the curtain rod with his right hand, and came bang down on the floor, bringing the snapped rod and the curtain on the top of him; and I had had a flashing, fleeting, but vivid impression of a leaping monkey. Even as he picked himself up, with a very sheepish air, and rubbed his knees, I thrust the fancy from me and assured myself that it was only his wonderful boyishness.

The impression kept recurring; but I thrust it away and refused to let it annoy me. Two days later it was strengthened indeed. I was strolling through the woods with him when he made another of those sudden leaps, caught the lower branch of a tree, swung, gave himself a curious jerk, and dropped in an oddly foolish ways on his hands and knees. He looked round with an air of strange surprise, rose, shook his leonine mane of snow-white hair on one side, looked behind him curiously, and said, "I thought I'd got a tail. Dodgast it, Hickman! Why haven't we tails?"

I gasped. Then he laughed a forced laugh and pretended he had been joking. I accepted the pretence; but when I reached home I locked myself in my study and faced the situation. There was no doubt that Bellamy Grist had acquired along with the heart, something of Moko's disposition; with him nothing could be done; but how did I stand to my patients still awaiting the operation? At first it seemed to me that I ought to warn all of them of these new results of it. I took the list of name) and dates out of the drawer, to write them; and it pulled me up short. There were two famous divines, a great but honest lawyer, a professor of Harvard, and a leading actor, about whom there could be no doubt; they were servants of the American people, doing good work; they must be told and choose for themselves. On the other hand there were two Wall Street operators, the head of a great, well-water trust, throe leading politicians, and five leaders of society in New York and Chicago. It was plain that the characters of these could not but benefit by the admixture of some natural monkey; and I resolved In their case to preserve a beneficial silence and operate.

For the next few weeks I watched Bellamy Grist closely, and now that my mind was on the right tack, I saw many more signs of the influence of Moko. I came to the conclusion that the influence was merely in his sentiments and emotions; his brain power was as strong as ever. He finished his volume of poems and despatched it to his editor. Editha was hurt, and I think deeply hurt, though she was too high-souled to complain, by the fact that he had not shown her a single poem in it. Before she had been his constant confidante and advisor in matters poetical, and had always striven, for, like Homer, he sometimes nodded, to keep him at his highest level of grave seriousness.

A few days later I suffered another shock. I was walking in our little town with him when a mulatto woman passed us. He gripped my arm and cried, "Good heavens. Hickman! What a beautiful creature! What features!"

It was the Simian type that appealed; and my blood ran cold. I turned and fairly dragged him along homewards.

We had just reached home one day after another walk, and were entering the house, when the sound of hurried footsteps made me pause and turn my head. A dapper little man with a very pale face, carrying a package under his arm. was opening the garden gate.

"Hello, here's Blick," said Bellamy Grist; and I caught a ring of discomfort in his tone.

The publisher skipped up to us in the hall and without a word or greeting cried, "Mr. Grist! What does this mean? What does this mean?"

"What does what mean?" said Bellamy.

"This book— this dreadful book!" cried the publisher.

"What's the matter with the book?" said Bellamy Grist cheerfully; and he opened the door of his study and we all went in.

"The matter! The matter!" cried Blick, slamming the package down on the table and beginning to strip off the wrappings. "We bought a volume of serious poetry from you; and this is humorous! It must be humorous! All our readers think it's humorous!"

"Well, if this doesn't beat the Dutch!" said Bellamy Grist. "It's nothing of the kind."

Blick turned over the leaves of the MS. quickly, and cried, "But— but this 'Ode to a Ripe Banana!' And— this poem, 'The Joy of Nuts!' And— and— this one, 'Up a Tree!' And this one— where is it?— here— 'Freedom'— all about freedom from the— from insects!"

"Well, what's the matter with them? They're all right!" said Bellamy Grist tartly.

"But we didn't want this kind of thing! We wanted poetry— serious poetry— the— the noble sort of stuff the American market expects from you."

Bellamy Grist grinned at him, an angry grin that bared his teeth, and said in a rising voice, "Ah, if you'd only told me so, I'd have told you I wasn't writing any more of that trash. Why, I can't read my previous volumes!" He snatched one out of the shelf and banged it down beside the MS.

"They're all about nothing at all. But this is all right; this is the real thing. I've always said that poetry should be the expression of genuine emotion; and this new volume is the expression of genuine emotion. Take this 'Ode to a Ripe Banana' and compare it with my 'Ode to a President.' A president is not like that, and nobody ever felt about him like that. But a ripe banana is like this; and I feel about It just like this— every healthy human being must. Besides a ripe banana is a beautiful thing, and a proper subject for poetry; a president Is not a beautiful thing and a proper subject for poetry. And this 'Freedom' again— have you ever in the summer been troubled by a flea?"

"What!" screamed Blick above Bellamy Grist's thunderous roar. "Are you seriously defending this dreadful poetry? Have you no care for your splendid reputation— for— for the great success you have had in the American market?"

"Oh, they're all right," said Bellamy Grist.

"They're not all right! And we won't publish this book! It won't sell! You must refund the fifty thousand dollars! We'll bring an action against you to recover It!" howled Blick.

"You make me tired," said Bellamy Grist scornfully. "Go and look at our agreement. I'll bring an action against you if you don't publish it."

The wretched Blick wiped the sweat from his clammy brow, and walked up and down, muttering; then he said bitterly, "Well, we've been done by America's noblest―"

"Say that, and I'll kick you out of the house!" roared Bellamy Grist, advancing on him briskly.

Blick curled up: "No, no, Mr. Grist! I— I— may be wrong! Perhaps I'm not a Judge of poetry. It's a new break for the firm. Perhaps you're right. After all there's the vegetarians— they're fond of reading." And he snatched up the MS., backed out of the door and slammed it in the wrathful poet's face.

"It's a new break for me, too," said Bellamy Grist.

I did not dare tell Editha of the character of the new volume any more than I had dared tell her of the effect of Mokos heart on her father's nature. I watched him more closely, trying to observe if that effect was increasing; I fancied that in the matter of a love of mischief it was. Some of his pranks were outrageous, and I found that he was on the best of terms with all the bad boys of the neighbourhood. I believed, indeed, that he was the instigator of their bolder fights.

Then came the domestic climax. One morning at breakfast Editha said. "Surely the embalmers are very long fixing up father's heart. They've had it five months."

"The embalmers haven't got it. They can't have it till Moko dies," I said in as matter of fact a tone as I could assume.

"What do you mean?" gasped Editha.

"Well, O'Driscoll replaced Moko's heart by your father's. He felt that science needed the converse of the operation."

"But— but— my father's heart— the splendid heart of Bellamy Grist— this Is desecration!" cried Editha.

"Worn out poet's hearts are no great shakes," said Bellamy with a chuckle. Then he added, "I'm thinking. Editha, that that biography you're writing for me should branch off at the operation and continue with Moko."

Week by week his boyishness grew more trying. It seemed as if he spent all his time, except when he was writing poetry, plotting or executing wild pranks. We were relieved, though we were very anxious about how he should behave, when the Society of American Litterateurs invited him to help entertain a great French writer, with a view to confronting their guest with the serious, earnest American spirit in its most perfect expression, and he left us for a fortnight.

I watched the papers anxiously; but plainly he was restraining his mischievous spirit, for the event passed off without a scandal. At the end of a fortnight he came back with the astounding intelligence that he was off to Paris. The old Bellamy Grist had always proclaimed that the true American poet must never weaken his grip on the American spirit by enervating contact with effete Europe. This recantation was a great shock to Editha, and I expect to most of his admirers.

After he had gone we were both happier. It was a rest for us. Then he wrote that he was going to settle down In Paris for a year or two, and asked me to manage his money and remit his income. I agreed thankfully.

But always there loomed ominously ahead the publication of his book of which I had never dared to speak to Editha. I was out when her advance copy of it came, and when I returned I found her in tears. I tried to comfort her; but it was no use; she said sobbing that her father had destroyed forever his splendid success. For the next two days she went about the house mourning. Then came the day of the book's publication and the appearance of the reviews. When I came to breakfast I found her sitting in the midst of a heap of newspapers and magazines. To my surprise she was flushed and smiling and there were tears In her eyes.

"How could I have been so foolish?" she cried. "I missed the true inwardness of my father's book utterly. The High Thinker says that it shows a poetic insight into the cosmic soul unsurpassed in literature. The Cultured American says that he is the greatest allegorist the world has ever known. Of course there are scoffers"— she frowned— "but they are only superficial and blind— souls in whom the mystic meaning of the universe awakens no response. My father's renewal of youth has trebled his great success. He is in truth to-day America's 'noblest soul.' "

I was a little dazed to hear that the cultured were filling themselves up cheerfully with the sentiments of Moko took me aback.

Editha tore herself away from the tributes to her father's genius, and we began breakfast. She opened some of her letters; and then I was startled by a sudden cry from her. Her face was full of horror and dismay, and she said, "My father is married! Bellamy Grist has married a French woman! He has married that!!" and she tossed a photograph across the table to me.

I have never seen a lady of a more Simian type.

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7: Jerry Bilder's Mistake

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld.) 30 Nov 1898

IT SEEMED from his face and figure his name must be Prosser, but it was not; his name was Jerry Bilder— Jeremiah Bilder. As he came out of the public house, he wiped his mouth and thick, stubby moustache, and gazed down the street with the bright confidence of a man who has all the world before him. He fell into the stream of people flowing towards Waterloo station; and it was plain that he was an observer, a furtive observer of men.

At Waterloo station he had taken a ticket for Epsom, and was coming out of the booking-office when a hoarse voice said: "Wot cheer, Jerry!"

He turned to face two gentlemen whose names seemed plainly Prosser, but he said to them, "'Ello, Warty? 'Ello Scotty!"

"All on your own, Jerry? You'd better come along of hus," said the gentleman whose excrescent fingers gave him a plain right to the name of Warty.

"I'm there," said Jerry, heartily. "Nosey Ricketts 'e was a-comin' with me; but 'e was copped las' night at the 'Orns Kennington. Six months 'ard for a J's watch it'll be. But I says to myself I'll find a good old pel or two down there. You an' me, an' Scotty, we ought to do a bit of biz."

"'E was a Juggins, a J," sang Warty gaily with one eye shut.

The three gentlemen were uncommonly alike in the checked pattern of their trousers, the dirtiness of their shirts, the gilded labels round their cigars, and a certain fragrance of beer that enhaloed their heads. They straggled to the refreshment bar; Jerry did the honours, and Warty cheered the draught with the sentiment: "Beer for Business, Scotch for Pleasure."

Scotty, a big raw-boned Scotchman, seemed a silent person. They travelled down to Epsom together, and. walked to the course, very genial, bubbling over with the milk of human kindness; but an hour later they stood, ugly and disconsolate, at the gate of the ten-shilling ring, and Warty was speaking:

"We must chance it, so fork out the three bob, Scotty. There ain't a mug worth troubling about outside.

"Jerry's the man; 'e 'as the most gentlemanly wyes of us three ; I admits it freely; an' 'e'll do best for us in the ring."

Scotty drew, reluctantly three shillings from his pocket, Warty three, and Jerry, who was to have the fun, four. He bade them watch for him, and saying, "What do you think?" to Warty's last adjuration to make sure that the mug was going back by train, he went into the ring and resumed his furtive observation of his fellow men.

THE BIG RACE was over; he had marked down several likely persons who had drawn money, and he stood by a young couple, watching one of the lucky ones, when the young man, saying to the girl, "We must follow our luck, Kate,"' pulled from his trouser's pockets a handful of gold and notes, and laughed.

At the sight Jerry felt a sudden lively interest in this pair. He had been indifferent to them, almost contemptuous ; but now he turned to them with his best attention. The young man had a fresh face; a light overcoat too large fur him gave him a weedy air; the girl was a very pretty demure creature, with a beautifully developed figure, and brown mischievous eyes.

"From the country," thought Jerry, and turning, said to the young man with his florid, pot-house politeness, "Could you oblige me with a pencil, sir?"

The young man gave him a very keen glance that might have warned him, had not Jerry been bestowing a captivating smile of chivalrous admiration on the girl, said "Certainly," and gave him his pencil. Jerry marked the name of a horse on his card, and said, "I like a little bit of sportin' myself ; and when the Derby comes round, I shuts up' my shop an' gives all my hassistants a 'oliday, an' down I comes."

He beamed on the two of them. "I lose a few pounds by it. But what's a few pounds to a man in my position compared to 'ealth— 'ealth an' sport, sir?"

He thought it well to establish his position, and he established it with an air.

"Yes, of course," said the young man civilly, and looked at Jerry's hoots. They were not the boots of a prosperous tradesman.

"I 'eard you say as you'd 'ad a bit of luck," said Jerry, with unsuspicious frankness. "I've 'ad a bit myself, an' I've followed it up." He went on to tell them that he had backed a horse called Morland for the next race, which was untrue ; that he had heard that it was certain to win, which was true, and in the end, since he did not offer to put this money on for them, they made up their minds to back it.

"What will you have on it, Kate?" said the young man.

The girl wrinkled her pretty forehead and said, "Well, I've won twenty-three pounds. I think I'll have three pounds on this time." And she gave him the money. Jerry's eyes opened. If the girl had won twenty-three pounds, what had the young man? He offered to take care of her while the young man put the money on, and the young man slipped into the group round a bookmaker.

While he was gone, Jerry obtained the piece of information he required ; they were going back to London by train, and his heart grew warm within him. He talked to the girl with a paternal, admiring kindliness.

The young man came back, and said he had got eight to one about the horse; and they, watched the race together. When Morland won easily by two lengths, the girl dapped her hands with delight and laughed; and the young man slapped Jerry on the book, and cried, "By Jove, sir, that , was a rattling good tip!"

He hurried away to draw the money; and the girl thanked Jerry very prettily. When the young man came back, he gave the girl five five-pound notes, and while she was putting them away in same recess of her skirts, he held another out to Jerry, saying: " You must really take this, sir, for your fine tip."

Jerry took the note with an alacrity as inappropriate as his boots to a prosperous tradesman, and declared the young man was a sportsman after his own heart. They had a drink together; and for the rest of the afternoon Jerry's friendliness grew. The young people did not seem, indeed, to desire any friends; they had plenty to say to one another, and their talk ran on furnishing; there was a happy flush on the girl's cheeks, and the young man's eyes were bright and shining.

But Jerry kept running up against them; and his gratitude, excessive in a prosperous tradesman who had had a bit of luck, was almost picturesque.  Now and again he might have been seen regarding them from a distance, over the shoulders of ether sportsmen, with, the benevolent air of a proprietor― a proprietor of innocent, fattening lambs. He found time to go out and explain matters to Warty and Scotty; and to Warty's outcry against mixing business and a woman, he set forth that it was "fifty quid apiece," the amiable Scotchman only remarking, "Ah'll twist her —― throttle.

A little while before the last race Jerry's young couple left the course. They walked along briskly, arm in arm, affectionately oblivious of the crowd, and the three gentlemen followed them. At the station the eddying of the throng brought Jerry to the girl's side. It also brought Warty and Scotty; but Jerry did not introduce them, he did not seem, indeed, to know them; he talked of having escaped a lonely journey amongst strangers by chancing on his young friends.

There was inrush and, a scramble for seats when the train came in; when it left the station, there were only the five of them in the first-class  compartment. Jerry was congratulating the young pair at length on having so much room and being so comfortable, when Warty pulled out a pack of cards, and broke in, "What d'yer sye to a little gime of nap, genelmen, just to pass the time awye? Perhaps tho young lidy would like to tike a 'and too?"

"I'm agreeable; we're sportsmen all," said Jerry, heartily. "We've 'ad a bit of luck, me and my young friends, and we can do with a bit more."

The young man nudged the girl quickly with his elbow, and said after a pause, "Very well; I don't mind. But tho young lady will look on; .she will help me play my hand."

"Yes, yes," said Jerry. "It's too exciting for a lidy."

There was a shifting of seats which left Warty in the corner, the young man next to him, the girl next to the young man, and Jerry and Scotty. facing them. The young man pulled off his overcoat for a card-table with great readiness ; and had the three gentlemen been in a humour to notice trifles, they would have seen that he took off his weediness along with it.

They fixed shilling points, and had played for five minutes, the three gentlemen carelessly and nervously, the young man cool, making little jokes to the girl, when Jerry said, "This ain't a very sporting gime, gentlemen, let's have a few rounds at a fiver the trick."

"I'm agreeable," paid Warty; and the Scotchman mumbled an assent.

"No," said the young man, quietly; "this'll do."

"You surprise me," said Jerry in a sorrowful tone ; "I thought you was a sportsman. I've seed you win a 'andful of notes. Come"— his voice rose blustering— "show a bit of spirit. Don't go shiming me before these gentlemen; hout with your flimsies, and plye like a man."

"I'd like to see your fiver first," said the young man, quietly.

There was a pause for fully ten seconds, and the air of the carriage was of a sudden electric with storm. The mask fell from Jerry's face; he turned a very ugly, dangerous, bare-teethed beast, and snarled "Shut it! 'And over the boodle — quick, or you and yer tatt'll get bashed and chucked out of the trine!"

"Rats! Look out, Kate!" cried the young man, as Warty and the Scotchman threw themselves on him in a flash. Jerry clutched the girl; she twisted out of his arms with surprising strength, got to her feet, and as he rose, he did not know what happened, but as he phrased it some months later, when he came out of prison, "Somethin' like a 'arf-brick took me on the p'int of the jaw, an' knocked me silly."

It was the girl's fist. He went down like a log, senseless; and that was a pity; for he missed seeing and feeling her set one foot firmly on his face, and land the Scotchman, who was striking viciously at her lover's head, a terrific smash behind the ear. He missed seeing the Scotchman sink down with a grunt, and the young man, who had looked weedy, get Warty's throat in a grip of iron, and drive his head through the carriage window. He missed seeing the young man and the young girl, with flushed triumphant faces, shake hands, and then, remembering, throw their arms round one another and kiss.

When he came to himself, feeling faint and sick, his head very loose on his shoulders, he was first concious of a familiar feeling, as of handcuffs about his wrists. Then he saw the young man at the further end of the carriage binding up the girl's cut knuckles, and heard Warty groaning. He tried to move, only to discover that he and his two friends were bound by the wrists, with their own dirty handkerchiefs, in a helpless, vicious circle.

His movement drew the young man's attention.

"You've come to, my friend, have you?" he said in a brisk, cheerful voice, with an official ring in it that Jerry knew well. "Let me introduce ourselves; perhaps if I had done it before it would have prevented this little misunderstanding. I am Detective Inspector Ramsay, of the Birmingham police and this is my intended— alias Kate Morton, the lady champion middleweight, boxer."

Jerry lay quietly back; he felt that he had made a mistake.

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8: The Thing in the Two Pair Back

Armidale Chronicle (NSW) 4 Feb 1903

("Two pair back":  room at the back of the house on the second floor. Two pair refers to two flights of steps with a landing in between.)

EVERYONE in the house disliked Kantra Prasad with something of the instinctive loathing awakened in human hearts by ugly, noxious, creeping things. An oily young Babu with beady black eyes peering from under drooping lids, the look of him alone was of a kind to inspire distaste into the most easy-going; and his manners, or rather an atmosphere that always surrounded him, that seemed to move with him, deepened the distaste to a hatred.

The fact that he had never allowed her to enter his room since he had occupied it, filled our landlady with a thousand fears and suspicions; and she would not have suffered him to stay in the house, had she not spent the six months' rent which he had paid her in advance. Maria, the untidy, hard-worked servant, declared with an unaffected shudder that she couldn't "a-bear" him.

I distrusted him profoundly for his furtive air, his slinking movements, and the uneasy, gaol-bird glances he shot at me from his half-closed eyes whenever we met. But Dulcie Langton, the daughter of the decayed gentleman, who lived also on the second floor, loathed him with the whole-souled loathing of her fourteen years. She called him the "Poison-spider" and would wait half-an-hour to avoid the risk of passing him on the stairs. As she and I were great friends, her loathing of him strengthened my distrust and dislike.

He had beep in the house about a month when I noticed one day that he was changing― the olive tints in his brown face were growing a repulsive lighter green― and before I had made up my mind whether the change had been brought about by illness or mental trouble, I found myself with a very real grievance against him. I am a light sleeper, and if by any chance I am awakened in the night, I am long falling asleep again; four or five nights running I was suddenly aroused to find myself in an inexplicable midnight, fright and to hear nothing that could have aroused me. But I knew, I knew not how, that the awakening sound had come from the room above, the two-pair back, where Kantra Prasad lodged. And as sure as ever I fell asleep again, some snarling beast came into my dreams.

The day was cold I had grown stiff writing, and a sentence baffled me; the right word would not come. I rose mechanically, began walking off the stiffness; without thinking why I walked, stopped before the window, and was going vacantly out into the sleety drizzle, trying to rake the right word from some cranny of my mind, when I became aware that eyes were on me. It is an impression to which I am always sensitive, but this time it affected me with strong uneasiness. My absorption vanished, and I stared with all my intentness at the curtained window of the house opposite. I could see nothing, not even a vague outline that might pass for a head; but I could feel that the eyes were there, very troubling.

I drew back into the room out of sight, and watched with a curiosity, ever growing livelier, for a glimpse of the eyes whose gaze could so disquiet me. I had watched no little while, when, at the sound of a hansom rattling down the street, the curtains parted, and a face peered stealthily out of them down into it, with a savage eagerness― a lean, brown face, set in lank blade hair, and alive with wild eyes. It was no face for a commonplace London back-street.

"A friend of Kantra Prasad's," I said to myself, slipping into my chair to go on with my work.

I fell to it again; but I had lost my grip on it. The face behind the curtains of the house opposite kept coming into my mind. Worse still, I could feel the eyes from time to time resting on me. I was glad when the early dusk forced me to draw down the blind and bar them out. I closed the shutters as well. Even then I could not write; I kept speculating on the face, and thinking that I should like no one to he waiting for one with so sinister an impatience.

It was no use trying to go on with my writing, it would be bad, and I rose to fill my pipe. I had filled it, and was folding a spill, when I heard a smothered cry, a patter of footsteps, and a flutter of skirts down the stairs; the door was jerked open, and Dulcie fell into the room.

She fell into the room, clutched the couch, and sank to her knees on the floor, her eyes glazed in a colourless face, contorted out of all its prettiness, her open lips gray; her very curls limp and straightening, with overmastering fear. I caught her up in my arms, and called on her to tell me what was the matter. She only choked and shuddered with her face against my shoulder, her fingers, clutching me with a painful grip, while her whole body quivered to each heartbeat. I set about soothing her, holding her in a tight clasp; it seemed the right method. It was at any rate effective for presently the choking gasps ended in a burst of tears that relieved her oppression.

"I should have died if you hadn't held me," she sobbed; and I was inclined to believe her.

"What is it, dear?" What frightened you?" I said gently

"There's something in the Babu's room," she sobbed.

"That infernal nigger again! I'll stop this!" I cried, angrily.

"Don't leave me! don't leave me!" she cried in a fresh access of terror, and threw her arms round my neck.

"You'll be quite safe here. Lock the door as I go out," said I, unclasping them, for I was in a bitter rage that she should have been so terrified.

"You shan't! You shan't! You shan't" she cried, almost wailed. "You'll be killed. The Poison-spider has been away in the country these three days. His room is empty― only there's something dreadful in it!"

There was no use in arguing with her; she was unnerved by too severe a shock. I laid her back in the easy chair, and said "Now, you lie here; I will be back in two minutes."

She looked at my set face in piteous helpless appeal, gave a great gulp, bit her little lip, set her teeth, stiffened her arms against the side of the chair, and rose.

"Then I'll go too," she said quietly, and something stronger than fear shone of her eye.

I took her hand— it was, atremble with the nervous effort— and thinking, that to see would, most surely banish her fear; led her out of the room. At the first , step that, creaked upon the dark stair, I heard a mumbling from tho empty two-pair-back, slipped my arm round her waist, and gripped her to me. When our steps creaked upon the landing the mumbling rose to an angry muttering of a sinister tone inconceivably disquieting.

"Oh, come away," she said below her breath; "it does worse than this," and she was again quivering with fear.

For all reply, I put her behind me, and rattled the door. But snarl upon snarl, long drawn, ferocious, from no human or animal throat, and withal of so strong a note of potent malignity as to assure me, against all reasoning, that we faced the extreme peril, rang upon the air. I stood helpless while a man might count a score, felt Dulcie stiffen on the arm I had thrown round her, then staggered down the stairs half-carrying her, and stood at the bottom in the disorder of unnerving horror, the cold beads trickling down my face with cold chills racing down my spine.

With an empty hand I struck a match to light the gas; I hadn't the sense left to go into my room. As I struck it,  I heard the front door open, and a blast of cold air blew it out. I struck another in wild hurry and unreasoning belief that the thing could not face the tight, and lit it. The flare relieved our hearts.

There came halting footsteps up the stairs, and Kantra Prasad rose into the circle of the light. His face, set in a mask of fear, helpless, hopeless fear, showed greenish; there was foam on his brown lips; his eyes were the eyes of a sleep walker, and saw nothing but some horrible fate awaiting him. We shrank back against the wall, and he passed us, with his arm strained behind him, on dragging feet that moved by no will of his own. At each creak of the stairs came a snarl in a new note of a triumphant savagery, a gloating ruthlessness. His steps quickening to their summons, he passed across the landing at a stumbling run, and dashed open the door

The room was very dimly lighted; as he went in a swaying, writhing black shadow veiled him; there came a storm of snarls in the sound of a monstrous worrying, and then his body shot out of the room, toppled slowly down the stairs, heels over head heels over head, and lay in a huddled heap at our feet.

At the mere human horror Dulcie's fear found voice in screams, and I heard the doors opening below. Of a sudden another head came into the light, and the brown man from the house opposite stood beside us. A glance at the huddled body, a glance at us, and he sprang up the stairs with a swift, noiseless spring. The other lodgers, and the landlady came hurrying up, and in an excited group, noisy with questions set about raising Kantra. Prasad, and soothing Dulcie.

In the midst of the uproar the brows man came leaping down, bearing in his arms a burden of the size of a baby swathed in a silk coverlet, and sprang through the group, down the stairs, and vanished.

I carried the fainting child into my room, and with the help of the landlady set about restoring her. When I came out I found two policemen among the group on the landing, looking at Kantra Prasad, and receiving suggestions with an air of imperturbable wisdom. The Babu was quite dead, and into his throat, blue against the brown, two little hands, no bigger than a baby's, had bruised their fatal imprint. His lips, and cheeks, and chin had been bitten about by tiny teeth; but his face was the face of a man relieved of some intolerable burden.

The policemen heard my story, and went up to the two-pair-back, their truncheons ready. I followed behind them. There was no living thing in the room. One of them lit the gas, and it showed us a large trunk in one corner, a pile of rags and cushions in another, and some simple cooking utensils an the hearth. In the middle of the room stood a small block of common deal, and, a foot away from each corner of it a little lamp of the kind used in illuminating gardens. Three of them had burned out, the fourth still flickered. In the trunk was a set of the tools of a gem setter.

THE INQUEST had been a tedious affair, very tiring to poor Dulcie; the jury, hopeless of understanding the matter, brought in a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.

I was sitting in my room tired out, when Maria brought up a card inscribed "E. V. Gilberton." I was sick of newspaper men and amateur detectives, and was about to say I would not see him, when I saw that he had written "Indian Police" in the corner of it. I told her to show him up; and there came into the room a sun-browned man of forty, a man of a languid air, but with very keen eyes.

He came straight to the point, told me he had been sent by the Indian Government in search of a man who might be the dead Babu, and asked me to tell him what had happened. I repeated the story for the fiftieth time. He heard me without a word, and when I had made an end of it, asked me to show him the Babu's room. I led him upstairs to it at once.

It was just us the police had found it, the impression of horror was too vivid on the women's minds for them to touch it yet. He looked at the wooden block and the lamps with a thoughtful frown; walked across the room, and opened the trunk; as his eye fell on the gem-cutter's tools, the frown smoothed out, and there came on to his face the easy, triumphant expression of a man who sees the solution of a problem that has troubled him.

"So they've got it back!" he said, very softly.

"Come and tell me," I said, led the way to my room, gave him a cigar, and poured him out some whisky and soda.

"It's only fair that you should know," he said, "you've had trouble enough about it. Kantra Prasad fell a victim to the spread of Western ideas. The gods of his fathers were not good enough for him, but he has leaned to appreciate them now. Six months ago a small idol of Shiva― the Destroyer, you know― which had two great rubies for eyes, was missing from a Benares temple. So was a young priest. When the priests found that he had got out of the country, they asked help of the Government, and I was sent to Europe after him. I traced him to Holland, and lost all traces of him there. While I was hunting, the brown man across the way had found him, and the goddess was looking after her image. She was angry. It strangled Kantra Prasad."

He took a sip of his whisky and soda.

"What! You mean to tell me that a stone image strangled a man! Here, in London, at the end of the nineteenth century!" I cried.

"I don't expect you to believe it," be said, with a smile. " But I have seen yet stranger things."

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9: Daffy

The Saturday Evening Post Nov 23 1918

HIS NAME was Daubigny Bligh, but the strong sense of euphony of his fastidious schoolfellows compelled them to call him Daffy. Daffy Bligh falls more gratefully on the sensitive ear. Sometimes, for two or three weeks of a term, he would be called Baby Bligh; then Daffy would reassert its euphonic superiority.

The name Baby was a tribute to his face, not to his figure. It was a large, long, square babyish face of a good sedate baby, who rarely cries. It had not, however, the babyish pink complexion, it was an unassuming brown. His figure was tall, broad and thick for his years; but he never presumed on it. No one ever saw Daffy leap, or even run. His gait was a gentle lounge. Apparently he had taken to heart that file proverb— "Fair and softly goes far in a day."

Apparently also, his mind to him a kingdom was. No other boy in the school talked so little. This reticence did not seem to rise from any mental deficiency. The words that did issue from his lips were as pertinent as most; yet there was no rapt look of the dreamer in his mild blue eyes. For the most part, a quiet satisfaction beamed from them.

To the masterpieces of antiquity, whether in poetry or prose, his brain was impervious. Those masterpieces were the chief feature of the education doled out at Middleham College, one of the smaller public schools. During those precious hours with the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome, whom his masters, with an effortless ease, made appear so small and so boring, his expression was vacuous; his attempts, made under pressure, to construe immortal lines were futile. Therefore, his form masters thought poorly of him. They could have forgiven him this failure had he shone at cricket, or even at football. But there was a violence about those games repugnant to his gentle spirit, and he shirked them, sometimes with successful guile, more often without excuse. His masters, cricket enthusiasts to a man, thought yet more poorly of him.

The fact that his French was rather better than that of the boys three forms above him, because he had had a French nurse and a French governess as a child, fads of his father; and the fact that his arithmetic was really good, were not to their minds any compensation for his failure in cricket and the classics. But Daffy was not a slacker. He was a gentle spirit, averse to violent exercise. Also, he was one of those rarer gentle spirits who are resolved to lead their own lives in their own way, and who bring, a considerable tenacity to the compassing of that end.

His schoolfellows bore with him. They never, though they did not know it,  felt that he was one of themselves. The sisters of his schoolfellows liked him; and he showed signs of liking them. When he was but fifteen he was a welcome guest at the lawn tennis parties, which were the chief summer social gatherings of the town.

Then the war came upon Daffy at the age of seventeen, and slowly transformed his world. Middleham College at once started its Officers' Training Corps. Daffy was one of the first to join it. He was induced to take the step by the massacres in Belgium. They grated on his gentle spirit. Indeed, he surprised and rather shocked his schoolfellows by an outburst of furious stammering indignation over the murders at Dinant. Ferrars, the captain of the football team, felt bound to gloss it over, saying— "I've always known that there was something queer about Daffy." And the rest of them realized that they too, had known it.

Daffy joined the school O.T.C.; but he was gentle with it. He learned his drill and attended the parades with assiduity; but he remained a private. He made no effort to become a section commander, much less to rise to higher and even more in laborious rank. Capt. Carstairs, the master who ran the corps, preferred more s energetic enthusiasts: but he had to admit that Daffy was an efficient private and one of the best marksmen in the corps.

Late in 1914 Mr. Bligh, returning at nine o'clock one evening, was surprised to find Daffy at home, and even more surprised to find him with a German grammar. An injudicious parent, instead of displaying satisfaction at finding his son engaged on so praiseworthy task, he said in a captious a tone that the war would be over long before Daffy knew German.

Daffy seemed j unimpressed by the prophecy. Indeed, he made very good progress in the learning of German, a useful colloquial German. To scholarship he did, not aspire. He acquired some at school, but mach more from a small jeweller and watchmaker, above whose shop the pre-war name of H. Block had been replaced, in larger and bolder letters, by Henry Block.

There had been some talk of interning Block; but, being of a sheep-like aspect, and as he had been in Middleham for thirty years, he was generally regarded as harmless. Daffy was alive to the fact that Heinrich Block's colloquial German was out of date; but his daughter Hilda had returned in June from a two-year stay is Berlin, and Daffy conversed chiefly with her. She was an uncommonly pretty girl of 22, of a warm colouring and a vivacity rare indeed among German girls; and Daffy found her a stimulating teacher. Indeed, he fell in love with her. The result was that at the end of three months he was talking German to her with considerable fluency and a creditable accent. He could also read, slowly, simple German tales.

Hilda enjoyed Daffy's warm admiration of her, though she made light of it, for no one came a-courting her, pretty as she was. Stories of the treatment of wounded Middleham men had come to the town, and the feeling against her country was growing more bitter. Moreover, she and her father were glad of the tuition fees Daffy paid, for business was falling off. In May she went to live in London, and Daffy was disconsolate. But he could talk German; also, he could write that language. He wrote to Hilda in it for nearly eight weeks; for, in truth, he had become reconciled to his loss at the end of five weeks. A Miss Marion Hazleden had dimmed somewhat the impression Hilda had made on his faithful boyish heart. He did not apply for a commisson till the spring of the nest year when he was nearly nineteen. He had decided that the strenuous open air life of an officers' cadet corps should be lived in the summer.

Even so,  he was not the most strenuous member the corps; but the life and training did him a world of good. It put plenty of stiffening into both his physical and moral backbone. Also, he added some military German to his colloquial German, became almost a trick shot with the automatic pistol, and acquired a useful working knowledge of the game of auction bridge.

In the autumn he received his commission. The depot of his regiment, the 4th Midlanders, was on the outskirts of Milldown, one of the chief manufacturing towns in the Midlands, and now a town of munition factories. He found regimental life restful after the life at the cadet corps, though there was plenty of work to be done, for they were turning raw rustic material into the finished military product against time.

Daffy proved himself a useful manufacturer. His imperturbable and almost languorous calm proved most valuable in handling a well-meaning but wholly awkward squad. He never rattled it and it never rattled him. The old sergeants, torn from their repose to instruct and train, approved his methods. They said he had an old head on young shoulders. Oddly enough he was a bit of a martinet, but his men liked him. That much keener soldier, the platoon captain, Christopher Helmsley, they hated. He was not only a martinet but a bully.

The younger of his brother officers neither liked nor disliked Daffy. Like his schoolfellows they felt that he was not quite one of themselves. He was on friendlier terms with the older men, and most of all with Lestrange, the adjutant.

A pukka officer, he had left the army four years before the war, but had emerged from his retirement at the beginning of 1915 to do excellent work at the front and at the depot. He was a long, lean, dark, lantern-jawed man of the world, with a passion for cards; and he had been amused and attracted by Daffy's judicious game at billiards, which he appreciated before he had seen him play half a dozen times. Since both of them spent much of their leisure at Milldown Club, Lestrange had opportunities of cultivating him; and he took them. What he liked about Daffy was that he left the young and foolish alone— as much as they would let him— and devoted himself to the old and knowing. He soon found that he had done well to cultivate Daffy. He amused him. He never knew whether Daffy would display the supreme ingenuousness of youth or the astuteness of an aged man about town. Also, he observed that Daffy's mild blue eyes saw a great deal more than the more obviously piercing eyes of the with whom they consorted. In fact, it missed next to nothing. He took him to two or three of the houses of the leading men of the town, and was not surprised to find that the women liked him. Once started, Daffy was invited to many more.

Another bond that united the pair was dislike of Helmsley. It was not only that he was of the bluff, vigorous, assertive between which and the gentle Daffys and Lestranges there is a natural antipathy, but it was thanks to Helmsley that the nickname Daffy had replaced Bligh at He had somehow learned Daffy's Middleham name and spread the information. Daffy did not mind this but he thought Bligh better suited to his rank. Also, Helmsley was always so very much his superior officer in and out of season. He was curt with him, patronising, and frequently overbearing. Daffy decided that he had a down on him; and he could not think of any reason for it. Helmsley's attitude to Lestrange was even yet more odd. He treated him with a half-veiled contemptuousness difficult to resent, but galling.

Daffy observed it and wondered what the reason for it could be. He learned that Helmsley talked about them behind their backs as wasters. He could not see it; Lestrange and be were doing their work as well as any one in the battalion.

With the rest of the mess Helmsley was very popular. His laugh alone would have ensured that. It was ready, ever ready indeed, sometimes to the point of unseasonableness; he rarely spoke without a laugh when off the parade ground. It was a jovial laugh, and it was loud. He had a broad, an uncommonly broad humour. He was always ready for a drink, did more than his share of standing drinks, and could carry a great deal of liquor without a hair. Moreover, he was the rack quarterback of the football team, and is keenness about his work made him a great favourite of the C.O.

Daffy, following the line of least resistance, saw as little as he could of Helmsley when he was not on duty; but on the parade ground he saw far too much of him. One thing that annoyed him -greatly was that Helmsley would often tike over a squad on which he had been working and, by a couple of hours' nagging and bullying, throw it back three or four days in its work.

Like all those who do not love work for work's sake. Daffy hated to have any work he had done undone. It seemed to him that Helmsley had no understanding of the men. It was so plainly an axiom with him that they were either dolts or shirkers, when, as a matter of fact, Daffy knew the great bulk of them were keen to do their best.

He was pleased indeed when one day Lestrange, who had come up unperceived behind him, listened to Helmsley bullying a squad for three minutes, and then, taking him aside, gave him a thorough dressing down about it. Daffy thought Helmsley took it rather badly―cringing rather.   After all, he had only acting up to his belief.

Later Lestrange told him he had talked to the C.O. about it, and that the C.O. had rather pooh-poohed the matter, ascribing Helmsley's method to excessive keenness.

"I told him it was the kind of keenness that gets a man shot in the back the first time he leads his platoon into action. I've been there! There are hot heads in that platoon and they won't stick it. But, the C.O. didn't understand," said Lestrange.

"It's a very good platoon, sir," said Daffy, standing up for it.

"Yes; it has the bright buttons and the longest punishment list we have ever had at the depot," said Lestrange dryly.

Daffy was worried. A few days later he was somewhat annoyed by a matter that was no business of his. His second brother, William, a lieutenant in a Mechanical Transport Corps, at home on leave, rode over on a motor cycle from Middleham to pay him a visit. They lunched at the mess. Helmsley was in great feather, as usual the bluff and noisy soul of the party.

As they strolled down to the club after lunch his brother said with a profound air:—

"It's a small world. Only a fortnight ago I saw that fellow Helmsley in Chiswick High-street with that pretty girl you learned German from, the daughter of old Bloch, the watchmaker. I shouldn't have noticed him if it hadn't been for her. And today I lunch at the same mess with him."

"Yes; it is a small world," said Daffy, with none of the annoyance the news caused him in his tone. It never occurred to him that his brother could be making a mistake; for, though William was slow on the uptake, he was uncommonly sure. Besides, Helmsley had been away on leave a fortnight before.

"They seemed to be on uncommonly good terms with each other," said his brother.

Daffy was yet more annoyed. But he had no right to be annoyed. At the moment the image of Miss Anne Kiblethwaite, the daughter of one of Milldown's most prosperous shell manufacturers, a lady only four years older than himself, filled his heart to the natural exclusion of the images of all others. But he was distinctly annoyed that Hilda should be on such friendly terms with the detested Helmsley.

He told himself that the reason for his annoyance was his strong feeling that Helmsley was not at all the kind of man to be the friend of such a pretty girl as Hilda. Helmsley was given to talking about women.

Moreover, this friendship explained Helsmley's knowledge of his Middleham name, and Daffy resented his having learned it from Hilda. He thought about it, still with annoyance, during his intervals of leisure during the day, and decided that the next time he went to London on leave, he would make a point of seeing Hilda, and telling her the kind of man Helmsley was. He felt that he could do no less. The ingenuousness which sometimes amused and even startled Lestrange ran that way. But the matter was driven from his mind by more worrying events.

First, the platoon was going wrong. The more of a whole it became, the worse it grew; and that was wholly contrary to the natural course of things. The men were sullen even fractious. They no longer put their backs into their work. They he shirked and slacked.

Con. Murphy, a hot-headed, volatile Irishman, one of Daffy's favourites among the men he had handled, got into most serious trouble for calling Helmsley "A blasted Prussian slavedriver!" to his face, though not on parade. Daffy was quite sure that Helmsley's nagging and bullying were the cause of the rot in the platoon; but Lestrange, who agreed with him, could not convince the C.O. that this was so.

Then the mess went wrong. It had always been an uncommonly cheerful mess, thanks chiefly to Helmsley's joviality and perpetual laugh. Now it seemed to Daffy that a cloud had fallen on it— not on the subalterns, but on the senior officers. They looked worried and gloomy. Even Helmsley was quieter.

Daffy would have been less troubled by that cloud had it not been for Lestrange. Lestrange was manifestly under the water. His long, lean, dark face was at no time a guide to his emotions, and it was not a guide to them now. But Daffy observed that he who had been the most abstemious man in the mess was drinking as much as Helmsley or even more. What was more significant, his bridge, which was usually excellent, was going to pieces.

Daffy was annoyed that this should be so. It worried him. But he did not see what he could do. Lestrange was not only an older man, but his superior officer, Moreover he was not the type of man who is ready with his confidences or ready to be helped. Daffy shrank from intervening. But he liked Lestrange; he was even rather fond of him. It grew plain to him that it had to be done.

A few nights later he made his effort.

They were walking back to their quarters after an evening's bridge at the house of Mr. Kiblethwaite. Lestrange had begun by playing very, badly, recovered himself, played a fine game, and had come out a winner.  Daffy thought it a good time to make his friendly effort.

"You seemed to get back your old form at the end, sir," he said. "What has been putting you off your games so badly?"

"Trouble — trouble, my young friend," said Lestrange lightly.

"Well, I'm glad it's over," said Daffy.

"Over! It's only just begun!" said Lestrange with a sudden heaviness.

"Can I help at all?" said Daffy.

"No," said Lestrange sharply.

"I should like to," said Daffy simply.

"It's very good of you," said Lestrange coldly.

Daffy took the snub with equanimity. He had made his effort.

They walked on in silence; but at the door of his quarters Lestrange said:—

"Come along and have a drink. There was no reason why I should bite your nose off, youngster."

Daffy went in and mixed himself a mild whisky and soda; Lestrange mixed himself a stiff one. They drank.

"If it was money, now " said Daffy gently, with a far-away look in his mild blue eyes. "I haven't had to touch my pay since I came here: in fact, I've put by quite a lot."

"Well, I'm damned!" said Lestrange, and his eyes blazed! Then he laughed, frowning. Then he said:

"I've noticed that you are a persistent young beggar; and, after all, why shouldn't you know? We're in disgrace here. There's been a leakage of information— information about drafts and anything else that was going. They got hold of the letter it was going abroad in— from some spy higher up. But they brought the leakage down to this depot and to an officer at this depot; and they haven't made any mistake, either."

"By Jove! That's pretty rotten!" said Daffy.

"I should say so," said Lestrange. Daffy took another draft of his whisky and soda. Then he said:—

"Yet; it is rotten. But is it as bad as all that—that it puts you quite off your game at bridge, sir?"

"Yes; it is as bad as that. You see, I'm the officer suspected," said Lestrange dryly.

"You. sir? But that's idiotic!" cried Daffy, astounded.

Lestrange said nothing; he frowned into his drink.

"It's— it's absurd!" cried Daffy.

"Not so absurd," said Lestrange quietly.

"But it is!" cried Daffy stubbornly "

"No," said Lestrange; "there's a little business behind it that gives it what you might call colour." He hesitated; then went on: "When I sent in my papers, nearly seven years ago, I sent them in by request. There was trouble about some gambling. The play was on the square, of course; but I did hate the fellow, and I gave him all he asked for— chiefly at piquet. In the end his father had to square up for him, He was a man of a good deal of influence—financial as well as political. He had to be humoured; and I had to go."

"Yes— of course— you would,'' said Daffy soberly.

"Cynic!" snapped Lestrange, and barked a short harsh laugh. "Well, that's why I'm suspected now; the old thing has come up against me. But what beats me is how it came up! Only half a dozen men knew about it; three of them are dead in Flanders and the other three are not so proud of it that they'd talk about it."

"Perhaps the War Office looked it up," said. Daffy.

"There'd be nothing to look up. A little business of that kind does not go on record."

"No; it wouldn't," said Daffy thoughtfully.

"But the queerest thing of all is that I've got it into my head that the C.O. got it from Helmsley— with trimmings, you know; the fact that I play high down here— and that l am hard up. I'm not."

"Ah, that would be why he behaved to you like that—if he knew about it," said Daffy; and his mild blue eyes brightened with sudden enlightenment.

"You saw that, too, did you?" snapped Lestrange. "You don't miss much, young feller me lad!"

"Yes; he must have known," said Daffy with conviction; and there was a note of satisfaction in his voice as of one who had cleared up a knotty point.

"But— hang it all!— how could he have known? A man who comes from nobody knows where, and knows nobody any one ever heard of!" cried Lestrange.

"He knew," said Daffy.

They stood silent, frowning. "Well, there it is; I shall have to go again," said Lestrange in a rather hopeless tone. Then he added bitterly:—

"And I don't want to go. Before, I didn't mind going— much. I was young. But now I know that soldiering is my game, I can play it; and I want to."

"Perhaps you're wrong, sir. Perhaps it's only fancy and they don't suspect you at all," said Daffy in a comforting tone.

"Rats! A man knows when he's suspected, all right," said Lestrange. He dropped into an easy chair heavily and added, in a mournful tone:—"Yes, I shall have to go."

Daffy was touched. He looked at him, frowning seriously and more deeply.

"It's always a point to know where you are, sir," he said. Lestrange looked up at him and smiled. He did not often smile. "Well, it's done me good to tell you, old chap. There's something solid about you— devilishly solid. But off you go to bed. There's a hard day before us tomorrow," said Lestrange.

Daffy bade him good night and went. It was a cold night, but he walked very slowly to his quarters. His bedroom was cold, but he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking for a long time. The next day he avoided, Lestrange, or Lestrange fancied he did; and he was hurt. But he told himself he had known that Daffy had a keen eye to the main chance, and he ought to have expected it. But he was hurt.

Two afternoons later he found Daffy playing billiards at the club, and very soon perceived that he was off his game. He was beaten in quite a ridiculous fashion for him. When it was over he came and sat down beside Lestrange. Lestrange was surprised.

"You're right off your game," he said, with no warmth in his tone.

"Yes," said "Daffy; "my mind wasn't on it—not all of it. All your mind has to be on a game if you want to win."

"It must be love," said Lestrange sarcastically.

"No; it doesn't get me like that— ever," said Daffy with quiet sincerity. "But I've got an idea."

"Very trying! What about?'' said Lestrange.

"What you were talking about. I want you to be ready— after mess to-night— just after mess."

"You're very mysterious. What is it?" said Lestrange.

"No; it mayn't come off. I don't want you in it if it doesn't, sir," said Daffy. He rose and went out of the room.

Later, going into the reading rooms to glance at the evening paper, Lestrange found him in front of the fire, sleeping the sleep of the just who have had a bad night. He did not hope much from Daffy's idea; but he did hope. Things were badly strained.

At dinner he could not help watching Daffy. Daffy addressed himself to the food and drink with unassuming application. Also, he took a great part in the talk as he usually took. If any one asked him a question he answered it. After dinner they trooped into the anteroom, and, as usual, stood chatting before they settled down to bridge or went off on duty, or to the club. Lestrange dropped into an easy chair and waited. Helmsley was on duty that evening.

He stood by the fire talking to the C.O.

Daffy stood on their left, apparently listening to the talk of a group of subalterns; but his eyes were on Helmsley. Helmsley finished his talk with a story, a broadly humorous story, and walked to the door, laughing. As he opened it his laugh ended, as it often did, on a sheerly vacant note; and then there was silence.

"Helmsley!" said Daffy sharply; and then, in a rasping voice, he barked an order in German. Helmsley swung round, clicked his heels together, saluted oddly, his face set in a wholly expressionless mask, and grunted— "Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!"

There was silence for a breath; then Lestrange rose quickly and cried fiercely— "You damned Hun!"

Helmsley's mouth opened, the expressionless mask crumpled into a quite ridiculous surprise. Then he jumped through the doorway and banged the door behind him; and the key grated in the lock. They did not wait to open it. Half a dozen of them were out of the window in less than ten seconds. But a man with death at his heels can go a long way in ten seconds; and Helmsley had done it.

The arrangements for his escape were good. He was last seen in Winter street, a slum near the station. There he disappeared. That they learned the next day. Twenty minutes later, after a fruitless hunt, they were back in the ante-room; and the C.O. was urgent with them on the impropriety of saying a word to any one outside about this unfortunate occurrence. The hum of assent died down; and then the major said:—

"But how on earth did you find out, Daffy?"

"Oh, well," said Daffy slowly, "he laughed like a Hun watchmaker I once knew— all the time; not a real laugh, you know. Huns do, I fancy. Besides, he knew more than any one but a Hun could have known."

"H'm! I never noticed that he was particularly well informed," said the C.O. doubtfully.

ii

DAFFY SAT at a table in front of the café of the Golden Crown, sipping an iced syrup. It is the chief café of the main street of a neutral city that has grown polyglot. Indeed, in the matter of the diversity of tongues it could give cards and spades to old Babel. The summer sun was shining; and it seemed to him as animated a scene and as complete a collection of rascals as the human eye could wish to linger upon. Every other man and woman was a spy and the rest looked like rogues. With his large, long, broad, innocent face and mild blue eyes of a good baby. Daffy looked like a lamb fallen among wolves. He finished his syrup and ordered another. It is a painful admission to make about a man of twenty, an English officer on secret service, too: but there is no getting away from the fact that Daffy had a sweet tooth. He paid for the syrup before the waiter could escape, and lit a cigarette. He looked as if his chief business in life was to sit sipping syrups and smoking cigarettes.

It was.

He had been brought from the depot of the 4th Midland Regiment, at Milldown, to spot a man. The English Secret Service had reason— half a sentence in the letter of a spy— to believe that man was in this neutral city; but it did not know him by sight. The mess of the Milldown depot did. And as a junior subaltern Daffy could be spared, without any violent disarrangement of the depot's work, to do the spotting.

Daffy had adopted this placid and pleasant method of compassing this end after a little thought. He was a slow thinker, but sure. He had come to the conclusion instead of hunting laboriously through polyglot throng for the German gentleman he had known as Capt. Christopher Helmsley, it would be better to let the polyglot throng present itself to him in ordered, or rather disordered, procession until such time as Capt. Helmsley should appear in it. Sooner or later every one in the city passed the three cafés before which he sipped syrups and smoked cigarettes. Many people passed them a score of times a day.

Besides, he had been instructed to spot without being spotted— if he could. This was not easy, for he was 6 ft. 1 in. in his stocking feet, and broad and thick in proportion. If he walked about it was any odds that he would be spotted as well as spot. As it was he sat at the tables farthest from the curb and nearest the walls of the cafés he frequented, so that he was as little conspicuous as might be.

The morning passed pleasantly, as the last three mornings had passed; but, like them, it did not bring success. From noon till one o'clock he was keenly on the alert all the while, for at that hour the spies and rogues rested from, their activities and betook themselves to their dejeuner at the cafés, the restaurants or their hotels. Then the procession along the pavements was thickest. Daffy watched it earnestly, leaning forward with an elbow on the table, shading most of his large face with a large hand. There was little his mild blue eyes missed.

At a quarter past one he went to the British Legation, where he was staying. It had been needful to provide an excuse for the presence in the neutral city of even so unimportant a person as a junior subaltern, since the German spy bureau took such a lively interest in every British and French visitor that it contrived to know much more about them than even the local police, meddlesome as they were.

He had been promoted to the dignity of nephew of the minister's wife, a daughter of Sir Archibald Bligh spending his leave on a visit to her. He was not related to her; he belonged to humbler Blighs. He was late; but he found his usual seat beside the daughter of the Minister empty. He was in her charge. She talked to him, because she had learned he wished  "to learn that tongue; and, and, since she was; on the way to become the object of his fourth grand passion he was learning quickly.

She found the task agreeable. Women liked Daffy; there was an appealing solidity about him.

He was back in the main street, at a retired table in front of the Café of the Princes, at a quarter-past two, watching the column of spies and rogues inarch past from their dejeuner to their activities.  At half-past three he slipped into a long and winding side street, sauntered down it through the outskirts of the town, and out into the country. At five he was sitting in front of the Grand Café, again on watch. He ate a great number of small rich cakes, in spite of the fact that they were not so sweet as he should have liked. Refreshed, he watched the rush from the offices to the aperitif, and listened to the talk at the tables round him. He had been instructed to keep his ears open, and the aperitif loosened tongues.

At seven the throng had, for the most part, cleared from the streets and the fronts of the cafes into the-dining rooms. He rose, relieved to be free from the din of the loud, unnecessary, and rather vacuous German laugh that had assaulted his ears all day. He dined at the legation, and after dinner won a game of billiards from one of the junior attachés; and then, after a close fight, was beaten by the Minister himself, a far inferior player. Among the diplomats Daffy was diplomatic. By ten he was in bed.

At half-past seven the next morning he was taking his coffee and rolls at a retired table in front of the café of the Golden Crown. His appetite was, excellent.

For four more days he pursued this course, unwearied, patiently. Most boys of his age would have found its monotony trying, but Daffy's was one of those sterling natures that can endure any amount of inactivity without flinching. A placid, ordered life suited him down to the ground. He liked to sit in the sun and watch the strange crowd to a soothing accompaniment of iced syrups, cigarettes, and sweet cakes.

Then, late in the afternoon of the fourth day his patience was rewarded. There had been a reception of sorts at the German Legation, and a rival reception at the Russian Legation: and the throng was thickly set with bright to gorgeous gala uniforms. Daffy was surprised to see in German uniform so many people he had taken for ordinary rogues. He scanned the throng, especially the throng that came from the direction of the German Legation, with more careful and keener eyes; for he had reason to believe Helmsley had the right to wear such a uniform. His face, well shaded by his large right hand, was turned to the right, when of a sudden there rang out on his left a loud hearty laugh. He knew that laugh; he would have known it among ten thousand.

He turned his face slowly, dropping two finger, to hide his eyes, and peered between them at the laughter. His eyes gave his ears the lie direct: the man who was laughing the laugh of the fresh-coloured, fair-haired, fair-moustached Helmsley was a sallow, dark-bearded man in the uniform of an officer of a Russian infantry regiment.

For a moment Daffy thought his ears had mocked him. Then his eyes fell on the pretty lady, so finely dressed, who was laughing up into the laughing face of the Russian officer; and he recognised the object of his first grand passion,. Hilda Bloch. His eyes, reassured, grasped the fact that, although the beard might be the beard of a Russian, the teeth were the large, greyish-brown teeth of Helmsley.

Absorbed in the joke, their eyes did not stray his way. He let them go thirty yards down the street; then rose and followed them. Thanks to his thoughtfulness in paying for each drink as soon as he got it, there was nothing to delay him. He followed them, stooping, using now the large hat of a woman, now the helmet of an officer, to screen his face. It was not difficult to follow them unseen; they seemed to be feeling secure enough; they never looked round.

Half-way down the main street they turned into a side street, and fifty yards down it, went into the Hotel of the Golden Canister. Daffy walked across the road to a café, and settled down on a retired chair thirty yards from the hotel door. Neither Helmsley nor Hilda Bloch came out of it; but several Russians in uniform and several civilians bearded like Russians went into it. Daffy sat patiently watching the hotel door; but his wonted placidity appeared to ruffled, as he was frowning darkly. He was annoyed that the object of his first grand passion should prove to be a German spy, but he was mightily indignant that Hilda Bloch, after having been born in England and lived in and on England for twenty years, should be out to help destroy the land on which she had so long sponged.

He kept watch until past seven, when it was time to get back to the legation for dinner. Then, making no doubt that Helmsley would dine at the Golden Canister, and, as the soul of the party, pick up any information his unsuspecting Russian friends inadvertently oozed, he rose and went. His face had not yet resumed its usual placidity; his indignation, indeed, was still growing; he was beginning to feel uncommonly vengeful. On entering the legation he went to the telephone, asked for a number, and, when he heard the voice he expected at the other end of the wire, said "Spotted!" and rang off.

That was all he was to say. Since the staffs of the exchanges were in the pay of the Germans, the French, the Russians, to say nothing of the Italians and the English, the wires were not busy carrying political information or the police news. Then he dressed for dinner quickly and went down to the end of the garden. He had barely reached it when a door in the wall opened and a small cheery-looking man, with twinkling grey eyes, in dress and appearance an obvious inhabitant of the neutral city, came through and shut the door sharply behind him.

"Well, young sir, what have you to report?' he said, not only in English but with the accent and intonation of a well-bred Englishman; and his eyes twinkled on Daffy.

"I spotted Helmsley. He's wearing the uniform of a Russian officer of the 153rd Regiment and a dark beard and wig— or perhaps he's dyed his hair. He's at the Golden Canister; dining there I should think, for he went into it at a quarter to six, and he was still there at a quarter past seven," said Daffy.

"An officer, of the 153rd Regiment, dark haired and with a dark beard— at the Golden Canister," said the small man in a rising inflection, "But that's― Oh,— hang it all!—you must have made a mistake! Why, you told me Helmsley was a full-faced, fresh-coloured young fellow, and this man's lean, and sallow."

"Yes; he's changed his hair and his complexion, but he hasn't changed his laugh or his teeth. It's Helmsley, all right," said Daffy with quiet certainty.

"Then all I can say is that the Czar and Czarina themselves attended his wedding weeks at Petrograd; and he's here on a most important mission," said the small man; and his eyes no longer twinkled.

"I can't help that," said Daffy firmly. "You see, it wasn't only his eyes and teeth, but he was with a girl I know Helmsley knew— a girl called Hilda Bloch, the daughter of a German jeweller at Middleham."

"He was! At a quarter to six? What's she like?" cried the small man; he appeared to be growing excited.

"She's a pretty enough girl," said Daffy in a grudging tone. "She has dark-blue eyes and dark-brown hair; and she always looks bright and lively. She hasn't that bleached look the German girls here have. She was wearing a greenish dress and a greenish hat with a red bow on it. The little beast looked top hole."

"The Countess Sudislaf," the little man said softly; and then, louder:—"But are you sure?"

"Sure?" said Daffy. "She taught me German!"

The. small man gazed at him, scowling ferociously; then his -face cleared, and he said:— "Young sir you would have surprised me, if I hadn't lost the gift of being surprised nearly two years ago. But, seriously, you have rendered us valuable service and I'm very much obliged to you."

"Not at all," said Daffy, politely.

The small man paused, thinking; then he said:— "I'm afraid I shan't he able to get you back to England, for nearly a week. But I think you'll be able to have a good time here, now that your time's all your own."

"Oh, that's, all right," said Daffy. "But, I say, couldn't I go on helping in this business? I should like to take it out of that little beast of a girl. This spying business is so uncalled for from her, you know."

The small man laughed gently. "I wonder what verb you and she chiefly conjugated," he said. "But no; I don't think you can do anything more. You've done quite a lot in stopping a big leak— stopping leaks seems to be your metier."

"But that was all rather accidental. I should like to do something real," said Daffy earnestly.

The little man shook his head; then his eyes twinkled again, and be said— "Well, one should never discourage enthusiasm. We believe that Count Boris Helmsley Sudislaf had in his possession stolen copies of the plans of a new submarine destroyer. But, thanks to you, he had to bolt in such a hurry that he hadn't time to get them before he went. We know there has been a hitch about getting them out of England. They're very likely at Milldown— in some place the Huns can't get at now. We can't have too many searchers.

"You know the officers' quarters; they may be hidden there, though we've searched in vain for them. You may have a try; but be careful, as long as you're here, to keep absolutely out of sight of both the Sudislafs. Thanks again for your discovery. Good night!" said the small man and he slipped through the doorway in the wall.

Daffy was disappointed. He had a feeling that he ought to get even with Hilda Bloch, alias the Countess Sudislaf, alias Frau Helmsley. At dinner the daughter of the Minister found him morose. That night there was a reception of sorts at the British Legation, and, thoughtlessly, Daffy was present. From a corner of the room, among a group of diplomats, he watched the guests enter. About the twentieth guest was the Countess Sudislaf.

There was nothing to be done. He could not go out of the room without passing her; he was too big to hide him. He stood still and watched her. She had shaken hands with the Minister, and was looking round the room when her gaze fell on him. Her eyes opened wider; his lips parted in surprise. Then she was smiling and, greeting an elderly diplomat. But she did not waste a second. She came straight across the room to him with a joyful smile on her face and both hands outstretched.

"Oh, Mr. Bligh! Who would have thought of seeing you here!" she cried.

Daffy shook her right hand without warmth, and said— "How are you? I'm staying here— with my aunt."

"But, how delightful! Take me to get an ice. I really must talk to you—about old times," she said, with charming friendliness. She laid her hand on Daffy's arm, smiled round on the group, and led him out of the room. She sat down in the corner of the dining room. farthest from the buffet, and when he had brought her an ice she said in a pleading tone— "I don't want you to talk to any one about me, Daffy— tell them anything about me, I mean; that my father was a German. I've married a Russian, Count Sudislaf; he's a dear, but so awfully proud, you know. It would spoil everything if people knew my people were German, though I'm English myself, of course. You can see it would. And you won't give me away, will you? For old times' sake!"

Her bright eyes were gazing earnestly into his; her face was set in pathetic entreaty. But Daffy was unmoved. As he had already told the right people about her he said grumpily:— "Why should I give you away?"

She breathed a short sharp sign of extreme relief, and cried:— "Ah, I knew you wouldn't! That's the advantage of having an English gentleman for a friend— an officer too! You're so safe."

Daffy was annoyed. Then she looked at him thoughtfully, considering, her brow knitted in a faint frown.

"Are you staying here long?" she said. "Four or five days," said Daffy. Her eyes hardened. She hesitated; then said:— "You must meet Boris— my husband. You'll get on so well together. Russians are so charming. Will you—will you come for a motor drive to-morrow afternoon at four, and dine with us afterwards?"

Daffy hesitated. He did not like her eyes: they were not at all friendly, though her lips were smiling. But there was just an off chance that he might get hold of something. He ought to have a shot at it.

"Thanks awfully. I should like to," he said.

"That will be nice," she said, and rose. Then she added:— "And we met— where did we meet? In London. Yes; it's a large place. Remember— in London."

"I remember," said Daffy.

That night and the next morning he pondered the invitation. What was the object of it? Probably Hilda had in her mind some idea of getting him out of the way. She had certainly looked as if she had something unpleasant in her mind. Very likely Count Sudislaf would see no necessity to take any such trouble, and a message would come to say that the motor drive and dinner were impossible. No such message came. Daffy was half inclined to let the Secret Service agent know of the entertainments that were being lavished on him, but desisted. He would probably be forbidden to go. But he went over the small automatic pistol with great care before he slipped it into his hip pocket. With boyish sentimentality, rather rare in him, he had named it Little Pet. On his day he could do things with it. He fancied that this was the day.

He found a light car in front of the Golden Canister; and in the hall he found the Countess Sudislaf, alone. She greeted him warmly, and then conveyed her husband's regrets that be could not motor with them. Daffy was not surprised. He had doubted that the count would put his disguise to the test. She said they would meet at dinner. Daffy doubted that, too.

The countess drove the car. She did not seem to be either an experienced or a courageous driver. Daffy persuaded her to let him drive. It seemed to him that, though she was not driving, she was still nervous.

It was a pleasant thought that Little Pet was in his hip pocket. It was also pleasant to think that they would surely underestimate his intelligence. He did not talk much. There was no need for him to talk much. The countess Sudislaf talked enough for two, nervously but insistently. Daffy tested the car. Later he might want to get a good deal of speed out of her. He thought he could.

The countess acted as guide. At about five, to judge from the loaded carts they passed and the empty carts they met, they were near the German frontier. Daffy had no intention of getting too near it. They must have been about a mile from the frontier when she bade him take a side road that ran parallel with it, saying they would make a circuit and return by another road.

It was a pleasant. evening and Daffy let the car run slowly to enjoy it fully. Twice the countess made him stop to admire the scenery. The third time she bade him stop to admire an old windmill, which stood about fifty yards back from the road. The sails were broken, and it looked empty. They looked at it; and then she said in a tone of girlish excitement— "Let's go and explore it. We might get to the top and get a beautiful view."

"Yes; they do think they've got a soft thing!" said Daffy in his heart; but his lips said— "Rather! It will be rather fun."

She stepped out of the car, smiling, and he followed her. Half-way to the mill she said— "It may be haunted!"

Daffy was sure it was; but, as he shifted Little Pet from his hip to his jacket pocket, he only said— "it's a bit early in the evening for ghosts."

He spoke carelessly enough, but his pulse was at least two beats quicker at the thought that probably he was going to get a chance to try Little Pet on a real target.

At the bottom of the steps leading to the mill door she turned her head and scanned his face with sharp eyes. It was placid, even phlegmatic. She walked up the steps, passed on the threshold, and entered the mill. Daffy followed her with both hands in his jacket pockets. Half-way across the half-circular stone-floored chamber she stepped sharply aside— and out of a low doorway opposite came Count Boris Helmsley Sudislaf, with his revolver pointing at Daffy's face.

"Hands up!" he cried. Daffy did not put up his hands; he opened his eyes and mouth, and stood, the picture of staring stupefaction.

The count burst into noisy hearty laughter; the countess laughed shrilly and spitefully.

"I think—I think we've turned the tables, Daffy, my young friend— except that you won't get any chance of bolting," said the count. "You're going to be found on the other side of the frontier during the course of the next half-hour—in mufti. And then you'll get several things jammed into your fat head. You'll learn how we treat spies— especially spies who've spoiled our plans.

"When you've told us everything we think you know— and you'll be made to tell, most unpleasantly made to tell— what's left of you will be hanged on the nearest tree. We shan't waste a single good cartridge on you. Oh, you'll wish much harder than you're wishing now that you hadn't been so damned smart at Milldown. Hans!"

A big man came out of the inner room grinning. He carried a small coil of thick cord in his left hand. Daffy looked hard at the count's left knee— so hard that it was the only thing he saw in the world. Little Pet cracked in his pocket; the count screeched, toppled over with a bullet through his kneecap, and squirmed, howling, about the floor; he had uncovered Hans. Little Pet cracked thrice— Hans was a big man. He looked slightly startled, groaned once, his legs gave under him, and he lay on the floor, curiously huddled up. Then the countess screamed.

"In wartime you should shoot first and talk afterward," said Daffy, with his slow placid smile; and he looked through the doorway of the inner room with all his eyes. Nothing stirred in it. The countess dropped on her knees beside her moaning spouse. Daffy refilled the magazine of Little Pet, stepped forward, picked the revolver, slipped it into his hip pocket, and took the coil of cord from Hans' nerveless hand. Gently enough, but firmly, he bound the countess's hands behind her. She abused him shrilly and furiously in English and German. He made no defence. He bound her ankles together; then he dragged her to the wall and set her back against it. He went back to the count and thoughtfully considered his pale, distorted face, covered with beads of cold sweat of pain. Then he knelt down in front of him, grinned at him hideously, and said:— "I'm going to saw your leg backward and forward till you tell me where you've hidden the plans of that submarine destroyer."

The count gibbered at him.

Daffy gripped the ankle of his wounded leg, but he did not move his hand, much less the leg. He moved his elbow as if he were moving the leg. The count saw the elbow move, and screeched for all the world as if his motionless leg were being sawed backward and forward.

Three times he yelled; then he gasped—

"Table drawer—Quarters—Milldown— C .O.!" And then he fainted.

Daffy rose, and said to the countess in a singularly boyish tone of laboured sarcasm— "Telling the truth seems to have hurt him more  than a bullet through the kneecap. He must be a bit soft, though— howling like that!"

"You blackguard! You dirty young blackguard!" cried the Countess.

"You don't suppose I really moved his beastly leg?" said Daffy, in a tone of reproach. He stopped again, searched the count's pockets, thrust a thick pocketbook into his and walked out of the mill with an air of injured dignity.

He drove back to the city by the way they had come; and he put all his heart and a good deal of his soul into the driving. In forty minutes he drew up in front of the legation. He was at the telephone in ten seconds. When his Secret Service friend at the other end of the wire said, "Hello!" he said, "Spotted! Dam' quick!" And rang off.

He went down the garden; and he did not have to wait long— about seven minutes. Then the small man bounced through the doorway. He looked far from pleased.

"What is it?" he snapped.

"The stolen plans of the new submarine destroyer are in the table drawer of Helmsley's old quarters at Milldown."

"I'm hanged if they are!" snapped the small man. "We've looked."

"He told me so; and he was speaking the truth," said Daffy positively.

"He told you so? When?" snapped the email man.

"About three-quarters of an hour ago— in an empty mill near the frontier. I can't tell you exactly where— only that it's along a side road off the South road, a mile from a big military bridge. He and that little beast of a girl set out to do me in. But I got in the first shot and smashed up his knee cap. It was after that he told me."

"It would make any one confidential," said the small man softly.

"There's another Hun, there, too. I think he's dead. I hadn't time to make sure. And that little beast of a girl is tied up."

"My hat!" said the little man softly; and he was staring at Daffy as if be were an object of real interest.

"And here's his pocket book— Helmsley's. I thought there might be something useful in it," said Daffy, holding it out to him. The small man took it almost gingerly; then, as he opened it, be said—

"I owe you an apology for not realizing sooner that you're hot stuff, young sir."

"You have to be if you're going to be tortured and then hanged," said Daffy with simple conviction.

"That was what he promised you, was it? These asses do make me tired! They will talk!" said the small man. He opened the pocket book, took some papers from one side of it and put them in his pocket. Then he examined the banknotes in the other side of it.

"World currency, of course," he said; "Bank of England £5 and £10 notes."

He put them back into the pocket book and held it out to Daffy.

"Oh, but―" said Daffy.

"Nonsense, my good chap! The spoils of war. I insist," said the small man.

Daffy put the pocket book into his pocket and, with a faint sigh of satisfaction, said—"It does always come in useful."

"True, O philosopher!" said the small man. "And now I must get you out of this dam' quick."

"That's what I thought," said Daffy.

THREE DAYS LATER, somewhat travel-stained, he reported himself to his friend Lestrange, the new C.O. of the Milldown Depot. After they had exchanged greetings, Daffy said:—

"Did you find those plans in the drawer of the table in Helmsley's old quarters?"

"We did not," said Lestrange. "The Secret Service people were foxed."

"It wasn't them; it was me," said Daffy, frowning. "I should like to take a look at that drawer myself."

They went to the quarters that had been occupied by Capt. Christopher Helmsley— and Daffy took the drawer out of the table. It was of poor but honest English deal. He turned it about, examined it, tapped it, put it back, and stared at its black composite handle in earnest thought. Then a slow placid smile illumined his large face, and he said:―

"Lord, what an ass I am! I forgot all about the C.O. They're in your quarters."

"Mine?" said Lestrange.

"Yes. Helmsley was very pally with the late C.O.— always in and out."

They went briskly to Lestrange's quarters. Lestrange pulled out the drawer. It was neatly lined with paper. Daffy raised the paper, and disclosed the bottoms of some sheets of tracing paper covered with drawings.

"Well, I'll be shot!" said Lestrange. "The beggar was cute."

"I knew he was speaking the truth!" said Daffy, in a tone of gentle satisfaction.

__________________

10: Lady Drysdale's Theft

The Strand Magazine Aug 1902

THE TWO WOMEN were dressed in black of a very different quality; and the woman with the baby was a widow. She wore the cheap black, but the baby's clothes did not match it— they were white clothes with black bows about them, and the stuff was fine. He was a clean and rosy, fair-haired baby, accepting everything with unwondering blue eyes, since everything alike passed understanding; but he drew his mother's attention to things of interest, the red automatic machines and the white horses drawing trucks in a siding, with a waggle of his arm and an inarticulate, but quite comprehensible murmur on two notes, a low note and then a higher, prolonged, "Ah—oh—h—h!"

His mother gave him but a distracted attention; for the most part her sad eyes gazed down the vista of the railway at a vision of a South African battle-field. When at his murmur she turned her face to him, it lost its sad dreaminess and shone with the divine passion; she almost smiled when she spoke to him. Lady Drysdale watched the baby with eyes which never left him, eyes filled with the last covetous hunger; sometimes there gleamed in them an envy very near a veritable hatred of his mother. Now and then she twisted her hands in a very passion of greed. Twice she made a step towards him and checked herself, staring round a little wildly. In the violence of her desire she actually dared not trust herself to speak to him. Lost in her unhappiness, his mother saw nothing of it.

Presently the train came in, and Lady Drysdale watched the mother climb into a third-class compartment "for ladies only," and bidding the wondering porter, who had opened the door of a first-class compartment for her, bring in her wraps and dressing-bag, climbed in after them, and, with a happy sigh, sat down in the corner farthest from the mother and child. The train started. The mother sat in a spiritless dejection, holding the baby so that he could stand, and look out of the window. Now and again, when he drew her attention to something of interest with more than usual emphasis, she roused herself to talk to him awhile, but she soon fell back into her unhappy reverie.

Lady Drysdale's gaze never left him, and once or twice he looked at her with familiar eyes, as though he knew her quite well, and every look thrilled her. Then she played her trump-card ; she took her dressing-bag down from the rack, and, opening it, revealed the shining row of silver-stoppered bottles.

The baby had turned at her movement, and at the shining sight his eyes opened very wide; he murmured "Ah—oh—h—h!' and began to struggle against his mother s arm. She looked round, saw the open dressing-bag, and held him tighter.

"Ah—oh—h—h ! Ah—oh—h—h !" he said. His lower lip went down, and he burst into a roar of anguished disappointment.

"Oh, let him come ! let him come !" cried Lady Drysdale eagerly.

"He will bother you," said his mother, reluctantly.

"No, no," said Lady Drysdale earnestly. His mother set him on the floor, and he rushed wildly down the carriage and tumbled up against Lady Drysdale's knee.

Her hands shook so that she could scarcely lift him on to the seat beside her ; he nearly dived into the bag in his eagerness to handle the bright treasures. She gave him bottle after bottle, until he wallowed In bottles, clamouring his shrill joy.

His mother watched him a little while, and then fell back into her unhappiness.

Lady Drysdale took him on to her knee, a bottle in either hand, and he tried to explain to her, in his inarticulate fashion, the intimate connection of these shining things with the ultimate mysteries; life and education had blunted her understanding.

Presently it was time for him to be fed, and his mother took a bottle of some baby food out of her shabby little bag, poured some into a mug, invested him with a napkin, and fed him. After it he ate a sponge-cake and a banana—travelling had not spoiled his appetite. Lady Drysdale took him on her knee and gave him the banana in bites of the proper size. When, after being filled, he went to sleep in Lady Drysdale's arms, with the freemasonry of mothers the two women began to exchange confidences.

They cried over the death of Lady Drysdale's little boy, whom she had lost just nineteen months before at the exact age of the sleeping child, and who, she said again and again, was extraordinarily like him, of the same colouring, the same eyes, and the same ways. Then they cried over the death of the widow's husband, an Imperial Yeoman killed in South Africa. At last the baby's mother was moved by Lady Drysdale's sympathy to confide to her her horrible dread of the future.

She was on her way to London to live with her people; London did not suit the boy, and she was tortured by the fear of his pining away there. Moreover, her stepmother did not like her, and hated children; she would be unkind to him.  Lady Drysdale pressed him closer to her, and schemes for saving him began to float through her mind. She was silent, thinking hard.

Suddenly there came a grinding, grating jar, and the carriage  swayed and jerked. Lady Drysdale was conscious of curling instinctively round the child to shield him, of being flung here and there; then came a great crash, and all was still.

She was roused from the shock by the screams of the child, and she found herself lying, still curled round him, on the top of his mother. The carriage seemed to be on its side, and they lay in a heap across the lower windows of it. Shaken and dazed, she drew herself off the child's mother, and began hurriedly, with trembling fingers, to feel his head and arms and legs and ribs: none of his bones were broken, and he screamed with a reassuring vigour.

She set him down and turned to his mother. She lay, deathly white, in a huddled heap. Lady Drysdale tried to lift her into an easier position; her head hung limp on her shoulders; she put her hand behind it, and found the back of it all crushed. She wiped her hand on the cushion, and thrust it into the injured woman's dress over her heart; there was not a beat.

In the first shock of horror she was stricken with panic, and, catching up the child, in a furious desire to be out of this chamber of death, she screamed again and again for help. Presently two men looked down through the windows above her head and opened the door. She thrust up the child into their hands, and when they had set it down they caught her wrists and began to haul her up. Using the supports of the rack as steps, she relieved them of some of her weight and was dragged out. She sank down sobbing beside the child; and the two men, bidding her not give way, went on to the next compartments to haul more people out.

She soon recovered enough to start soothing the child. At the sight of some blood on his mouth her heart sank with the fear of internal injury. It was only a cut lip. The soothing him composed her, and she began to think clearly, gazing round at the scene.

The train had run off the line; the engine, wantoning in its freedom, had ploughed its way up to an elm tree and tried to butt it down. Three carriages lay on their sides; their passengers were hobbling or crawling about on the upper sides of them; some were still dragging people up out of the compartments. Three carriages still stood on the metals, and the two others stood in a crooked slant on the embankment. The passengers from these were streaming about the fallen ones. The air was filled with a mingled clamour; the engine in a cloud of steam was sizzling shrilly; the passengers were shouting inquiries, suggestions about getting down, and theories of the cause of the catastrophe at one another; women were in hysterics.

It seemed to Lady Drysdale that she and the boy might have been in a desert for all the notice any one took of them; and, frightened by the din, he clung to her, clutching her tightly, his little body shaken by great sobs after his crying. She had but realised their loneliness when a sudden idea sprang up in her mind, and filled it on the instant with a very rage of possession. Why should she not take the boy?

She began quickly to consider the matter, and her chances of getting him. His father was dead.... His mother was dead.... No one wanted him.... At any rate, his mother had made it plain to her that his grandfather and grandmother, who alone had a right to him, did not want him... They would neglect or misuse him... She wanted him.... Oh, how she wanted him!... He was the living image of her dead child. Heaven had given him to her instead of her lost darling.... Besides, she had a right to him, for she had saved his life.... And, again, she could give him the proper care and love.... She would take him!... Wight or wrong, she would take him!

In this, cursory and disjointed fashion she settled the moral question, and turned to the practical matter of stealing him. She looked round carefully, and, under the impulse of her purpose, stealthily.  The passengers were still busy with their injuries and theories of the cause of the catastrophe. She made up her mind to sever all connection between herself and the wrecked train, and she scanned the country. A couple of hundred yards from the line a high road ran parallel with it; beyond rose a great slope of woods and fields; up the slope ran a white footpath. The slope seemed familiar to her; at any rate, her path with the child lay over it. Somewhere on the other side was a railway, other than the North-western, which would carry them to London.

She went to the edge of the carriage roof, called imperiously to an excited old gentleman, and handed the boy down to him. He was too excited to refuse or even protest. He held him gingerly, gasping. She lowered herself over the edge of the carriage, and, getting a foot-hold on the rim of a lamp pole, jumped from it to the ground, and relieved him of his burden.

"This is the result of carelessness— gross carelessness!" stuttered the old gentleman. "I tell you, madam, they have neglected to look after the metals. I call it perfectly―"

"Where are we?" said Lady Drysdale, cutting him short. "They tell me we are two miles north of King's Langley. Such wanton carelessness is quite inconceivable ! I can't understand―"

She turned her back on him, and walked alongside the fallen carriages towards the end of the field. She knew where she was; the winter before her marriage her people had been kept in town, and she had come down here twice a week to hunt.

Over the slope ten miles across country, she could strike the Metropolitan at Rickmansworth, and take a train to Baker-street. No one could connect her and the boy with the wrecked train if they landed in London at Baker-street.

Whenever they passed one of the noisy, argumentative groups the baby clutched her and nestled his face against her cheek. Every time he did it he set her heart hammering against her ribs end hardened her in her purpose. She turned up the hedgerow towards the high-road, climbed over three fences, and came into it opposite the footpath up the slope. She crossed the stile, and began to mount it quickly, casting timorous glances behind her to see if she were followed; once she thought that she saw people pointing at her from the wrecked train.

She set her teeth, hugged, the boy to her, and pressed on the quicker. She could not feel her bruises for the joy of having him. She walked for nearly an hour, then she had to stop; a baby of nineteen months is no light weight, and for all that she was strong and in good condition, her arms and legs and back were aching. She climbed over a stile into a meadow, far over the brow of the slope; set him down, threw herself down beside him, and abandoned herself to her joy in him.

She hugged him, kissed him, nuzzled him, laughed over him, and cried over him. He took her tenderness in very good part, and made no complaint; indeed, when at last she lay still he clambered about her with chuckles of infinite delight; always he looked at her with familiar eyes. Presently he turned his attention to Nature, and made little rushes at flowers near them, invariably falling flat on the object of his desire. He had been trained to bravery; he did not howl at a tumble; he only grunted and pulled himself up again. He knew, too, what to do with a flower when he had plucked it; he sniffed at it.

She watched him in an absorbed, unfathomable joy; the intolerable hunger which had gnawed her was blunted. She was loth to tear herself away from her delightful watching ; but at last she rose and moved slowly down the path, letting him toddle before her, or leading him by the hand. He would go a little way with thoughtful dignity, pointing out things of interest with a waggling arm, and saying, "An—oh—h—h!"; then he would make a wild rush at a flower, and she would save him from the ditch.

She walked in a vast content, drinking in with greedy eyes and ears his every look, movement, and murmur. For the first time since her loss the sun was really shining, and she heard the birds singing.

The path ended in a lane running downwards between high hedges; and on the Instant, with a cry of delight, the boy sat down in the thick dust and began to play with it.  With this sport to his hand there was no keeping him on his feet, and she picked him up and carried him.

The lane ran into another lane running along the bottom of a valley, and turning to the left she plodded steadily on. At about four she came into a small village, and was very glad to rest her weary body in the parlour of the little Inn. She fed the boy on warm milk and bread and butter; and it was such a delight to her that she could have wished him to go on eating and drinking for ever.

The landlady came in once or twice and called him a pretty dear and a fine child ; Lady Drysdale resented her interest, but she was careful to gratify her rustic curiosity with a story of how she had brought the boy down from London to Rickmansworth to spend a day in the country, and had wandered with him hither. While she took her own tea the boy enjoyed a splendid time with a large cat— the cat rather endured than enjoyed it.

After tea she played with him a little; then, since the landlord could not persuade the baker, who owned the only trap in the village, to drive her to Rickmansworth, she took the boy and went to him herself. There are not many men who could refuse Lady Drysdale anything in their power to give her, if she put herself about to coax it out of them; certainly the simple but grumpy baker was not one of them; and in twenty minutes she was being jolted along to the station. She had to wait there but a very few minutes for a train, and reached London at six. She changed her cab in Oxford-street, that there might be no tracing her from Baker-street to Grosvenor-square; let herself into her house, and gained her room without meeting a servant, so that none of them could have told exactly at what hour she came home.

But as soon as she had taken off her hat and the boy's hat and coat she rang for her maid, and, after telling her she bad adopted the boy, a Berkshire child, that she might spread that quite inaccurate information, she ordered her to set the servants to work to bring down the cot and baby's bath from upstairs, and to tend out for baby food. The boy appeared pleased with the pretty room, and showed his approval by tearing the draping round the toilet table in the intervals of waggling his arm and murmuring "A—oh—h—h!" at all the bright things on it.

Lady Drysdale prepared his food herself, and then she set about giving him his bath. In the middle of it the fancy came to her that he was her little dead baby come back to her; he was so like him, not only in his little body, bit in his ways of splashing the water, of playing with the soap and the sponge, of crowing his delight; besides, never had he looked at her as at a stranger.

She thrust the fancy away from her, but it would come back. When she had fed him, and rocked him to sleep, and sat watching him, she played with the fancy. Could such things be? Why could not such things be? As her baby died, this one had been born. The tearing clutch of little dead hands was loosening from her heart.

Presently she heard her husband come in, and up the stairs, not three steps at a time, as he had used to come on the chance of finding their boy still awake, but slowly. He opened the door and looked in, and at the sight of the cot he started, and stared with all his eyes. She beckoned him, and, coming softly, he stood by the cot staring down at the sleeping child in a bewildered fascination.

"Good heavens!" he said softly. "It's the boy!"

In a low voice she told him of her theft and her precautions. He listened in a dull wonder, staring at the child. When she had done he said nothing; he only gazed and gazed. She shook his arm in a feverish impatience, and said in a husky, grasping voice:

"I must have him, Dick! I must —I must! I tell you he is mine!"

"By the Lord, you shall!" said Lord Drysdale, waking up.

The next day Lady Drysdale and the boy were on their way to Munich. Her husband stayed behind to watch events. The baby's unfortunate mother was identified by her stepmother, and when that lady found no baby awaiting her care she was exceedingly guarded in her inquiries about him.

In the end she seemed to take it very easily for granted that he had fallen Into charitable hands; and even seemed pleased to be rid of the responsibility. She told the railway officials that the child could not have been travelling with his mother.

Lord Drysdale contrived to see her—a thin-lipped, narrow-faced, small-eyed woman: and the sight of her face sent him to Munich justified in his own eyes in keeping the child out of her clutches.

The boy, with a wangling arm and his murmur of "Ah-eh-h-h!" points out to his new parents things of interest in the European capitals; soon he will have grown out of the recognition of any one who knew him in England.

His new parents are devoted to him. It is wonderful, almost past believing, how he has filled the gap in their lives; possibly it is the likeness. Lady Drysdale's feelings about him are very curious; often she tells herself that he is her dead baby come back to her. Perhaps she believes it— a mother's heart is, after all, the mystery of mysteries.

__________________

11: Priscilla's Poaching

Longman’s Magazine Feb 1902

MY NAME is Priscilla Chute, and I am a poacher. But I do not think I could have done otherwise, and under the same circumstances I would certainly do it again.

It was partly the fault of the Boer war, partly of the failure of a large commercial corporation, and surely I am not to blame for either.

The Chutes and the Baldrans had lived at Sleetham Regis since the days of the Stuarts— the Chutes at Blackstead and the Baldrans at the Hall.  The Baldrans own the land all round; the Chutes have always been rolling stones and gathered very little moss indeed; they say at Fleetham, "The Chutes only come Home to die."

Most of them failed to do even that; fighting or by fever, they have died all over the world, and their graves are high tide, marks of the British Empire. We know, if anyone does, that "on the bones of the English the English flag is stayed".

When I was a child; there were six of us at Blackstead; five boys, two brothers and three cousins, and myself. During their holidays they teased me a great deal and bullied me a little; but I learned to do most things that boys do— I am even a quite decent featherweight boxer— and some things that many boys have no chance of doing.

In the house my mother ruled us; out of it "them little Chute devils" were known for miles round. Of the poor boys only Tom is left. Harry and Noel lie on the North-West frontier, Roger and Jack on the banks of the Tugelh. Tom had stayed at Blackstead partly because he had failed for Sandhurst, partly to look after me when our mother had died: but he had been one of the first of the Yeomanry to volunteer for the Cape, and in November he was invalided  home. It looked, indeed, as if he had only come home to die; and Jane, our old nurse, and I set ourselves to drag him back, inch by inch, from death. We nursed him night and day, watching and sleeping turn-about, until at last he began to mend a very little.

Then the last blow fell. T had been short of money before Tom came back; I had been waiting and waiting for the dividend from the company above mentioned, and it never came; then; on the morning of my nineteenth birthday, a circular came to say that it would pay no dividend at all, at any rate, for a long While. It was a birthday! I thought, and worried, and puzzled my brain, but I could see no way of getting money. There was £6 in the house, three people to feed, and one of them, an invalid; needing the most delicate and nourishing food. I knew of no one to ask help of. I worried and worried until, in the afternoon, I had that rarest of all things for me, a headache. Fortunately Tom fell asleep, and, leaving Jane to watch him, I set out for a walk with the dogs.

I was walking along with my eyes on the road instead of on the fields and hedgerows as usual, still working and still hopeless, when I was aroused by a rustling in the hedge and a rush from the dogs. There was a squeaking and fluttering, and Vixen came out of the ditch with a partridge in her mouth. I took it from her; and found that it had been badly wounded and had crept away to die; she had killed it. I slipped it under my cloak, rejoicing at the windfall, since it would make Tom an appetising soup, when it flashed upon me that had stumbled upon a mine of food: During the last two years the game had been strictly preserved, for Sir John Baldran, the new baronet, was going to shoot over his Fleetham estate. There had even been talk of his spending part of the winter at the Hall, which had been shut up for nearly thirty years, since his father, Sir Hubert, had never been able to endure the place after my mother's marriage. The country was fuller of game and rabbits than ever it had been before, and I was soon glowing at visions of abundance of the most tempting food for an invalid. My £6 would last six months, for our cow gave us milk and butter, our hens eggs; we only needed flour and groceries. By that time Tom would be well and able to make money somehow, and the company— such was my fond hope— would pay a dividend...

I turned and set out home, my headache gone.

As I went I considered the other side of the matter. Poaching was wrong, of course; but I had done so much of it a with the poor boys that to that particular sin my conscience was hardened. And if it had not been hardened I could not have listened to it, because Tom came first. But unfortunately poaching had grown far more dangerous than it used to be. The keepers were new men, strangers to the neighbourhood, and by the number of poachers they had prosecuted plainly bent on doing their work thoroughly.

It did not matter; I must take the risk. The sight of many scampering rabbits, and the calling of pheasants from coppice to coppice, cheered me. I had never had a bicycle, and consequently knew every foot of the country for five miles round; while, thanks to my early training, I had learned to watch the ways or the wild dwellers in. it. On the other hand, I was handicapped by a-great disadvantage. Though I do not mind shooting creatures, because the gun does the killing, I could ; not possibly kill any I caught, in cold-blood, with my hands; and I should have to rely on snares which would strangle them for me.  The boys had laughed often enough at my squeamishness, as they called it; and I tried hard to argue myself out of it. It was no use; much as should have preferred birds, I must be content with hares and rabbits. I might, indeed, set horsehair springes for pheasants, but we had never had any luck with them; and they are so conspicuous when thrown, for they hold the bird hanging in the air. It must be hares and rabbits.

When I reached home I lighted a lantern and went up into the big loft above the empty stables where the boys had kept most of their sporting paraphernalia, and there in a corner I found a score of snares, their pegs still hanging to them by the rotten strings, and even a bundle of the little notched sticks in which you set up the wires. I carried half a dozen up to Tom's room and set about cleaning them with sand. They had been put away greased and were very little rusted.

Then I made sure that the slipknots ran easily, and fastened them to their pegs with fresh string. In less than an hour they were read for use, and I took my old cloak and sewed inside it two great pockets, either of which would hold three rabbits. Then I made my first plan.

At 9.30 I set out with my snares for Horton's Dingle, which lies a mile and a half further from the village than Blackstead. I went quickly till I came to Where the road runs within a hundred yards of Fleetham Wood, and then I stole very quietly along the grass, that no watcher posted in the the wood might hear me.  A quarter of a mile from the wood lies the dingle mouth,  twenty yards from the road, and I slipped into it quickly. I knew every foot of it; and, besides, it is an easy, place to set a wire in.

One's skirts are the chief difficulty; unless you are very careful they brush across the rim and no rabbit or hare will pass along it. But here I could stand in. the dingle and beach up to the runs which ran along the banks. It was dark, but, looking upward, I could see dimly the big trees which were my landmarks; I went a dozen yards into the dingle and set my first wire, driving, the peg into the bank three feet below the run with my foot, and rubbing my glove in the dead leaves to take all human scent from it, before I stuck into the middle of the run the little notched stick which holds up the wire noose. Moving along as noiselessly as a cat, I set all my wires in the first forty yards of the dingle, three on either bank; then I retraced my steps; and when I came out on the road I found myself breathing quickly and sighing with relief. Whether it was that I had grown unused to poaching or that I had never before poached alone I had not enjoyed setting my wires one little bit. I was soon home and in bed.

At two o'clock Jane woke me to take my spell of nursing till six; when she relieved me I went straight off to my wires. After the watching and sleeplessness the dark morning was horribly chilling; but hope and hard walking warmed me, and I reached the dingle in a glow. I slipped into it, with my heart beating quickly; so much depended on success. The first two wires had not been thrown; I pulled them up, and my heart began to sink. When I felt for the third it was not there. I groped about my feet found the string taut, and at the end of it a noosed rabbit.

My spirits rose. I pulled up the peg and dropped rabbit and snare together into my pocket. The fourth wire had not been thrown; coming to the fifth I trod on a rabbit it had caught, and pouched him; the sixth: was empty. I came out of the dingle very happy; my hand had not forgotten its cunning, and my anxiety was gone. I hurried home, had breakfast, went to bed and slept till eleven.

I awoke to dreams of affluence on the strength of two rabbits, and began at once to make my plan for the day. My heart was set on a hare. I was cleaning the wires by Tom's bedside, when I looked up to find him watching me ,with the first interest I had seen on his face since he came back.

"Ah!" he said, in his shadow of a voice, "you're going to have a shot at Bunter."

"At a hare," I said. "I got two rabbits last night." And I told him of my wiring the dingle.

His eyes grew almost bright as he listened, and I felt that I had stimulated the desire to live in him. But he was so weak that the moment I had done he fell asleep.

I was indeed impatient for the twilight, and as soon as it fell I hurried off through the village to the down which runs along above the Hall. A footpath rises to the top of it, and half-way up a belt of larch and fir stretches across the side of the; slope. I had often noticed that the hares came down to the meadows through the stile and through a gap in the hedge on; the further side of the belt of trees. At the stile I paused arid looked up and down. No one was coming; Below me, to the right, lay Baldran Hall; and I was surprised to see many of the windows brightly lighted. Sir John Baldran must have come down for his shoot.

Of course I had not heard of it. Tom kept Jane and myself prisoners; we had not even been to church since his return. I wasted no time, but went along the lower side of the hedge to the gap, which lay about fifty yards from the stile. I set my wire in the gap itself, taking the greatest care not to touch the run. Then I went back to the stile, climbed over it, went twenty yards down the hedge, and walked out into the field, letting my skirts drag through the stubble. I waffled in a half-circle to a point in the hedge twenty yards on the other side of the stile. I was pretty sure that not a hare would cross that half-circle for several hours. I had closed the passage to the stile; they would all go through the gap. Then I went quietly home.

When I had told Tom what I had done he said, "I should like some hare soup."

It was the first time he had fancied anything, and I knew well that he had only fancied hare soup made from poached hare. The nest day he had it, for  going to my wire at ten that night, I found it thrown and a plump young hare in it. Tom took his soup as though he actually enjoyed it, and made me keener than ever on my neighbour's game.

The next night I stayed at home, but the night after that I tried tor another hare. I had set my wire in the gap, and was coming down the slope, when I heard the squeal, a little muffled, of n hare.

This was luck; I was saved a journey. I went back to the gap slowly, for if the hare was not dead when I reached it I know that I should let her go. She was dead; and, slipping her neck out of the wire, I put her in my pocket. I was pulling the peg, when a voice made my heart jump into my mouth, saying quietly, "I say, this must be great fun."

And a man stepped through the gap.

I dropped the wire; I was caught. Plainly, he had been on his way from the top of the down, and turning aside to find out I why the hare squealed had seen me pocket her.

I could say nothing; I could only stare; and he raised his cap and said, "I beg your pardon. I'm afraid I startled you." '

"Not at all," I stammered; and . my tongue stuck. He picked up the wire and examined it carefully; and as he did I examined him. He seemed about twenty-seven, tall, and slight, with a longish, rather pale face, dark, and clean-shaven. I thought he had a foreign air. I began to gather my scattered wits and wonder what was coming next.

"This is very ingenious," he said, dangling the wire and looking at me in a queer, solemn kind of way. "Do you know, I think I'm coming into this."

"What— what do you mean?" I stammered

"I'm going to join in the chase and help you."

"Indeed you're "not!" I cried.

''Indeed I am. I have a tender conscience, and it must be humored."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"It is bidding me to take you along, hare, snare, and all, to the nearest keeper, by force if necessary"— his eyes sparkled queerly, as though he would have really enjoyed taking me along by force. "I can only quiet it by at once becoming useful and helpful to a fellow-creature. Therefore I'm going to help you in your nefarious occupation."

"But I don't want any help."

"That's a pity— a great pity," he said, with a deep sigh. "Come along to a keeper." He put out his hand to my arm, and I saw that he meant it. I jumped back crying, "Oh, you are hateful!"

"I am.  How did you guess it? I have a perfectly fiendish nature, cruel and malignant. Sometimes it surprises even me. But come along."

"'No, no!" I cried, edging away. "Let me think a moment."

"You shall have three minutes," he said, and looked at his watch, holding, it in the moonlight.

I was almost too angry to think; and if it hadn't been for Tom and the six pounds I needn't have thought at all. But I might be locked up for the night— poachers are— and then the fine and the costs. I was in a mess. I thought of bolting, but that was no use.

He kept looking from my face to his watch; then he said, "Time's up."

"Very , well," I said very sulkily; "you shall help. But I think you're utterly detestable."

"I am. I told you I was," he said almost proudly."But it is an' honest pro―"

"Oh, you shall help," I said; and then and there I made up my mind to, make every use of him. If I caught anything alive he should kill it; and if a keeper caught us, he would get into all the trouble.

I turned and walked down the hill, and he walked by my side, talking of the beauty of the country in the frosty moonlight, and asking who lived at the big lighted building. My short, sulky answers did not spoil his cheerfulness. He told me that his name was Hubertson, that he was no sportsman except in the matter of big game, out of which you could get some excitement; but he thought that poaching might be exciting, too. I showed no interest in him at all. As we went through the village he asked which was the road to Swyre, which is four miles off; and I was so glad to hear that he was living so far away that I was less sulky with him the rest of the way to Blacksstead. At the gates we, or rather he, arranged to meet there at nine o'clock the night after next, and he said good-night.

I had plenty of time the next two days to try to find a way out of this unwelcome companionship, but could find none. I thought for a little while of giving up poaching altogether, but necessity and my promise to let him help me prevented it; I must make the best of it.

I was very punctual at the gates, hoping that he would be late and I should get away by myself; but he was there, quite unconcerned, not in the least shamefaced at having forced himself on me. He talked cheerfully on the way to the dingle, till I bade him follow me noiselessly on the grass past Fleetham Wood.  I set the wires, and very little he saw of their setting in that darkness. On the way back he talked of the sense of adventure, the excitement and the risk; and once I found myself forgetting my resolve to treat him as the intruder he was, and actually talking to him of the creepy sounds of the night. I stopped short when I remembered.

When we reached Blackstead he asked when we should go and see what we had caught; and when I said at six in the morning, he cried, "Good  heavens! How am I to be here at six in the morning?"

"I can go alone quite well," I said triumphantly. "I'd rather."

"My conscience will not suffer me to let you go about these lonely lanes in the dark," he said; and at six o'clock he was waiting for me, rather subdued. We got three rabbits.

That was the first of a dozen expeditions. I do not know how it was, but little by little, except for an occasional quarrel, we grew quite friendly; snubbing and stiffness only made him more cheerful.

The whole business was strange and quite wrong; but I could not help myself. Indeed, I began at last to look forward to our expeditions. He had seen so much, and could talk of it so well; and after all the country is very dull. He drew from me, without my perceiving what he was doing, the reason of my poaching, and showed himself quite anxious about Tom. I could never make out why he came poaching, for he never learned anything, not even how to set a wire; and as for helping, he never helped at all. That was why I fell into the way of calling him Helper. I always used to say, "Good evening, Helper," and "Good-bye, Helper." I thought he must come with me for the pleasure of having someone to talk to, for I knew that anyone staying at Swyre would find it very dull.

Then I did make him useful. Tom heard a pheasant call across the meadows one evening and said he would like, some pheasant. I made up my mind to get one; and the Helper should kill it.

That night he went up to the little fir plantation about two hundred yards from the north end of Fleetham Wood, to which I had often seen at least a dozen pheasants going to roost. It was a long walk, for we had to make a circuit to come at the plantation from the side furthest from the wood, but the Helper kept me laughing most of the way, and it seemed short. We had to cross a hundred yards of open meadow to get into the plantation, and we crossed it at a run; for if there were a watcher in it we must be seen. Once inside the plantation I hunted noiselessly about for a convenient pheasant. Most of them were roosting too high or in awkward trees; but at last I found one about ten feet from the ground which I could get at.

I told the Helper to stand ready to wring its neck, and then scrambled, noiselessly on to a bough four feet from the ground. I stood up on it, and gripping the bough on which the pheasant was roosting with my left hand, I slipped my right softly along it till I had him by the legs. I pulled him from his perch; thrust him downward, squawking and struggling, into the Helper's hands, and sprang down. I thought he was never going to kill it; it seemed to go on squawking for an age, and he was swearing under his breath. At last it was quiet;

I put it into my pocket. We hurried out of the plantation and ran for the. road. When we reached it I laughed with excited delight; then, turning to' the Helper, I saw that his face was working with, angry disgust.

"Never in my life did I do anything so beastly," he burst out. "I feel like a murdering poulterer!"

"Never mind, come along," I said,  and started briskly for home. He walked along angry and sulky; and I wondered at him. Presently be growled, "Why Wouldn't we stick to hares and rabbits? They don't want any necks wringing."

"I wanted a change," I said stiffly.

"It was mere thoughtless selfishness," he cried. "You never thought how; I should feel playing the poulterer."

"I don't care how you feel," I said hotly. "You thrust you help on me, and the first time you are of any use you grumble."

"It was beastly," he said.

"You will have to harden yourself to it or not come with me. Now that I've got you to kill them for me I'm going to try for birds often. However, you needn't come if you don't like."

He growled like a bear, and we walked on in silence, I could not understand his squeamishness about a pheasant; for he had killed moose, elk, and three kinds of bears; besides, the boys had been able to kill anything with their hands without the slightest discomfort.

At the gates of Blackstead we stopped, and I was just going to say good-night when he said, "I think I deserve something for killing that bird." And  his eyes were shining curiously.

"Yes— yes— you do," I said slowly. "But what— can I give you?"

"I want a kiss," he said, in a breathless kind of voice.

Tor a moment I experienced the strangest feeling I have' ever felt; a kind of thrilling feeling; and I knew that I was blushing to the roots of my hair. Then I turned very angry and cried, "You will have nothing of the kind. How dare you talk of such a thing?"

"I dare— oh, I dare," he said slowly. "I'm certainly going to have one."

"You're not!"

"You showed no considerations for my feelings about that beastly bird, and I won't show any for yours— so there." And with that he made a quick movement to catch hold of me...

Without a thought I hit out with all my might and he went down in a heap. I jumped back and stood staring down at him panting. He lay quite still, and of a sudden I realised that I must have hurt, him very badly. I dropped on one knee beside him, with a sinking heart, and propped him up against the other; his limbs and back were all limp; and I guessed what had happened. I had caught him on the point of the jaw— a thing I mightn't have done in a hundred times trying to do it.

For three or four minutes I knelt, propping him up and trying feebly to bring him to; then I laid him flat, ran to the tool house and brought a wheelbarrow. I lifted him into it, wheeled him up to, the back door, and dragged him into the kitchen, where the fire was still burning, and huddled him into a big oak chair in front of, it. I got some brandy; and forced a little, into, his mouth; then I brought a basin of cold water and a sponge and bathed his temples and forehead, till at last he heaved a deep sigh.

He was coming to, but he looked so horribly-pale, and shaken that, though I never cry, the tears would keep coming into my eyes at having hurt him so.

Presently he said faintly, "Where— where am I? Oh, my head."

"In Blackstead kitchen," I said. "But keep quite quiet, and you'll soon feel better."

He shut his eyes obediently, and I went to the dining-room and wheeled a light sofa into the kitchen. I helped him, half-carrying him, on to it and covered him with rugs. In five minutes he was sleeping heavily, and I went up to Tom. During the next two hours I kept coming down to my new patient, but he slept on and began to look better, and, at last, tired out, I went to sleep myself on the sofa in Tom's room.

I slept heavily ; and only awakened at half-past five. I went down at once to see how the Helper was and to, my surprise and dismay I found the sofa empty; he had gone.

I put on my cloak and hat, and hurried down the road and through the village half way to Swyre, expecting every moment to find him lying by the roadside. Two miles from Swyre. I met a couple of labourers coming from it; they had met and seen no one. I came home anxious enough, but assuring myself that he had been less hurt than I thought and had reached Swyre safely.

At nine that night, and again at ten, I went to the gates in the hope that he might come to go poaching. He did not come, and I went to bed very anxious.

The next morning there came a letter bearing the Swyre postmark. It ran:

Dear Miss Chute,

I am sorry that I behaved so badly last night; I deserved the penalty I paid for it. My head is only just beginning to join on to my shoulders. I hope that in consideration of having nearly killed me, you will forgive. I shall come round at nine this evening to help, but chiefly to deprecate your just resentment.

Yours sincerely

J. Hubertson

The letter cleared away my last anxiety, but it gave me the freedom to grow angry. I saw plainly that I ought never to have accepted such a situation, and I made up my mind that he should help me no more. I went down to the gates at a few minutes to nine and locked them.

Presently the Helper came striding up, greeted me in a shamefaced way, and began to apologise. I accepted his apologies and told him that he was never coming poaching with me again. He begged me not to punish him so cruelly, promised never to offend again, and at last lost his temper, as I knew he would, and stormed furiously. Then he made a dash at the gates, tried to open them, and, failing, shook and shook them.

I said, "You see how right I was. Goodbye." And I turned and went up the drive, never turning my head for all his entreaties that I would, stay and talk to him, if only for two minutes.

For some days I never went out of, the grounds and kept the gates locked after midday. Twice I saw him, leaning disconsolately against them. But I missed our expeditions very much; so much that I wished, for all that they were pleasant to look back on, that I had never snared that wretched hare which had been to blame for them. Sometimes I wondered whether, when Tom was better, the Helper would find a way of meeting me again; but I was still very angry with him.

At last I had to go out and seek more food. I was bent on getting pheasants, and I took the boys' old muzzle-loader, and charged it with a very little powder and a full charge of shot. I did not think that the report would be heard a hundred yards off.

At eleven that night I set out for the fir plantation. It seemed a much longer walk than when I went with the Helper. Once in it I soon found a brace of pheasants roosting at a convenient height, and getting them against a patch of the Milky Way, fired; they both came tumbling down. I thrust them quickly into my pockets and hurried through the plantation toward the road. I had not gone twenty yards when a man jumped from between two firs and gripped my arm, crying, "I've got you, my lad!"

For a moment I tried to shake myself free, but on his heels came another man and caught my other arm, and I said— "Don't tear my cloak to pieces, my good men; I'll go quietly."

"Good Lord, it's a woman!" cried one of them, and they began, to discuss what they had better do with me. They decided to take me to the Hall.

It was a dismal walk. If I had been a girl in a book I should have gone dauntlessly to meet my judges, but I felt very downhearted. How that they were upon me, the appearing before the bench, the having my name in the papers, and the scandal, seemed terrible. Besides, there was the fine, and they might lock me up for the night, and Tom, though on the mend, needed every care.

We went to the back door of the hall, and after looking at me the butler said: "You'd better bring the young person to the library and I'll fetch Sir John."

He led the way to the library, lighted two lamps in it, and poked up the fire. Without thinking, I took an easy chair by it and stretched out my feet to the blaze. The butler frowned at me and went out, leaving the door ajar. I heard another door open, a babble of voices, clicking billiard balls, and the butler's voice, saying,

"Please, Sir John, Jenkins and Smith have got a poacher in the library."

"A poacher!"

"Let's see the rascal!"

"I vote we duck him!"

"Give him a horsewhipping!!' cried half a dozen voices; there was a hurrying of feet in the hall, and what seemed a crowd of men in evening dress poured in through the library door. How I hated them! and I think I must have looked like it, for they hushed suddenly, and some or their mouths opened.

"What on earth did the idiots bring him here for?" said a voice in the hall, a voice I knew very well; and the Helper came into the room.

At once I felt quite safe, but at the sight of me his face filled with a dismayed surprise, and he cried, "What senseless idiocy have you been to now, Jenkins?" and came swiftly across the room with outstretched hand, saying, "How do you do, Miss Chute; I hope to goodness my idiots have not annoyed you?"

Then he turned angrily on the keepers and said, "Clear out, you dunderheaded idiots."

"But, Sir John—" said the keeper.

"Clear out, will you!" roared the Helper furiously, stamping his foot, and they shuffled out quickly.

Then he turned to his friends and practically, drove them back to their game, telling them that he must see me home, and refusing curtly two or three offers to come with him that he might not have to walk back alone. The butler brought his hat and coat, and in two minutes we were out of the house.

We had not gone ten yards down the drive when I turned on him and said furiously, "How dare you?"

"How dare I what?" he said. .

"You're― you're Sir John Baldran. You've been practically giving me all that game we caught. It was disgraceful of you. I'm— I'm glad—yes; I'm glad that I hit you so hard."

He looked at me gravely and said, "I'm afraid, my dear, Priscilla, that you have a bad temper."

"I'm not you dear Priscilla. How dare you―"

"Oh, yes, you are. I always think of you as my dear Priscilla," he said calmly.

"You've no right―"

"Oh, yes, I have," he interrupted again. "You've made me your partner in crime, a poacher; you've bullyragged me continually; you've knocked me down and nearly killed me; with a cold cruelty you've tried to drive me to suicide by denying me the sight of you when you knew I was dying for it. Look  what you've cost me in mental, moral, and physical anguish— it gives me every right to call you my dear Priscilla. You're the dearest creature I ever came across, and it was a bad day for me when I met you."

"Well, that will soon be mended! We shan't meet again!" I gasped out, almost choking with rage.

"No; there's no mending it," he said, in the saddest, voice. "I can't do without you, you're my one extravagance— my, dearest Priscilla; you'll have to take pity on me and— and beggar me."

It was no use my saying anything; he would only twist my words. I know that way of his well!  We walked on without speaking and my anger cooled a little. Then suddenly he said in a very different voice, "Do be kind to me, Priscilla; you've been cruel so long."

It was not fair. My nerves had been shaken by my capture and that horrible walk with the keepers; the sudden gentleness upset me, and I rather broke down.

We were some time saying good-bye at Blackstead gates, and— well, I did not knock him down this time.

As I went up the drive he called, after me, "By the way, my dearest Priscilla, I'm going to take a long and severe course of boxing lessons before we're married."

_________________

12: The Tea-Leaf

(with  Robert Eustace)

Tales of Detection (edited by Dorothy L. Sayers)

ARTHUR KELSTERN and George Willoughton met in the Turkish bath in Duke Street, St. James’s, and rather more than a year later in that Turkish bath they parted. Both of them were bad-tempered men, Kelstern cantankerous and Willoughton violent. It was indeed difficult to decide which was the worse-tempered; and when I found that they had suddenly become friends, I gave that friendship three months. It lasted nearly a year.

When they did quarrel they quarrelled about Kelstern’s daughter Ruth. Willoughton fell in love with her and she with him and they became engaged to be married. Six months later, in spite of the fact that they were plainly very much in love with one another, the engagement was broken off. Neither of them gave any reason for breaking it off. My belief was that Willoughton had given Ruth a taste of his infernal temper and got as good as he gave.

Not that Ruth was at all a Kelstern to look at. Like the members of most of the old Lincolnshire families, descendants of the Vikings and the followers of Canute, one Kelstern is very like another Kelstern, fair-haired, clear-skinned, with light blue eyes and a good bridge to the nose. But Ruth had taken after her mother: she was dark with a straight nose, dark-brown eyes of the kind often described as liquid, dark-brown hair, and as kissable lips as ever I saw. She was a proud, rather self-sufficing, high-spirited girl, with a temper of her own. She needed it to live with that cantankerous old brute Kelstern. Oddly enough in spite of the fact that he always would try to bully her, she was fond of him; and I will say for him that he was very fond of her. Probably she was the only creature in the world of whom he was really fond. He was an expert in the application of scientific discoveries to industry; and she worked with him in his laboratory. He paid her five hundred a year, so that she must have been uncommonly good.

He took the breaking off of the engagement very hard indeed. He would have it that Willoughton had jilted her. Ruth took it hard too: her warm colouring lost some of its warmth; her lips grew less kissable and set in a thinner line. Willoughton’s temper grew worse than ever; he was like a bear with a perpetually sore head. I tried to feel my way with both him and Ruth with a view to help to bring about a reconciliation. To put it mildly, I was rebuffed. Willoughton swore at me; Ruth flared up and told me not to meddle in matters that didn’t concern me. Nevertheless my strong impression was that they were missing one another badly and would have been glad enough to come together again if their stupid vanity could have let them.

Kelstern did his best to keep Ruth furious with Willoughton. One night I told him – it was no business of mine; but I never did give a tinker’s curse for his temper – that he was a fool to meddle and had much better leave them alone. It made him furious, of course; he would have it that Willoughton was a dirty hound and a low blackguard – at least those were about the mildest things he said of him. It struck me of a sudden that there must be something much more serious in the breaking off of the engagement than I had guessed.

That suspicion was strengthened by the immense trouble Kelstern took to injure Willoughton. At his clubs, the Athenaeum, the Devonshire, and the Savile, he would display an astonishing ingenuity in bringing the conversation round to Willoughton; then he would declare that he was a scoundrel and a blackguard of the meanest type. Of course it did Willoughton harm, though not nearly as much harm as Kelstern desired, for Willoughton knew his job as few engineers knew it; and it is very hard indeed to do much harm to a man who really knows his job. People have to have him. But of course it did him some harm; and Willoughton knew that Kelstern was doing it. I came across two men who told me that they had given him a friendly hint. That did not improve Willoughton’s temper.

An expert in the construction of those ferro-concrete buildings which are rising up all over London, he was as distinguished in his sphere as Kelstern in his. They were alike not only in the matters of brains and bad temper; but I think that their minds worked in very much the same way. At any rate both of them seemed determined not to change their ordinary course of life because of the breaking off of that engagement.

It had been the habit of both of them to have a Turkish bath, at the baths in Duke Street, at four in the afternoon on the second and last Tuesday in every month. To that habit they stuck. The fact that they must meet on those Tuesdays did not cause either of them to change his hour of taking his Turkish bath by the twenty minutes which would have given them no more than a passing glimpse of one another. They continued to take it, as they always had, simultaneously. Thick-skinned? They were thick-skinned. Neither of them pretended that he did not see the other; he scowled at him; and he scowled at him most of the time. I know this, for sometimes I had a Turkish bath myself at that hour.

It was about three months after the breaking off of the engagement that they met for the last time at that Turkish bath, and there parted for good.

Kelstern had been looking ill for about six weeks: there was a greyness and a drawn look to his face; and he was losing weight. On the second Tuesday in October he arrived at the bath punctually at four, bringing with him, as was his habit, a thermos flask full of a very delicate China tea. If he thought that he was not perspiring freely enough he would drink it in the hottest room; if he did perspire freely enough, he would drink it after his bath. Willoughton arrived about two minutes later. Kelstern finished undressing and went into the bath a couple of minutes before Willoughton. They stayed in the hot room about the same time; Kelstern went into the hottest room about a minute after Willoughton. Before he went into it he sent for his thermos flask which he had left in the dressing-room and took it into the hottest room with him.

As it happened, they were the only two people in the hottest room; and they had not been in it two minutes before the four men in the hot room heard them quarrelling. They heard Kelstern call Willoughton a dirty hound and a low blackguard, among other things, and declare he would do him in yet. Willoughton told him to go to the devil twice. Kelstern went on abusing him and presently Willoughton fairly shouted: “Oh, shut up, you old fool! Or I’ll make you!”

Kelstern did not shut up. About two minutes later Willoughton came out of the hottest room, scowling, walked through the hot room into the shampooing room and put himself into the hands of one of the shampooers. Two or three minutes after that a man of the name of Helston went into the hottest room and fairly yelled. Kelstern was lying back on a blood-drenched couch, with the blood still flowing from a wound over his heart.

There was a devil of a hullabaloo. The police were called in; Willoughton was arrested. Of course he lost his temper and, protesting furiously that he had had nothing whatever to do with the crime, abused the police. That did not incline them to believe him.

After examining the room and the dead body the detective-inspector in charge of the case came to the conclusion that Kelstern had been stabbed as he was drinking his tea. The thermos flask lay on the floor in front of him and some of the tea had evidently been spilt, for some tea-leaves – the tea in the flask must have been carelessly strained of the leaves by the maid who filled it – lay on the floor about the mouth of the empty flask. It looked as if the murderer had taken advantage of Kelstern’s drinking his tea to stab him while the flask rather blocked his vision and prevented him from seeing what he would be at.

The case would have been quite plain sailing but for the fact that they could not find the weapon. It had been easy enough for Willoughton to take it into the bath in the towel in which he was draped. But how had he got of it? Where had he hidden it? A Turkish bath is no place to hide anything in. It is as bare as an empty barn – if anything barer; and Willoughton had been in the barest part of it. The police searched every part of it – not that there was much point in doing that, for Willoughton had come out of the hottest room, and gone through the hot room into the shampooers’ room. When Helston started shouting murder, Willoughton had rushed back with the shampooers to the hottest room and there he had stayed. Since it was obvious that he had committed the murder, the shampooers and the bathers had kept their eyes on him. They were all of them certain that he had not left them to go to the dressing-rooms; they would not have allowed him to do so.

It was obvious that he must have carried the weapon into the bath, hidden in the folds of the towel in which he was draped, and brought it away in the folds of that towel. He had laid the towel down beside the couch on which he was being shampooed; and there it still lay when they came to look for it, untouched, with no weapon in it, with no traces of blood on it. There was not much in the fact that it was not stained with blood, since Willoughton could have wiped the knife, or dagger, or whatever weapon he used, on the couch on which Kelstern lay. There were no marks of any such wiping on the couch; but the blood, flowing from the wound, might have covered them up.

There was no finding the weapon; and its disappearance puzzled the police and later puzzled the public.

Then the doctors who made the autopsy came to the conclusion that the wound had been inflicted by a circular, pointed weapon nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It had penetrated rather more than three inches and supposing that its handle was only four inches long it must have been a sizeable weapon, quite impossible to overlook. The doctors also discovered a further proof of the theory that Kelstern had been drinking his tea when he was stabbed. Half-way down the wound they found two halves of a tea-leaf which had evidently fallen on to Kelstern’s body, been driven into the wound and cut in half by the weapon. Also they discovered that Kelstern was suffering from cancer. This fact was not published in the papers; I heard it at the Devonshire.

Willoughton was brought before the magistrates and to most people’s surprise did not reserve his defence. He went into the witness box and swore that he had never touched Kelstern, that he had never had anything to touch him with, that he had never taken any weapon into the Turkish bath and so had had no weapon to hide, that he had never even seen any such weapon as the doctors described. He was committed for trial.

The papers were full of the crime; every one was discussing it; and the question which occupied every one’s mind was: where had Willoughton hidden the weapon? People wrote to the papers to suggest that he had ingeniously put it in some place under everybody’s eyes and that it had been overlooked because it was so obvious. Others suggested that, circular and pointed, it must be very like a thick lead pencil, that it was a thick lead pencil; and that was why the police had overlooked it in their search. The police had not overlooked any thick lead pencil; there had been no thick lead pencil to overlook. They hunted England through – Willoughton did a lot of motoring – to discover the man who had sold him this curious and uncommon weapon. They did not find the man who had sold it to him; they did not find a man who sold such weapons at all. They came to the conclusion that Kelstern had been murdered with a piece of a steel, or iron, rod filed to a point like a pencil.

In spite of the fact that only Willoughton could have murdered Kelstern, I could not believe that he had done it. The fact that Kelstern was doing his best to injure him professionally and socially was by no means a strong enough motive. Willoughton was far too intelligent a man not to be very well aware that people do not take much notice of statements to the discredit of a man whom they need to do a job for them; and for the social injury he would care very little. Besides, he might very well injure, or even kill, a man in one of his tantrums; but his was not the kind of bad temper that plans a cold-blooded murder; and if ever a murder had been deliberately planned, Kelstern’s had.

I was as close a friend as Willoughton had, and I went to visit him in prison. He seemed rather touched by my doing so, and grateful. I learnt that I was the only person who had done so. He was subdued and seemed much gentler. It might last. He discussed the murder readily enough and naturally with an harassed air. He said quite frankly that he did not expect me, in the circumstances, to believe that he had not committed it; but he had not, and he could not for the life of him conceive who had. I did believe that he had not committed it; there was something in his way of discussing it that wholly convinced me. I told him that I was quite sure that he had not killed Kelstern; and he looked at me as if he did not believe the assurance. But again he looked grateful.

Ruth was grieving for her father; but Willoughton’s very dangerous plight to some degree distracted her mind from her loss. A woman can quarrel with a man bitterly without desiring to see him hanged; and Willoughton’s chance of escaping hanging was not at all a good one. But she would not believe for a moment that he had murdered her father.

“No; there’s nothing in it – nothing whatever,” she said firmly. “If Dad had murdered Hugh I could have understood it. He had reasons – or at any rate he had persuaded himself that he had. But whatever reason had Hugh for murdering Dad? It’s all nonsense to suppose that he’d mind Dad’s trying all he knew to injure him, as much as that. All kinds of people are going about trying to injure other people in that way, but they don’t really injure them very much; and Hugh knows that quite well.”

“Of course they don’t; and Hugh wouldn’t really believe that your father was injuring him much,” I said. “But you’re forgetting his infernal temper.”

“No: I’m not,” she protested. “He might kill a man in one of his rages on the spur of the moment. But this wasn’t the spur of the moment. Whoever did it had worked the whole thing out and came along with the weapon ready.”

I had to admit that that was reasonable enough. But who had done it? I pointed out to her that the police had made careful enquiries about every one in the bath at the time, the shampooers and the people taking their baths, but they had found no evidence whatever that any one of them had at any time had any relations, except that of shampooer, with her father.

“Either it was one of them, or somebody else who just did it and got right away, or there’s a catch somewhere,” she said frowning thoughtfully.

“I can’t see how there can possibly have been any one in the bath, except the people who are known to have been there,” said I. “In fact, there can’t have been.”

Then the Crown subpoenaed her as a witness for the prosecution. It seemed rather unnecessary and even a bit queer, for it could have found plenty of evidence of bad blood between the two men without dragging her into it. Plainly it was bent on doing all it knew to prove motive enough. Ruth seemed more upset by the prospect of going into the witness-box than I should have expected her to be. But then she had been having a very trying time.

On the morning of the trial I called for her after breakfast to drive her down to the New Bailey. She was pale and looked as if she had had a poor night’s rest, and, naturally enough, she seemed to be suffering from an excitement she had to control. It was not like her to show any excitement she might be feeling.

We had of course been in close touch with Willoughton’s solicitor, Hamley; and he had kept seats for us just behind him. He wished to have Ruth at hand to consult should some point turn up on which she could throw light, since she knew more than any one about the relations between Willoughton and her father. I had timed our arrival very well; the jury had just been sworn in. Of course the Court was full of women, the wives of Peers and bookmakers and politicians, most of them over-dressed and over-scented.

Then the judge came in; and with his coming the atmosphere of the Court became charged with that sense of anxious strain peculiar to trials for murder. It was rather like the atmosphere of a sick room in a case of fatal illness, but worse.

It was unfortunate for Willoughton that the judge was Garbould. A hard-faced, common-looking fellow, and coarse in the grain, he has a well-founded reputation as a hanging judge and the habit of acting as an extra counsel for the prosecution.

Willoughton came into the box, looking under the weather and very much subdued. But he certainly looked dignified and he said that he was not guilty in a steady enough voice.

Greatorex, the leading Counsel for the Crown, opened the case for the prosecution. There was no suggestion in his speech that the Police had discovered any new fact.

Then Helston gave evidence of finding the body of the dead man and he and the other three men who had been with him in the hot room gave evidence of the quarrel they had overheard between Willoughton and the dead man, and that Willoughton came out of the hottest room, scowling and obviously furious. One of them, a fussy old gentleman of the name of Underwood, declared that it was the bitterest quarrel he had ever heard. None of the four of them could throw any light on the matter of whether Willoughton was carrying the missing weapon in the folds of the towel in which he was draped; all of them were sure that he had nothing in his hands.

The medical evidence came next. In cross-examining the doctors who had made the autopsy, Hazeldean, Willoughton’s counsel, established the fact quite definitely that the missing weapon was of a fair size; that its rounded blade must have been over half an inch in diameter and between three and four inches long. They were of the opinion that to drive a blade of that thickness into the heart, a handle of at least four inches in length would be necessary to give a firm enough grip. It might have been a piece of a steel, or iron, rod sharpened like a pencil. At any rate it was certainly a sizeable weapon, not one to be hidden quickly, or to disappear wholly in a Turkish bath. Hazeldean could not shake their evidence about the tea-leaf; they were confident that it had been driven into the wound and cut in half by the blade of the missing weapon, and that that went to show that the wound had been inflicted while Kelstern was drinking his tea.

Detective-Inspector Brackett, who was in charge of the case, was cross-examined at great length about his search for the missing weapon. He made it quite clear that it was nowhere in that Turkish bath, neither in the hot rooms, nor the shampooing room, nor the dressing-rooms, nor the vestibule, nor the office. He had had the plunge bath emptied; he had searched the roofs, though it was practically certain that the skylight above the hot room, not the hottest, had been shut at the time of the crime. In re-examination he scouted the idea of Willoughton’s having had an accomplice who had carried away the weapon for him. He had gone into that matter most carefully.

The shampooer stated that Willoughton came to him scowling so savagely that he wondered what had put him into such a bad temper. In cross-examining him Arbuthnot, Hazeldean’s junior, made it clearer than ever that, unless Willoughton had already hidden the weapon in the bare hottest room, it was hidden in the towel. Then he drew from the shampooer the definite statement that Willoughton had set down the towel beside the couch on which he was shampooed, that he had hurried back to the hot rooms in front of the shampooer; that the shampooer had come back from the hot rooms, leaving Willoughton still in them discussing the crime, to find the towel lying just as Willoughton had set it down, with no weapon in it and no trace of blood on it.

Since the Inspector had disposed of the possibility that an accomplice had slipped in, taken the weapon from the towel, and slipped out of the bath with it, this evidence really made it clear that the weapon had never left hottest room.

Then the prosecution called evidence of the bad terms on which Kelstern and Willoughton had been. Three well-known and influential men told the jury about Kelstern’s efforts to prejudice Willoughton in their eyes and the damaging statements he had made about him. One of them had felt it to be his duty to tell Willoughton about this; and Willoughton had been very angry. Arbuthnot, in cross-examining, elicited the fact that any damaging statement that Kelstern made about any one was considerably discounted by the fact that every one knew him to be in the highest degree cantankerous.

I noticed that during the end of the cross-examination of the shampooer and during this evidence, Ruth had been fidgeting and turning to look impatiently at the entrance to the Court, as if she were expecting some one. Then, just as she was summoned to the witness box, there came in a tall, stooping, grey-headed, grey-bearded man of about sixty, carrying a brown-paper parcel. His face was familiar to me; but I could not place him. He caught her eye and nodded to her. She breathed a sharp sigh of relief and bent over and handed a letter she had in her hand to Willoughton’s solicitor and pointed out the grey-bearded man to him. Then she went quietly to the witness box.

Hamley read the letter and at once bent over and handed it to Hazeldean and spoke to him. I caught a note of excitement in his hushed voice. Hazeldean read the letter and appeared to grow excited too. Hamley slipped out of his seat and went to the grey-bearded man who was still standing just inside the door of the Court and began to talk to him earnestly.

Greatorex began to examine Ruth; and naturally I turned my attention to her. His examination was directed also to show on what bad terms Kelstern and Willoughton had been. Ruth was called on to tell the jury some of Kelstern’s actual threats. Then – it is astonishing how few things the police fail to ferret out in a really important case – the examination took a curious turn. Greatorex began to question Ruth about her own relations with Willoughton and the plain trend of his questions was to bring out the fact that they had not merely been engaged to be married but had also been lovers.

I saw at once what the prosecution was aiming at. It was trying to make use of the tendency of a British jury and a British judge, in a natural effort to champion morality, to hang a man or a woman, who is on trial for murder, for behaving immorally in relations with the other sex. There was no better way of prejudicing Willoughton than by proving that he had seduced Ruth under the promise of marriage.

Of course Hazeldean was on his feet at once protesting that this evidence was irrelevant and inadmissible; and of course Garbould was against him – he does not enjoy the nickname by which he is known to the junior bar for nothing. Hazeldean was magnificent. He had one of the worst rows with Garbould he had ever had; and he has had many. Garbould is a fool to let him have these rows. Hazeldean always gets the better of him, or seems to; and it does him good with the jury. But then Garbould was raised to the bench not for intelligence but for political merit. He ruled that the questions were admissible and put one or two to Ruth himself.

Then Willoughton lost his temper and protested that this had nothing to do with the case and that it was an outrage. Willoughton has a ringing voice of considerable volume. He is not at all an easy man to hush when he does not wish to hush; and they were some time hushing him. By the time they succeeded, Garbould was purplish-red with fury. Anything that he could do to hang Willoughton would certainly be done. But, observing the jury, my impression was that Willoughton’s outburst had done him good with it and that Hazeldean’s protests had ended its confidence in Garbould. When I looked at the faces, just a trifle sickly, of the counsel for the prosecution, I felt sure that the Crown had bungled this business rather badly.

Greatorex, assisted by Garbould, went on with his questions; and Ruth defiant rather than abashed, and looking in her flushed animation a more charming creature than ever, admitted that she and Willoughton had been lovers; that more than once when he had brought her home from a dance or a theatre he had not left her till the early morning. One of the maids had spied on them; and the Crown had the facts.

I was afraid, in spite of Hazeldean’s protests, that the fact that Willoughton had seduced her under the promise of marriage, as Greatorex put it, would do him great harm with the jury – very likely it would hang him.

Then Ruth, still flushed, but not greatly discomposed, said: “That would be a reason for my father’s murdering Mr. Willoughton, not for Mr. Willoughton’s murdering my father.”

That brought Garbould down upon her like a ton of bricks. She was there to answer questions, not to make idle remarks and so forth and so on.

Then Greatorex came to the breaking off of the engagement and put it to her that Willoughton had broken it off, had in fact jilted her after compromising her. That she would not have for a moment. She declared that they had had a quarrel and she had broken it off. To that she stuck and there was no shaking her, though Garbould himself took a hearty hand in trying to shake her.

In the middle of it Willoughton, who was looking quite himself again, now that the atmosphere of the Court might be said to be charged almost with violence, said in a very unpleasant, jeering voice: “What she says is perfectly true – what’s the good of bothering her?”

Again Garbould was to the fore, and angrily reprimanded him for speaking, bade him keep silent, and said that he would not have his Court turned into a bear-garden.

“With the bear on the bench,” said Hazeldean to Arbuthnot in a whisper that carried well.

Two or three people laughed. One of them was a juryman. By the time Garbould had finished with him I did not think that that juryman would have convicted Willoughton, if he had actually seen him stab Kelstern.

Willoughton was writing a note which was passed to Hazeldean.

Hazeldean rose to cross-examine Ruth with a wholly confident air. He drew from her the facts that her father had been on excellent terms with Willoughton until the breaking off of the engagement; that in that matter he had taken her part warmly; and that when the maid who had spied upon them had informed him of her relations with Willoughton he had been very little more enraged than he was already.

Then Hazeldean asked: “Is it a fact that since the breaking off of your engagement the prisoner has more than once begged you to forgive him and renew it?”

“Four times,” said Ruth.

“And you refused?”

“Yes,” said Ruth. She looked at Willoughton queerly and added: “He wanted a lesson.”

“Did he then beg you at least to go through the form of marriage with him, and promise to leave you at the church door?”

“Yes.”

“And you refused?”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

Garbould bent forward and said in his most unpleasant tone: “And why did you reject the opportunity of repairing your shameful behaviour?”

“It wasn’t shameful,” Ruth almost snapped; and she scowled at him frankly. Then she added naïvely: “I refused because there was no hurry. He would always marry me if I changed my mind and wanted to.”

There was a pause. To me it seemed clearer than ever that the Crown had bungled badly in raising the question of the relations between her and Willoughton since he had evidently been more than ready to save her from any harm that might come of their indiscretion. But then, with a jury, you can never tell. Then Hazeldean started on a fresh line.

In sympathetic accents he asked: “Is it a fact that your father was suffering from cancer in a painful form?”

“It was beginning to grow very painful,” said Ruth sadly.

“Did he make a will and put all his affairs in order a few days before he died?”

“Three days,” said Ruth.

“Did he ever express an intention of committing suicide?”

“He said that he would stick it out for a little while and then end it all,” said Ruth. She paused and added: “And that is what he did do.”

One might almost say that the Court started. I think that everyone in it moved a little, so that there was a kind of rustling murmur. Garbould threw himself back in his seat with a snort of incredulity and glowered at Ruth.

“Will you tell the Court your reasons for that statement?” said Hazeldean.

Ruth seemed to pull herself together; the flush had faded from her face and she was looking very tired; then she began in a quiet, even voice: “I never believed for a moment that Mr. Willoughton murdered my father. If my father had murdered Mr. Willoughton it would have been a different matter.”

Garbould leaned forward and snarled that it was not her beliefs or fancies that were wanted, but facts.

I did not think that she heard him; she was concentrating on giving her reasons exactly; she went on in the same quiet tone: “Of course, like everybody else I puzzled over the weapon: what it was and where it had got to. I did not believe that it was a pointed piece of a half-inch steel rod. If anybody had come to the Turkish bath meaning to murder my father and hide the weapon, they wouldn’t have used one so big and so difficult to hide, when a hat-pin would have done just as well and could be hidden much more easily. But what puzzled me most was the tea-leaf in the wound. All the other tea-leaves that came out of the flask were lying on the floor. Inspector Brackett told me they were. And I couldn’t believe that one tea-leaf had fallen on to my father at the very place above his heart at which the point of the weapon had penetrated the skin and got driven in by it. It was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. But I got no nearer understanding it than anyone else.”

Garbould broke in in a tone of some exasperation and told her to come to the facts. Hazeldean rose and protested that the witness should not be interrupted; that she had solved a mystery which had puzzled some of the best brains in England, and she should be allowed to tell her story in her own way.

Again Ruth did not appear to listen to them, and when they stopped she went on in the same quiet voice: “Of course I remembered that Dad had talked to putting an end to it; but no one with a wound like that could get up and hide the weapon. Then, the night before last I dreamt that I went into the laboratory and saw a piece of steel rod, pointed, lying on the table at which my father used to work.”

“Dreams now!” murmured Garbould contemptuously; and he leaned back and folded his hands over his stomach.

“I didn’t think much of the dream, of course,” Ruth went on. “I had been puzzling about it all so hard for so long that it was only natural to dream about it. But after breakfast I had a sudden feeling that the secret was in the laboratory if I could only find it. I did not attach any importance to the feeling; but it went on growing stronger; and after lunch I went to the laboratory and began to hunt.

“I looked through all the drawers and could find nothing. Then I went round the room looking at everything and into everything, instruments and retorts and tubes and so on. Then I went into the middle of the floor and looked slowly round the room pretty hard. Against the wall, near the door, lying ready to be taken away, was a gas cylinder rolled it over to see what gas had been in it and it had no label on it.”

She paused to look round the Court as if claiming its best attention; then she went on: “Now that was very queer because every gas cylinder must have a label on it – so many gases are dangerous. I turned on the cylinder and nothing came out of it. It was quite empty. Then I went to the book in which all the things which come in are entered, and found that ten days before Dad died he had had in a cylinder of CO2 and seven pounds of ice. Also he had had seven pounds of ice every day till the day of his death. It was the ice and the CO2 together that gave me the idea. CO2, carbon dioxide, has a very low freezing-point – eighty degrees centigrade – and as it comes out of the cylinder and mixes with the air it turns into very fine snow; and that snow, if you compress it, makes the hardest and toughest ice possible. It flashed on me that Dad could have collected this snow and forced it into a mould and made a weapon that would not only inflict that wound but would disappear instantly!”

She paused again to look round the Court at about as rapt a lot of faces as any narrator could desire. Then she went on: “I knew that that was what he had done. I knew it for certain. Carbon dioxide ice would make a hard, tough dagger, and it would melt quickly in the hottest room of a Turkish bath and leave no smell because it is scentless. So there wouldn’t be any weapon. And it explained the tea-leaf too. Dad had made a carbon dioxide dagger perhaps a week before he used it, perhaps only a day. And he had put it into the thermos flask as soon as he had made it. The thermos flask keeps out the heat as well as the cold, you know. But to make sure that it couldn’t melt at all he kept the flask in ice till he was ready to use the dagger. It’s the only way you can explain that tea-leaf. It came out of the flask sticking to the point of the dagger and was driven into the wound!”

She paused again and one might almost say that the Court heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Then Garbould asked in an unpleasant and incredulous voice: “Why didn’t you take this fantastic theory straight to the police?”

“But that wouldn’t have been any good,” she protested quickly. “It was no use my knowing it myself; I had to make other people believe it; I had to find evidence. I began to hunt for it. I felt in my bones that there was some. What I wanted was the mould. I found it!”

She uttered the words in a tone of triumph and smiled at Willoughton; then she went on: “At least I found bits of it. In the box into which we used to throw odds and ends, scraps of material, damaged instruments, and broken test tubes, I found some pieces of vulcanite; and I saw at once that they were bits of a vulcanite container. I took some wax and rolled it into a rod about the right size and then I pieced the container together on the outside of it – at least most of it – there are some small pieces missing. It took me nearly all night. But I found the most important bit – the pointed end!”

She dipped her hand into her handbag and drew out a black object about nine inches long and three quarters of an inch thick and held it up for every one to see.

Someone, without thinking, began to clap; and there came a storm of applause that drowned the voice of the Clerk calling for order and the bellowing of Garbould.

When the applause died down, Hazeldean, who never misses the right moment, said: “I have no more questions to ask the witness, my lord,” and sat down.

That action seemed to clinch it in my eyes, and I have no doubt, it clinched it in the eyes of the jury.

The purple Garbould leant forward and almost bellowed at Ruth: “Do you expect the jury to believe that a well-known man like your father died in the act of deliberately setting a dastardly trap to hang the prisoner?”

Ruth looked at him, shrugged her shoulders, and said with a calm acceptance of the facts of human nature one would expect to find only in a much older woman: “Oh, well, Daddy was like that. And he certainly believed he had very good reasons for killing Mr. Willoughton.”

There was that in her tone and manner which made it absolutely certain that Kelstern was not only like that but that he had acted according to his nature.

Greatorex did not re-examine Ruth; he conferred with Hazeldean. Then Hazeldean rose to open the case for the defence. He said that he would not waste the time of the Court, and that in view of the fact that Miss Kelstern had solved the problem of her father’s death, he would only call one witness, Professor Mozley.

The grey-headed, grey-bearded, stooping man, who had come to the Court so late, went into the witness-box. Of course his face had been familiar to me; I had seen his portrait in the newspapers a dozen times. He still carried the brown-paper parcel.

In answer to Hazeldean’s questions he stated that it was possible, not even difficult, to make a weapon of carbon dioxide hard enough and tough enough and sharp enough to inflict such a wound as that which had caused Kelstern’s death. The method of making it was to fold a piece of chamois leather into a bag, hold that bag with the left hand, protected by a glove, over the nozzle of a cylinder containing liquid carbon dioxide, and open the valve with the right hand. Carbon dioxide evaporates so quickly that its freezing-point, 80 degrees centigrade, is soon reached; and it solidifies in the chamois-leather bag as a deposit of carbon dioxide snow. Then turn off the gas, spoon that snow into a vulcanite container of the required thickness, and ram it down with a vulcanite plunger into a rod of the required hardness. He added that it was advisable to pack the container in ice while filling it and ramming down the snow, then put the rod into a thermos flask; and keep it till it is needed.

“And you have made such a rod?” said Hazeldean.

“Yes,” said the Professor, cutting the string of the brown-paper parcel. “When Miss Kelstern hauled me out of bed at half-past seven this morning to tell me her discoveries, I perceived at once that she had found the solution of the problem of her father’s death, which had puzzled me considerably. I had breakfast quickly and got to work to make such a weapon myself for the satisfaction of the Court. Here it is.”

He drew a thermos flask from the brown paper, unscrewed the top of it, and inverted it. There dropped into his gloved hand a white rod about eight inches long. He held it out for the jury to see.

“This carbon dioxide ice is the hardest and toughest ice we know of; and I have no doubt that Mr. Kelstern killed himself with a similar rod. The difference between the rod he used and this is that his rod was pointed. I had no pointed vulcanite container; but the container that Miss Kelstern pieced together is pointed. Doubtless Mr. Kelstern had it specially made, probably by Messrs. Hawkins Spender.”

He dropped the rod back into the thermos flask and screwed on the top.

Hazeldean sat down. The juryman who had been reprimanded by Garbould leaned forward and spoke earnestly to the foreman. Greatorex rose.

“With regard to the point of the rod, Professor Mozley: would it remain sharp long enough to pierce the skin in that heat?” he asked.

“In my opinion it would,” said the Professor. “I have been considering that point and bearing in mind the facts that Mr. Kelstern would from his avocation be very deft with his hands, and being a scientific man, would know exactly what to do, he would have the rod out of the flask and the point in position in very little more than a second – perhaps less. He would, I think, hold it in his left hand and drive it home by striking the butt of it hard with his right. The whole thing would not take him two seconds. Besides, if the point of the weapon had melted the tea-leaf would have fallen off it.”

“Thank you,” said Greatorex, and turned and conferred with the Crown solicitors.

Then he said: “We do not propose to proceed with the case, my lord.”

The foreman of the jury rose quickly and said: “And the Jury doesn’t want to hear anything more, my lord. We’re quite satisfied that the prisoner isn’t guilty.”

Garbould hesitated. For two pins he would have directed the case to proceed. Then his eye fell on Hazeldean, who was watching him; I fancied that he decided not to give him a chance of saying more disagreeable things.

Looking black enough, he put the question formally to the Jury, who returned a verdict of “Not Guilty,” and then he discharged Willoughton.

I came out of the Court with Ruth, and we waited for Willoughton.

Presently he came out of the door and stopped and shook himself. Then he saw Ruth and came to her. They did not greet one another. She just slipped her hand through his arm; and they walked out of the New Bailey together.

We made a good deal of noise, cheering them.

________________

13: Mr. Belton's Immunity

(with  Robert Eustace)

The Strand Magazine, Oct 1926

THERE IS LITTLE doubt that, had not Miss Kitty Glentworth quarrelled so furiously with young Mr. Belton and cast him off for ever, he would not have gone on from the 99 Club to the large and beautifully-furnished flat of Mr. Cyril Montgomery— so much more Cyril than Montgomery— and lost two hundred and fourteen pounds at baccarat. It was an action for which he can hardly be blamed severely, because, when a young man knows clearly that his heart is broken for good and all, it is unlikely that his conduct will be directed by that sweet reasonableness so highly lauded by the late Matthew Arnold.

But there it was; he awoke next morning to no mean hangover and to the bitter knowledge that a month of the quarter had still to run and only eleven pounds on which to lead the life remained to him. It was not till the evening, however, that he realized that this was not to be borne. There was only one thing to do; that was to go to his uncle and guardian, Professor Octavius Crowle, and procure an advance on his next quarter's allowance.

It was no use writing to the Professor. That worthy gentleman had fallen into a shocking, but apparently rooted, habit of never answering his nephew's letters. It was the more distressing in that those letters always treated of the same theme, an advance on his next quarter's allowance. On the two occasions on which Mr. Belton had pointed out, reproachfully, that it was a shocking bad  habit, the Professor had made the disingenuous excuse that he was a busy man. This was, however, a fact; and it made it practically certain that if Mr. Belton went to see him and showed distinct symptoms of staying on. Professor Octavius Crowle would cough up the advance, as his nephew phrased it, to get rid of him.

Gloomily, therefore, by reason of his broken heart, but with a cheery little hope of a cheque for a hundred floating about on the top of the gloom, at eleven o'clock next morning Mr. Belton took his way to his uncle's solid house in Bedford Square.

The door was opened to him by Maria Ann, whom he believed to be the prettiest parlourmaid in London, and whom, had his heart not been broken, he would have made a probably successful attempt to kiss. She greeted him with an uncommonly attractive smile; then, at his request, led him straight to his uncle's study with a rather startled air. Was she, she asked herself, losing her charm?

His uncle was sitting at his desk, studying a paper. He looked a busy man and worried. Mr. Belton did not know exactly what his uncle did; he only knew that he was an eminent chemist and toxicologist and worked for the Government.

The Professor looked up, frowning, and said, inhospitably: "How are you, Richard? You always contrive to come when I'm at my busiest."

"Sorry, sir," said Richard. "It's only about a little matter of..."

"I know what it's about," snapped the Professor. "And one of these days you won't get it. Your father left his money to come to you through me in order that you should spend it at a reasonable rate."

"It was just an unfortunate accident..."

"The sixth in two years," said the Professor, coldly; but his eyes softened a little as he gazed at his well-set-up, beautifully-dressed, blue-eyed, and amiable nephew.

"I'll just put the case..."

"You won't. I know what it is, or what it's like; and you'll waste half my morning putting it. How much do you want?" said his uncle; and he began to hunt among the piles of papers on his desk for his cheque-book. "I don't know why we have a Public Trustee if people don't use him," he added, morosely.

"A hundred," said Mr. Belton, and a little of the gloom lifted from his spirit.

His uncle found his cheque-book and began to fill up a cheque. Mr. Belton smiled on him.

In the middle of his timely action his uncle stopped short, and said: "By the way, didn't you tell me once that you were making a study of ciphers?"

Mr. Belton blushed. He had two vices that prevented him from being the complete young gentleman about Town: he was addicted to chess and cryptography. The polite world did not know this.

With an air of shame he said: "Yes."

"Then what do you make of this?" said his uncle; and he thrust at him the paper he had been studying. To it was clipped a piece of parchment on which was drawn a square divided into hundreds of little squares, in each of which was a letter of the alphabet. They were in alphabetical order, alphabet after alphabet, with a Z in each corner square, so that they did not come exactly under one another.

Mr. Belton looked at it for about fifteen seconds; then he said: ''Nothing. And nobody could without the key-word. It must be a chiffre carre."

"But if you had the key-word you could decipher it?"

"Rather," said Mr. Belton, confidently.

The Professor ran his long fingers through the disorderly shock of grey hair and gazed earnestly at his nephew; then he said: "Look here, Dick: would you like to earn some money?"

Mr. Belton's blue eyes opened wide in a certain consternation; he scented an effort to weaken his congenital disinclination to do work of any kind; he shuffled his feet uneasily; he said: "Oh, well, you know, I've got my little bit. It does me very well. And it doesn't seem quite fair to the fellows who like that kind of thing to go buttin' in."

"Yes, yes; a lily of the field," said Professor Crowle, unpleasantly and scowling. "But, after all, it's perhaps just as well. Though the Government will pay a big fee, it's a very dangerous job. The last man who had a shot at it came to a very painful end. But, of course, it was in the service of the country. It was only you being an expert in ciphers and a stout young fellow that put it into my head to suggest it. The Government will have no difficulty in finding someone else."

"Here; steady on, uncle," said Mr. Belton, with a sudden animation. "You say it's a dangerous job and for the good of the country and that sort of thing?"

"It is; and it's very dangerous."

Mr. Belton's ingenuous face darkened with a Byronic gloom; and he said: "Oh, well, I've got nothing to go on living for; I'll take it on."

A shadow of a grin of satisfaction wreathed the Professor's lips, then the gravity of his expression deepened; he said, gravely: "Wait a minute. Did you ever hear of the daboia?"

"No," said Mr. Belton.

"Well, the daboia, as the Hindus call it, is known to science as Russell's viiper. It is a very pretty snake about six feet long; and its venom works about four times as quickly as that of the cobra. The odds are that in the course of this affair you'll get a dose of that venom injected into you. We are fairly sure that we can make you immune, but not quite sure. The anti-toxin is uncertain in its working."

"That's all right. I'll chance it," said Mr. Belton, quite cheerfully. "It looks like lively doin's."

A faint, reluctant admiration softened the hard face of the Professor; he said, thoughtfully: "Well, you ought to be able to hold your own. After all, you were a captain in what you called a stunting regiment at nineteen and got the D.S.O. But you'll be dealing with very clever people and you'll need all your wits."

Mr. Belton nodded. He was already looking very much more intelligent.

His uncle went on: "Of course, the Home Office has excellent cipher experts, but none at the moment to handle a dangerous business like this. Either they're not the type, or they have ties which make it unwilling to call on them to take the risk. And only a cipher expert can handle it. Several people are looking for one of the right type, and I'm one of them. I was just  considering how to set about it; and your coming to see me seemed almost provid— one of those curious coincidences, I mean, in which foolish and superstitious people see all kinds of absurdities. Well, the Home Office has seized some documents which should be of the greatest importance. But they're in cipher, this chiffre carre, and it wants the key-word. It knows of only one person in London who knows the key-word— a lady who mixes in Bohemian circles and calls herself the Princess Obrenovski."

"Not Bohemian, uncle— not Bohemian," his nephew protested quickly, in pained accents. "Popsy would never be seen in a Bohemian circle, I give you my word. Only the high life for Popsy— always."

"Popsy! What the devil are you talking about?" said his uncle.

"We always call the Princess 'Popsy.' She looks like it, you know," Mr. Belton explained. "But fancy Popsy being a Bolshie! I knew she was hot stuff; but I never guessed that. Still, you don't mean to say she'll sell the key-word?" He added in a tone of rather grieved surprise: "I always thought she was a sportswoman, Popsy."

"She'd sell it every day in the week, if someone produced the money," said his uncle in unpleasant but assured accents.

"She's sold it once already. But the man she sold it to never got the chance of bringing it to us. He got the key-word, but also he got a dose of daboia venom; and that was the end of him. "We know that it was daboia and not cobra— from the way his blood was clotted. And we know that he was helpless ten minutes after getting it and dead within the half-hour. Whether your friend injected it, or somebody else, we don't know. But his body was found in an empty bungalow at Thames Ditton four days after Princess Obrenovski received the money for selling the key-word to him."

Mr. Belton rubbed his hands together in a positively middle-class manner and said with genuine cheeriness: "Lively doin's! Lively doin's! But you don't mean to say that he parted with the money before he got away with the key-word?"

"He never had the money. You don't suppose he would carry a large sum of money with him into the surroundings in which a Bolshevist agent would sell a secret?" said the Professor with some impatience. "When he had received the key-word and tested it on a passage from one of these documents, he was to sign an order which would enable the Princess to draw the money. And it is practically certain that he was not poisoned, to prevent him getting away with the key-word, till after he had signed that order."

"Astucious," said young Mr. Belton in approving accents. "But I should never have guessed that Popsy had brain-storms like that. Still, she does seem a bit of a snake herself."

"A bit of a snake!" said the Professor with immense asperity.  "A much worse snake than any daboia that ever lived!" He paused, scowling; then he went on: "Well, the Home Office wants that key-word quickly and it will pay you five hundred pounds for getting it— and your expenses. I take it from your paying me a visit that you are very short of money."

"Well, as a matter of fact, you're right, sir. At the moment my name is Beanless Ben," said Mr. Belton, frankly.

"Then I'll give you a cheque for thirty pounds; and you can let me know what your expenses are," said the Professor. "Can you get in touch with the Princess at once?"

"To-night," said Mr. Belton, confidently. "If she isn't at the 99, she'll be at the Forty Sinners."

"And you said that she didn't move in Bohemian circles?" said the Professor, scornfully.

He wrote out a cheque for thirty pounds and gave Mr. Belton the document in cipher with the square clipped on to it. Also he gave him the order, which, once he had signed it, would enable the Princess to draw the money.

Then he said: "The anti-toxin had better be injected at the latest possible moment. I'll send a doctor to your flat at seven sharp to inject it. It'll take you a couple of hours to get over the effects of it; but then you should be immune from daboia venom for a good twelve hours."

"It'll be done, or I shall be done inside eight," said Mr. Belton, cheerfully, as he put the cheque into his note-case. He paused and looked at his uncle and grinned, and added: "If it doesn't work and I don't see you again, I'll just wish you good luck, sir."

The Professor frowned at him in a sudden disquiet, hesitated, and said: "I wish—I wish— oh, it'll work all right. And after all it is of the greatest importance that these documents should be deciphered; and it's time that you did something to justify your existence."

"So it is. So it is," said his nephew, cheerfully, and held out his hand.

The Professor gripped it and wrung it, and then came to the front door with him and let him out and said good-bye. He stood on the step and watched, with eyes full of disquiet, Mr. Belton stride briskly along the pavement and turn the corner, and twice he plucked rather nervously at his chin.

Cheered by the prospect of action, Mr. Belton kept forgetting for as long as eleven minutes at a time that Miss Kitty Glentworth had cast him off for ever. He made an excellent lunch, and with a friend attended a -matinee of the latest musical comedy. He did not think it right to take the risk of passing out of the world without having seen it.

At seven o'clock the doctor, a cheerful, but beavered, man with an uncommonly clever face, arrived at his flat, injected the anti- toxin, and declared, with much more confidence than his uncle had shown, that Mr. Belton was now immune from the venom of Russell's viper for a good twelve hours. Feeling that he would like to know, if someone did contrive to inject a shot of the venom Into him, whether the anti-toxin was really working, Mr. Belton asked him how the venom acted. The doctor said that any not immune person who was bitten by the snake would first be afflicted with nausea and a splitting headache, presently become paralysed, and then fall into a coma from which he would not awake. He stayed on for nearly an hour watching the effects of the anti-toxin. It gave Mr. Belton considerable discomfort in the way of nausea, a headache, twitchings, and a temperature.

At a few minutes past eight, after assuring him that the effects of the anti-toxin had been everything that could be desired, the doctor departed. At nine o'clock feeling better but still rather shaky, Mr. Belton walked up to the 99 Club. He found the Princess Obrenovski, who had come early in order to get some dancing before the room became crowded, dining with another young lady. They welcomed his suggestion that he should join them.

Mr. Belton was not talkative. The anti-toxin was still troubling him. The Princess talked for the three of them. Her chief theme was herself. He kept looking at her with wondering eyes, trying to discover evidence of the serpent in her. He could find none. She was the perfect type of Slav woman with a dash of the Tartar in her. Nature had moulded her with clumsy fingers. Her cheek-bones protruded slightly; her unfinished nose was rather thick, with a rounded, rather protruding tip; her lips were rather thick and shapeless; her black hair was lustreless; her brown eyes were for the most part dull, though they lit up sufficiently when she talked; her figure was clumsy; she was well-meaning but rather heavy in the dance. She had many feelings and always talked about them. She could not be more than twenty-two.

Bearing in mind that this might well be his last dinner, Mr. Belton did himself well and drank plenty of champagne. His young companions did themselves well and also drank plenty of champagne. It was half -past ten before he felt like dancing; then he embarked on a fox-trot with the Princess.

The anti-toxin, or the champagne on top of it, had robbed Mr. Belton of any diplomatic tendency he may have possessed. He came straight to the matter in hand.

He said: "I've been told to push a little money at you, Popsy."

"Push money— at me!" cried the Princess in lively astonishment.

"Yes. It's a little business of a key-word to a cipher," said Mr. Belton in almost jocular accents.

He felt her stiffen against his arm; and she bent backwards to stare at him with incredulous eyes. He had a strange and uncommonly strong feeling that he was an intruder. He was. In the mind of the Princess his activities were confined wholly to her social life; he had suddenly intruded into the political.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said; but her tone did not carry conviction.

"Oh, it's quite all right," he said in a reassuring tone. "I'm not giving anything away."

He felt her relax. But again she declared that she did not know what he was talking about. They had gone right round the room before she had re-arranged her ideas about him and decided to treat with him. Then she made him give her his word of honour to tell no one anything about it.

Then, with a winning smile and in winning accents, she said: "Have you got the money, Dicky?"

"I have not— only an order to sign when I've got the key-word and tested it," said Mr. Belton.

She looked up at him with a languishing glance and said: "Then it will be all right if I tell you the key-word. You can sign the order at once."

"When I've tested the key-word," said Mr. Belton firmly.

"Don't you trust me, Dicky?" she said haughtily.

"Till all's blue. But instructions are instructions," said Mr. Belton rather more firmly.

She was silent; she appeared to be thinking hard. It was unfortunate that Miss Kitty Glentworth, who was not on in the third act of the play "Driver's Folly," in which she had a moderate part, entered the room just in time to catch the winning smile and then the languishing glance. She had cast Mr. Belton off for what she had been pleased to consider his perfidy in  making himself uncommonly amiable to another lady. They had often quarrelled about his amiability to other ladies. She did not make sufficient allowance for his natural bent. He never could refrain from being amiable to a pretty girl. He was like that. Now he was being amiable to the Princess. She had for some time suspected the Princess of designs. That suspicion was now verified. Of course, it was no longer any business of hers. She told herself that it was not. Nevertheless her beautiful eyes flashed fiercely as she scowled on the unconscious couple; she walked to a table with her head high, trying to rid her face of the scowl.

The Princess came out of her reflections and said with a yet more languishing glance: "But you do think I would deceive you, Dicky."

"Never!" said Mr. Belton, in loud, loyal accents. "I tell you instructions arc instructions, and I've got to stick to them."

Undaunted, the Princess spent the next twenty minutes trying to persuade him to disregard those instructions; and her smiles grew yet more winning, her glances more languishing.

Miss Kitty Glentworth observed this softening process with an anger that grew more and more intense. She had not expected Mr. Belton to accept his dismissal without further protest or entreaty, or to recover from it so quickly. She had broken off their engagement deliberately; but she felt that this behaviour of his was outrageous. She was of an uncommonly jealous disposition; she felt, unreasonably enough, that she was being shamelessly robbed; her anger was becoming fury.

It was at last borne in upon the Princess that the political Mr. Belton was a very different person from the social one. She ceased to languish at him. Indeed, she cut the patter, came to the 'osses, and asked in a business-like tone whether he had with him the means of testing the key-word. He said that he had, that she had only to give him the key-word and he would sit down and test it and sign the order inside of five minutes.

"But that is impossible!" she said, hastily. "I am watched— always." She paused, then added: "And you do not suppose that I know the key-word. I know only where it is. I can get it."

Mr. Belton had the strongest feeling that she was not telling him the truth. He looked round the room for those who watched her. He knew everyone in it. No one of them could be watching her. Few of them were capable of watching a child of five. But, of course, there were the waiters. Besides, she must have given the key-word to the man who had been poisoned, or he would not have signed the order; or had she merely put him in touch with the person who knew the key-word? That must be it. He could not see anything of the snake about her; he could not believe that she had had a hand in the actual poisoning.

"Well, let's go and get it," he said.

At the words a pleased light just flickered in the eyes of the Princess. She said: "Not together. My car is parked in Pardon Street. I will go and wait for you in it. Come in five minutes."

"Right-o!" said Mr. Belton.

She emptied her glass and rose and went. Mr. Belton looked at his watch. Agog for action, he kept looking at it. The five minutes passed slowly. Kitty, relieved by the going of the Princess, saw that he kept looking at it. He rose with an uncommonly alert air.

Of a sudden another suspicion seized her: he was going to the Princess! She gave him about two minutes. As she came out of the door of the dancing-room he was leaving the club. She followed him, furious. She wished to make sure, then demonstrate to him triumphantly that he had the shallow and perfidious nature of which she had complained.

"When the Princess came out of the 99, a big, respectably-dressed man, in a bowler hat and No. 11 shoes, who was standing on the opposite pavement, moved down the street, keeping level with her. At the top of Pardon Street he stood still to light a cigarette. A motor-cyclist thirty yards down the street stopped tinkering with his engine and lit a cigarette.

The driver of a big car, sixty yards down the street, turned and said to its occupants, Detective-Inspectors Halliday, Gedge, and Tomkins, and the doctor who had injected the anti-toxin into Mr. Belton: "Here they come!"

The Princess sat down in the driver's seat of her two-seater and fiddled with the gadgets. The motor-cyclist tinkered again with his engine. For five minutes nothing happened. Then Mr. Belton came briskly down the street. As he was stepping into the car of the Princess, Miss Kitty Glentworth came round the corner. The Princess, getting her car out of the line, did not see her; Mr. Belton, talking to the Princess, did not see her. She broke into a little run, sprang into her own two-seater, and came out of the line just ahead of the big car containing the detectives.

It was just before the theatre traffic, and the going was good. In this order the four motor vehicles moved up Regent Street, the motor-cyclist twenty yards behind the Princess, Kitty Glentworth ten yards behind the motor-cyclist, the big car thirty yards behind Kitty. The Princess had not enough of the cunning of the serpent to guess that she was being followed; she had not been followed on that earlier journey to Thames Ditton. At Oxford Circus she turned to the left. The motor-cyclist and Kitty turned after her. Then came the hitch. After Kitty turned, the policeman on point-duty held up the traffic; the big car was held up behind a bus and a taxi. By the time one of the detectives had run to the policeman and way was made for it nearly two minutes had been lost. The motor-cyclist, on the look-out, saw what had happened. When the Princess turned up Orchard Street he pulled up and said a few words to the policeman at the bottom of it. Kitty Glentworth passed him. He bucketed up Orchard Street and passed Kitty.

At the bottom of Upper Baker Street and again at the top of the St. John's Wood Road he stopped to speak to the policeman on duty. The Princess turned into the Grove End Road. There was no policeman at the corner of it. She ran along the Grove End Road and turned into that little cul-de-sac, Mehna Place.

She had slowed down to turn into it; Kitty slowed down also, so that when she turned to follow and saw that it was a cul-de-sac, she was able to switch out of it and come to a stop just beyond the opposite corner, slip out of her car, and peep round. The Princess had stopped nearly at the bottom; she was standing on the pavement talking to Mr. Belton. She went through a door in the wall, leaving him there. He lit a cigarette and stepped back into the car.

The motor-cyclist ran slowly past the top of Melina Place. He saw the car of the Princess; he saw Kitty peeping round the corner. He turned, went back along the Grove End Road about forty yards, dismounted, and began to blow his horn— one long honk and two short ones— again and again and again. When the big car came to the policeman at the bottom of the St. John's Wood Road and learnt that he had not seen him, it would come back.

The Princess came through the door in the wall, hurried up the path of the little garden, went through the front door of the little house at the end of it and into a room on her right. It was panelled; an old oak gate-leg table stood in the middle of it, an older oak armchair, high-backed, with a very thin cushion on its seat, stood on the right of the fireplace, four old oak chairs stood against the walls, a cushioned oak settle in the recess on the left of the fireplace. She crossed the room to the armchair, pulled it to the top of the table, and took the cushion from the seat of it. Then she pressed a button in the back of the chair. Three inches from the edge of the seat, on the left, there shot up the needle of a hypodermic syringe. She pressed another button and the needle sank back into the seat of the chair. Smiling an uncommonly ugly smile, she went to the oak corner cupboard, in the corner on the left of the fireplace above the settle, took from it a pen, an inkpot, blotting paper, notepaper, envelopes, and a small bottle. She set the writing materials on the table in front of the armchair. Then she knelt down beside the armchair, took from under its seat a hypodermic syringe, filled it carefully from a small bottle, and put it back. She rose, a yet uglier smile wreathing her thick lips, and put the bottle back in the cupboard. Then she sat down in the armchair, wrote on a sheet of paper "Paris," and enclosed it in an envelope. With brightly shining eyes she hurried back to Mr. Belton.

"There is no one in the house. I have found the key-word!" she cried in excited accents, waving the envelope at him. "Come along."

Mr. Belton sprang from the car and followed her through the door in the wall.

Another wave of jealous fury surged through Kitty Glentworth. She stood undecided for about twenty seconds, then went briskly down the street. To her surprise she saw the gleam of the key in the lock of the garden door. The unmethodical Slavonic mind of the Princess had caused her, in her excitement, to leave it there. Kitty opened the door a few inches and looked at the dark house. Then, resolved to have all the evidence of Mr. Belton's perfidy before demonstrating it to him, she stepped into the garden and shut the door. The motor-cyclist came quickly to the top of Melina Place, dismounted, and again began to honk a long honk and two short ones. In that quiet neighbourhood the sound would carry half a mile.

The policeman at the bottom of Orchard Street sent the big car up Baker Street; the policeman at the bottom of Upper Baker Street sent it up Park Road; the policeman at the end of Park Road sent it down the St. John's Wood Road. It ran past Grove End Road to Maida Vale. The policeman at the bottom of St. John's Wood Road had not seen a two-seater car, driven by a lady and followed by a motor-cyclist. The big car turned and went back up the St. John's Wood Road slowly. It stopped at the corner of Hanover Terrace and then moved slowly on. Midway between Hamilton Terrace and the Grove End Road the driver heard a motor-horn honking a long honk and then two short ones again and again, away on the left. He drove quickly up the Grove End Road and came to the motor-cyclist.

The three detectives and the doctor stepped out of the tonneau. The motor-cyclist told them quickly that Mr. Belton and the Princess had driven down Melina Place, that a second lady had come in the car standing at the opposite corner, watched them, and gone down Melina Place after them.

''How long can we give them?" said Inspector Halliday to the doctor.

''Anything up to a quarter of an hour," said the doctor; and he looked at his watch.

"That will give the Princess a chance to make her getaway," said Inspector Halliday.

"Just stick the car across the road and block it, Hawkins. It will save a lot of trouble if we collar her on the spot."

THE PRINCESS ushered Mr. Belton into the room furnished with old oak and pushed him into the armchair. She tore open the envelope, looked at the sheet of paper, and said in excited accents: "The word is 'Paris'!"

"Right-o," said Mr. Belton, cheerfully, and took from his breast pocket the document with the square clipped to it and set about decoding it. He worked at it for perhaps four minutes. At the end of the second minute he was frowning. The frown deepened.

Then he looked up and said: "A lemon. My name is not Walter the Human Boo. Cough up the right word, Popsy darling." "But it is the right word; It is! You humbug me!" cried the Princess.

"Oh, cough it up!" he said impatiently. The Princess stormed and protested for a good two minutes. Mr. Belton, unmoved, preserved an amiable air. The Princess ground her teeth. Then of a sudden she was calm.

"You're too clever, Dicky— much too clever," she said, with a queer laugh that bared her teeth a little. "But you promise that you'll sign the order whatever happens?"

"I've promised once," said Mr. Belton, impatiently. "The word is 'Popsy'," she said.

"Of course. It would be!" said Mr. Belton; and he took up the pen and got to work again.

The Princess stepped behind the chair and leant over the back, watching him. He could not see that she was scowling, that her nostrils were dilated, that she was breathing quickly. The middle finger of her right hand rested, ever so lightly, on the button which worked the spring.

At the end of the second minute a pleased smile illumined Mr. Belton's face. At the end of the third minute he said, triumphantly: "This time you're right. And now for the reward of— vice."

He took the order from his pocket and signed it. As his pen rose from the completed "n," the Princess pressed the button. The needle ran into his thigh. He sprang up with a sharp howl.

The Princess snatched up the order and was through the door like a knife. She snapped it to, turned the key in the lock, ran out of the house and across the garden to her car. She sprang into it, started it, turned, and came up the street, to find a clumsy chauffeur with his big car, half -jammed, right across the road, trying to back out of it. She shouted to him to clear out of the way and brought her car to a stop ten feet from his. Then, before she knew what was happening. Inspector Halliday had both her wrists in a vice-like grip and was hauling her out of the car.

As the door snapped to, Mr. Belton swore. Then he dashed to it. The house might be old, but the lock on that door was new. He rushed to the window and threw up the sash. It was shuttered with heavy shutters, barred on the outside. He hammered on them and yelled. Someone in the neighbouring houses might hear him. He paused to listen for twenty seconds, then hammered and yelled again.

Kitty heard him hammering and yelling. It increased the astonishment aroused in her by the inexplicable flight of the Princess. She recognized the urgent note in his clamour; but she had no desire to help him. If in the course of the nefarious exercise of perfidy he had got himself into trouble, let him get himself out of it. At any rate, she was not going to help him at once. She was on the opposite side of the house to that at which he was hammering and clamouring; she walked round it and found that the unmethodical Princess had left the front door ajar. She stood hesitating what to do. Of a sudden Mr. Belton's clamouring and shouting stopped.

A sudden wave of nausea had swept through him. The anti-toxin load not worked!

He came away from the window, drew a chair from the wall to the table, sat down on it, and stared in front of him with the dazed air of one who faces the worst, and that worst inevitable. There was no chance of getting to a hospital in time. These devils had only needed to make a prison to hold a man a few minutes and the poison would keep him in it.

The thought that he was going to die, painfully, inside of half an hour gave him a sinking feeling that increased the nausea. He had faced death often enough in the old days; but this was different. Then, at the very worst, there had always been a chance. This was hopeless. He stared at the wall in front of him without seeing it. He saw a hundred things, a hundred scenes. The dancing room of the 99 Club he had just left, the crowded theatre in which he had spent the afternoon came first, then scene after scene.

In nearly every one of them the chief figure was Kitty— Kitty happy, Kitty sad, Kitty angry, Kitty in ballrooms, on the stage, in restaurants, on the river, in the country. He had lost Kitty. He had not really believed that he had lost her when she cast him off. Now he had lost her. He had lost everything. It was not even slipping away; it had gone, absolutely gone. He almost sobbed.

Then he pulled himself together and ground his teeth. A raging desire to balk the devils who had robbed him of Kitty and the bright world surged through him. He would get the key-word to his uncle. But how, with a few minutes of failing powers left, could he? Yet he must. He cudgelled his brains, rejecting device after device. Then the idea came. He took a sheet of notepaper, tore a small square out of it, wrote on it, in big letters and deep, ''The key-word is Popsy," let them dry, rolled it into a ball and swallowed it.

There would certainly be an autopsy.

Another wave of nausea swept through him. He took another sheet of paper and began to write a farewell letter to Kitty. He wrote:

My Dear Kitty,

You were absolutely wrong about Mabel Carruthers. I never did care a scrap for anyone but you, and you....

Someone tried the handle of the door. He turned towards It sharply. The key turned in the lock; the door opened; in came Kitty herself, her eyes still blazing, her face still pale. He stared at her with his mouth open.

"So I was quite right about you," she said in terrible accents. "The Princess now. The very moment you got rid of me! I should like to hear what you have to say for yourself."

"I am Walter the Human Boo," said Mr. Belton in a tone half exasperated, half dismal. "That's what I've got to say for myself. But get to my uncle at once— straight— and tell him that the key-word is 'Popsy.' Don't forget— 'Popsy'."

Kitty stared at him in a blank bewilderment. "What do you mean?" she said. "Are you mad or drunk?"

"Neither, worse luck," said Mr. Belton. In merely dismal accents. "I let that little devil inject a shot of daboia poison into me— Russell's viper, you know. I came to buy the key-word of a cipher off her. She's a Bolshie agent. The key-word's 'Popsy'— the damned little snake's own name!"

Kitty stared at him with her eyes opened their widest; her mouth went suddenly dry; the anger in her died in panic.

"What d-d-do you mean— d-d-daboia p-p-poison— Russell's viper?" she stammered.

"She fired a shot of it into my thigh. There's a needle in that cushion." He pointed to the armchair. "I'm a goner, old girl," said Mr. Belton quietly; and he rose and took her gently in his arms and kissed her.

His eyes seemed to be devouring her. They would not see her long.

"But there must be something to be done! Can't I— can't I suck the poison out of the wound?" she cried in desperate accents.

"You can't. The damned needle went too far in."

There came a banging on the garden door.

"Here they are! Get out! Lock the door! It's no good bothering about me," cried Mr. Belton. "The key-word— 'Popsy'— is the important thing! Get off! Hide in the garden! Slip out when they come into the house! Get to my uncle with the key-word! And— and— yes— tell— him that you're to have the five hundred quid for bringing it."

"I won't! I won't! I won't leave you!" she cried; and she threw her arms round his neck, and, kissing him, burst into a storm of sobs.

The garden door went with a crash.

"I'm afraid you can't get away now. The devils will get you, too! Oh, why didn't I think to bring a gun!" cried Mr. Belton; and he faced the door with his right arm round her waist. It flew open, and in came Inspector Halliday, followed by the doctor.

"Did they get a jab at you?" cried the doctor anxiously.

"They got it— at least that little devil, the Princess, did. The needle is in the cushion of that armchair. The key-word is 'Popsy. Don't forget, 'Popsy'," said Mr. Belton.

"Good man!" said the doctor. "How are you feeling?"

"As sick as a cat," said Mr. Belton.

"Then you must have had a devil of a dose! Off with your coat! Quick!" said the doctor; and he opened his bag.

Mr. Belton was quick getting his coat off and opening his shirt; the doctor was quick injecting another shot of anti-toxin. Then he pulled out a flask of whisky, with very little water in it, and made him drink all of it.

"Don't you worry. That'll set you right," he said, cheerfully, and made him lie down on the cushioned settle.

Kitty sat down beside him and took his hand and stared at his pale face with eyes full of anguish.

The other two detectives came in with the Princess. She was snivelling. Inspector Halliday took the cushion from the armchair and gingerly he examined it. Then he ripped the cover off it and spread the stuffing on the table and searched it thoroughly.

"But there isn't any needle," he said, in puzzled accents. "It must have been your imagination, Mr. Belton."

"Imagination be damned!" said Mr. Belton with extraordinary tartness. "My thigh is stinging like the devil. Take a look at the chair— perhaps it's in the chair. I heard a click— two clicks."

The Inspector examined the seat of the chair and found the hole up which the needle shot.

"Try the back. The little devil was leaning against the back," said Mr. Belton, who was still taking notice.

"I was never near the chair! I did nothing! I did not know about the chair!" cried the Princess.

No one took any notice of her. The Inspector found the right button and pressed it. Up shot the needle. He laid the chair on its side, and found, screwed to the bottom of it, a little box that evidently contained the mechanism which raised the syringe and thrust in the plunger and forced the poison out.

"That's fine!" cried the detective. "All the evidence of attempted murder will be in this box— a long stretch for the lady."

The Princess protested shrilly and snivelled louder.

For the next five minutes they were busy taking down Mr. Belton's exact account of what had happened. He signed it. Whether it was the whisky, or whether it was the second shot of anti-toxin, he was feeling no more sick than he had felt. If anything, he was feeling less sick. Kitty sat, still holding his hand and gazing at him with eyes which held a world of passion and despair.

At intervals the doctor felt his pulse and made cheering remarks. The Princess snivelled on. Inspectors Halliday and Tomkins went away to search the house. The minutes passed. A little colour came into Mr. Belton's cheeks; his eyes grew brighter.

Of a sudden he sat up on the couch and said in a tone of satisfaction: "I'm feeling better. That anti-toxin must have caught on."

In her relief Kitty buried her face in her hands and cried in the most unaffected fashion.

Mr. Belton patted her back and said: "Steady on, old girl. There's nothing to worry about now," slipped off the couch, stood up, and shook himself.

"You're right. You'll be all right now," said the doctor cheerfully. "But take it easy for a day or two. And you'd better get home and get to bed. We've got the lady and the chair."

Mr. Belton wasted no time. He thanked the doctor, slipped his arm through Kitty's and marched her out of the house. On the steps she took a tight hold of his arm and supported him carefully all the way to her car. He did not need support, but he appeared thoughtful. She took the driver's seat and started.

Then he said, thoughtfully: "Seeing how you've been— what you've been saying and doing, I don't believe you meant all you said the night before last."

"I was a little beast!" said Kitty, remorsefully. "I didn't mean any of it."

Mr. Belton's method of expressing his relief interfered with her driving.

____________________

14:  The Emerald Celt

The Strand Magazine Mar 1927

I STOOD at the window and looked down into the grimy, sweltering street, and wished to goodness I had never come to New York, and wondered how the devil I was ever going to get out of it. My hat! It was a sweltering afternoon— not an intelligentsiac or an artist's model was about; the street, for once, was empty.

Of course I could pawn my sleeve links and cable to the family to cable my fare home, but on those lines there was nothing doing. The family had been too dashed despondent about my making a go of it in New York for me to do that. I could never go back without some money to save my face or I should never hear the last of it from Aunt Caroline. I fingered my last quarter in my trouser-pocket and considered what would be best for my healthy appetite, which was speaking to me earnestly at the moment, before I set out for the lights of Broadway and made a final stab at Fortune. It looked to me as if it would be some-thing in the way of grand larceny with violence.

And then the Chinaman came running round the corner of the street.

Frightened? I give you my word he was frightened. I've seen frightened men; and if ever a man was running from death, he was. From the height of that first floor window I could see that his staring eyes were starting out of his head, and I guessed that the sweat on his shining face was none too warm. In the crook of his left arm he carried a bundle.

He came to a stop opposite my window and peered about the street as if he were looking for a bolt-hole. Then he saw me. and stared at me hard Then he ran across the street, and croaked, huskily: "Catchee! Velly soft!" and swung the bundle upward, just hard enough to reach me.

I caught it softly all right. Without another word he ran on up the street and round the next corner.

I stepped well back into the room. I guessed that the bundle was better out of the sight of passers-by. And when twenty seconds later I saw the passers-by, I knew I had guessed right—f our long, lean Chinamen came racing round the corner, and their faces were as full of fury as the face of the first beggar had been full of fear, and they weren't nice kind faces either, not at any time, not even in repose.

I had time to see that they looked to belong to the same family and were very superior— I mean that they were nicely dressed by Wetzler or Bell—and I saw the sun gleam on the small automatic in the hand of the last of them, all ready for business, and as he passed out of sight up the street the bundle stirred on my arm.

Did I quail? I quailed. Other brave lads might have got off with a pet dog or a kitten— or even a rabbit. But not Jocelyn. No: not gentle Jocelyn. I went on quailing as I laid the bundle on the bed and pulled out the four gold pins that fastened the thick silk shawl, embroidered with birds of paradise, that was rolled five times round it, and unwrapped it. It was a baby!

I did a last quail and blenched. Then I looked at it closer. It was quite a nice baby— plump, and it round face was a creamy yellow, and its round head would have been creamy yellow too, but for the dark down on it; its closed eyes slanted a little upwards; it was smiling at some dream— a Chinese baby.

Here was a go! My mind whirled a bit. What on earth was I to do with it? I couldn't keep myself—at least I was making no sort of a job of it. How was I going to keep a baby too? I stood staring at it, trying to think what to do with it with a brain that wouldn't work.

Then it opened its eyes, tremendously old and wise eyes, much older an wiser than most grown-ups' eyes, and blinked at me, and shut them and went to sleep again.

I had a queer feeling that it had entrusted itself to me just as the Chinaman had entrusted it to me; and I said, cheerily: "All right, comrade. We'll find a way."

But I'll be hanged if I knew how I was going to find it.

I bent down again to look at its tiny yellow toes, all curled up, and saw the pouch pinned to the shawl just under them. I unpinned it and opened it and took out of it ten fifty-dollar notes, two thousand-dollar notes, and a sheet of rice paper covered with Chinese writing.

What I said was: "Saved! Saved!"

I put the notes into my note-case and looked at the sheet of paper. If I could read it, it would be instructions, and instructions would come in handy. Then I remembered the Chinaman in the basement. I covered the comrade with the shawl— and I hoped he wouldn't wake and howl—  shut the door gently and locked it, and bolted down the stairs and knocked at the Chinaman's door. He opened it himself, a stout and worthy old gentleman and sedate, and smiled at me politely.

I showed him the sheet of rice paper and what had been my last quarter and said: "A friend of mine has sent this to me to get translated for him. I'll give you this quarter if you'll do it for me."

He accepted the offer and took the paper, and read out in his pidgin but understandable way:

Honourable and benevolent stranger, my husband, Sien Seng, is old and very sick, and my step-sons are wicked men. They will poison my baby Hsiang Kwei and me also. Save him, I pray you, and bring him up kindly. I give you the money, but when he is a man I pray you to give him the axe. If you do these things, Kuan Yin, the friend of children, will give you prosperity.

"What does 'give him the axe' mean?" I asked.

"Me no savvee," said the Chinaman.

I thanked him and gave him the quarter. On my way up to my room I did some quick thinking. I'd seen those stepsons, and I felt that the neighbourhood of Washington Square was no place for comrade Kwei. It was a good thing that the heat had kept the street so empty that no one was likely to have seen me receive that bundle, but those blackguardly step-sons might catch their man and force him to tell them what he had done with it. Besides, it would soon be all over the street that I had be-come the owner of a Chinese baby. No; the neighbourhood was not healthy; it was me and comrade Kwei for the really busy haunts of men where an extra baby, Chinese or otherwise, is not noticed.

And then, as I unlocked the door of my room, the great idea came. I made sure that the comrade was sleeping, then I picked up The New York Times and found the advertisement I had noticed when I had been looking through the jobs vacant and wanted that morning. I soon found it:

Young English lady will act as companion or secretary for a year for passage home to England.—S. Burton. 147B, 144th Street, N.Y.

I had thought it an uncommonly sporting offer, and now I felt in my bones that this was the very young woman to help me get comrade Kwei away to Easingwold. In about three minutes I had packed everything I had left in a suit-case and rolled comrade Kwei in his shawl and was out of the house with them.

I walked down the street and took the first turning to the right, at a right angle to the line of the China-man's flight. I was in luck: I hadn't gone more than a couple of hundred yards when I met an empty taxi. I told the driver to drive to 147B, 144th Street. When we reached it I paid him and let him go. I wanted to lose him.

The house looked to be densely populated and it was certainly strongly scented. Carrying my suit-case and comrade Kwei, I went in. A small girl in the hall told me that Miss Burton lived on the second floor, the first door on the left, and I went upstairs and knocked at it. It was opened by an astonishingly pretty girl.

I was taken a bit unawares. I'm never quite comfortable with a pretty girl at first, not in fact till the acquaintance has ripened. Besides, I'd got it into my head that S. Burton would be a capable, matter-of-fact, rather stern, plainish young woman, sternly dressed. This one looked cap-able enough, but not particularly matter-of-fact or stern— rather otherwise in fact— and she certainly wasn't sternly dressed, but smartly and prettily.

And somehow or other the thinking machine went a bit out of gear, and instead of leading up to the basic fact of comrade Kwei with a few diplomatic remarks, as I had intended, I blurted out: "Good afternoon, Miss Burton. I want a secretary who can look after a baby."

Her eyes— they were good grey eyes that looked at you uncommonly frankly— opened rather wide and she stared at me and then at the bundle, which must have looked more than a bit out of place on my arm, and said: "Who can look after a baby? Are you a widower?"

"No. Oh, no. Not exactly. I'm not married— yet. I― I'm looking after it." I said, still rather on the uncomfortable side.

"You're smothering it, you mean," she said, rather sharply, and stepped forward and made an opening in the shawl, to let comrade Kwei get more air, and looked at him and said: "But what a duck!"

"A snifter— as they go!" said I.

She looked at me suspiciously, quite suspiciously, and said: "But how do you come to be looking after a Chinese baby?"

I thought it best to be open with her, and I said: "It's like this. This baby's in great danger. It's got some step-brothers— regular thugs. I give you my word, and they're out to do it in. Its mother— at least, a friend of its mother—handed it over to me to look after. And the safest place I can think of for it is my father's place in Yorkshire. I saw your advertisement in The New York Times this morning, and it looks to me as if you were in a bit of a hole, and I am in a bit of a hole, and we could help one another out. I want to get this baby away to England by the first steamer, and I want you to help me. Will you?"

She looked at me, and her suspicion seemed to go; she smiled and said: "I'll help you. Give me the lad. I sha'n't be more than three minutes. My things are packed."

She took comrade Kwei and went into her room, and, sure enough, she was out of it in less than three min-utes, bringing a suit-case and comrade Kwei wrapped in a thin silk wrap better suited to the weather. She gave me the suit-case and his thick shawl, and we went down the stairs.

"What we want is a quiet hotel," said I.

"And milk and baby foods, and a spirit lamp and spirit, and a baby's bath," she said.

"We'll get them on the way," said I.

It was quite a nice baby— I and the adventures surrounding its queer adoption brought romance to a man  and woman.

WE soon found a taxi, and I asked the driver if he could recommend a quiet hotel, and he said that the Sevastopol was the place, because the only Russian thing about it was its name. I told him to drive to it, and on the way I told Miss Burton how comrade Kwei had come to me and repeated his mother's letter.

She said I was quite right to get him away to England, but what did his mother mean by asking me to give him the axe when he was grown up. I said I couldn't think, unless it was some Chinese custom; and if it was, they'd tell us all about it at the British Museum. Then I gave her one of the fifty-dollar notes, and we stopped at a dairy and a couple of stores, and she bought comrade Kwei's food and outfit and bath.

I took a small suite at the hotel, two bedrooms and a sitting-room. The less I was seen with comrade Kwei the better, and when I had settled her and him in them and lighted the spirit lamp, I went off to book our passage to England. I found that the Carmania was sailing next day. Since it wasn't the time of year when people are going Europe way, I got, after a bit of a wrestle, two adjacent cabins for a hundred and fifty dollars apiece. I wanted to get home with all the money I could, for there was the matter of Aunt Caroline.

When I came back Miss Burton came out of the bedroom, looking a trifle excited, and said: "I've found the axe! And it is an axe! Come and look at it."

I found comrade Kwei, still sleeping soundly, on the bed. She pointed to a silk cord round his neck, then pulled gently from under his frock a small green axe-head, rather more than an inch long and nearly an inch broad, of a lovely transparent green stone with kind of green fires in its depths, and on it were carved three Chinese characters.

"I know what that is," I said. "It's a celt. The governor collects them by the hundred— the cheap kind— flint and what not— and it's jade."

"That's what I thought at first," she said. "But the finest jade hasn't those fires in its depths. It's an emerald, and it must be worth thousands."

"My hat! An emerald! Then I am glad I got comrade Kwei away at once. No wonder his step-brothers were in a hurry to get him back. If that's what they're after, they'll never rest till they get on the track of it, and they're persistent lads. All the same, they're never going to get it."

She looked at me rather hard and said: "I don't believe they ever will." And she pushed the celt back under comrade Kwei's frock.

WE dined in the sitting-room, and talked about ourselves and New York. She had done exactly what I had done, come out to New York to make a small fortune and found that she was hidden by the crowd. Her family had been as despondent as mine. I told her about mine; in fact. I was quite open with her.

"You'll get very little butcher's meat at Easingwold," I said. "It doesn't run to it. Poultry, game, rabbits, and trout are what we live on because we, so to speak, grow them all. But unless a pig is killed for purposes of bacon, there's next to no butcher's meat. The governor ran the home farm himself for years; but he couldn't make a go of it, so now it's let, and we've only cows."

"I don't mind that. I don't like butcher's meat—much."

"Wait till you have to do without it," said I.

We were drinking our coffee when there came a quiet howl from the next room, and she made a dash for comrade Kwei. About a quarter of an hour later she brought him to keep me company, and he lay on her lap and thought deeply. I had been quite right about his eyes; he looked as if he was ninety-three and knew everything. But there was nothing stand-offish about him. He'd hold on to your little finger and try to get it into his mouth, and now and then he'd smile at you affably. Then he went to sleep and was put to bed. and we went on talking till it was time for us to go to bed too.

I awoke jolly cheerful— no more making stabs at Fortune in a dry country, but hey for the land where you could buy a drink and know what you were drinking! "The New York Times" came with the breakfast, and I took a quick look at the advertisements— not those about jobs— and there it was:—

"LOST. Chinese baby. Yesterday, near Washington Square. 10,000 dollars reward, with axe. Box 1142."

Miss Burton came in, and I read it out to her.

"Well, it's all right so far," she said. "Nobody has seen us with a Chinese baby, for no one has seen Kwei's

"No. But that taxi-driver saw me with a baby in a Chinese shawl, and in the neighbourhood of Washington Square. He can take them as far as your lodging. There the trail stops. But it won't be easy to keep the comrade dark on the steamer, with a lot of women about, and some of the passengers will have read this ad."

"It won't. But it's got to be done."

"It has. And what we want now is a wedding ring, for I booked your passage as Mrs. S. Burton."

"Goodness! Whatever would the family say?" she said. "But it was best. I suppose I had a Chinese husband."

"Comrade Wu—  Wu Burton— an American citizen," I said.

After breakfast we made a bee-line for the "Carmania," only pausing on the way to buy a red rolled-gold wed-ding ring. I wanted to put it on her finger, but she wouldn't let me. We lay low till the steamer started, then went on deck and found an out-of-the way corner for our deck chairs. I found the passage much pleasanter than the passage out, for we had to stick together to stave people off comrade Kwei, and when he was awake we had to amuse him, and in the evening we danced a lot, going to her cabin every ten minutes to make sure that he was asleep. He was a good sleeper, was comrade Kwei. We al-ways found plenty to talk about, for she had lived in the country—her father was a retired Major-General— since she was ten.

THEN, on the fourth  evening, I got a jolt. We were taking a quiet stroll, with the comrade asleep on Miss Burton's arm, and stopped to look down at the second-class passengers. A steward came out of the companion-way of their saloon and glanced up at us and stopped short and stared.

It was the Chinaman who had tossed comrade Kwei up to me.

We just stared at one another. He didn't nod, and I didn't nod. Then he turned and went along the deck, leaving me uncomfortable. I had not expected to see him again, and I hadn't wanted to see him again, and now that I did see him again I didn't like him. There was not nearly so much of the faithful servant about his face, in repose, as I could have wished, and I didn't like the way in which he looked at us.

"Why ever did that Chinaman stare at us like that?" said Miss Burton in a startled voice.

"It's the beggar who tossed comrade Kwei up to me." said I.

"That's a nuisance," she said, seriously

"It is," said I. "I don't like his face, or the way he looked at us. I've got a notion, though I've precious little to go upon, that he didn't know comrade Kwei had that celt, and now he does— having seen that ad., I mean. But, mind you, I've nothing to go upon but the way he looked at us."

"And how much more do you want?" she said, and her grey eyes sparkled queerly.

"Then the trouble we took to get comrade Kwei away from New York without anyone knowing has been wasted." said I, a bit peeved. "Con-found that celt! I feel in my bones we're going to have trouble about it. But we've got to keep it safe for comrade Kwei."

We went down to her cabin; she took the celt from comrade Kwei's neck and put it in a small cardboard box and wrapped it up, and I took it to the purser, and he sealed it up and put it in the ship's strongroom. We felt easier in mind about it.

WE did right in losing no time about that, for when she came to dinner the next night Miss Burton told me that she was absolutely certain that while we were on deck that afternoon her cabin had been searched; and I believe that the next afternoon mine was searched. Two or three things had not been put back exactly as I left them, and I had noticed carefully how I left them in order to know. It really did look as if my guess had been right that the Chinaman had not known about the celt when he handed over Kwei. but knew now.

I made a point of often taking a look down to the second-class deck, but I never saw him about it. But I did see two other Chinese stewards at different times, so there might be a gang of them.

This business seemed to make Miss Burton and me even friendlier— closer allies, so to speak— and I got into the way of calling her comrade Sarah, and she called me comrade Joss, for she quite saw my point that anyone who had hunted a job in New York for months would turn into a Red. But soon we dropped the comrade part.

Two days from Southampton I saw my Chinaman again, and I saw him come out of the Marconi room. He scuttled away when he saw me, as if he would rather not have a word with me. I thought it uncommonly suspicious, and watched him go down to the second-class. Then I went into the Marconi room.

"I suppose there's a strict rule about not telling me," I said to the operator, a bright and pleasant lad. "But this is a serious business. That Chinaman is out to rob a baby, and it wants stop-ping, or I wouldn't ask you. Did he cable about the axe to England or the States?"

He looked at me and hesitated, considering; then he said: "The rule is very strict, Mr. Featherstonehaugh. But I don't mind telling you that no Chinaman has telegraphed to the States this voyage."

I thanked him warmly and came away, thinking briskly. The Chinaman had probably cabled to London for reinforcements. I went back and cabled to Bill Throgmorton to meet the Carmania at Southampton with his Austro-Daimler. I didn't want any frisking on the way to London Town.

At Southampton comrade Kwei's Chinaman and three more left the "Carmania" just in front of us, and they were not far from us in the Custom House, though none of them seemed to see us, and they went out of it just in front of us, and there three Chinese friends met them. The seven of them looked as ugly a gang of thugs as you could wish to see. But there also was Bill Throgmorton and the Austro-Daimler, and in about half a minute I had introduced Sarah, and we were moving off. Then the China-men did see us, quite distinctly. They stood still and glared, jabbering furiously. I thought it quite likely that they wouldn't see us again for quite a while.

I explained the business to Bill, as much of it as I wanted, and he drove us to Grantham. My hat! It was ripping to be in the English country again, and it was a ripping drive. We stayed the night at Grantham, and next morning took the train to York. From York I took a taxi to the Hall, and we reached it in plenty of time for lunch.

Strensall opened the door and jumped at the sight of me. Then he grinned and said: "Good morning, Mr. Jocelyn. I knew you'd be coming home one day this week. His lordship will be pleased to see you."

Strensall always knows everything; but we humour him, for he is the best butler in Yorkshire, and about a hundred years old.

"How are you, Strensall? I knew I should find you not looking a day older," said I. "This is Miss Burton, my secretary, and this is a young Chinese friend I'm taking care of. What they will want will be the sunniest bedroom and sitting-room in the West wing, and they will want them now, for comrade Kwei wants to sleep."

"They shall be ready in ten minutes, sir," said Strensall, and we went into the hall.

My young sister Alicia was coming down the stairs, and she came down them quicker at the sight of us, and sprang upon me and kissed me. I introduced her to Sarah. But a minute later she went up the stairs, yelling: "Joss has come home, Aunt Caroline! And he isn't destitute at all, but he's brought such a pretty secretary and the loveliest Chinese baby you ever saw with him!"

I put Sarah into an easy-chair and went into the library, which the governor has turned into a museum, and there I found him wallowing in arrow-heads. He woke up at the sight of me; and we were pleased to see one another. He told me that they had missed me a lot, that the place did not run as smoothly when I wasn't about, looking after things, and it was selfish, but he was glad that I hadn't made a success of it in New York.

"But I haven't done so badly," I said. "I've brought back a secretary and a Chinese baby and a couple of thousand dollars."

That brought him into the hall quite ' quickly, and I introduced him to Sarah, and I saw at once that he liked her, and, of course, she liked him. Then Aunt Caroline came downstairs with Alicia. What we do with Aunt Caroline is bear. We wish she would live somewhere else, but she won't. She is enormously rich and enormously stingy, and the worst grumbler in Yorkshire, and in her usual cross-grained way she was up-stage with Sarah and sniffed at comrade Kwei.

Then Tollerton sauntered in on his crutches. I never came across anyone else who could get the effect of sauntering on crutches, but Tollerton is always tremendously IT, and I'm not sure that, though he was so dreadfully smashed up in the war, he is not even more IT than ever. But I'm afraid he won't live to be Earl of Easingwold, poor chap, which is what keeps me tied to the place, except for a few months at a time, like that shot at getting rich quickly in New York. He was as pleased as the governor to see me back, and took to Sarah and comrade Kwei at once.

Then Strensall came to say that Miss Burton's rooms were ready, and Alicia insisted on carrying Kwei up to them.

I stayed and told the others about New York, and how I hadn't found a job to get rich in.

Then I handed the jolt I'd been carrying about with me to Aunt Caroline; I said: "So I've come back to buy the bee farm I've always wanted, with the money Aunt Caroline promised me."

"What money?" snapped Aunt Caroline.

"Well, when I was starting you were so certain that I was going to return destitute and in rags that you said you would cheerfully give me three times whatever I brought back above sixpence. Here's the sixpence, and here's a fiver and four Bradburys and two thousand-dollar notes. So you owe me twenty-seven pounds and six thousand dollars, which is twelve hundred guineas. And I'll put up a bee farm under the edge of the wold and sell the best honey in England by the ton."

It was a jolt all right; Aunt Caroline gasped. But when she had got breath enough to say she'd been joking, the governor and Tollerton were down on her like a cart-load of bricks, and in the end she gave in. It has done her a world of good parting with that twelve hundred, made her more civil.

Then Sarah and Alicia came down, and we went in to lunch, and there was no butcher's meat.

After lunch I showed the governor the emerald celt, and it fairly startled him. He said that it might be a symbol or it might be a talisman, or it might be connected with one of the obscure cults which have lived on under the official religions of China, but, anyhow, it was worth a good many thousand pounds, and the best place for it was the vaults of Coutts' till the baby grew up. He would make inquiries about it cautiously, next time he went to London. I handed it over to him. It would be best that it should be in Coutts' when the Chinamen came to Easingwold. I saw no chance of their not coming.

WHEN I woke up next morning and heard only the sounds of the country, cattle lowing and sheep bleating away in the fields, and the doves cooing in the cedars in the gar-dens, and the peacocks screaming, my expedition to New York seemed no more than a dream—all except the end of it with Sarah and comrade Kwei in it. I settled down to the old life without an effort.

But about five days later Sarah said, when we were from walking in the garden after dinner: "Now that I've got Kwei comfortably settled at Easingwold, I suppose I can be getting home."

"You want a holiday already?" I said, pretty severely.

"A holiday?" she said.

"Well, the agreement was that you should be my secretary for a year if I paid your passage to England. Agreements have to be kept, and now that I'm a capitalist it's my job to exact my pound of flesh and grind the faces of the poor."

"I can see you doing it," she said, grinning at me.

"You will see me grinding this one," said I.

"But you don't want a secretary," she said.

"I do want a secretary. Did you ever hear of anyone running a bee farm without a secretary? And, anyhow, I've got a secretary, and I'm going to keep it. I've got into the way of having one, and I can't do without it. You know perfectly well I can't."

"I don't," she said

"Well, it's early yet, but you'll learn that it is so," said I, being diplomatic, for I didn't want to rush things.

She said nothing for about half a minute; she seemed to be thinking; then she said: "Oh, well, it's a good thing I didn't take any autumn and winter frocks with me to New York; but by next spring I shall be going about in rags."

"A salary will be arranged," said I, in a lofty way.

"It won't! It wasn't in the bar-gain! And if you think I'm going to take a salary for doing nothing at all, you're wrong!" she said, flaring up rather.

"There will be plenty to do, I said. "I shall be handling most of the governor's correspondence, and there'll be letters and letters about all kinds of things connected with the bee farm. You'll have heaps to do."

That seemed to satisfy her, for she calmed down and said no more about going.

She was uncommonly useful, for so many more letters got written, letters about the estate; and she fitted into our life at the Hall perfectly. Also she kept possession of comrade Kwei, though I wanted to get him a nurse and looked after him. He saw a lot of country life and got plenty of fresh air, because when I drove about the estate, keeping tenants up to the mark or looking into their complaints, or went fishing or shooting, I took him with me— at least, she brought him. It was surprising the amount of ground she could cover with comrade Kwei on her hip and how quickly she learnt to throw a fly. Alicia, who is nearly as good a fisherman and shot as I am, often came with us, but I thought myself that we got on better alone.

Of course, Aunt Caroline did not make herself pleasant to Sarah, but then she did not know how, and one day she descended on me in the gun-room, and said: "I want to speak to you seriously, Jocelyn. You've got to bear in mind that you'll be Earl of Easingwold one of these days."

"Not for at least seven thousand of them. So we won't start worrying about that." said I.

"But you must remember your responsibilities, and I feel it my duty to warn you. That girl, Miss Burton, is setting her cap at you," she went on, with a sour face and a voice like vinegar.

"It's very good of you, Aunt Caroline. But you're wrong," I said. "I'm setting my cap at her; and we'll let it go at that."

There was rather a fuss; but we let it go at that.

THEN the governor went up to London and took the emerald celt with him. He left it at Coutts' and came back rather uneasy about it. He had shown it to an expert in Chinese things who had only been able to tell him that, from the style of the carving, he believed it to be Middle Ming, about the end of the fifteenth century. Without telling him that it was in England, that expert had made inquiries about it of two of the leading London Chinese, and they had seemed immensely astonished that a European should ever have heard of it. In fact, they gave him the impression that it was some-thing very important indeed, and that they were very much annoyed that he should have heard about it. So it seemed more unlikely than ever that I should be allowed to keep it till comrade Kwei's twenty-first birthday without a struggle, or perhaps two. I might have to deal with the London Chinamen first and the comrade's step-brothers afterwards, or with both combined. But it would be some time before the New York Chinamen could take a hand in the game.

The weeks ran on, but nothing happened till the last Thursday in September, and then things began to move rather suddenly. On Thursday, from eleven till six, the historic parts of the Hall are open to visitors, and a confounded nuisance they are. But we have to let people see it, and we stick them; and, of course, three or four thousand half-crowns a year come in useful for repairs.

After lunch on that Thursday, in the nursery in the West wing,  helping  Sarah amuse the comrade, we saw  one of the large cars from Central Station Hotel at York coming up the drive, full of visitors. There was, sitting beside the driver, a large yellow Chinaman. The trophy hunt was going to begin.

I said nothing to Sarah. Why worry her? I went to the hall and told Strensall to keep an eye on the Chinaman and see that he did not stray from the party. Then I went back to Sarah and suggested that we should try to catch a dish of trout for dinner, and we went.

The stream comes down from the wold, and the green pool, which we fished, is half-way up the slope at the north-western corner of the home wood, and there is a clear view down into the gardens from it. I kept an eye on them, and in about three-quarters of an hour I saw a figure come out of the door at the end of the east wing. It was the big Chinaman. He moved about uncommonly quickly, taking cover wherever there was any, and I tumbled to it that he was making a careful reconnaissance of the house and gardens.

I stood watching him, not thinking of Sarah, when she suddenly said from behind me: "What's that fat man doing in the gardens?"

"I was just wondering," I said, quietly.

"Why, it's a Chinaman!" she said.

I tried to persuade her that it wasn't, but she wouldn't have it, and she was a good deal upset about it, more upset than I had expected; but she certainly had grown tremendously fond of comrade Kwei. I told her that it was the celt they were after, not the comrade, but she said that their only way of getting the celt was to get the comrade, and then I should have no right to it, and they could make me hand it over. There was a lot in that.

We did not go back to the Hall till we saw the car full of visitors leave, the big Chinaman again sitting beside the driver. Strensall was uncommonly peeved about the Chinaman's slipping away, but for the first half hour the beggar had been the life of the party, in the forefront and asking all the questions, and then he wasn't there. When the others came out of the Hall they found him sitting in the car, talking to the driver. A cool beggar.

We held a council of war that evening and decided that the Chinaman's examining the house and gardens meant that they were going to break in one night and try to get away with Kwei, and probably the celt as well. It did not look an easy job. So we transferred Sarah and the comrade to Henry VIII's bedroom above the great hall, because we all slept in bedrooms round it. Also I told the keepers and the gardeners and the shepherds on the wold to keep their eyes open for Chinamen, especially at night, so that all the countryside would be on the lookout for them. I could not see how, unless they made an attack in force, they could find out where Kwei was sleeping. Also I arranged that the York police should let me know if any Chinamen came to York.

Nothing happened; no Chinamen appeared. Then, five days later. Alicia came in to tea one afternoon, looking rather startled. Sarah saw it, and asked her what had happened.

"Oh, I had rather a jar. Hawkins told me that there were a couple of coveys of partridges in the long meadow, and I went down to try to get a brace. I couldn't get near them, and gave it up, and on my way back, in the middle of the home wood, I heard something move on my right, and looked round and saw a yellow face staring at me round the trunk of a large elm about thirty yards in, and when it saw I saw it, it vanished. I was glad I had my gun with me, I can tell you."

"ALL imagination. Your head's full of Chinamen, and you'll be seeing them everywhere," said Aunt Caroline, instantly.

But I did not agree with her; Alicia is only fourteen, but she is level-headed enough and has no nerves. But how had a Chinaman got into the home wood? Where had he come from and how? Not from York and not by train, or I should have heard about it. But nowadays it is so much easier to get about unobserved; a motor car might have brought him from Leeds and dropped him, and be coming back for him.

I told Hawkins that there was a Chinaman in the home wood, but he would not believe it. But the home wood is a couple of miles long, running up to the edge of the wold, and a mile across, and here and there an acre or so is pathless. After dinner that night I went down to it my-self and slipped quietly into it, and moved quietly along the edge of it nearest the Hall.

The light of the harvest moon was almost as bright as day. I saw no-thing and heard nothing till I had turned and was coming back. I came to one of the broad drives that run right through the wood and stopped and looked down it. About a hundred yards down I saw two rabbits bolt across it, as if they were scared badly. It might have been a stoat, but I waited. Then two men ran quickly across it. They were short, slim men, much too small to be any of the keepers. There was more than one Chinaman in the home wood.

But even then I did not tumble to  what they were really up to, and I  slept that night with my bedroom door open and my automatic under my pillow. Nothing happened.

I SPENT most of the next morning and afternoon arranging a grand search of the home wood. I got together nearly a hundred men, chiefly tenants and farm labourers, to meet on the wold at the top of the wood at seven in the morning to sweep down the length of the wold and drive the Chinamen down to the road that runs to Easingwold along the bottom of it. There a dozen men would be posted to catch them. It would be worth ten pounds' worth of beer.

After tea Sarah and I went up to the stream for trout; Alicia came with us as far as the stream, and went on to shoot rabbits. We fished the green pool. Sarah carrying comrade Kwei comfortably on her left hip as she threw the fly. Like a fool, without thinking, I moved on up the stream, leaving her at the green pool. I had gone about seventy yards up it, when there came a scream from Sarah.

Then a loud cry: "Joss! The Chinamen!"

I started; but it was no ground to sprint on— very rough.

I heard her cry out and say: "You brute!" And then I came a cropper.

By the time I had picked myself up and reached her twenty seconds must have elapsed. She was picking herself up and holding her left wrist.

'The brute twisted it and snatched Kwei from me!" she said. "Come on!" and she started to run, sobbing.

I ran with her, getting back my breath from the cropper. The path ran twisting between tall bushes; the Chinamen were out of sight. They would get into the wood well ahead of us, and there'd be no finding them. Their car might be on any of three roads, waiting for them. It looked pretty hopeless.

Then Alicia's gun banged twice about two hundred yards ahead, and a curious squealing broke out.

"What the devil?" I said, and sprinted ahead.

I bucketed round a corner and nearly ran into Alicia and knocked her down. She had the comrade on her right hip, and her gun in her left hand, and she was smiling. I pulled up, and she stopped smiling.

"I gave them fifty yards before I peppered them. I did really, Joss― quite fifty yards," she said quickly and very earnestly; and I knew quite well that she hadn't given anyone forty yards before she peppered them— thirty at the outside.

"Peppered who?" I said.

"The two Chinamen. I heard Sarah scream, and then I saw them coming before they saw me, and I stepped into the bushes and let them run past me, and stepped out and gave them a good fifty yards before I peppered them. Then, while they were busy squealing, I ran and picked up the comrade and came away with him."

"Splendid!" I said, and I examined the comrade carefully.

He certainly wasn't hurt, and he seemed more thoughtful than startled, and tried to get my finger into his mouth.

Sarah came up panting and very white, and gave a little cry at the sight of the comrade, and almost snatched him from Alicia, and fairly nuzzled him and cried with relief. I told her and Alicia to get back to the Hall and send the gardeners and some bandages, and took Alicia's gun and went on to take a look at the Chinamen. They were about a hundred yards down the path and had stopped squealing, but when I came up to them they were looking uncommonly sick and sorry for themselves, much too sorry to put up any fight when I took their automatics from them. One of them was one of comrade Kwei's step-brothers. Then I had a look at their calves. As I thought, Alicia had given them no forty yards before she peppered them.

I talked to them about the seriousness of kidnapping a child in a civilized country, and said I hoped that seven years' penal servitude would teach them not to twist English girls' wrists. Then Alicia and the gardeners came, and we bandaged their calves and carried them back to the Hall and put them to bed. I went up to the nursery and found Sarah recovered and the comrade making a hearty meal. Her wrist was hurting her a good deal, and when Dr. Horton came I made him examine it before he went to the Chinamen. He found that the brute had broken one of the metacarpal bones, and bound it up. He was over an hour picking the pellets from the Chinamen's calves, for both of them were carrying about the best part of a charge of shot. He said that they'd walk stiffly for many a long day.

FIVE days went by, and I began to wonder what Kwei's other step-brothers were doing. Then on the afternoon of the sixth day Strensall came up to the nursery to tell me that a Chinaman had called to see me. I went down to the blue drawing-room, and there was our fat friend who had come with the visitors.

He was soapy enough when he did get started, and he spoke English very well. It seemed that there had been what he called an unfortunate misapprehension. Comrade Kwei's step-brothers were noble fellows, and they had wanted very badly to have their little brother back at home, and they still wanted him. I told him that they didn't live in a healthy house, and they could go on wanting him till the cows came home. Then he said that it was not really their little brother that they wanted, but his little jade axe, and he had come to make an agreement about it and his two wounded countrymen. I told him that, as soon as they were well enough to travel, his two wounded countrymen were going to take a short journey to York Gaol, and he could make an agreement with the police.

He got flustered and argued and begged. But I stuck to it. The brutes had twisted Sarah's wrist, and to gaol they should go. Then he talked about compensating her. I had plenty of time to consider things while he talked away, and I saw pretty clearly that life would be more than a bit tiresome with a gang of greedy and revengeful Chinamen always on the track of comrade Kwei, and nearly sure to get him in the end, and that money in the hand is better than an emerald celt in the bank, especially when there are doubts about the ownership of the emerald celt. So I grew a bit less peeved and asked what they wanted to pay for the emerald, and he said.

"Three thousand pounds."

I laughed a good loud scornful laugh. What is three thousand to Chinamen in Wetzler suitings? And we argued it out till he agreed to pay seven thousand for the emerald and two thousand compensation to Sarah. He went away very respectful indeed.

I told the governor and Tollington, and they both agreed that I had done the best thing for the comrade, since the beggars knew that he had the emerald.

I caught the next London express at York and got the emerald celt from the bank first thing next morning and was back at the Hall at half-past two. At three o'clock my stout friend— I never asked his name— arrived in a large car with the nine thousand pounds in notes, and I handed over the emerald celt and the peppered Chinamen to him, and was jolly glad to see the last of them.

I locked the comrade's seven thousand in the governor's safe and went up to the nursery with the two thousand for Sarah, and told her what I had done. She was immensely surprised and pleased.

Then, when she had counted the notes and stroked them and made them crinkle, she said: "But you're the only one who doesn't get anything out of it."

"Oh, yes, I do." I said. "I get you. I'm going to marry you for your money."

She blushed and laughed and said: "But I've always wanted to be married for myself!"

"And there'll be something doing in that way, too, if you notice very carefully," I said, and grabbed her and tried to show her.

____________________

15: The Bechut Mystery

North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times (Tasmania)  4 Feb 1911

THE GARDEN in the middle of Garthoyle Gardens is in the shape of a triangle; and at each of the three gates is a notice-board declaring that only residents in the Gardens, their families and their friends, are allowed in it. The gardeners have strict orders to turn strangers out. But my uncle Algernon, who left the Gardens to me, had a soft place in his heart, though he was a bachelor, for young people in love with one another; and he gave instructions to the gardeners not to interfere with pairs of lovers.

I let these instructions stand, because the garden looks more as if it had been laid out for the purpose of love-making than any other place of the kind in London. Indeed, on a summer's evening it would look rather incomplete, rather wasted, without some pairs of lovers in it. I am bound to say that I have never found it looking incomplete. I have never used it for that purpose myself.

The only girl I ever talk to in the garden is Amber Devine, the niece of Scruton, the New Zealand gum millionaire, who lives, at No. 9. She is very pretty and nice, but I should never dream of letting myself fall in love with her. If I did, it would be the mess of a lifetime, for she let her uncle use her in a little millionairish game of his by which he tried to trick me into letting him have his house rent free. I have never been able to understand how she came to help him in it, for it is quite unlike anything else in her. But she did; and even if I wanted to make love to her it is quite out of the question.

One Friday night I had arranged to go to a Covent Garden ball, and after  dining at home I strolled out about half-past ten into the central garden to smoke a cigarette. The garden never grows stale, like the rest of London in the summer, because it is watered, and watered, and watered. In dry weather all night long there is a patter of falling water from two or three revolving standards on most of the lawns; and if there is any moonlight their sprays glitter very prettily.

As I was crossing the road to the gate which stands in front of my house, I saw a pair of lovers going up the central path of the garden. At least I took them for a pair of lovers, though they were walking rather quickly. The girl was in evening dress, for I saw her shoulders white in the moonlight, and she had a scarf twisted round her head. The man was wearing tweeds and a straw hat. At the same time. I noticed a man in evening dress coming along the pavement on my left, in a rather slinking way, in the shadow of the shrubs on the edge of the garden.

I went through the gate and up the central path, and I had gone thirty or forty yards up it when I heard his feet crunch on the gravel by the garden gate. I looked back to see if it was anyone I knew, but a little bit of cloud was passing over the moon, and he was too far off to recognise. He turned sharply off to the right. I went on a few yards, and sat down on a seat. I had been sitting there two or three minutes when a woman! came in through the gate. She came along at a smart pace, and I saw that; she was wearing a good-sized feathered hat. I could not see who she was, for she wore a veil. She did not look like a wife or daughter of one of my tenants: she looked more like a lady's maid. She went straight un the central path, out of sight in the shadow, of the shrubberies.

The night was not as warm as it might have been. I got up and walked along the central path to find a more sheltered seat. Just before I came to the middle of the garden I met Amber Devine. We do not often meet in the garden in the evening; generally it is in the afternoon. We shook hands; she turned round, and we went on to the middle of the garden. She was in evening dress, with, a light and filmy wrap round her shoulders, and in the moonlight she looked, if anything, prettier than she does in the day. I thought that her eyes were like shining stars. The pair of lovers and the woman in the feathered hat were nowhere in sight.

Now, the middle of the garden is set with shrubberies in the shape of a wheel.  The hub is a clump of shrubs; the spokes are narrow shrubberies; and the tyre is a ring, about twenty feet thick, of shrubs. In between the shrubberies which, form the spokes are little lawns. Each of these lawns has a narrow entrance— a break in the tyre of the wheel. We turned into the nearest of these little lawns, and went to a seat at the end of it, right up against the hub of the wheel, and well sheltered, and began to talk.

We always have plenty to talk about; there are the poor children whom Amber collects in the Park and takes for outings to Kew or to the country: and there are the troubles I have with my tenants, owing to the. fact that I run Garthoyle Gardens myself. I always tell her about them, because I find her so sympathetic. As we talked, I heard the sound of voices very faint on the lawn on the other side of the shrubbery on our left. I just noticed it, and no more ; I was giving my attention to Amber. We had been sitting talking for three or four minutes at the outside, when there came the loud, startling bang of a revolver from the lawn on our left, and then a woman's scream.

Amber sprang up with a little cry of fright, and I got up more slowly. There was a crashing in. the shrubbery on our left, and a man in evening dress burst out of it, bolted across the lawn, and out of the entrance.

'Come on!' I said. 'We must look into this!'

'No, no ! Be; careful— oh, do be careful,' cried Amber. And she clutched my arm with both hands..

'It's  all right,' I said. 'They won't hurt me. You stop here a minute. You'll be  quite safe.' And I tried to loosen the grip of her hands.

'No, you'll get hurt!' she said.

'But I must go— I must really,' I said.

'Then I'm coming, too,' said Amber.

'Very well; only don't be frightened. I'll see that you don't come to any harm,' I said. And I slipped my arm round her waist to encourage her.

We hurried out at the entrance of the lawn, and I saw at once we had lost time. The man in evening dress was nowhere in sight. But in the open garden on the left the lady in evening dress was hurrying down a path which led to the left-hand gate.

She was a good way off, but I called after her: 'What's happened?'

She did not answer; she did not even' look back ; she hurried on. Then, beyond her, on another 'path' also leading to the left-hand gate, I caught a short glimpse of the woman in the feathered hat; as she passed a gap between two shrubberies. She was hurrying, too, as if the sound of the shot had frightened her.

Amber and I ran to the entrance of the lawn from which the sound of the shot had come. In the middle of it lay a man; fallen on his face, with his arms outspread. My first feeling was a great relief that it was not a woman. I ran to him, knelt down, and turned him over. He looked to he a foreigner, a man of about 30. His face was very white; and his eyes were half closed. I felt for his pulse, but could not find it. I was sure that he was dead.

Amber broke into frightened sobbing. I could do nothing. It was a matter for a doctor and the police. I rose and said: 'Come on; we must tell the police.'

We took the path to the left-hand gate. When we came out of it neither of the two women was in sight. That side of the gardens was empty. I took her straight to No. 9, and saw her let herself in with her latchkey. Then, I ran round the top of the gardens and down the other side. At the bottom I found Brooks, one of the policemen who looks after them. I told him what had happened; and on his suggestion we ran round to my house, and I told Richards, my butler, to telephone the news to the police-station. Then Brooks and I ran to the scene of the crime.

The man was lying just as I left him. Brooks knelt down beside him, and examined him.

'He's quite dead,' he said rather shakily, and rose to his feet, looking shocked. He began to look about the lawn, holding his lantern about two feet from the ground and examining it carefully. About six feet from the dead man he found three envelopes, lying close together. They were empty, and all three were addressed to Sir Theobald Walsh. The addresses were typewritten. I knew Walsh and I was able to assure Brooks that the dead man was not he.

'Well, it's odd as he should have Sir Theobald Walsh's letters,' said Brooks. And he went on searching. The dead man's hat, a straw, was lying quite ten yards from the body, close to the left-hand shrubbery, as if it had pitched off his head and rolled along when he fell. On the other side of the lawn, behind the dead man, half-way between his body and the right-hand shrubbery, Brooks picked up a small revolver. It was stuck sideways in the turf. By the light of his lantern we saw that it was of French make, and that the top of the barrel was choked with earth.

'Now, why on earth was it stuck in the turf?' I said. 'It couldn't have been dropped, because it's not heavy enough to stick into the turf of itself.'

Brooks said we had better not trample about the turf too much; and we came out of the lawn, and waited at the entrance; discussing the crime. It plainly lay between the lady in evening dress and the man who had bolted from the shrubbery. One of them must have fired the shot.

We had not waited long when an inspector of police, a doctor and a man in grey tweeds came hurrying up. They were followed by two policemen wheeling an ambulance.

I gathered that the man in the tweeds was a detective, and his name was Pardoe. He had been at the police station when the telephone message came. He was tall and thin and hook-nosed, with bushy eyebrows and thin lips. He looked like a hawk. He took charge of the business and gave the orders. I told him quickly what I knew; and at once he sent off the two policemen to hunt about the garden to find if anyone in it had heard the shot fired, or seen the lady or the man in evening dress. Then he and the doctor went in to the lawn to the body,

The doctor knelt down beside it; and presently I heard him say: 'Cervical vertebrae smashed. Must have been killed instantly. The bullet is embedded in his neck.'

Pardoe himself fetched the ambulance, lifted the body on to it, and wheeled it out on the lawn. Then, by the light of the lanterns of the policemen, he searched the dead man's pockets. In the breast pocket of the jacket was a good-sized bag of money. He opened it, and took out a handful of coins. They were all sovereigns. There was a handful of loose silver and coppers in one of the trouser pockets; in one of the side-pockets of the jacket was an ugly looking jack knife— such as sailors carry— and very sharp. In the other pocket was a packet of Caporal tobacco, and cigarette papers. In one of the waistcoat pockets was a cheap. American watch; in the other were four visiting cards, on which was printed the name Etienne Bechut.

When he read the name on the visiting cards, Pardoe took a lantern, and again looked closely at the dead man's face.

'Thought I knew him. A bad lot. Soho,' he said, in quick, jerky sentences.

'Well, then we shall soon find out all about him,' said, the inspector. Then Brooks produced' the revolver, and the typewritten envelopes addressed to Sir Theobald Walsh. Pardoe studied them by the light of a lantern; then he began to question me closely and at length, about what I had seen and heard. I told him that l had seen the murdered man walking up the central path of the garden with a lady in evening dress; that I had seen the man in evening dress come into the garden and go up the right hand path; and that a woman, veiled, and in a feather hat, had gone up the central path about fifty yards behind the lady and the murdered man; that I had strolled up that path myself, met Amber Devine, and gone with her on to the lawn on the left; and we had heard the revolver shot and the scream, and seen the man in evening dress halt.

'Did you see what the lady in evening dress was like?' said Pardoe.

'No, not clearly: but I got just an impression that she was all right — a lady, don't you know?' said I. 'But I didn't recognise, her, and I don't think I should know her again.'

'This foreigner hardly looks the kind of a man a lady would be walking with at this hour, here,' said the doctor.

'You're right there. Dr. Brandon,' said Pardoe slowly.  'But then there's this bag of sovereigns.'

'Blackmail?' said Dr. Brandon.

'Looks like it,' said Pardoe.

'But why should she shoot him? She'd got the letters,' I said.

'We don't know that, my lord,' laid Pardoe.

'She may have wanted to make  sure that he did not blackmail her again,' said Dr. Brandon.

'We don't know that she did shoot him,' said Pardoe. And he began to question me about the man in evening dress.

I told him that I should not know him again; that he had been too far off to recognise when he came into the garden, and he had bolted so fast from the  shrubbery that I had not caught sight of his face before his back was turned to me, and he was rushing out of the entrance.

Then he asked me in what position the dead man had been lying when I first came on to the lawn. I told him that he had been lying on his face, and that he had fallen with his face towards the left-hand shrubbery, out of which the man in evening dress had bolted.

He asked the doctor whether a man, with that wound, would fall straight forward. Brandon said that the bullet might knock him straight forward, or he might spin round, and then fall.

Then Pardoe questioned Brooks  about the finding of the revolver. He too seemed puzzled by the fact that it had been sticking in the turf. He went on to question Brooks about the people he  had seen in the Gardens, and found that he had seen none of the three actors in the crime. He was in the middle of these questions when the two policemen who had been scouring the garden for someone who had heard the revolver fired, or seen the lady or the man in evening dress as they fled, came back, with the that they had found no one else who could give any information. They had found three pairs of lovers but each pair had been so absorbed in the business in hand that they had heard and seen nothing.

Pardoe frowned; and considered for a little. Then he told the inspector that he was going straight off to Soho to try to find something in Bechut's lodgings which might throw some light on the matter, and that he would come back at half-past three, and search the lawn and shrubberies. Leaving the inspector and Brooks in charge of the lawn, Pardoe, Brandon, and I left the garden, followed by the two policemen wheeling the ambulance with the dead man on it.

I went home. At twelve o'clock I had some supper; and after it I smoked and read and puzzled over the crime till half-past three. Then l went back to the garden and found Pardoe and the police beginning their examination of the lawn in the daylight

At the very entrance to it Pardoe made a discovery. Hanging from the projecting bough of a shrub was a black lace scarf. It had plainly been caught from the lady's head as she ran out of the lawn. It was an expensive scarf, but not uncommon.

On the lawn itself they found nothing fresh. Then they searched the left-hand shrubbery from which the man in evening dress had bolted. In that they found nothing, not even his footprints, for the soil was hard. They went on to search the shrubbery on the right; and in that they found one of those leather wristbags in which women carry their handkerchiefs and purses. It was old and worn and shabby. It might have been thrown away, by a nursemaid. It smelt strongly of some coarse violet scent, but in the dry weather we had been having it might have lain there for a day or two and still kept the scent. There was nothing more to be done, and I went off to bed.

Soon after breakfast next morning I went round to No. 9 to talk the matter over with Amber. I found that she could throw no more light than I on the identity of either the man or the woman.

I was surprised to find no mention of the matter in the evening papers; the police were keeping their own counsel. Pardoe came to see me in the afternoon, to talk over my evidence, at the inquest; and I learnt from him that Sir Theobald Walsh had declared himself quite unable to identify the three envelopes. I was able to assure him that that settled the question of his getting any information from that quarter. I know Walsh. He is as stubborn as an ox. At the same time, he could hardly be blamed for not giving the lady away.

The inquest brought no new fact to light; it rather complicated the affair. It made it seem most improbable that the revolver had been tired from the left-hand shrubbery, for Brooks had found it between the spot where the man fell and the right-hand shrubbery. This made it look as if the woman had fired the shot. But why had she screamed after it was fired, and not before?

There were not many people at the inquest, but among them I noticed the Duke of Letchworth― we call him the piebald Duke because of his hair― and I saw that he was taking a great interest in the evidence. I had not known that he was one of those people who are keen on crimes and trials; he had never struck me as being morbid. I was a good deal surprised to find that there was no newspaper storm. I had expected there would be columns and columns about the case. This, of course, increased the, mystery, and set me puzzling over it harder than ever. Walsh was the man who knew, but he would never tell. In the case of any other man, it would have been possible to guess the lady. In the case of Walsh it was quite impossible; there were too many of them.

It was curious how after the inquest nothing seemed to happen. The police went on hunting, I knew, for I saw Pardoe in the Gardens frequently; and once or twice he came over to see me and talk over little clues he, had found. They were not of any value, and it was soon quite clear that the police were baulked. They had not traced the scarf to anyone; they could not find the woman with the feathered hat. She might have been able to throw some light on the matter. They went so far as to advertise for her, but with no result. They did not find me of much help. I was not going to run the risk of getting any of my friends into the mess of a lifetime on account of a wretched blackmailing foreigner, but at the same time I went on making inquiries myself, just to try to satisfy my curiosity about the matter; and at last I began to think I was getting warm.

Then one night, a fortnight later. I was playing baccarat at Scruton's, and I fancied that the piebald Duke kept looking at me rather oddly as ho played. The interest he was taking in me must have put him off his usual game, for he actually won— nearly seven thousand. The party broke up about three; and just as I was going out of the house, the Duke called to me:

'Half a minute, Garthoyle. I'll stroll along with you.' And we came out of the house together

'Are you in a hurry to go to bed?' he said.

'Not a bit,' I said. 'I like the early morning.'

'Have you got the key of that middle garden of yours on you?' he said. 'I want to talk to you. And after a long gamble like that, I'd sooner be in the fresh air than not. You might, take me to the lawn where that foreign blackguard was shot.'

The words 'foreign blackguard' were rather an eye-opener. It looked as if the Duke knew something about the affair; more than I did. I had a key on me; we went into the garden, and straight to the lawn.

'It's about this murder that I want to talk to you,' he said slowly, looking round the lawn. 'I know who the lady was who was blackmailed; and I know who the man was who bolted. They came to me and put themselves into my hands. If you go on much further with your inquiries, you'll find out who they were yourself, and you will very likely enlighten the people whose enlightenment would a lot of harm in the way of causing an infernal scandal. Now, I want to give you my assurance that I am absolutely convinced that neither of them had anything to do with the shooting. Both of them were taken utterly by surprise by it, and, as you saw, bolted. I think it was the best thing they could do under the circumstances.... I don't know whether you care to accept my assurance that they were innocent, but I am absolutely convinced of it.'

'I'm quite ready to accept it,' I said, quickly. 'I would sooner take your judgment in the matter than anybody's.'

'Thank you. I thought you would,' he said. And he sighed, as if he had, taken a weight off his mind. 'There are one or two points that support my judgment,'  he went on. 'The man lay here, and the revolver there near the right-hand shrubbery. The man who bolted was in the left hand shrubbery on the-other side of the body. The shot was fired from the right-hand shrubbery.'

'I noticed that, and it does complicate the matter. It lets the man out pretty well. But it rather makes it look as if the woman may have fired the shot,' I said.

'Yet you yourself brought out thee fact quite clearly that the woman screamed after the shot was fired. I think she told me the truth  when she said she screamed because the shot surprised and frightened her.'

'Yes; that sounds right enough,' I said. 'But if neither of those two fired the shot, who on earth did?' I said.

'Well, I think that the police did not attach enough importance to the wrist-bag they found in the right-hand shrubbery, and to the fact that the revolver was of French make. That seem to me the real clues to the murderer.'

'Then who do you think the murderer was?'

'The woman in the feathered hat,' said the Duke.

'The deuce you do!' said I.

'Yes I do. She was veiled. She was following this blackmailing scoundrel, and the lady. She bolted too; and she has disappeared. She never answered tho advertisement. Why is she hiding?' said the Duke.

'These are pretty awkward facts. I shall have to work it out afresh from this point of view,' I said,

'And you might put them to the police. Working on their present lines. they might discover these two innocent people and make a great deal of trouble. It doesn't, seem likely; and I've seen to it that they are not being encouraged to show too much zeal in the matter, but they might if you could put them on the right tack.'

'Oh, I will: or I'll try to,' I said.

'Thank you,' said the Duke.

We turned and walked to the bottom of the garden. As we came out of the gate, I said: 'I suppose, whether the police come in or not, this business has rather smashed up those two people's lives?'

'No; I don't think so,' said the Duke slowly. 'I think that it will be rather the other way about. They were drifting apart, but this business— being in this mess, together— is rather drawing them together again.'

'That's all right,' I said.

IT WAS QUITE plain, that the Duke had seen to it that the police did not make themselves too active in the matter, for I saw nothing of Pardoe for two or three days. Then one morning he came.

'Well, Mr. Pardoe,' I said, 'I have discovered who murdered Etienne Bechut. To begin with, it was neither the lady he was blackmailing nor the man in  evening dress. They do not, very naturally, want to appear in the matter; but they have put themselves into the hands of a third person, and told him what happened: as far as they know. I am absolutely convinced of their innocence.'

I paused; Pardoe scratched his head, and looked at me very keenly. 'You'll excuse my asking, my lord, but do you really honestly and truly believe this?'

'I give you my word that I believe them to be absolutely innocent.'

'I take it, my lord, that you're the person they put themselves in the hands of?'

I said nothing.

'Well, my lord, what are your new facts?' he said.

'The shot was fired from the right hand shrubbery by the woman in the feathered hat.'

Pardoe frowned thoughtfully. 'I've thought about her a good many times,' he said.

'Well, my theory is that she followed Bechut and the lady, carrying with her the revolver in the wrist-bag. She slipped into the right-hand shrubbery, took the revolver out of the bag, threw the bag down, shot Bechut, and threw the revolver away so that it stuck in the turf.'

Pardoe sat very still, frowning. Then he said:' 'There's certainly something in. this. I'll. look for her in Soho.'

He wished me good-morning, and hurried off. Three days later he came again. When we were settled down in the library, he said:

'Well, my lord, I've found the woman in the feathered hat; or, to be exact, I've got on her track. The man Bechut was very mixed up with a woman of the name of Cesarine Thibaudier. She seems to have been a thoroughly bad lot, as bad as Bechut himself. At the same time, she seems to have been infatuated with him, and just as jealous as could be. It seems that he had arranged to go to France quietly as soon as he got the money for the letters. He was just running away from her. She found out this plan of his, and rowed him about it, for she had made up her mind that he was going off 'with another woman. She must have watched and followed him.'

'It seems to look pretty promising,' I said.

'Yes; it does fit in,' said Pardoe. 'And then she went off at six o'clock on. the morning after the murder, and has not been seen since. Probably she's in Paris.'

'Well, you ought to be able to catch her without much difficulty,' I said. 'Will you go over .to Pans yourself?'

'Wait a bit— wait a bit, my lord,' said Pardoe, smiling. 'Where's our evidence? I've not been able to find anyone who saw Cesarine Thibaudier nearer Garthoyle Gardens than Soho. It's true that I've found two of her friends who declare that, the wrist-bag we found is the very image of one that belonged to her, but I counted nine women in Soho carrying the identical wristbag in the course of one morning. Also, Cesarine Thibaudier used that scent of violets of which the bag smelt. But the two women who told me so, smelt of it themselves. I have not been able to trace the revolver to her; and I shouldn't wonder if it belonged to Bechut himself, and she stole it. Again, neither the lady who was blackmailed nor the man who bolted saw anything of the person who fired the shot; or, I take it, they would have told you about it. Unless this woman chose to confess we haven't enough evidence to hang a cat on.'

'All the same, I'm quite convinced that this woman followed Bechut to Garthoyle Gardens, and shot him from the shrubbery.'

Pardoe took a long pull at his whisky and soda. Then he said: 'Ah, my lord, if we were to arrest all the people we're sure have committed murder we could keep the Central Criminal Court going with murder trials for the next six months. But I don't suppose we'd get one in ten of them hanged. Murder's one thing, and evidence is another.'

'It's very cheery hearing,' I said.

He has not been to see me since; nor have the police arrested Cesarine Thibaudier.

____________________

16: A Criminal Freak

Mercury (Hobart) 7 Feb 1903

AMONG MEN well on in years and comfortably retired there is hardly a stronger bond than collecting, and the society of Little Bystowe is a coterie of collectors. Lord Howsden's collection of Hellenic coins is, or rather was, well known to the scholar and the antiquarian all the world over, and not to have heard of it proved you not even the Man in the Street. Sir Walter Keightleys drawings, especially the possible Leonardo, keep 'The Rose and Crown" supplied with an unbroken succession of guests, long haired lovers of painting who come from every part of Europe to see them. Professor Helmsley s collection of Renaissance medals is the very highest achievement to be attained by a man of no great means but of great knowledge, judgment, and patience Major General Bullock's Indian gold work is the joy not only of connoisseurs but of every woman who sets eyes on it and the envious declare that he owes it not so much to his scrupulous as to his judicious use of his opportunities as commander of that famous Irregular Horse, the Bombay Bhustis during the Mutiny; an accusation by no means weakened by the old gentleman's social and domestic ferocity; while my uncle Lord Justice Crowe, is a light of the Philatelic world, the venerated owner of the five-cent yellow Patagoman surcharged twelve cents

Collecting bound this little society in a close bond, but it was as well that their collecting did not clash. They were fiery old gentlemen, and from their hatred of rival collectors it was plain that had any of them met in battle at Christies, there would have been an end at once and for ever of their friendship. The other bond which linked them together was a love of good living. During the autumn and winter they dined at the house of one or the other every week, at dinner they talked of additions made or about to be made to their collections, and told stories of their battles in the auction-room, after dinner they examined, for perhaps the fiftieth time, the collection of their host. It was a matter of give and take, each secured the interest of the others in his collection by taking an interest in theirs, and by dint of taking that interest had come to have a very fair understanding of them.

Only General Bullock could make nothing of Sir Walter Keightley's drawings, as he often said, quite frankly and quite truthfully, he was no artist. I dine with them often, and nowhere do I eat better dinners or drink better wine. General Bullock makes a curry which excuses his kitchen being, so the gossips declare, ankle deep in boiled rice before he has it to his mind, Professor Helmsley has a Madeira, left him by a really thoughtful grandfather, which voyaged twice round the world forty years ago. For talk we have the romance of collecting, and I am growing to believe that there is no romance.

Last autumn another member was added to the circle. The long-empty Gables was let to Morton Faraday, the traveller, one of the most striking victims of Fortune's caprice. For ten years he had not been within three thousand miles of England, but wandering about the ends of the earth had courted and endured all the dangers which the adventurous can still find beyond the fast extending confines of civilisation. While on an expedition, of the usual filibustering kind, in one of the smaller South American Republics, the news had come to him that an aunt had died leaving him £50,000, and the guardianship of his brother's daughter. Tired of wandering and fighting, he had laid aside his Leo-Metford for good and all, and started for England, only, after coming unscathed through a thousand perils, to lose both arms in an accident on a trumpery Brazilian railway.

He was a big man, with black eyes, black hair, and a long, flowing black beard ; he had a thousand good stories of the things that happen at the ends of the earth; his laugh was the heartiest, and probably the loudest, which ever bellowed out of mortal lungs. It was true that, owing to the shock of his accident there wore gaps in his memory; he had forgotten one or two whole countries and most of the friends and the events of his life before he had left England, but even without them he had reminiscences enough to entertain you for a year on end; and he was soon the soul, the hilarious soul, of the Little Bystowe dinners.

He did not eat them, indeed, for he said that it was painful for people to see him fed; he dined in his den beforehand, his servant, a some-what sullen and shifty-looking person named Johnson, feeding him. But he had a drinking machine of his own. invention, worked by his foot, which raised his wineglass to his lips; and hw could carry more liquor like a gentleman than any man I ever met.

Besides being a welcome addition to the Little Bystowe circle for his entertaining talk, he was also welcome to it as a collector. His collections were small but good, made, so he told us, partly before his ten years' filibustering, partly after it, and partly Faraday heirlooms from the collection of his grandfather. In particular he had two coins of Himera of the seventh century B.C. for which Lord Howsden, hungered, a Hungarian medal, struck in commemoration of John Sobieski's victory over the Turks, which must have haunted the Professor's dreams, and no less than five Timotheos which Sir Walter Keightley for ever bothered him to sell; while his old colonial stamps were in some respects better than those of my uncle.

For my part, I found his niece. Susannah Parady an even more welcome addition to Little Bystowe society; and whereas I had been in the habit of coming down to my uncle's for the week-end, I now made shift to find an evening from my briefs in the middle of the week as well. I fell in love with her at first sight, as I believe that most men were bound to do, seeing that she is the very image of her great grandmother, the famous Lady Lettice Paraday, painted twice by Gainsborough and once by Lawrence. But what was a great deal more, I knew at the end of my first evening spent in her society that she was the one woman in the world for me, and that her nature was as charming as her face was beautiful. I bet to work, patiently and sparing no effort, though with a very faint hope, to make myself the one man in the world for her. She was a long while understanding, and when she did, the was at first a little frightened. I was very gentle with her; putting a violent compulsion on myself, I even stayed away from Little Bystowe for ten days to give her time to grow  used to the idea, undisturbed by my presence.

When I next came down, I met her, by a happy chance, on my way from the station to my uncle's; and her blush at the sudden sight of me, the light in her soft brown eyes, the new shyness, which did not wear off and let her natural gaiety have play till we had walked nearly a mile together, set my heart throbbing with delightful hopes. After that I began to strive with an even greater strenuousness.  I think that the sudden hostility which Morton Paraday showed towards me I mid in my favour; for I had long perceived that Susannah disliked and distrusted her uncle, strive against the feeling and strive to hide it as she might; and naturally the more hostile he showed himself, the kindlier she grew.

When the courts rose for Christmas I went down to Little Bystowe resolved to put my fortune to the test. On the Wednesday before Christmas there was a dinner at the Gables at which Susannah and I were the only non-collectors ; and in the course of it I began to remonstrate with Morton Parady on the little regard he paid to the safe-keeping of his treasures, pointing out that his coins were in one cabinet, his drawings in another, or on the wall, and in ten minutes a burglar could make a haul of the lot.

"That's Frank's hobby," said my uncle drily. "He has talked to all of us about our carelessness many times."

"Well, sir," I said, "we're only twenty miles from London. Your collection of stamps is well known; and there are a number of gentlemen whom at different times you have sent into a poorly fed retirement, who would be delighted to do you a bad turn, and themselves a good one, by stealing it."

"I'd rather take the risk than be bothered with a safe," said my uncle.

"That's what I say," said Lord Howsden, who after all had the most to lose; "the risk's very small, and cabinets are trouble enough."

"I agree with Frank," said General Bullock. "I like to be on the safe side, and I am." And he roared at his simple joke.

"Ah, but your collection has a value in the weight of the gold," said my uncle.

"That's the real point," said Morton Parady. "Any one who stole our treasures would not know what to do with them. Every one who can afford to buy them knows who owns the yellow Patagonian, or fifty of Lord Howsden's coins, or my Hungarian medal."

"Yes, yes," said the others; "that's our real safeguard."

"I've yet to learn," said I, a little nettled by the consensus of opinion against me, "that collectors are so scrupulous. If Baron Dierckstein could buy the yellow Patagonian, would he ask how the seller came by it?"

"That rascal! I should think not!" cried my uncle hotly.

"There you have it; and you may be sure that there are collectors of coins and drawings no more inquisitive."

My argument chilled their certainty a little ; but Morton Paraday bellowed his jovial laugh, and cried, "Where's your burglar with special knowledge?"

Looking up I saw the eyes of Johnson, his servant, who was standing behind his chair, fixed on me in a very curious stare. For a moment I wondered at it; then as I followed the changing talk, it drifted out of my mind, until later events recalled it.

The next day I went down to the Gables on my bicycle to take Susannah for a long ride. We went round the house to the coach-house where she kept her machine, and beside it I saw a man's bicycle, a first-grade Humber nearly new. I asked whose it was, and Susannah said that she had found it there when she first brought hers into the coach-house, and supposed that it belonged to one of the servants. It was clear that Morton Paraday paid good wages.

At breakfast on Christmas morning the butler startled us with the news that the night before there had been a burglary al the Gables, and that the conscientious operator had made a clean sweep of Morton Paraday's coins, stamps, and drawings.

As soon as we had eaten our meal my uncle and I hurried round to condole with him, and found Lord Howsden and Keightley already there. We were unfeignedly sorry for him; and the way in which he took his loss increased our sympathy. We had expected to find him storming like a true filibuster; but he was not storming at all; he was dejected, and only said ruefully: "I'd grown attached to the things, and I shall miss them. I shan't be able to match you fellows any longer, and I haven't many amusements." He looked down at his armless sleeves with a pathetic wistfulness.

We were sorrier than ever, and Howsden said, "Never mind, old fellow, you'll pick up others."

"No," said Morton Paraday sadly; "I can't afford it. I've spent more on it already than I ought to have done."

We learned that the burglar had entered the room through, the window, made his haul, and departed unseen and unheard. The detective, who came down from Scotland Yard the next day, elicited no more by all his examinations and inquiries; and widely circulated descriptions of the stolen treasures brought no further information.

The need of discussing the burglary, of speculating as to how it had been committed, of forming theories about the criminal threw me even more with Susannah; and at last I put my hopes and fears to the test, and to my joy my hopes proved justified. It was perhaps no time to ask Morton Paraday's consent, smarting as he was under his late loss; but I was impatient, and anxious also to act quite openly in the matter.

In a stormy interview he refused it on the ground that, though my means and prospects were good enough, Susannah ought, with her beauty and her blood, to make a splendid match. His reason was sound enough, but in his manner of urging it a curious underbred strain showed itself, which filled me with a now and hearty dislike of him. He ended the interview by forbidding all private intercourse between me and Susannah. I told him frankly that I should disregard his prohibition, seeing that Susannah was within three months of being of age, quite enough to know her own mind.

That night there was a burglary at the Court, and the cream, and just the cream, of Lord Howsden's collection was stolen. We were indeed in an excitement; the actual value of the coins was between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds, not a very great loss perhaps to a man of Lord Howsden's wealth, but some twenty of them could never be replaced. It was clear, moreover, that they had not only been stolen by an expert in ancient coins, but by some one who knew the collection; two cabinets containing the less rare coins had not even been opened. Lord Howsden's anger was doubled by the irritating fact that the safe, which he had ordered immediately after the burglary at the Gables, had arrived late in the evening, and stood in the hall waiting to be set up next day. It seemed likely that tho burglar had known that evening would be his last chance.

In the afternoon I met Susannah, by appointment, out bicycling; and Susannah, had a genuine clue. It chanced that late on the night before she had gone out to her bicycle to fetch some patterns which she had left in the spanner-case, and was certain that the man's Humber, which was kept beside it, was perfectly clean. Going through the stableyard before breakfast to feed her pigeons, she had come upon Johnson cleaning the Humber, which was covered with mud.

"Well," said I, "your uncle may have sent him to fetch something earlier in the morning."

"Ah, but the mud on the bicycle was dry. It must have been used in the  middle of the night, after tho rain fell; and it did not begin to fall till eleven."

"My dear girl," I said, kissing her warmly, "henceforth your name shall be Sherlock!"

After our ride I went up to the Court, and, as I expected, found the detective there, and told him Susannah's discovery. He was properly impressed by it, and said that he would have Johnson watched so as, if possible, to catch him in the very act of flight, with his booty on him, since the main thing was to recover the coins. For my part, I had a fancy that Johnson would not fly yet, he was too secure for suspicion― but that he would have a try for Professor Helmsley's medals, or the yellow Patagonian. But that fancy I kept to myself.

Three or four nights later, having dreamed my fill, over a couple of pipes, of Susannah, I was lighting by bedroom candle, when it occurred to me that it was a perfect burglar's night, pitch dark and a south-westerly gale. I began to wonder if the man watching Johnson was doing his duty― my experience as a barrister has left little trust in the paid watcher― or snugly asleep in his own bed. The latter seemed to me most likely, and I began to consider whether I should not go down and watch myself. Why shouldn't I? I was fairly wakeful: I would. In ten minutes I was changed and on my bicycle, struggling down to the Gables against the wind; it took me a quarter of an hour to do the mile and a half. I dismounted at the gates of the drive, put my bicycle under a tree on the other side of the road, and crossed to the gates. One half stood wide open, and I did not like the look of it at all on such a night gates should be shut. A fusee showed me that the drive was unmarked by fresh tracks: I walked ten yards down it, and posted myself fairly warmly and comfortably among the lower branches of a deodora. I was so hidden that I ventured to light ray pipe, and moving pleasantly from memory to memory of Susannah, I waited.

It must have been nearly two when tho reward of my patience came; there was a little clink, just audible in the sheltered drive, and very dim, a mere shadow on the darkness, a figure on a bicycle passed me.

I slipped out of my hiding-place, and strained my eyes after it; would he turn to the right to the Professor's, or to the left to my uncle's, to the Renaissance medals, or to the yellow Patagonian? He turned to the left, with the wind behind him, and was gone. I found my bicycle, mounted and followed slowly, for since he had to get into the house, I had time and to spare. I left my bicycle outside against the hedge, slipped into the garden, and peeped round the corner of the house. Very faintly I could see a figure against the library window. I stole round to the back, and let myself in very quietly, took off my shoes in the kitchen, gave the burglar some five minutes' grace to get in and to business, and crept to the library door. A faint scratching assured me that my I man was at work. I knelt down, and looked through the keyhole. The bottom of the stamp album cabinet, lighted by a strong ray from a lantern, was full in my view. Apparently the burglar was leaning over it, plying a steel tool in two huge hands against the lock of the drawer which held tho yellow Patagonian.

I rose to my feet, opened the door, stepped into the room, and as I did so, switched on the electric light. Then I fairly fell back against the door in my amazement. I could not believe my eyes; Morton Paraday sat on the cabinet, working the steel tool with bare and muddy feet.

At the sight of me his face filled for a breath with tho savageness of a trapped wild beast; then he fell smiling, and said cheerfully, "You've caught me."

"Very much so," said I, closing the door

"You won't give the joke away? You tumble to it?" he said anxiously.

"Only to the felony," I said quietly. "My dear follow, don't you see? It's your joke; you gave me the idea by your talk of burglary; and yon must not give it away. I wouldn't for the world miss the faces of tho dear old fellows when I take them to my room one night after dinner, and show them their lost treasures on the table!"

"Of all the jokes I ever heard of it's the stupidest and most idiotic. It's felony."

"Felony! My dear chap! The intention makes the crime. It's a mere prank, a freak."

"It's a pity that freak and felony both begin with f." I said grimly. "I know my uncle; he'll prosecute."

"You'd never inform! Ah, of course you can't." His face suddenly brightened. "There's Susannah."

"By your own act you've made Susannah nothing to me. I'm going to raise the house," said I, walking to the bell.

"But my dear fellow!" he cried in genuine terror.

I stopped, and half turned.

"I might sell you my silence?" I suggested.

"For Susannah― blackmail!" He said, jumping to my meaning.

"In love― true love― there is no blackmail," I said severely, laying my hand on the bell.

"Don't ring: I consent. I'm bound to," he said with a rueful laugh.

"My dear Mr. Paraday, you've made me the happiest of men!" I said warmly. "I need not assure you of my ever-lasting gratitude, and of my firm resolve to make Susannah as happy as myself."

"To think that I am going to be connected by marriage with a blackmailer!" he said, with a wry face.

"And I with a felon," said I, with a deep sigh. "We must bear with one another."

"Well, I'm going through with my joke," he said, bending over to look at the lock, and fixing the tool in it.

"That you're not!" said I sharply. "You don't know my uncle, or Howsden; they'd never forgive you."

He lost his temper, argued, entreated, threatened, and swore, for all the world like a big spoiled child. But I was not to be moved, and at last I calmed him. Then I got him some whiskey and soda-water out of the store my uncle  kept to hand in a cupboard, and appeased him by compliments on the extraordinary dexterity he had attained in using his feet. He held his glass in his foot, and raised it to his lips with a seemingly jointless leg, a very disconcerting sight.

He softened presently, and told me how. during the year which had elapsed since his accident, he had spent hours every day exercising the muscles. At last I had him in such a good temper that I ventured to suggest to him that he should return Lord Howsden's coins by post the very next day. It was, indeed, a business to persuade him; but at last he yielded, and promised to go up to London and despatch them.

I took him out of tho house by the back door, and at the garden gate I said, "By the way, how did you open the library window?"

"With my mouth, a knife in my teeth. People don't half use their mouths; you can almost make extra hands of them."

I helped him on to his bicycle, which stood against the hedge not ten yards from my own. He admitted that he had expected to have a devil of a job mounting in that high wind, but declared that he would have done it in three tries, and promised to show me how easily he could mount on a still day. He would not hear of my riding back with him to help him to dismount, for Johnson would be waiting for him.

I went back to the house, therefore, bolted the library window, took away the glasses and soda-water bottles, and the lamp he had used to light him in his burglarious task; and then went to bed, overjoyed at having removed the obstacle to my marriage with Susannah, and feeling far kindlier towards Morton Paraday than ever I had expected to feel.

The next morning I told my uncle that I had interrupted a burglar in an  attempt upon his stamps; but as I bad not seized the rascal, I had seen no use in alarming the house. He was, indeed, grateful, and immediately after breakfast sat down to write for a safe. At about eleven o'clock I went down to the Gables to Susannah, and finding that her uncle had not told her of the withdrawal of his refusal, had the pleasure of telling her the news myself. For a while her eyes shone with delight; but soon the mischievous strain in her led her to play the provoking indifferent. Presently, she broke away from my subject to tell me that a telegram had come for her uncle at breakfast, and that he had felt for London immediately afterwards, taking Johnson with him. It set my mind at ease about the return of Lord Howsden's coins; and I spent the most delightful morning and afternoon with Susannah, for all that she teased me to the top of her bent by refusing even to consider my proposal that we should marry in February.

At four o'clock, since she was driving out to make calls, I left her, after inviting myself to return to dinner. On my way home I met the detective from the Court, who told me that his watcher had followed Johnson. I said nothing of my discovery of the real burglar: Lord Howsden's coins would come back, and the matter would drop.

After tea, a talk with my uncle, and a pipe, I walked down to the station to meet the 6.15 and get the evening paper. The train came in, and the usual two or three passengers got out of it, among them Morton Paraday. To my surprise, for he had said nothing of having ordered them, he had been fitted with two excellent artificial arms.

He stepped on to the platform just in front of me, and looked round the station in a fashion somewhat odd in him, as though he had never set eyes on the place before ; his eyes wandered over me unlighted by a spark of recognition, and a strange, incredible suspicion seized me. Then he passed his artificial fingers through his beard, and the suspicion became a. certainty.

I stepped forward, and said rather breathlessly. "Have you arranged for their return?"

"My dear sir, you have the advantage of me," he said in a voice. I did not know, "and I suspect I shall find a good many others in the same position. You seem to know me; but I don't know you."

"You're Morton Paraday," I gasped.

"I am indeed," he said.

As the words fell from his lips a keen-looking, hatchet-faced man, who had got out of the train a few compartments down, gripped his arm, and said in a high, nasal voice, ringing with triumph, "Bonamy, my boy, I've got you at last! Don't let's have any fuss!" And then he cried in a shrill scream, "What's this? The arm's real! It's not the man!"

"What man?" said this new Morton Paraday quietly.

"What man?" cried the stranger shrilly.  "Why Bonamy Pitt, the freak forger, the armless burglar!"

"Oh, so that's his real name," paid Morton Paraday. "When I know him he was called Wonderful Timbs."

"I've hunted him half round the world, and missed him again !" cried the stranger, his face working in the extreme of disappointment and mortification.

"Come in here, and you, sir," said Morton Paraday, opening the waiting room door; for the porters had grown very attentive to our conversation.

In that dingy little room we constructed the history of the late soul, the hilarious soul, of Little Bystowe society. The stranger, Detective-Inspector Bramick of the New York Police, began the tale.

Bonamy Pitt was a congenitally armless native of Cincinnati, who from his earliest years had shown great intelligence. He had at first applied it to making the best of his unfortunate condition, with such success that he had obtained at age of fifteen, a remunerative post in the freak exhibition of Messrs. Barnum and Bailey. In it he had spent seven comfortable years, improving his mind by voluminous reading, and the patient study of the weaknesses of human nature among the many people with whom his travels brought him into contact. At the age of 21 he found himself admirably equipped for a campaign against the laws and police of the Western hemisphere, and entered upon it without delay. For many years he waged a successful war, becoming an expert hotel-thief; but his forte was the robbery of museum and collections. The curators and owners took no pains to watch an armless man; his feet could be slipped in and out of his shoes with the greatest ease; and he would walk out of a museum on two or three of its rarest coins, or stamps, pitied but unsuspected.

Then flying at higher game and larger sums, he turned his talents to forgery, until at last the evidence of an accomplice outweighed his infirmity, and he was convicted and imprisoned in one of those American institutions in which criminals are reformed by instruction in literature, dancing, and polite conversation. Three years ago he had been discharged reformed, one of their brightest cases: and three months later had by a skilful burglary made a clean sweep of the treasures of a collecting pork millionaire. Inspector Bramick had been put on his track, followed it to Paraguay, and there lost it. Lately he had heard of him in London, had traced him to Little Bystowe, and arrived in the very nick of time to arrest the wrong man.

Morton Paraday took up the tale. He had seen perform at a theatre at Rio Janeiro an armless trick bicyclist called Wonderful Timbs.

"That's him! He learnt it in prison," interjected Bramick.

"Nice prison― better than mine," said Morton Paraday, and went on with the story.

Struck by the bicyclist's extraordinary likeness to himself― "He was me with a clipped beard and without the arms,": he said― he had made his acquaintance, and found him a most entertaining, well-mannered fellow. Later they had travelled together into Paraguay, and there Morton Paraday had left him, and going on his revolutionary way into a neighbouring Republic, the revolution failing, had found himself a political prisoner. The letters announcing his aunt's death had fallen into Bonamy's hands, who had doubtless heard the widespread report of his death; and he had jumped at the chance of impersonating him. The simple invention of the Brazilian railway accident had accounted for his double loss of arms and memory, and prevented all suspicion. Morton Paraday had arrived in England the day before; he had called on his lawyers that morning, learned of the imposture, and having taken all necessary steps to save the unspent portion of his inheritance (fortunately some £35,000) had hurried down to Little Bystowe to unmask the impostor who was already in full flight, warned probably by some accomplice who had seen the list of passengers from America.

I finished the story with the relation of Bonamy's social success, the sham burglary at the Gables, the real burglary at the court. When I let fall that the detective had a man watching Johnson, giving me no time to tell of the attempt on the yellow Patagonian, Bramick cried, "Come along to the police station," and hurried us out. When we reached it, we learned that two hours be-fore the detective had had a telegram from his watcher saying that Johnson had eluded him, and hurried up to London to help him to pick up the trail.

"They never will, never!" groaned Bramick. He was perfectly right.

He took the next train to London; I took Morton Paraday up to the Gables to introduce him to Susannah; and there was a fine commotion in Little Bystowe when the news of the imposture spread. Very soon things settled down with the real Morton Paraday in the place of the false, but he by no means fills that place, and is by no means so popular; he lacks his impersonator's social brilliance, and he can talk neither of coins, stamps, nor drawings.

Susannah, however, is far fonder of him; and so am I, for he supports warmly my desire for an early marriage. Only she knows how I caught the vanished Bonamy in the very act of burgling, and how beautifully he threw dust in my eyes.

Poor Lord Howsden's coins have never been recovered. They have begun already to filter through many channels, one or two at a time, into the great continental collections.

End

Table of Contents

- 1: The Humanising of the Bishop
- 2: The Wrong Man's Daughter
- 3: The Dead That Wept
- 4: The Burglar, The Twins, and Ernestine
- 5: The Carling Cure
- 6: The Rejuvenation of Bellamy Grist
- 7: Jerry Bilder's Mistake
- 8: The Thing in the Two-Pair Back
- 9: Daffy
- 10: Lady Drysdale's Theft
- 11: Priscilla's Poaching
- 12: The Tea-Leaf  (with  Robert Eustace)

- 13: Mr. Belton's Immunity (with  Robert Eustace)

- 14: The Emerald Celt
- 15: The Bechut Mystery
- 16: A Criminal Freak