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THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN








“I wonder who can have done it.”


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THE
THOUSANDTH WOMAN
By
ERNEST W. HORNUNG
Author of
THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN, RAFFLES, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK SNAPP
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS


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CoPYRIGHT 1913
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Braunworth & Co.
Books inders And PR in TERs
N. BROOKLYN, N. Y.


CONTENTS
crl Arrºr
I
II
III
IV
VI
VII
VIII
IX
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
A SMALL World .
Second SIGHT
IN THE TRAIN - -
Down THE RIVER . -
AN UNTIMELY Visitor
VolunTARY SERVICE
AFTER Michelangelo
FINGER-PRINTs - -
FAIR WARNING
THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES
In Country AND IN Town
The THousANDTH MAN
QUID PRO QUo . -
FAITH UNFAITH FUL
The PERSON UNKNowN .
race
16
29
169
181
205
214





THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN








“I wonder who can have done it.”


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THE
THOUSANDTH WOMAN
By
ERNEST W. HORNUNG
Author of
THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN, RAFFLES, HTC.
illustrated by
FRANK SNAPP
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS


2 tº ( , / 7, 2 6
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CoPYRIGHT 1913
The Bobbs-MERRILL CoMPANY
Hahwahi C. Litt: E Ltd*A*
Git Al S
Aq t \ºne
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PR ess of
BRAunworth & co.
BookBuNDERS AND PRINTERs
N. BROOKLYN, N. Y.


CONTENTS
cmarriºr race
I A SMALL World . - - - - 1
II SECOND SIGHT - - - - . 16
III IN THE TRAIN - - - - . 29
IV Down THE RIVER . - - - . 42
V AN UNTIMELY Visitor . - - ... 64
VI VOLUNTARY SERVICE . - - . 83
VII AFTER MichelANGELo . - - . 98
VIII FINGER-PRINTS - - - - . 117
IX FAIR WARNING . - - - . 134
X THE WEEK OF THEIR Lives . - . 146
XI. In Country AND IN Town . - . 156
XII THE THousANDTH MAN - - . 169
XIII QUID PRO Quo . - - o . 181
XIV FAITH UNFAITH FUL - - - . 205
XV. The PERSON UNKNowN . - - . 214


- - - - - - ） ---___----- - - - - - - - - - - - -） ---- ----


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN


– – – – – – ~~~~


THE THOUSANDTH
WOMAN
A SMALL WORLD
AZALET sat up so suddenly that
his head hit the woodwork over the
upper berth. His own voice still rang in
his startled ears. He wondered how much
he had said, and how far it could have
carried above the throb of the liner's
screws and the mighty pounding of the
water against her plates. Then his as-
sembling senses coupled the light in the
cabin with his own clear recollection of
having switched it off before turning over.
I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
And then he remembered how he had
been left behind at Naples, and rejoined
the Kaiser Fritz at Genoa, only to find
that he no longer had a cabin to himself.
A sniff assured Cazalet that he was
neither alone at the moment nor yet the
only one awake; he pulled back the sway-
ing curtain, which he had taken to keep-
ing drawn at night; and there on the set-
tee, with the thinnest of cigarettes between
his muscular fingers, sat a man with a
strong blue chin and the quizzical solem-
nity of an animated sphinx.
It was his cabin companion, an Amer-
ican named Hilton Toye, and Cazalet ad-
dressed him with nervous familiarity.
“I say! Have I been talking in my
sleep?”
“Why, yes!” replied Hilton Toye, and
broke into a smile that made a human be-
ing of him.


A SMALL WORLD
Cazalet forced a responsive grin, as he
reached for his own cigarettes. “What
did I say?” he asked, with an amused
curiosity at variance with his shaking
hand and shining forehead.
Toye took him in from crown to finger-
tips, with something deep behind his
kindly smile. “I judge,” said he, “you
were dreaming of some drama you've
been seeing ashore, Mr. Cazalet.”
“Dreaming!” said Cazalet, wiping his
face. “It was a nightmare! I must have
turned in too soon after dinner. But I
should like to know what I said.”
“I can tell you word for word. You
said, “Henry Craven—dead!’ and then you
said, ‘Dead—dead—Henry Craven!’ as if
you'd got to have it both ways to make
sure.”
“It’s true,” said Cazalet, shuddering.
“I saw him lying dead, in my dream.”
3


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Hilton Toye took a gold watch from
his waistcoat pocket. “Thirteen minutes
to one in the morning,” he said, “and now
it's September eighteenth. Take a note of
that, Mr. Cazalet. It may be another case
of second sight for your psychical re-
search society.”
“I don't care if it is.” Cazalet was
smoking furiously.
“Meaning it was no great friend you
dreamed was dead?”
“No friend at all, dead or alive!”
“I’m kind of wondering,” said Toye,
winding his watch up slowly, “if he's by
way of being a friend of mine. I know a
Henry Craven over in England. Lives
along the river, down Kingston way, in
a big house.”
“Called Uplands?”
“Yes, sir! That's the man. Little
world, isn't it?”


A SMALL WORLD
The man in the upper berth had to
hold on as his curtains swung clear; the
man tilted back on the settee, all attention
all the time, was more than ever an ef-
fective foil to him. Without the kindly
smile that went as quickly as it came,
Hilton Toye was somber, subtle and
demure. Cazalet, on the other hand, was
of sanguine complexion and impetuous
looks. He was tanned a rich bronze about
the middle of the face, but it broke off
across his forehead like the coloring of a
meerschaum pipe. Both men were in their
early prime, and each stood roughly for
his race and type: the traveled American
who knows the world, and the elemental
Britisher who has made some one loose
end of it his own.
“I thought of my Henry Craven,” con-
tinued Toye, “as soon as ever you came
out with yours. But it seemed a kind of
5


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
ordinary name. I might have known it
was the same if I’d recollected the name
of his firm. Isn't it Craven & Cazalet, the
stockbrokers, down in Tokenhouse
Yard P”
“That's it,” said Cazalet bitterly. “But
there have been none of us in it since my
father died ten years ago.”
“But you're Henry Craven's old part-
ner’s Son?”
“I’m his only son.”
“Then no wonder you dream about
Henry Craven,” cried Toye, “and no
wonder it wouldn't break your heart if
your dream came true.”
“It wouldn't,” said Cazalet through
his teeth. “He wasn't a white man to me
or mine—whatever you may have found
him.”
“Oh! I don't claim to like him a lot,”
said Toye.
6


A SMALL WORLD
“But you seem to know a good deal
about him?”
“I had a little place near his one sum-
mer. I know only what I heard down
there.”
“What did you hear?” asked Cazalet.
“I’ve been away ten years, ever since the
crash that ruined everybody but the man
at the bottom of the whole thing. It
would be a kindness to tell me what you
heard.”
“Well, I guess you've said it yourself
right now. That man seems to have beg-
gared everybody all around except him-
self; that's how I make it out,” said
Hilton Toye.
“He did worse,” said Cazalet through
his teeth. “He killed my poor father; he
banished me to the wilds of Australia;
and he sent a better man than himself to
prison for fourteen years!”
7


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Toye opened his dark eyes for once.
“It that so? No. I never heard that,”
said he.
“You hear it now. He did all that, in-
directly, and I don't care who hears me
say so. I didn't realize it at the time. I
was too young, and the whole thing laid
me out too flat; but I know it now, and
I've known it long enough. It was worse
than a crash. It was a scandal. That was
what finished us off, all but Henry Cra-
ven' There'd been a gigantic swindle—
special investments recommended by the
firm, bogus certificates and all the rest of
it. We were all to blame, of course. My
poor father ought never to have been a
business man at all; he should have been
a poet. Even I–I was only a youngster
in the office, but I ought to have known
what was going on. But Henry Craven
did know. He was in it up to the neck,
8


A SMALL WORLD
though a fellow called Scruton did the
actual job. Scruton got fourteen years—
and Craven got our old house on the
river!”
“And feathered it pretty well!” said
Toye, nodding. “Yes, I did hear that.
And I can tell you they don't think any
better of him, in the neighborhood, for
going to live right there. But how did he
stop the other man's mouth, and—how do
you know?”
“Never mind how I know,” said Caza-
let. “Scruton was a friend of mine,
though an older man; he was good to me,
though he was a wrong 'un himself. He
paid for it—paid for two—that I can
say! But he was engaged to Ethel Craven
at the time, was going to be taken into
partnership on their marriage, and you
can put two and two together for your-
self.”


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Did she wait for him?”
“About as long as you’d expect of the
breed She was her father's daughter. I
wonder you didn't come across her and
her husband l’’
“I didn’t see so much of the Craven
crowd,” replied Hilton Toye. “I wasn't
stuck on them either. Say, Cazalet, I
wouldn’t be that old man when Scruton
comes out, would you?”
But Cazalet showed that he could hold
his tongue when he liked, and his grim
look was not so legible as some that had
come and gone before. This one stuck
until Toye produced a big flask from his
grip, and the talk shifted to less painful
ground. It was the last night in the Bay
of Biscay, and Cazalet told how he had
been in it a fortnight on his way out by
sailing-vessel. He even told it with con-
siderable humor, and hit off sundry pas-
IO


A SMALL WORLD
sengers of ten years ago as though they
had been aboard the German boat that
night; for he had gifts of anecdote and
verbal portraiture, and in their unpre-
meditated cups Toye drew him out about
the bush until the shadows passed for
minutes from the red-brick face with the
white-brick forehead.
“I remember thinking I would dig for
gold,” said Cazalet. “That's all I knew
about Australia; that and bushrangers
and dust-storms and bush-fires! But you
can have adventures of sorts if you go far
enough up-country for 'em; it still pays
you to know how to use your fists out
there. I didn't, but I was picking it up
before I’d been out three months, and in
six I was as ready as anybody to take off
my coat. I remember once at a bush
shanty they dished up such fruity chops
that I said I’d fight the cook if they'd send
II


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
him up; and I'm blowed if it wasn't a fel-
low I'd been at school with and worshiped
as no end of a swell at games! Potts his
name was, old Venus Potts, the best look-
ing chap in the school among other things;
and there he was, cooking carrion at
twenty-five bob a week! Instead of fight-
ing we joined forces, got a burr-cutting
job on a good station, then a better one
over shearing, and after that I wormed
my way in as bookkeeper, and my pal be-
came one of the head overseers. Now
we're our own bosses with a share in the
show, and the owner comes up only once
a year to see how things are looking.”
“I hope he had a daughter,” said Toye,
“and that you're going to marry her, if
you haven't yet?”
Cazalet laughed, but the shadow had re-
turned. “No. I left that to my pal,” he
said. “He did that all right!”
I 2


A SMALL WORLD
“Then I advise you to go and do like-
wise,” rejoined his new friend with a
geniality impossible to take amiss. “I
shouldn't wonder, now, if there's some
girl you left behind you.”
Cazalet shook his head. “None who
would look on herself in that light,” he
interrupted. It was all he said, but once
more Toye was regarding him as
shrewdly as when the night was younger,
and the littleness of the world had not yet
made them confidant and boon companion.
Eight bells actually struck before their
great talk ended and Cazalet swore that
he missed the “watches aft, sir!” of the
sailing-vessel ten years before; and re-
called how they had never changed watch
without putting the ship about, his last
time in the bay.
“Say!” exclaimed Hilton Toye, knit-
ting his brows over some nebulous recol-
I 3


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
lection of his own. “I seem to have heard
of you and some of your yarns before.
Didn't you spend nights in a log-hut miles
and miles from any other human being?”
It was as they were turning in at last,
but the question spoiled a yawn for
Cazalet.
“Sometimes, at one of our out-sta-
tions,” said he, looking puzzled.
“I’ve seen your photograph,” said
Toye, regarding him with a more critical
stare. “But it was with a beard.”
“I had it off when I was ashore the
other day,” said Cazalet. “I always meant
to, before the end of the voyage.”
“I see. It was a Miss Macnair showed
me that photograph—Miss Blanche Mac-
nair lives in a little house down there near
your old home. I judge hers is another
old home that's been broken up since your
day.”
I4


A SMALL WORLD
“They've all got married,” said Cazalet.
“Except Miss Blanche. You write to
her some, Mr. Cazalet?”
“Once a year—regularly. It was a
promise. We were kids together,” he ex-
plained, as he climbed back into the upper
berth.
“Guess you were a lucky kid,” said the
voice below. “She's one in a thousand,
Miss Blanche Macnair!”


II
SECOND SIGHT
OUTHAMPTON WATER was an
S ornamental lake dotted with fairy
lamps. The stars above seemed only a
far-away reflex of those below; but in
their turn they shimmered on the sleek
silken arm of sleeping sea. It was a mid-
summer night, lagging a whole season be-
hind its fellows. But already it was so
late that the English passengers on the
Kaiser Fritz had abandoned all thought
of catching the last train up to London.
They tramped the deck in their noisy,
shiny, shore-going boots; they manned
the rail in lazy inarticulate appreciation
of the nocturne in blue stippled with
green and red and countless yellow lights.
I6


SECOND SIGHT
Some delivered themselves of the patri-
otic platitudes which become the homing
tourist who has seen no foreign land to
touch his own. But one who had seen
more than sights and cities, one who had
been ten years buried in the bush, one
with such yarns to spin behind those out-
post lights of England, was not even on
deck to hail them back into his ken.
Achilles in his tent was no more conspicu-
ous absentee than Cazalet in his cabin as
the Kaiser Fritz steamed sedately up
Southampton Water.
He had finished packing; the stateroom
floor was impassable with the baggage
that Cazalet had wanted on the five-weeks'
voyage. There was scarcely room to sit
down, but in what there was sat Cazalet
like a soul in torment. All the vultures
of the night before, of his dreadful dream,
and of the poignant reminiscences to
17


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
which his dream had led, might have been
gnawing at his vitals as he sat there wait-
ing to set foot once more in the land from
which a bitter blow had driven him.
Yet the bitterness might have been al-
layed by the consciousness that he, at any
rate, had turned it to account. It had
been, indeed, the making of him; thanks
to that stern incentive, even some of the
sweets of a deserved success were al-
ready his. But there was no hint of com-
placency in Cazalet's clouded face and
heavy attitude. He looked as if he had
not slept, after all, since his nightmare;
almost as if he could not trust himself
to sleep again. His face was pale, even
in that torrid zone between the latitudes
protected in the bush by beard and wide-
awake. And he jumped to his feet as sud-
denly as the screw stopped for the first
I8


SECOND SIGHT
time; but that might have been just the
curious shock which its cessation always
causes after days at sea. Only the same
thing happened again and yet again, as
often as ever the engines paused before
the end. Cazalet would spring up and
watch his stateroom door with clenched
fists and haunted eyes. But it was some
long time before the door flew open, and
then slammed behind Hilton Toye.
Toye was in a state of excitement even
more abnormal than Cazalet's nervous de-
spondency, which indeed it prevented him
from observing. It was instantaneously
clear that Toye was astounded, thrilled,
almost triumphant, but as yet just draw-
ing the line at that. A newspaper flut-
tered in his hand. -
“Second sight?” he ejaculated, as
though it were the night before and Caza-
I9


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
let still shaken by his dream. “I guess
you've got it in full measure, pressed
down and running over, Mr. Cazalet!”
It was a sorry sample of his talk. Hil-
ton Toye did not usually mix the ready
metaphors that nevertheless had to satisfy
an inner censor, of some austerity, before
they were allowed to leave those deliber-
ate lips. As a rule there was dignity in
that deliberation; it never for a moment,
or for any ordinary moment, suggested
want of confidence, for example. It could
even dignify some outworn modes of
transatlantic speech which still preserved
a perpetual freshness in the mouth of Hil-
ton Toye. Yet now, in his strange ex-
citement, word and tone alike were on the
level of the stage American's. It was
not less than extraordinary.
w
“You don't mean about—” Cazalet
seemed to be swallowing.
“I do, sir!” cried Hilton Toye.
2O


SECOND SIGHT
“—about Henry Craven?”
“Sure.”
“Has—something or other—happened
to him P”
“Yep.”
“You don't mean to say he's—dead?”
“Last Wednesday night!” Toye looked
at his paper. “No, I guess I’m wrong.
Seems it happened Wednesday, but he
only passed away Sunday morning.”
Cazalet still sat staring at him—there
was not room for two of them on their
feet—but into his heavy stare there came
a gleam of leaden wisdom. “This was
Thursday morning,” he said, “so I didn't
dream of it when it happened, after all.”
“You dreamed you saw him lying dead,
and so he was,” said Toye. “The fu-
neral's been to-day. I don't know, but
that seems to me just about the next near-
est thing to seeing the crime perpetrated
in a vision.”
2I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Crime!” cried Cazalet. “What
crime?”
“Murder, sir!” said Hilton Toye.
“Wilful, brutal, bloody murder! Here's
the paper; better read it for yourself. I’m
glad he wasn't a friend of yours, or mine
either, but it's a bad end even for your
worst enemy.”
The paper fluttered in Cazalet's clutch
as it had done in Toye's; but that was as
natural as his puzzled frown over the
cryptic allusions of a journal that had
dealt fully with the ascertainable facts
in previous issues. Some few emerged be-
tween the lines. Henry Craven had re-
ceived his fatal injuries on the Wednes-
day of the previous week. The thing had
happened in his library, at or about half
past seven in the evening; but how a
crime, which was apparently a profound
mystery, had been timed to within a min-
22


SECOND SIGHT
ute of its commission did not appear
among the latest particulars. No arrest
had been made. No clue was mentioned,
beyond the statement that the police were
still searching for a definite instrument
with which it was evidently assumed that
the deed had been committed. There was
in fact a close description of an unusual
weapon, a special constable's very special
truncheon. It had hung as a cherished
trophy on the library wall, from which it
was missing, while the very imprint of a
silver shield, mounted on the thick end
of the weapon, was stated to have been
discovered on the scalp of the fractured
skull. But that was a little bit of special
reporting, typical of the enterprising sheet
that Toye had procured. The inquest,
merely opened on the Monday, had been
adjourned to the day of issue.
“We must get hold of an evening pa-
23


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
35
per,
mous truncheon! He had it mounted and
inscribed himself, so that it shouldn't be
forgotten how he'd fought for law and
order at Trafalgar Square! That was the
man all over!”
said Cazalet. “Fancy his own fa-
His voice and manner achieved the ex-
cessive indifference which the English
type holds due from itself after any ex-
cess of feeling. Toye also was himself
again, his alert mind working keenly yet
darkly in his acute eyes.
“I wonder if it was a murder?” he
speculated. “I bet it wasn’t a deliberate
murder.”
“What else could it have been P”
“Kind of manslaughter. Deliberate
murderers don't trust to chance weapons
hanging on their victims' walls.”
“You forget,” said Cazalet, “that he
was robbed as well.”
24


SECOND SIGHT
“Do they claim that?” said Hilton
Toye. “I guess I skipped some. Where
does it say anything about his being
robbed?”
“Here!” Cazalet had scanned the pa-
per eagerly; his finger drummed upon the
place. “‘The police,’” he read out, in
some sort of triumph, “‘have now been
furnished with a full description of the
missing watch and trinkets and the other
articles believed to have been taken from
the pockets of the deceased.’ What's that
but robbery?”
“You’re dead right,” said Toye. “I
missed that somehow. Yet who in thun-
der tracks a man down to rob and mur-
der him in his own home? But when
you've brained a man, because you
couldn't keep your hands off him, you
might deliberately do all the rest to make
it seem like the work of thieves.”
25


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Hilton Toye looked a judge of delibera-
tion as he measured his irrefutable words.
He looked something more. Cazalet could
not tear his blue eyes from the penetrat-
ing pair that met them with a somber
twinkle, an enlightened gusto, quite un-
comfortably suggestive at such a moment.
“You aren't a detective, by any chance,
are you?” cried Cazalet, with rather
clumsy humor.
“No, sir! But I’ve often thought I
wouldn't mind being one,” said Toye,
chuckling. “I rather figure I might do
something at it. If things don't go my
way in your old country, and they put up
a big enough reward, why, here's a man
I knew and a place I know, and I might
have a mind to try my hand.”
They went ashore together, and to the
same hotel at Southampton for the night.
Perhaps neither could have said from
26


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
man's firm, for the apprehension of his
murderer, as made Toye's eyes glisten in
his sagacious head.
But Cazalet, though he had skimmed
the many-headed column before sitting
down to supper, flatly declined to discuss
the tragedy his first night ashore.


III
IN THE TRAIN
ISCUSSION was inevitable on the
D way up to town next morning.
The silly season was by no means over;
a sensational inquest was worth every
inch that it could fill in most of the morn-
ing papers; and the two strange friends,
planted opposite each other in the first-
class smoker, traveled inland simultane-
ously engrossed in a copious report of the
previous day's proceedings at the coro-
ner's court.
Of solid and significant fact, they
learned comparatively little that they had
been unable to gather or deduce the night
before. There was the medical evidence,
29


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
valuable only as tracing the fatal blow to
some such weapon as the missing trun-
cheon; there was the butler's evidence,
finally timing the commission of the deed
to within ten minutes; there was the head
gardener's evidence, confirming and sup-
plementing that of the butler; and there
was the evidence of a footman who had
answered the telephone an hour or two
before the tragedy occurred.
The butler had explained that the din-
ner-hour was seven thirty; that, not five
minutes before, he had seen his master
come down-stairs and enter the library,
where, at seven fifty-five, on going to ask
if he had heard the gong, he had obtained
no answer but found the door locked on
the inside; that he had then hastened
round by the garden, and in through the
French window, to discover the deceased
gentleman lying in his blood.
3O


IN THE TRAIN
The head gardener, who lived in the
lodge, had sworn to having seen a bare-
headed man rush past his windows and
out of the gates about the same hour, as
he knew by the sounding of the gong up
at the house; they often heard it at the
lodge, in warm weather when the win-
dows were open, and the gardener swore
that he himself had heard it on this oc-
casion.
The footman appeared to have been less
positive as to the time of the telephone
call, thought it was between four and
five, but remembered the conversation
very well. The gentleman had asked
whether Mr. Craven was at home, had
been told that he was out motoring, asked
when he would be back, told he couldn't
say, but before dinner some time, and
what name should he give, whereupon
the gentleman had rung off without an-
3I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
swering. The footman thought he was a
gentleman, from the way he spoke. But
apparently the police had not yet suc-
ceeded in tracing the call.
“Is it a difficult thing to do?” asked
Cazalet, touching on this last point early
in the discussion, which even he showed
no wish to avoid this morning. He had
dropped his paper, to find that Toye had
already dropped his, and was gazing at
the flying English fields with thoughtful
puckers about his somber eyes.
“If you ask me,” he replied, “I should
like to know what wasn't difficult con-
nected with the telephone system in this
country! Why, you don't have a system,
and that's all there is to it. But it's not at
that end they'll put the salt on their man.”
“Which end will it be, then?”
“The river end. That hat, or cap. Do
you see what the gardener says about the
32


IN THE TRAIN
man who ran out bareheaded? That gar-
dener deserves to be cashiered for not
getting a move on him in time to catch
that man, even if he did think he'd only
been swiping flowers. But if he went and
left his hat or his cap behind him, that
should be good enough in the long run.
It's the very worst thing you can leave.
Ever hear of Franz Müller?”
Cazalet had not heard of that immortal
notoriety, nor did his ignorance appear to
trouble him at all, but it was becoming
more and more clear that Hilton Toye
took an almost unhealthy interest in the
theory and practise of violent crime.
“Franz Müller,” he continued, “left his
hat behind him, only that and nothing
more, but it brought him to the gallows
even though he got over to the other side
first. He made the mistake of taking a
slow steamer, and that's just about the one
33


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
mistake they never did make at Scotland
Yard. Give them a nice, long, plain-sail-
ing stern-chase and they get there by bed-
time—wireless or no wireless!”
But Cazalet was in no mind to discuss
other crimes, old or new ; and he closed
the digression by asserting somewhat
roundly that neither hat nor cap had been
left behind in the only case that interested
him.
“Don’t be too sure,” said Toye. “Even
Scotland Yard doesn't show all its hand
at once, in the first inquiry that comes
along. They don't give out any descrip-
tion of the man that ran away, but you
bet it's being circulated around every po-
lice office in the United Kingdom.”
Cazalet said they would give it out fast
enough if they had it to give. By the way,
he was surprised to see that the head
gardener was the same who had been at
34


IN THE TRAIN
Uplands in his father's time; he must be
getting an old man, and no doubt shakier
on points of detail than he would be likely
to admit. Cazalet instanced the alleged
hearing of the gong as in itself an uncon-
vincing statement. It was well over a
hundred yards from the gates to the
house, and there were no windows to open
in the hall where the gong would be rung.
He sighed heavily as in his turn he
looked out at the luxuriant little paddocks
and the old tiled homesteads after every
two or three. But he was not thinking of
the weather-board and corrugated iron
strewn so sparsely over the yellow wilds
that he had left behind him. The old Eng-
lish panorama flew by for granted, as he
had taken it before ever he went out to
Australia. It was as though he had never
been out at all.
“I’ve dreamed of the old spot so often,”
35


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
he said at length. “I’m not thinking of
the night before last—I meant in the bush
—and now to think of a thing like this
happening, there, in the old governor's
den, of all places!”
“Seems like a kind of poetic justice,”
said Hilton Toye.
“It does. It is!” cried Cazalet, fetching
moist yet fiery eyes in from the fields. “I
said to you the other night that Henry
Craven never was a white man, and I
won't unsay it now. Nobody may ever
know what he's done to bring this upon
him. But those who really knew the man,
and suffered for it, can guess the kind of
thing!”
“Exactly,” murmured Toye, as though
he had just said as much himself. His
dark eyes twinkled with deliberation and
debate. “How long is it, by the way, that
they gave that clerk and friend of yours?”
36


IN THE TRAIN
A keen look pressed the startling ques-
tion; at least, it startled Cazalet.
“You mean Scruton? What on earth
made you think of him?”
“Talking of those who suffered for be-
ing the dead man's friends, I guess,” said
Toye. “Was it fourteen years?”
“That was it.”
“But I guess fourteen doesn’t mean
fourteen, ordinarily, if a prisoner behaves
himself P”
“No, I believe not. In fact, it doesn't.”
“Do you know how much it would
mean?”
“A little more than ten.”
“Then Scruton may be out now?”
“Just.”
Toye nodded with detestable aplomb.
“That gives you something to chew on,”
said he. “Of course, I don't say he's our
man—”
37


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“I should think you didn't!” cried Caza-
let, white to the lips with sudden fury.
Toye looked disconcerted and dis-
tressed, but at the same time frankly puz-
zled. He apologized none the less readily,
with almost ingenious courtesy and ful-
ness, but he ended by explaining himself
in a single sentence, and that told more
than the rest of his straightforward elo-
quence put together.
“If a man had done you down like that,
wouldn't you want to kill him the very
moment you came out, Cazalet?”
The creature of impulse was off at a
tangent. “I’d forgive him if he did it,
too!” he exclaimed. “I’d move heaven
and earth to save him, guilty or not
guilty. Wouldn't you in my place?”
“I don't know,” said Hilton Toye.
“It depends on the place you're in, I
38


IN THE TRAIN
guess!” And the keen dark eyes came
drilling into Cazalet's skull like augers.
“I thought I told you?” he explained
impatiently. “We were in the office to-
gether; he was good to me, winked at the
business hours I was inclined to keep, let
me down lighter in every way than I de-
served. You may say it was part of his
game. But I take people as I find them.
And then, as I told you, Scruton was ten
thousand times more sinned against than
sinning.”
“Are you sure? If you knew it at the
time—”
“I didn't. I told you so the last night.”
“Then it came to you in Australia?”
said Toye, with a smile as whimsical as
the suggestion.
“It did!” cried Cazalet unexpectedly.
“In a letter,” he added with hesitation.
39


TV
DOWN THE RIVER
T Waterloo the two men parted,
A. a fair exchange of fitting
speeches, none of which rang really false.
And yet Cazalet found himself emphati-
cally unable to make any plans at all for
the next few days; also, he seemed in two
minds now about a Jermyn Street hotel
previously mentioned as his immediate
destination; and his step was indubitably
lighter as he went off first of all to the
loop-line, to make sure of some train or
other that he might have to take before
the day was out.
In the event he did not take that train
or any other; for the new miracle of the
42


DOWN THE RIVER
new traffic, the new smell of the horseless
streets, and the newer joys of the new-
est of new taxicabs, all worked together
and so swiftly upon Cazalet's organism
that he had a little colloquy with his smart
young driver instead of paying him in
Jermyn Street. He nearly did pay him
off, and with something more than his
usual impetuosity, as either a liar or a fool
with no sense of time or space.
“But that's as quick as the train, my
good fellow !” blustered Cazalet.
“Quicker,” said the smart young fellow
without dipping his cigarette, “if you were
going by the old Southwestern!”
The very man, and especially the man-
ners that made or marred him, was en-
tirely new to Cazalet as a product of the
old country. But he had come from the
bush, and he felt as though he might have
been back there but for the smell of petrol
43


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
and the cry of the motor-horn from end
to end of those teeming gullies of bricks
and mortar.
He had accompanied his baggage just
as far as the bureau of the Jermyn Street
hotel. Any room they liked, and he would
be back some time before midnight; that
was his card, they could enter his name
for themselves. He departed, pipe in
mouth, open knife in one hand, plug to-
bacco in the other; and remarks were
passed in Jermyn Street as the taxi
bounced out west in ballast.
But indeed it was too fine a morning
to waste another minute indoors, even
to change one's clothes, if Cazalet had
possessed any better than the ones he
wore and did not rather glory in his rude
attire. He was not wearing leggings, and
he did wear a collar, but he quite saw that
even so he might have cut an ignominious
z
44


DOWN THE RIVER
figure on the flags of Kensington Gore;
no, now it was the crowded High Street,
and now it was humble Hammersmith.
He had told his smart young man to be
sure and go that way. He had been at St.
Paul's school as a boy—with old Venus
Potts—and he wanted to see as many
landmarks as he could. This one towered
and was gone as nearly in a flash as a
great red mountain could. It seemed to
Cazalet, but perhaps he expected it to
seem, that the red was a little mellower,
the ivy a good deal higher on the great
warm walls. He noted the time by the
ruthless old clock. It was after one al-
ready; he would miss his lunch. What
did that matter?
Lunch?
Drunken men do not miss their meals,
and Cazalet was simply and comfortably
drunk with the delight of being back. He
45


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
had never dreamed of its getting into his
head like this; at the time he did not real-
ize that it had. That was the beauty of his
bout. He knew well enough what he was
doing and seeing, but inwardly he was
literally blind. Yesterday was left be-
hind and forgotten like the Albert Mem-
orial, and to-morrow was still as distant
as the sea, if there were such things as to-
morrow and the sea.
Meanwhile what vivid miles of dazzling
life, what a subtle autumn flavor in the
air; how cool in the shadows, how warm
in the sun; what a sparkling old river it
was, to be sure; and yet, if those weren't
the first of the autumn tints on the trees
in Castlenau.
There went a funeral, on its way to
Mortlake! The taxi overhauled it at a
callous speed. Cazalet just had time to
tear off his great soft hat. It was actually
46


DOWN THE RIVER
the first funeral he had seen since his own
father's; no wonder his radiance suffered
a brief eclipse. But in another moment he
was out on Barnes' Common. Then, in
the Lower Richmond Road, the smart
young man began to change speed and
crawl, and at once there was something
fresh to think about. The Venture and
its team of grays, Oxford and London,
was trying to pass a motor-bus just ahead,
and a gray leader was behaving as though
it also had just landed from the bush.
Cazalet thought of a sailing-ship and a
dreadnought, and the sailing-ship thrown
up into the wind. Then he wondered how
one of Cobb's bush coaches would have
behaved, and thought it might have played
the bargel
It had been the bicycle age when he
went away; now it was the motor age, and
the novelty and contrast were endless to
47


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
a simple mind under the influence of for-
gotten yet increasingly familiar scenes.
But nothing was lost on Cazalet that great
morning; even a milk-float entranced him,
itself enchanted, with its tall can turned
to gold and silver in the sun. But now he
was on all but holy ground. It was not
so holy with these infernal electric trams;
still he knew every inch of it; and now,
thank goodness, he was off the lines at
last.
“Slower!” he shouted to his Smart
young man. He could not say that no no-
tice was taken of the command. But a
wrought-iron gate on the left, with a cov-
ered way leading up to the house, and the
garden (that he could not see) leading
down to the river, and the stables (that
he could) across the road—all that was
past and gone in a veritable twinkling.
And though he turned round and looked
48


DOWN THE RIVER
back, it was only to get a sightless stare
from sightless windows, to catch on a
board “This Delightful Freehold Resi-
dence with Grounds and Stabling,” and to
echo the epithet with an appreciative
grunt.
Five or six minutes later the smart
young man was driving really slowly
along a narrow road between patent
wealth and blatant semi-gentility; on the
left good grounds, shaded by cedar and
chestnut, and on the right a row of hide-
ous little houses, as pretentious as any
that ever let for forty pounds within forty
minutes of Waterloo.
“This can’t be it!” shouted Cazalet. “It
can't be here—stop! Stop! I tell you!”
A young woman had appeared in one
of the overpowering wooden porticoes;
two or three swinging strides were bring-
ing her down the silly little path to the
49


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
wicket-gate with the idiotic name; there
was no time to open it before Cazalet
blundered up, and shot his hand across to
get a grasp as firm and friendly as he
gave.
“Blanchie!”
“Sweep!”
They were their two nursery names,
hers no improvement on the proper
monosyllable, and his a rather dubious
token of pristine proclivities. But out
both came as if they were children still,
and children who had been just long
enough apart to start with a good honest
mutual stare.
“You aren't a bit altered,” declared the
man of thirty-three, with a note not en-
tirely tactful in his admiring voice. But
his old chum only laughed.
“Fiddle!” she cried. “But you're not
altered enough. Sweep, I’m disappointed
in you. Where's your beard?”
5O


DOWN THE RIVER
“I had it off the other day. I always
meant to,” he explained, “before the end
of the voyage. I wasn't going to land like
a wild man of the woods, you know!”
“Weren't you! I call it mean.”
Her scrutiny became severe, but soft-
ened again at the sight of his clutched
wide-awake and curiously characterless,
shapeless suit.
“You may well look!” he cried, de-
lighted that she should. “They're awful
old duds, I know, but you would think
them a wonder if you saw where they
came from: a regular roadside shanty in
a forsaken township at the back of be-
yond. Extraordinary cove, the chap who
made them; puts in every stitch himself,
learns Shakespeare while he's at it, knew
Lindsay Gordon and Marcus Clarke—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Blanche,
laughing, “but there's your taxi ticking
up twopence every quarter of an hour,
5.I


DOWN THE RIVER
Martha and me; you remember old Mar-
tha, don't you? You'll have to come and
see her, but she'll be horribly disappointed
about your beard"
Coming through the room, stopping to
greet a picture and a bookcase (filling a
wall each) as old friends, Cazalet had
descried a photograph of himself with
that appendage. He had threatened to
take the beastly thing away, and Blanche
had told him he had better not. But it did
not occur to Cazalet that it was the pho-
tograph to which Hilton Toye had re-
ferred, or that Toye must have been in
this very room to see it. In these few
hours he had forgotten the man's exist-
ence, at least in so far as it associated it-
self with Blanche Macnair.
“The others all wanted me to live near
them,” she continued, “but as no two of
them are in the same county it would have
53


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
meant a caravan. Besides, I wasn't going
to be transplanted at my age. Here one
has everybody one ever knew, except
those who escape by emigrating, simply
at one's mercy on a bicycle. There's more
golf and tennis than I can find time to
play; and I still keep the old boat in the
old boat-house at Littleford, because it
hasn't let or sold yet, I'm sorry to say.”
“So I saw as I passed,” said Cazalet.
“That board hit me hard l’’
“The place being empty hits me
harder,” rejoined the last of the Mac-
nairs. “It’s going down in value every
day like all the other property about here,
except this sort. Mind where you throw
that match, Sweep! I don't want you to
set fire to my pampas-grass; it's the only
tree I’ve got!”
Cazalet laughed; she was making him
laugh quite often. But the pampas-grass,
54


DOWN THE RIVER
like the rest of the ridiculous little gar-
den in front, was obscured if not over-
hung by the balcony on which they sat.
And the subject seemed one to change.
“It was simply glorious coming down,”
he said. “I wouldn't swap that three-
quarters of an hour for a bale of wool;
but, I say, there are some changes! The
whole show in the streets is different. I
could have spotted it with my eyes and
ears shut. They used to smell like a stable,
and now they smell like a lamp. And I
used to think the old cabbies could drive,
but their job was child's play to the taxi-
man's' We were at Hammersmith before
I could light my pipe, and almost down
here before it went out! But you can't
think how every mortal thing on the way
appealed to me. The only blot was a fu-
neral at Barnes; it seemed such a sin to
be buried on a day like this, and a fellow
55


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
like me just coming home to enjoy him-
self ſ”
He had turned grave, but not graver
than at the actual moment coming down.
Indeed, he was simply coming down
again, for her benefit and his own, with-
out an ulterior trouble until Blanche took
him up with a long face of her own.
“We’ve had a funeral here. I suppose
you know?”
“Yes. I know.”
Her chair creaked as she leaned for-
ward with an enthusiastic solemnity that
would have made her shriek if she had
seen herself; but it had no such effect on
Cazalet. -
“I wonder who can have done it!”
“So do the police, and they don't look
much like finding out!”
“It must have been for his watch and
money, don't you think? And yet they
56


DOWN THE RIVER
say he had so many enemies!” Cazalet
kept silence; but she thought he winced.
“Of course it must have been the man
who ran out of the drive,” she concluded
hastily. “Where were you when it hap-
pened, Sweep?”
Somewhat hoarsely he was recalling the
Mediterranean movements of the Kaiser
Fritz, when at the first mention of the
vessel's name he was firmly heckled.
“Sweep, you don't mean to say you
came by a German steamer?”
“I do. It was the first going, and why
should I waste a week? Besides, you can
generally get a cabin to yourself on the
German line.”
“So that's why you're here before the
end of the month,” said Blanche. “Well,
I call it most unpatriotic; but the cabin to
yourself was certainly some excuse.”
“That reminds me!” he exclaimed. “I
57


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
hadn't it to myself all the way; there was
another fellow in with me from Genoa;
and the last night on board it came out
that he knew you!”
“Who can it have been?”
“Toye, his name was. Hilton Toye.”
“An American man! Oh, but I know
him very well,” said Blanche in a tone
both strained and cordial. “He’s great
fun, Mr. Toye, with his delightful Amer-
icanisms, and the perfectly delightful way
he says them!”
Cazalet puckered like the primitive man
he was, when taken at all by surprise;
and that anybody, much less Blanche,
should think Toye, of all people, either
“delightful” or “great fun” was certainly
a surprise to him, if it was nothing else.
Of course it was nothing else, to his im-
mediate knowledge; still, he was rather
58


DOWN THE RIVER
ready to think that Blanche was blushing,
but forgot, if indeed he had been in a fit
state to see it at the time, that she had
paid himself the same high compliment
across the gate. On the whole, it may be
said that Cazalet was ruffled without feel-
ing seriously disturbed as to the essential
issue which alone leaped to his mind.
“Where did you meet the fellow?” he
inquired, with the suitable admixture of
confidence and amusement.
“In the first instance, at Engelberg.”
“Engelberg! Where's that?”
“Only one of those places in Switzer-
land where everybody goes nowadays for
what they call winter sports.”
She was not even smiling at his ar-
rogant ignorance; she was merely explain-
ing one geographical point and another of
general information. A close observer
59


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
might have thought her almost anxious
not to identify herself too closely with a
popular craze.
“I dare say you mentioned it,” said
Cazalet, but rather as though he was won-
dering why she had not.
“I dare say I didn't! Everything won't
go into an annual letter. It was the win-
ter before last—I went out with Betty
and her husband.”
“And after that he took a place down
here P” -
“Yes. Then I met him on the river the
following summer, and found he'd got
rooms in one of the Nell Gwynne Cot-
tages, if you call that a place.”
“I see.”
But there was no more to see; there
never had been much, but now Blanche
was standing up and gazing out of the
balcony into the belt of singing sunshine
60


DOWN THE RIVER
between the opposite side of the road and
the invisible river acres away.
“Why shouldn't we go down to Little-
ford and get out the boat if you're really
going to make an afternoon of it?” she
said. “But you simply must see Martha
first; and while she's making herself fit to
be seen, you must take something for the
good of the house. I’ll bring it to you on
a lordly tray.”
She brought him siphon, stoppered bot-
tle, a silver biscuit-box of ancient memo-
ries, and left him alone with them some
little time; for the young mistress, like
her old retainer in another minute, was
simply dying to make herself more pre-
sentable. Yet when she had done so, and
came back like snow, in a shirt and skirt
just home from the laundry, she saw that
he did not see the difference. His de-
vouring eyes shone neither more nor less;
6I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
but he had also devoured every biscuit in
the box, though he had begun by vowing
that he had lunched in town, and stuck to
the fable still.
Old Martha had known him all his life,
but best at the period when he used to
come to nursery tea at Littleford. She
declared she would have known him any-
where as he was, but she simply hadn't
recognized him in that photograph with
his beard.
“I can see where it's been,” said Mar-
tha, looking him in the lower temperate
zone. “But I'm so glad you've had it off,
Mr. Cazalet.”
“There you are, Blanchie!” crowed
Cazalet. “You said she'd be disappointed,
but Martha's got better taste.”
“It isn't that, sir,” said Martha ear-
nestly. “It’s because the dreadful man
who was seen running out of the drive, at
62


DOWN THE RIVER
your old home, he had a beard! It's in all
the notices about him, and that's what's
put me against them, and makes me glad
you've had yours off.”
Blanche turned to him with too ready
a smile; but then she was really not such
a great age as she pretended, and she had
never been in better spirits in her life.
“You hear, Sweep! I call it rather
lucky for you that you were—”
But just then she saw his face, and re-
membered the things that had been said
about Henry Craven by the Cazalets'
friends, even ten years ago, when she
really had been a girl.


V
AN. UNTIMELY VISITOR
HE really was one still, for in these
days it is an elastic term, and in
Blanche's case there was no apparent rea-
son why it should ever cease to apply, or
to be applied by every decent tongue ex-
cept her own. If, however, it be conceded
that she herself had reached the purely
mental stage of some self-consciousness
on the point of girlhood, it can not be too
clearly stated that it was the only point
in which Blanche Macnair had ever been
self-conscious in her life.
Much the best tennis-player among the
ladies of the neighborhood, she drove an
almost unbecomingly long ball at golf,
64


AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
so out upon the leafy lawn, shelving
abruptly to the river; round first, how-
ever, to the drying-green where the care-
takers' garments were indeed drying un-
ashamed; but they knew each other well
enough to laugh aloud, had picked each
other up much farther back than the point
of parting ten years ago, almost as far
as the days of mixed cricket with a toy
set, on that very green.
Then there was the poor old green-
house, sagging in every slender timber,
broken as to every other cobwebbed pane,
empty and debased within; they could not
bring themselves to enter here.
Last of all there was the summer
schoolroom over the boat-house, quite
apart from the house itself; scene of such
safe yet reckless revels; in its very aura
late Victorian'
It lay hidden in ivy at the end of a now
67


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
neglected path; the bow-windows over-
looking the river were framed in ivy, like
three matted, whiskered, dirty, happy
faces; one, with its lower sash propped
open by a broken plant-pot, might have
been grinning a toothless welcome to two
once leading spirits of the place.
Cazalet whittled a twig and wedged
that sash up altogether; then he sat him-
self on the sill, his long legs inside. But
his knife had reminded him of his plug
tobacco. And his plug tobacco took him
as straight back to the bush as though the
unsound floor had changed under their
feet into a magic carpet.
“You simply have it put down to the
man's account in the station books. No-
body keeps ready money up at the bush,
not even the price of a plug like this; but
the chap I’m telling you about (I can see
him now, with his great red beard and
68


AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
freckled fists) he swore I was charging
him for half a pound more than he'd ever
had. I was station storekeeper, you see;
it was quite the beginning of things, and
I'd have had to pay the few bob myself,
and be made to look so small that I
shouldn't have had a soul to call my own
on the run. So I fought him for the dif-
ference; we fought for twenty minutes
behind the wood-heap; then he gave me
best, but I had to turn in till I could see
again.”
“You don't mean that he-’”
Blanche had looked rather disgusted
the moment before; now she was all
truculent suspense and indignation.
“Beat me?” he cried. “Good Lord, no;
but there was none too much in it.”
Fires died down in her hazel eyes, lay
lambent as soft moonlight, flickered into
laughter before he had seen the fire.
69


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“I’m afraid you're a very dangerous
person,” said Blanche.
“You’ve got to be,” he assured her;
“it’s the only way. Don't take a word
from anybody, unless you mean him to
wipe his boots on you. I soon found that
out. I'd have given something to have
learned the noble art before I went out.
Did I ever tell you how it was I first came
across old Venus Potts?”
He had told her at great length, to
the exclusion of about every other topic,
in the second of the annual letters; and
throughout the series the inevitable name
of Venus Potts had seldom cropped up
without some allusion to that Homeric en-
counter. But it was well worth while
having it all over again with the intricate
and picaresque embroidery of a tongue
far mightier than the pen hitherto em-
ployed upon the incident. Poor Blanche
70


AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
had almost to hold her nose over the pri-
mary cause of battle; but the dialogue
was delightful, and Cazalet himself made
a most gallant and engaging figure as he
sat on the sill and reeled it out. He had
always been a fluent teller of any happen-
ing, and Blanche a ready commentator,
capable of raising the general level of the
entertainment at any moment. But after
all these centuries it was fun enough to
listen as long as he liked to go on; and
perhaps she saw that he had more scope
where they were than he could have had
in the boat, or it may have been an un-
realized spell that bound them both to
their bare old haunt; but there they were
a good twenty minutes later, and old
Venus Potts was still on the magic tapis,
though Cazalet had dropped his boasting
for a curiously humble, eager and yet
ineffectual vein.
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THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Old Venus Potts!” he kept ejaculat-
ing. “You couldn't help liking him. And
he'd like you, my word!”
“Is his wife nice?” Blanche wanted to
know; but she was looking so intently out
her window, at the opposite end of the
bow to Cazalet's, that a man of the wider
world might have thought of something
else to talk about.
Out her window she looked past a wil-
low that had been part of the old life, in
the direction of an equally typical silhou-
ette of patient anglers anchored in a punt;
they had not raised a rod between them
during all this time that Blanche had been
out in Australia; but as a matter of fact
she never saw them, since, vastly to the
credit of Cazalet's descriptive powers, she
was out in Australia still.
“Nelly Potts?” he said. “Oh, a jolly
good sort; you'd be awful pals.”
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AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
“Should we?” said Blanche, just smil-
ing at her invisible anglers. .
“I know you would,” he assured her
with immense conviction. “Of course she
can't do the things you do; but she can
ride, my word! So she ought to, when
she's lived there all her life. The rooms
aren't much, but the verandas are what
count most; they’re better than any
rooms. There are two distinct ends to the
station—it's like two houses; but of
course the barracks were good enough
just for me.”
She knew about the bachelors' bar-
racks; the annual letter had been really
very full; and then she was still out there,
cultivating Nelly Potts on a very deep
veranda, though her straw hat and straw
hair remained in contradictory evidence
against a very dirty window on the Mid-
dlesex bank of the Thames. It was a
73


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
shame of the September sun to show the
dirt as it was doing; not only was there a
great steady pool of sunlight on the un-
speakable floor, but a doddering reflec-
tion from the river on the disreputable
ceiling. Cazalet looked rather desperately
from one to the other, and both the calm
pool and the rough were broken by shad-
ows, one more impressionistic than the
other, of a straw hat over a stack of
straw hair, that had not gone out to Aus-
tralia—yet.
And of course just then a step sounded
outside somewhere on some gravel. Con-
found those caretakers! What were they
doing, prowling about?
“I say, Blanchie!” he blurted out. “I
do believe you'd like it out there, a sports-
woman like you! I believe you'd take to
it like a duck to water.”
He had floundered to his feet as well.
74


AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
He was standing over her, feeling his
way like a great fatuous coward, so some
might have thought. But it really looked
as though Blanche was not attending to
what he did say; yet neither was she
watching her little anglers stamped in jet
upon a silvery stream, nor even seeing any
more of Nelly Potts in the Australian
veranda. She had come home from Aus-
tralia, and come in from the river, and
she was watching the open door at the
other end of the old schoolroom, listening
to those confounded steps coming nearer
and nearer—and Cazalet was gazing at
her as though he really had said some-
thing that deserved an answer.
“Why, Miss Blanche!” cried a voice.
“And your old lady-in-waiting figured I
should find you flown!”
Hilton Toye was already a landsman
and a Londoner from top to toe. He was
75


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
perfectly dressed—for Bond Street—and
his native simplicity of bearing and ad-
dress placed him as surely and firmly in
the present picture. He did not look the
least bit out of it. But Cazalet did, in an
instant; his old bush clothes changed at
once into a merely shabby suit of despi-
cable cut; the romance dropped out of
them and their wearer, as he stood like a
trussed turkey-cock, and watched a bunch
of hothouse flowers presented to the lady
with a little gem of a natural, courteous,
and yet characteristically racy speech.
To the lady, mark you; for she was one,
on the spot; and Cazalet was a man again,
and making a mighty effort to behave
himself because the hour of boy and girl
WaS OVer.
“Mr. Cazalet,” said Toye, “I guess you
want to know what in thunder I’m doing
on your tracks so soon. It's hog-luck,
76


AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
sir, because I wanted to see you quite a
lot, but I never thought I'd strike you
right here. Did you hear the news?”
“No | What?”
There was no need to inquire as to the
class of news; the immediate past had
come back with Toye into Cazalet's life;
and even in Blanche's presence, even in
her schoolroom, the old days had flown
into their proper place and size in the
perspective.
“They've made an arrest,” said Toye;
and Cazalet nodded as though he had
quite expected it, which set Blanche off
trying to remember something he had said
at the other house; but she had not suc-
ceeded when she noticed the curious pal-
lor of his chin and forehead.
“Scruton?” he just asked.
“Yes, sir! This morning,” said Hilton
Toye.
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THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“You don’t mean the poor man?” cried
Blanche, looking from one to the other.
“Yes, he does,” said Cazalet gloomily.
He stared out at the river, seeing nothing
in his turn, though one of the anglers was
actually busy with his reel.
“But I thought Mr. Scruton was
still—” Blanche remembered him, re-
membered dancing with him; she did not
like to say, “in prison.”
“He came out the other day,”
Cazalet. “But how like the police all over!
sighed
Give a dog a bad name, and trust them to
hunt it down and shoot it at sight!”
“I judge it's not so bad as all that in
this country,” said Hilton Toye. “That's
more like the police theory about Scruton,
I guess, bar drawing the bead.”
“When did you hear of it?” said Caza-
let.
“It was on the tape at the Savoy when
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AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
I got there. So I made an inquiry, and I
figured to look in at the Kingston Court
on my way to call upon Miss Blanche.
You see, I was kind of interested in all
you'd told me about the case.”
“Well?”
“Well, that was my end of the situa-
tion. As luck and management would
have it between them, I was in time to
hear your man—”
“Not my man, please! You thought of
him yourself,” said Cazalet sharply.
“Well, anyway, I was in time to hear
the proceedings opened against him.
They were all over in about a minute. He
was remanded till next week.”
“How did he look?” and, “Had he a
beard?” demanded Cazalet and Blanche
simultaneously.
“He looked like a sick man,” said Toye,
with something more than his usual de-
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AN UNTIMELY VISITOR
opinion, and I’ve given the matter some
thought, is the evidence of identity.” He
turned to Cazalet, who had betrayed a
quickened interest in his views. “Shall
I tell you why? Think how often you're
not so sure if you have seen a man be-
fore or if you never have! You kind of
shrink from nodding, or else you nod
wrong; if you didn't ever have that feel-
ing, then you're not like any other man I
know.”
“I have l’’ cried Cazalet. “I’ve had it
all my life, even in the wilds; but I never
thought of it before.”
“Think of it now,” said Toye, “and
you'll see there may be flaws in the best
evidence of identity that money can buy.
But circumstantial evidence can't lie, Miss
Blanche, if you get enough of it. If the
links fit in, to prove that a certain person
was in a certain place at a certain time,
8I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
I guess that's worth all the oaths of all
the eye-witnesses that ever saw daylight!”
Cazalet laughed harshly, as for no ap-
parent reason he led the way into the gar-
den. “Mr. Toye's made a study of these
things,” he fired over his shoulder. “He
should have been a Sherlock Holmes, and
rather wishes he was one!”
“Give me time,” said Toye, laughing.
“I may come along that way yet.”
Cazalet faced him in a frame of tan-
gled greenery. “You told me you
wouldn't!”
“I did, sir, but that was before they put
salt on this poor old crook. If you're
right, and he's not the man, shouldn't you
say that rather altered the situation?”


VI
VOLUNTARY SERVICE
ge ND why do you think he can't have
done it?”
Cazalet had trundled the old canoe over
the rollers, and Blanche was hardly pad-
dling in the glassy strip alongside the
weir. Big drops clustered on her idle
blades, and made tiny circles as they met
themselves in the shining mirror. But be-
low the lock there had been something to
do, and Blanche had done it deftly and
silently, with almost equal capacity and
grace. It had given her a charming flush
and sparkle; and, what with the sun's bare
hand on her yellow hair, she now looked
even bonnier than indoors, yet not quite,
83


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
quite such a girl. But then every bit of
the boy had gone out of Cazalet. So that
hour stolen from the past was up forever.
“Why do the police think the other
thing?” he retorted. “What have they
got to go on 2 That's what I want to
know. I agree with Toye in one thing.”
Blanche looked up quickly. “I wouldn't
trust old Savage an inch. I've been think-
ing about him and his precious evidence.
Do you realize that it's quite dark now
soon after seven P It was pretty thick say-
ing his man was bareheaded, with neither
hat nor cap left behind to prove it! Yet
now it seems he's put a beard to him, and
next we shall have the color of his eyes!”
Blanche laughed at his vigor of phrase;
this was more like the old, hot-tempered,
sometimes rather overbearing Sweep.
Something had made him jump to the
conclusion that Scruton could not possibly
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lave killed Mr. Craven, whatever else he
might have done in days gone by. So it
simply was impossible, and anybody who
took the other side, or had a word to say
for the police, as a force not unknown to
look before it leaped, would have to
reckon henceforth with Sweep Cazalet.
Mr. Toye already had reckoned with
him, in a little debate begun outside the
old summer schoolroom at Littleford, and
adjourned rather than finished at the iron
gate into the road. In her heart of hearts
Blanche could not say that Cazalet had
the best of the argument, except, indeed,
in the matter of heated emphasis and
Scornful asseveration. It was difficult,
however, to know what line he really
took; for while he scouted the very notion
of uncorroborated identification by old
Savage, he discredited with equal warmth
all Toye's contentions on behalf of cir-
85


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
cumstantial evidence. Toye had advanced
a general principle with calm ability, but
Cazalet could not be shifted from the par-
ticular position he was so eager to de-
fend, and would only enter into abstract
questions to beg them out of hand.
Blanche rather thought that neither
quite understood what the other meant;
but she could not blink the fact that the
old friend had neither the dialectical mind
nor the unfailing courtesy of the new.
That being so, with her perception she
might have changed the subject; but she
could see that Cazalet was thinking of
nothing else; and no wonder, since they
were approaching the scene of the tragedy
and his own old home, with each long dip
of her paddle.
It had been his own wish to start up-
stream; but she could see the wistful pain
in his eyes as they fell once more upon the
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red turrets and the smooth green lawn of
Uplands; and she neither spoke nor
looked at him again until he spoke to her.
“I see they've got the blinds down
still,” he said detachedly. “What's hap-
pened to Mrs. Craven?”
“I hear she went into a nursing home
before the funeral.”
“Then there's nobody there?”
“It doesn't look as if there was, does
it?” said poor Blanche.
“I expect we should find Savage some-
where. Would you very much mind,
Blanche? I should rather like—if it was
just setting foot—with you—”
But even that effective final pronoun
failed to bring any buoyancy back into his
voice; for it was not in the least effective
as he said it, and he no longer looked her
in the face. But this all seemed natural
to Blanche, in the manifold and over-
87


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
lapping circumstances of the case. She
made for the inlet at the upper end of the
lawn. And her prompt unquestioning ac-
quiescence shamed Cazalet into further
and franker explanation, before he could
let her land to please him.
“You don't know how I feel this!” he
exclaimed quite miserably. “I mean
about poor old Scruton; he's gone through
so much as it is, whatever he may have
done to deserve it long ago. And he
wasn't the only one, or the worst; some
day I'll tell you how I know, but you may
take it from me that's so. The real vil-
lain's gone to his account. I won't pre-
tend I’m sorry for him. De mortuis
doesn't apply if you've got to invent the
bonum! But Scruton—after ten years—
only think of it! Is it conceivable that he
should go and do a thing like this the
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very moment he gets out? I ask you, is it
even conceivable?”
He asked her with something of the
ferocity with which he had turned on
Toye for suggesting that the police might
have something up their sleeves, and be
given a chance. But Blanche understood
him. And now she showed herself golden
to the core, almost as an earnest of her
fitness for the fires before her.
“Poor fellow,” she cried, “he has a
friend in you, at any rate! And I’ll help
you to help him, if there's any way I
can P”
He clutched her hand, but only as he
might have clutched a man's.
“You can't do anything; but I won't
forget that,” he almost choked. “I meant
to stand by him in a very different way.
He’d been down to the depths, and I’d
89


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
come up a bit; then he was good to me
as a lad, and it was my father's partner
who was the ruin of him. I seemed to
owe him something, and now—now I'll
stand by him whatever happens and—
whatever has happened"
Then they landed in the old, old inlet.
Cazalet knew every knot in the post to
which he tied Blanche's canoe.
It was a very different place, this Up-
lands, from poor old Littleford on the
lower reach. The grounds were five or six
acres instead of about one, and a house in
quite another class stood farther back
from the river and very much farther
from the road.
The inlet began the western boundary,
which continued past the boat-house in the
shape of a high hedge, a herbaceous bor-
der (not what it had been in the old
days), and a gravel path. This path was
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screened from the lawn by a bank of
rhododendrons, as of course were the
back yard and kitchen premises, past
which it led into the front garden, even-
tually debouching into the drive. It was
the path along which Cazalet led the way
this afternoon, and Blanche at his heels
was so struck by something that she could
not help telling him he knew his way very
well.
“Every inch of it!” he said bitterly.
“But so I ought, if anybody does.”
“But these rhododendrons weren't here
in your time. They're the one improve-
ment. Don't you remember how the path
ran round to the other end of the yard?
This gate into it wasn't made.”
“No more it was,” said Cazalet, as they
came up to the new gate on the right. It
was open, and looking through they could
see where the old gateway had been
9I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
bricked. The rhododendrons topped the
yard wall at that point, masking it from
the lawn, and making on the whole an im-
provement of which anybody but a former
son of the house might have taken more
account.
He said he could see no other change.
He pretended to recognize the very blinds
that were down and flapping in the
kitchen windows facing west. But for the
fact that these windows were wide open,
the whole place seemed as deserted as
Littleford; but just past the windows, and
flush with them, was the tradesmen's
door, and the two trespassers were barely
abreast of it when this door opened and
disgorged a man.
The man was at first sight a most in-
congruous figure for the back premises of
any house, especially in the country. He
was tall, rather stout, very powerfully
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built and rather handsome in his way;
his top-hat shone like his patent-leather
boots, and his gray cutaway suit hung
well in front and was duly creased as to
the trousers; yet not for one moment was
this personage in the picture, in the sense
in which Hilton Toye had stepped into the
Littleford picture.
“May I ask what you're doing here?”
he demanded bluntly of the male intruder.
“No harm, I hope,” replied Cazalet,
smiling, much to his companion's relief.
She had done him an injustice, however,
in dreading an explosion when they were
both obviously in the wrong, and she
greatly admired the tone he took so read-
ily. “I know we've no business here what-
ever; but it happens to be my old home,
and I only landed from Australia last
night. I'm on the river for the first time,
and simply had to have a look round.”
93


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
The other big man had looked far from
propitiated by the earlier of these re-
marks, but the closing sentences had
worked a change.
“Are you young Mr. Cazalet?” he
cried.
“I am, or rather I was,” laughed Caza-
let, still on his mettle.
“You’ve read all about the case then,
I don't mind betting!” exclaimed the
other with a jerk of his topper toward the
house behind him.
“I’ve read all I found in the papers last
night and this morning, and such arrears
as I’ve been able to lay my hands on,”
said Cazalet. “But, as I tell you, my ship
only got in from Australia last night, and
I came round all the way in her. There
was nothing in the English papers when
we touched at Genoa.”
“I see, I see.” The man was still look-
94


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Still minding our own job,” said Mr.
Drinkwater genially. They had saun-
tered on with him to the corner of the
house, and seen a bowler hat bobbing in
the shrubbery down the drive. Cazalet
laughed like a man.
“Well, I needn't tell you I know every
inch of the old place,” he said; “that is,
barring alterations,” as Blanche caught
his eye. “But I expect this search is har-
rowed, rather?”
“Rather,” said Mr. Drinkwater, stand-
ing still in the drive. He had also taken
out a presentation gold half-hunter, suit-
ably inscribed in memory of one of his
more bloodless victories. But Cazalet
could always be obtuse, and now he re-
fused to look an inch lower than the de-
tective-inspector's bright brown eyes.
“There's just one place that's occurred
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to me, Mr. Drinkwater, that perhaps may
not have occurred to you.”
“Where's that, Mr. Cazalet?”
“In the room where—the room itself.”
Mr. Drinkwater's long stare ended in
an indulgent smile. “You can show me
if you like,” said he indifferently. “But I
suppose you know we've got the man?”


VII
AFTER MICHELANGELO
“T WAS thinking of his cap,” said Caz-
alet, but only as they returned to the
tradesmen's door, and just as Blanche put
in her word, “What about me?”
Mr. Drinkwater eyed the trim white
figure standing in the sun. “The more
the merrier!” his grim humor had it. “f
dare say you'll be able to teach us a thing
or two as well, miss.”
She could not help nudging Cazalet in
recognition of this shaft. But Cazalet
did not look round; he had now set foot
in his old home.
It was all strangely still and inactive,
as though domestic animation had been
98


AFTER MICHELANGELO
suspended indefinitely. Yet the open
kitchen door revealed a female form in
mufti; a sullen face looked out of the
pantry as they passed; and through the
old green door (only now it was a red
one) they found another bowler hat bent
over a pink paper at the foot of the stairs.
There was a glitter of eyes under the
bowler's brim as Mr. Drinkwater con-
ducted his friends into the library.
The library was a square room of re-
spectable size, but very close and dim
with the one French window closed and
curtained. But Mr. Drinkwater shut the
door as well, and added indescribably to
the lighting and atmospheric effects by
switching on all the electric lamps; they
burned sullenly in the partial daylight,
exposed as thin angry bunches of red-hot
wire in dusty bulbs.
The electric light had been put in by
99


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
the Cravens; all the other fixtures in the
room were as Cazalet remembered them.
The bookshelves contained different
books, and now there were no busts on
top. Certain cupboards, grained and var-
nished in Victorian days, were undeni-
ably improved by being enameled white.
But the former son of the house gave
himself no time to waste in sentimental
comparisons. He tapped a pair of ma-
hogany doors, like those of a wardrobe
let into the wall.
“Have you looked in here?” demanded
Cazalet in yet another key. His air was
almost authoritative now. Blanche could
not understand it, but the experienced Mr.
Drinkwater smiled his allowances for a
young fellow on his native heath, after
more years in the wilderness than were
good for young fellows.
“What's the use of looking in a cigar
IOO


AFTER MICHELANGELO
cupboard?” that dangerous man of the
world made mild inquiry.
“Cigar cupboard!” echoed Cazalet in
disgust. “Did he really only use it for his
cigars?”
“A cigar cupboard,” repeated Drink-
water, “and locked up at the time it hap-
pened. What was it, if I may ask, in
Mr. Cazalet's time?”
“I remember!” came suddenly from
Blanche; but Cazalet only said, “Oh, well,
if you know it was locked there's an end
of it.”
Drinkwater went to the door and sum-
moned his subordinate. “Just fetch that
chap from the pantry, Tom,” said he; but
the sullen sufferer from police rule took
his time, in spite of them, and was sharply
rated when he appeared.
“I thought you told me this was a cigar
cupboard?” continued Drinkwater, in the
IOI


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
browbeating tone of his first words to
Cazalet outside.
“So it is,” said the man.
“Then where's the key?”
“How should I know? I never kept
it!” cried the butler, crowing over his op-
pressor for a change. “He would keep it
on his own bunch; find his watch, and
all the other things that were missing
from his pockets when your men went
through 'em, and you may find his keys,
too !”
Drinkwater gave his man a double sig-
nal; the door slammed on a petty triumph
for the servants’ hall; but now both in-
vaders remained within.
“Try your hand on it, Tom,” said the
superior officer. “I’m a free-lance here,”
he explained somewhat superfluously to
the others, as Tom applied himself to the
lock in one mahogany door. “Man’s been
IO2


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
he had said it to Hilton Toye on board
the Kaiser Fritz. Only he went rather
farther for the benefit of the gentlemen
from Scotland Yard, who took not the
faintest interest in the late Mr. Cazalet,
beyond poking their noses into his dimin-
utive sanctum and duly turning them up
at what they saw.
“He used to complain that he was never
left in peace on Saturdays and Sundays,
which of course were his only quiet times
for writing,” said the son, elaborating his
tale with filial piety. “So once when I'd
been trying to die of scarlet fever, and my
mother brought me back from Hastings
after she'd had me there some time, the
old governor told us he'd got a place
where he could disappear from the dis-
trict at a moment's notice and yet be back
in another moment if we rang the gong.
I fancy he'd got to tell her where it was,
IO4


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
tive had been watching his satellite en-
gaged in an attempt to render the damage
done to the mahogany doors a little less
conspicuous. Neither appeared to be tak-
ing any further interest in the cigar cup-
board, or paying the slightest attention to
Cazalet's reminiscences. But Mr. Drink-
water happened to have heard every
word, and in the last sentence there was
one that caused him to prick up his expert
ears instinctively.
“What's that about a hole?” said he,
turning round.
“I was reminding Miss Macnair how
the place first came to be—”
“Yes, yes. But what about some hole
in the floor?”
“I made one myself with one of those
knives that contain all sorts of things,
including a saw. It was one Saturday
afternoon in the summer holidays. I
Ioé


AFTER MICHELANGELO
came in here from the garden as my fa-
ther went out by that door into the hall,
leaving one of these mahogany doors open
by mistake. It was the chance of my life;
in Islipped to have a look. He came back
for something, saw the very door you've
broken standing ajar, and shut it without
looking in. So there I was in a nice old
trap! I simply daren't call out and give
myself away. There was a bit of loose
oilcloth on the floor—”
“There is still,” said the satellite, paus-
ing in his task.
“I moved the oilcloth, in the end;
howked up one end of the board (luckily
they weren't groove and tongue), sawed
through the next one to it, had it up, too,
and got through into the foundations,
leaving everything much as I had found
it. The place is so small that the oilcloth
was obliged to fall in place if it fell any-
Io.7


AFTER MICHELANGELO
quinade of which they might have been
the rascal heroes, all three disappeared
down the makeshift trap-door cut by one
of them as a schoolboy in his father's
floor; and Blanche found herself in sole
possession of the stage, a very envious
Columbine, indeed!
She hardly even knew how it happened.
The satellite must have popped back into
the Michelangelo cigar cupboard. He
might have called to Mr. Drinkwater, but
the only summons that Blanche could re-
member hearing was almost a sharp one
from Drinkwater to Cazalet. A lot of
whispering followed in the little place; it
was so small that she never saw the hole
until it had engulfed two of the trio; the
third explorer, Mr. Drinkwater himself,
had very courteously turned her out of the
library before following the others. And
he had said so very little beforehand for
IO9


AFTER MICHELANGELO
and another the next. That was all that
Blanche allowed herself to think of Sweep
Cazalet—just then.
She turned her wholesome mind to
dogs, which in some ways she knew better
and trusted further than men. She had,
of course, a dog of her own, but it hap-
pened to be on a visit to the doctor or no
doubt it would have been in the way all
the afternoon. But there was a dog at
Uplands, and as yet she had seen nothing
of him; he lived in a large kennel in the
yard, for he was a large dog and rather
friendless. But Blanche knew him by
sight, and had felt always sorry for him.
The large kennel was just outside the
back door, which was at the top of the
cellar steps and at the bottom of two or
three leading into the scullery; but
Blanche, of course, went round by the
garden. She found the poor old dog quite
III


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
3.
disconsolate in a more canine kennel in a
corner of the one that was really worthy
of the more formidable carnivora. There
was every sign of his being treated as the
dangerous dog that Blanche, indeed, had
heard he was; the outer bars were fur-
ther protected by wire netting, which
stretched like a canopy over the whole
cage; but Blanche let herself in with as
little hesitation as she proceeded to beard
the poor brute in his inner lair. And he
never even barked at her; he just lay
whimpering with his tearful nose between
his two front paws, as though his dead
master had not left him to the servants all
his life.
Blanche coaxed and petted him until
she almost wept herself; then suddenly
and without warning the dog showed his
worst side. Out he leaped from wooden
Sanctuary, almost knocking her down, and
II2


AFTER MICHELANGELO
barking horribly, but not at Blanche. She
followed his infuriated eyes; and the back
doorway framed a dusty and grimy figure,
just climbing into full length on the cel-
lar stairs, which Blanche had some diffi-
culty in identifying with that of Cazalet.
“Well, you really are a Sweep!” she
cried when she had slipped out just in
time, and the now savage dog was still
butting and clawing at his bars. “How
did you come out, and where are the
enemy?”
“The old way,” he answered. “I left
them down there.”
“And what did you find?”
“I’ll tell you later. I can't hear my
voice for that infernal dog.”
The dreadful barking followed them
out of the yard, and round to the right,
past the tradesmen's door, to the verge
of the drive. Here they met an elderly
II.3


AFTER MICHELANGELO
further use of the East Anglian pronoun.
“That's a long time since we fared to
see you, Mus’ Walter,” said he; “that’s a
right long time! And now here's a nice
kettle of fish for you to find! But I seen
the man, Mus’ Walter, and we'll bring
that home to him, never you fear!”
“Are you sure that you saw him?”
asked Blanche, already under Cazalet's
influence on this point.
Savage looked cautiously toward the
house before replying; then he lowered
his voice dramatically. “Sure, Miss
Blanche. Why, I see him that night as
plain as I fare to see Mus’ Walter now !”
“I should have thought it was too dark
to see anybody properly,” said Blanche,
and Cazalet nodded vigorously to himself.
“Dark, Miss Blanche? Why, that was
broad daylight, and if that wasn’t there
were the lodge lights on to see him byl"
II5


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
His stage voice fell a sepulchral semitone.
“But I see him again at the station this
very afternoon, I did! I promised not to
talk about that—you'll keep that a secret
if I tell 'e somethin’?—but I picked him
out of half a dozen at the first time of
askin'!”
Savage said this with a pleased and
vacuous grin, looking Cazalet full in the
face; his rheumy eyes were red as the
sunset they faced; and Cazalet drew a
deep breath as Blanche and he turned
back toward the river.
“First time of prompting, I expect!”
he whispered. “But there's hope if Sav-
age is their strongest witness.”
“Only listen to that dog,” said Blanche,
as they passed the yard.


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
ways then—half his acquaintances had no
idea how he made his money, and the
other half wondered how he spent his
time. Of his mere interests, which were
many, Toye made no such secret; but it
was quite impossible to deduce a main in-
dustry from the by-products of his level-
headed versatility.
Criminology, for example, was an Ob-
vious by-product; it was no morbid taste
in Hilton Toye, but a scientific hobby
that appealed to his mental subtlety. And
subtle he was, yet with strange simplici-
ties; grave and dignified, yet addicted to
the expressive phraseology of his less en-
lightened countrymen; naturally sincere,
and yet always capable of some ingenuous
duplicity.
The appeal of a Blanche Macnair to
such a soul needs no analysis. She had
struck through all complexities to the
II 8


FINGER-PRINTS
core, such as it was or as she might make
it. As yet she could only admire the char-
acter the man had shown, though it had
upset her none the less. At Engelberg he
had proposed to her “inside of two
weeks,” as he had admitted without com-
punction at the time. It had taken him,
he said, about two minutes to make up his
mind; but the following summer he had
laid more deliberate siege, in accordance
with some old idea that she had let fall to
soften her first refusal. The result had
been the same, only more explicit on both
sides. She had denied him the least par-
ticle of hope, and he had warned her that
she had not heard the last of him by any
means, and never would till she married
another man. This had incensed her at
the time, but a great deal less on subse-
quent reflection; and such was the posi-
tion between that pair when Toye and
IIQ


THE THOUSANDTHI WOMAN
Cazalet landed in England from the same
Steamer.
On this second day ashore, as Cazalet
sat over a late breakfast in Jermyn Street,
Toye sent in his card and was permitted
to follow it, rather to his surprise. He
found his man frankly divided between
kidneys-and-bacon and the morning pa-
per, but in a hearty mood, indicative of
amends for his great heat in yesterday's
argument. A plainer indication was the
downright yet sunny manner in which
Cazalet at once returned to the conten-
tious topic.
“Well, my dear Toye, what do you
think of it now P”
“I was going to ask you what you
thought, but I guess I can see from your
face.”
“I think the police are rotters for not
setting him free last night!”
I2O


-
+-
---
“What do you think of it now P”





FINGER-PRINTS
“Scruton P”
“Yes. Of course, the case'll break down
when it comes on next week, but they
oughtn't to wait for that. They’ve no
right to detain a man in custody when the
bottom's out of their case already.”
“But—but the papers claim they’ve
found the very things they were search-
ing for.” Toye looked nonplused, as well
he might, by an apparently perverse jubi-
lation over such intelligence.
“They haven't found the missing cap!”
crowed Cazalet. “What they have found
is Craven's watch and keys, and the sil-
ver-mounted truncheon that killed him.
But they found them in a place where
they couldn't possibly have been put by
the man identified as Scruton!”
“Say, where was that?” asked Toye
with great interest. “My paper only says
the things were found, not where.”
I2 I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“No more does mine, but I can tell you,
because I helped to find ‘em.”
“You don't say!”
“You’ll never grasp where,” continued
Cazalet. “In the foundations under the
house!”
Details followed in all fulness; the lis-
tener might have had a part in the Up-
lands act of yesterday's drama, might
have played in the library scene with his
adored Miss Blanche, so vividly was every
minute of that crowded hour brought
home to him. He also had seen the orig-
inal writing-cupboard in Michelangelo's
old Florentine house; he remembered it
perfectly, and said that he could see the
replica, with its shelf of a desk stacked
with cigars, and the hole in its floor. He
was not so sure that he had any very
definite conception of the foundations of
an English house.
I 22


FINGER-PRINTS
“Ours were like ever so many little
tiny rooms,” said Cazalet, “where I
couldn't stand nearly upright even as a
small boy without giving my head a crack
against the ground floors. They led into
one another by a lot of little manholes—
tight fits even for a boy, but nearly fatal
to the boss policeman yesterday! I used
to get in through one with a door, at the
back of a slab in the cellars where they
used to keep empty bottles; they keep 'em
there still, because that's how I led my
party out last night.”
Cazalet's little gift of description was
not ordered by an equal sense of selec-
tion. Hilton Toye, edging in his word
in a pause for a gulp of coffee, said he
guessed he visualized—but just where had
those missing things been found?
“Three or four compartments from the
3.
first one under the library,” said Cazalet.
I23


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Did you find them?”
“Well, I kicked against the truncheon,
but Drinkwater dug it up. The watch and
keys were with it.”
“Say, were they buried?”
“Only in the loose rubble and brick-
dusty stuff that you get in foundations.”
“Say, that's bad! That murderer must
have known something, or else it's a bully
fluke in his favor.”
“I don't follow you, Toye.”
“I’m thinking of finger-prints. If he'd
just've laid those things right down, he'd
have left the print of his hand as large as
life for Scotland Yard.”
“The devil he would !” exclaimed Caz-
alet. “I wish you’d explain,” he added;
“remember I’m a wild man from the
woods, and only know of these things by
the vaguest kind of hearsay and stray
paragraphs in the papers. I never knew
I24


FINGER-PRINTS
you could leave your mark so easily as all
that.”
Toye took the breakfast menu and
placed it face downward on the tablecloth.
“Lay your hand on that, palm down,” he
said, “and don't move it for a minute.”
Cazalet looked at him a moment before
complying; then his fine, shapely, Sun-
burnt hand lay still as plaster under their
eyes until Toye told him he might take it
up. Of course there was no mark what-
ever, and Cazalet laughed.
“You should have caught me when I
came up from those foundations, not
fresh from my tub!” said he.
“You wait,” replied Hilton Toye, tak-
ing the menu gingerly by the edge, and
putting it out of harm's way in the empty
toast-rack. “You can't see anything now,
but if you come round to the Savoy I'll
show you something.”
I25


FINGER-PRINTS
of the partners, to get them either to take
up Scruton's case themselves, or else to
recommend a firm perhaps more accus-
tomed to criminal practise. Cazalet was
always apt to be elaborate in the first per-
son singular, either in the past or in the
future tense; but he was more so than
usual in explaining his considered inten-
tions in this matter that lay so very near
his heart.
“Going to see Scruton, too?” said
Toye.
“Not necessarily,” was the short reply.
But it also was elaborated by Cazalet on
a moment's consideration. The fact was
that he wanted first to know if it were
not possible, by the intervention of a
really influential lawyer, to obtain the
prisoner's immediate release, at any rate
on bail. If impossible, he might hesitate
to force himself on Scruton in the prison,
but he would see.
127


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
you may just as well know the rest this
week as well as next, if you don't mind
keeping it to yourself.”
Nobody could have minded this par-
ticular embargo less than Hilton Toye;
and in nothing was he less like Cazalet,
who even now had the half-regretful and
self-excusing air of the impulsive person
who has talked too freely and discovered
it too late. But he had been perfectly de-
lightful to Hilton Toye, almost too ap-
preciative, if anything, and now very anx-
ious to give him a lift in his taxi. Toye,
however, had shopping to do in the very
street that they were in, and he saw Caz-
alet off with a smile that was as yet
merely puzzled, and not unfriendly until
he had time to recall Miss Blanche's part
in the strange affair of the previous after-
11OO11.
Say, weren't they rather intimate,
I 30


FINGER-PRINTS
those two, even if they had known each
other all their lives? He had it from
Blanche (with her second refusal) that
she was not, and never had been, en-
gaged. And a fellow who only wrote to
her once in a year—still, they must have
been darned intimate, and this funny af-
fair would bring them together again
quicker than anything.
Say, what a funny affair it was when
you came to think of it! Funny all
through, it now struck Toye; beginning
on board ship with that dream of Caza-
let’s about the murdered man, leading to
all that talk of the old grievance against
him, and culminating in his actually find-
ing the implements of the crime in his in-
spired efforts to save the man of whose
innocence he was so positive. Say, if that
Cazalet had not been on his way home
from Australia at the time!
I3 I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Like many deliberate speakers, Toye
thought like lightning, and had reached
this point before he was a hundred yards
from the hotel; then he thought of some-
ting else, and retraced his steps. He re-
traced them even to the table at which he
had sat with Cazalet not very many min-
utes ago; the waiter was only now begin-
ning to clear away.
“Say, waiter, what have you done with
the menu that was in that toast-rack?
There was something on it that we rather
wanted to keep.”
“I thought there was, sir,” said the
English waiter at that admirable hotel.
Toye, however, prepared to talk to him
like an American uncle of Dutch extrac-
tion.
“You thought that, and you took it
away?”
“Not at all, sir. I 'appened to observe
I 32


FINGER-PRINTS
the other gentleman put the menu in his
pocket, behind your back as you were get-
ting up, because I passed a remark about
it to the head waiter at the time!”


IX
FAIR WARNING
T was much more than a map of the
metropolis that Toye carried in his able
head. He knew the right places for the
right things, from his tailor's at one end
of Jermyn Street to his hatter's at the
other, and from the man for collars and
dress shirts, in another of St. James', to
the only man for soft shirts, on Piccadilly.
Hilton Toye visited them all in turn this
fine September morning, and found the
select team agreeably disengaged, readier
than ever to suit him. Then he gazed
critically at his boots. He was not so dead
sure that he had struck the only man for
boots. There had been a young fellow
aboard the Kaiser Fritz, quite a little bit
I34


FAIR WARNING .
of a military blood, who had come ashore
in a pair of cloth tops that had rather
unsettled Mr. Toye's mind just on that
one point.
He thought of this young fellow when
he was through with the soft-shirt man
on Piccadilly. They had diced for a drink
or two in the smoking-room, and Captain
Aylmer had said he would like to have
Toye see his club any time he was passing
and cared to look in for lunch. He had
said so as though he would like it a great
deal, and suddenly Toye had a mind to
take him at his word right now. The idea
began with those boots with cloth tops,
but that was not all there was to it; there
was something else that had been at the
back of Toye's mind all morning, and now
took charge in front.
Aylmer had talked some about a job in
the war office that enabled him to lunch
I 35


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
daily at the Rag; but what his job had
been aboard a German steamer Toye did
not know and was not the man to inquire.
It was no business of his, anyway. Refer- .
ence to a card, traded for his own in
Southampton Water, and duly filed in his
cigarette-case, reminded him of the Rag's
proper style and title. And there he was
eventually entertained to a sound, work-
manlike, rather expeditious meal.
“Say, did you see the cemetery at Ge-
noa?” suddenly inquired the visitor on
their way back through the hall. A mar-
tial bust had been admired extravagantly
before the question.
“Never want to see it again, or Genoa
either,” said Captain Aylmer. “The
smoking-room's this way.”
“I judge you didn't care a lot about the
city?” pursued Toye as they found a
COrner.
136


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
self. I had to go in with Cazalet; that's
how I saw so much of him.”
It was Toye's third separate and inde-
pendent attempt to introduce the name
and fame of Cazalet as a natural topic of
conversation. Twice his host had listened
with adamantine politeness; this time he
was enjoying quite the second-best liqueur
brandy to be had at the Rag; and he
leaned back in his chair.
“You were rather impressed with him,
weren't you?” said Captain Aylmer.
“Well, frankly, I wasn't, but it may have
been my fault. It does rather warp one's
judgment to be shot out to Aden on a
potty job at this time o' year.”
So that was where he had been 2 Yes,
and by Jove he had to see a man about it
all at three o'clock.
“One of the nuts,” explained Captain
Aylmer, keeping his chair with fine re-
138


FAIR WARNING
straint. Toye rose with finer alacrity. “I
hope you won't think me rude,” said the
captain, “but I'm afraid I really mustn't
keep him waiting.”
Toye said the proper things all the way
to the hat-stand, and there took frontal
measures as a last resort. “I was only go-
ing to ask you one thing about Mr. Caza-
let,” he said, “and I guess I've a reason
for asking, though there's no time to state
it now. What did you think of him, Cap-
tain Aylmer, on the whole?”
“Ah, there you have me. ‘On the
whole' is just the difficulty,” said Aylmer,
answering the straight question readily
enough. “I thought he was a very good
chap as far as Naples, but after Genoa he
was another being. I’ve sometimes won-
dered what happened in his three or four
days ashore.”
“Three or four, did you say?”
I39


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
And at the last moment Toye would
have played Wedding Guest to Aylmer's
Ancient Mariner.
“Yes; you see, he knew these German
boats waste a couple of days at Genoa, so
he landed at Naples and did his Italy over-
land. Rather a good idea, I thought, espe-
cially as he said he had friends in Rome;
but we never heard of 'em beforehand,
and I should have let the whole thing
strike me a bit sooner if I’d been Cazalet.
Soon enough to take a hand-bag and a
tooth-brush, eh? And I don't think I
should have run it quite so fine at Genoa,
either. But there are rum birds in this
world, and always will bel”
Toye felt one himself as he picked his
way through St. James' Square. If it
had not been just after lunch, he would
have gone straight and had a cocktail, for
of course he knew the only place for them.
I40


FAIR WARNING
What he did was to slue round out of the
square, and to obtain for the asking, at
another old haunt, on Cockspur Street,
the latest little time-table of continental
trains. This he carried, not on foot but in
a taxi, to the Savoy Hotel, where it kept
him busy in his own room for the best
part of another hour. But by that time
Hilton Toye looked more than an hour
older than on sitting down at his writing-
table with pencil, paper and the little book
of trains; he looked horrified, he looked
distressed, and yet he looked crafty, deter-
mined and immensely alive. He pro-
ceeded, however, to take some of the life
out of himself, and to add still more to
his apparent age, by repairing for more
inward light and leading to a Turkish
bath.
Now the only Turkish bath, according
to Hilton Toye's somewhat exclusive
I4 I


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
code, was not even a hundred yards from
Cazalet's hotel; and there the visitor of
the morning again presented himself be-
fore the afternoon; now merely a little
worn, as a man will look after losing a
stone an hour on a warm afternoon, and
a bit blue again about the chin, which of
course looked a little deeper and stronger
on that account.
Cazalet was not in; his friend would
wait, and in fact waited over an hour in
the little lounge. An evening paper was
offered to him; he took it listlessly,
scarcely looked at it at first, then tore it
in his anxiety to find something he had
quite forgotten—from the newspaper end.
But he was waiting as stoically as before
when Cazalet arrived in tremendous
spirits. t
“Stop and dine!” he cried out at once.
“Sorry I can’t; got to go and see some-
body,” said Hilton Toye.
I42


FAIR WARNING
“Then you must have a drink.”
“No, I thank you,” said Toye, with the
decisive courtesy of a total abstainer.
“You look as if you wanted one; you
don't look a bit fit,” said Cazalet most
kindly.
“Nor am I, sir!” exclaimed Toye. “I
guess London's no place for me in the fall.
Just as well, too, I judge, since I’ve got
to light out again straight away.”
“You haven’t ſ”
“Yes, sir, this very night. That's the
worst of a business that takes you to all
the capitals of Europe in turn. It takes
you so long to flit around that you never
know when you've got to start in again.”
“Which capital is it this time?” said
Cazalet. His exuberant geniality had been
dashed very visibly for the moment. But
already his high spirits were reasserting
themselves; indeed, a cynic with an ear
might have caught the note of sudden
I43


THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES
about six; said he had to see some one,
too, now I think of it. But I'd give a bit
to know what he was doing, messing
about down here at the last moment!”
Blanche liked this as little as anything
that Cazalet had said yet, and he had said
nothing that she did like this morning.
But there were allowances to be made for
him, she knew. And yet to strengthen her
knowledge, or rather to let him confirm
it for her, either by word or by his silence,
she stated a certain case for him aloud.
“Poor old Sweep!” she laughed. “It’s
a shame that you should have come home
to be worried like this.”
“I am worried,” he said simply.
“I think it's just splendid, all you're
doing for that poor man, but especially
the way you're doing it.”
“I wish to God you wouldn't say that,
Blanche!”
I40


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
He paid her the compliment of speak-
ing exactly as he would have spoken to a
man; or rather, she happened to be the
woman to take it as a compliment.
“But I do say it, Sweep! I’ve heard all
about it from Charlie. He rang me up last
night.”
“You’re on the telephone, are you?”
“Everybody is in these days. Where
have you lived? Oh, I forgot!” And she
laughed. Anything to lift this duet of
theirs out of the minor key!
“But what does old Charlie really think
of the case? That's more to the point,”
said Cazalet uneasily.
“Well, he seemed to fear there was no
chance of bail before the adjourned hear-
ing. But I rather gathered he was not go-
ing to be in it himself?”
“No. We decided on one of those
sportsmen who love rushing in where a
I5O


THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES
Cazalet had gone out on the balcony;
now he called to her; and there was no
taxi, but a smart open car, waiting in the
road, its brasses blazing in the sun, an
immaculate chauffeur at the wheel.
“Whose is that, Sweep?”
“Mine, for the week I’m talking about!
I mean ours, if you'd only buck up and
get ready to come out! A week doesn't
last forever, you know!”
Blanche ran off to Martha, who fussed
and hindered her with the best intentions.
It would have been difficult to say which
was the more excited of the two. But the
old nurse would waste time in perfectly
fatuous reminiscences of the very earliest
expeditions in which Mr. Cazalet had lead
and Blanche had followed, and what a
bonny pair they had made even then, etc.
Severely snubbed on that subject, she took
to peering at her mistress, once her bairn,
I 53


XI
IN COUNTRY AND IN TOWN
HE weather was true to them, and
Tº: was a larger matter than it
might have been. They were not making
love. They were “not out for that,” as
Blanche herself actually told Martha, with
annihilating scorn, when the old dear
looked both knowing and longing-to-know
at the end of the first day's run. They
were out to enjoy themselves, and that
seemed shocking to Martha “unless some-
thing was coming of it.” She had just
sense enough to keep her conditional
clause to herself.
Yet if they were only out to enjoy
themselves, in the way Miss Blanche
I 56


IN COUNTRY AND TOWN
Crueller anticlimax was never planned,
but Martha's face had brought it on her;
and now it remained to make her see for
herself what an incomparably good time
they were having so far.
“It was a simply splendid lunch at the
Beacon, and such a tea at Byfleet, coming
back another way,” explained Blanche,
who was notoriously indifferent about her
food, but also as a rule much hungrier
than she seemed to-night. “It must be that
tea, my dear. It was too much. To-mor-
row I'm to take the Sirram, and I want
Walter to see if he can’t get a billy and
show me how they make tea in the bush;
but he says it simply couldn't be done
without methylated.”
The next day they went over the Hog's
Back, and the next day right through
London into Hertfordshire. This was a
tremendous experience. The car was a
I 59


IN COUNTRY AND TOWN
paratory school-days, and the terrible dis-
illusion of Hounslow Heath and its mur-
derous trams.
Then there was the wood they found
where gipsies had been camping, where
they resolved that moment to do the same,
just exactly in every detail as Cazalet had
so often done it in the bush; so that flesh
and flour were fetched from the neigh-
boring village, and he sat on his heels and
turned them into mutton and damper in
about a minute; and after that a real
camp-fire till long after dark, and a shad-
owy chauffeur smoking his pipe some-
where in the other shadows, and thinking
them, of course, quite mad. The critic on
the hearth at home thought even worse of
them than that. But Blanche only told the
truth when she declared that the whole
thing had been her idea; and she might
have added, a bitter disappointment to
I6I


IN COUNTRY AND TOWN
less about themselves when young than
there had been at Littleford, that first
day. And so much for their conversation,
Once for all; it was frankly that of two
very ordinary persons, placed in an ex-
traordinary position to which they had
shut their eyes for a week.
They must have had between them,
however, some rudimentary sense of con-
struction; for their final fling, if not just
the most inspiring, was at least unlike all
the rest. It was almost as new to Blanche,
and now much more so to Cazalet; it ap-
pealed as strongly to their common stock
of freshness and simplicity. Yet cause
and effect were alike undeniably lacking
in distinction. It began with cartloads of
new clothes from Cazalet's old tailor, and
it ended in a theater and the Carlton.
Martha surpassed herself, of course;
she had gone about for days (or rather
163


IN COUNTRY AND TOWN
miracles in her poor parents' graves; and
though Martha herself would die sooner
than inform Mr. Charlie or the married
sisters, other people were beginning to
talk, and when this came out she knew
who would get the blame.
So Blanche seemed rather flushed and
very spirited at the short and early dinner
at Dieudonne's; but it was a fact that the
motoring had affected her skin, besides
making her eyes look as though she had
been doing what she simply never did. It
had also toned up the lower part of Cazar
let's face to match the rest; otherwise he
was more like a meerschaum pipe than
ever, with the white frieze across his
forehead (but now nothing else) to stamp
him from the wilds. And soon nobody
was laughing louder at Mr. Payne and
Mr. Grossmith; nobody looked better
qualified for his gaiety stall, nobody less
165


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
meant their mileage in the car; he made
himself extremely intelligible now, as he
often would when she rallied him in a
serious voice. Evidently that was not the
way to rouse him up to-night, and she
wanted to cheer him after all that he had
done for her. Better perhaps not to burke
the matter that she knew was on his mind.
“Well, it's been a heavenly time,” she
assured him just once more. “And to-
morrow it's pretty sure to come all right
about Scruton, isn't it?”
“Yes! To-morrow we shall probably
have Toye back,” he answered with grim
inconsequence.
“What has that to do with it, Walter?”
“Oh, nothing, of course.”
But still his tone was grim and heavy,
with a schoolboy irony that he would not
explain but could not keep to himself. So
Mr. Toye must be turned out of the con-
I7o


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
about? If they commit the man for trial,
then you do come in, I know. It's like
your goodness.”
“I wish you wouldn't say that! It
hurts me!”
“Then will you explain yourself? It's
not fair to tell me so much, and then to
leave out just the bit that's making you
miserable!”
The trusty, sisterly, sensible voice, half
bantering but altogether kind, genuinely
interested if the least bit inquisitive, too,
would have gone to a harder or more
hardened heart than beat on Blanche's
balcony that night. Yet as Cazalet lighted
lis pipe he looked old enough to be her
father.
“I’ll tell you some time,” he puffed.
“It's only a case of two heads,” said
Blanche. “I know you're bothered, and
I should like to help, that's all.”
“You couldn't.”
172


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
you think I owe him something, as the
only man left to pay?”
But Blanche made no attempt to an-
swer his passionate questions. He had let
himself go at last; it relieved her also in
a way, for it was the natural man back
again on her balcony. But he had set
Blanche off thinking on other lines than
he intended.
“I’m thinking of what he must have
felt he owed Mr. Craven and—and
Ethel !” she owned.
“I don't bother my head over either of
them,” returned Cazalet harshly. “He
was never a white man in his lifetime, and
she was every inch his daughter. Scru-
ton's the one I pity—because—because
I've suffered so much from that man my-
self.”
“But you don't think he did it!”
Blanche was sharp enough to interrupt.
176


THE THOUSANDTH MAN
“No-no—but if he had l’”
“You’d still stand by him?”
“I’ve told you so before. I meant to
take him back to Australia with me—I
never told you that—but I meant to take
him, and not a soul out there to know who
he was.” He sighed aloud over the tragic
stopper on that plan.
“And would you still?” she asked.
“If I could get him off.”
“Guilty or not guilty?”
“Rather l’”
There was neither shame, pose, nor hes-
itation about that. Blanche went through
into the room without a word, but her
eyes shone finely in the lamplight. Then
she returned with a book, and stood half
in the balcony, framed as in a panel, look-
ing for a place.
“You remind me of The Thousandth
Man,” she told him as she found it.
177


THE THOUSANDTH MAN
In season or out of season.
Stand up and back it in all men's sight—
With that for your only reason!
Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by
your side
To the gallows-foot—and after!’”
The last italics were in Blanche's voice,
and it trembled, but so did Cazalet's as he
cried out in his formula:
“That's the finest thing I ever heard in
all my life! But it's true, and so it should
be. I don't take any credit for it.”
“Then you're all the more the thou-
sandth man!”
He caught her suddenly by the shoul-
ders. His rough hands trembled; his jaw
worked. “Look here, Blanchie! If you
had a friend, wouldn't you do the same?”
“Yes, if I’d such a friend as all that,”
she faltered.
I79


XIII
QUID PRO QUO
T was his blessing that had done it; up
I to then she had controlled her feelings
in a fashion worthy of the title just be-
stowed upon her. If only he had stopped
at that, and kept his blessing to himself!
It sounded so very much more like a knell
that Blanche had begun first to laugh, and
then to make such a fool of herself (as
she herself reiterated) that she was
obliged to run away in the worst possible
order.
But that was not the end of those four
superfluous words of final benediction; be-
fore the night was out they had solved, to
Blanche's satisfaction, the hitherto im-
penetrable mystery of Cazalet's conduct.
I8I


----
1"
“God bless you, Blanchie.





QUID PRO QUO
There was no reason why he should
not; there never had been any sort or kind
of understanding between herself and
him; it was only as lifelong friends that
they had written to each other, and that
only once a year. Lifelong friendships
are traditionally fatal to romance.
Blanche could remember only one occa-
sion on which their friendship had risen
to something more—or fallen to some-
thing less! She knew which it had been
to her; especially just afterward, when all
his troubles had come and he had gone
away without another word of that kind.
He had resolved not to let her tie her-
self, and so had tied her all the tighter, if
not tighter still by never stating his re-
solve. But to go as far as this is to go two
or three steps further than Blanche went
in her perfectly rational retrospect: she
simply saw, as indeed she had always seen,
183


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
that they had both been free as air; and if
he was free no longer, she had abso-
lutely no cause for complaint, even if she
was fool enough to feel it.
All this she saw quite clearly in her
very honest heart. And yet, he might
have told her; he need not have flown to
see her, the instant he landed, or seemed
so overjoyed, and such a boy again, or
made so much of her and their common
memories' He need not have begun beg-
ging her, in a minute, to go out to Aus-
tralia, and then never have mentioned it
again; he might just as well have told her
if he had or hoped to have a wife to wel-
come her! Of course he saw it afterward,
himself; that was why the whole subject
of Australia had been dropped so sud-
denly and for good. Most likely he had
married beneath him; if so, she was very
sorry, but he might have said that he was
184


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
only less intolerable than her unspoken
sympathy with Blanche. Martha had
been perfectly awful about the whole
thing. And Martha had committed the ,
final outrage of being perfectly right,
from her idiotic point of view.
Now among all these meditations of a
long night, and of a still longer day, in
which nobody even troubled to send her
word of the case at Kingston, it would
be too much to say that no thought of
Hilton Toye ever entered the mind of
Blanche. She could not help liking him;
he amused her immensely; and he had
proposed to her twice, and warned her
he would again. She felt the force of his
warning, because she felt his force of
character and will. She literally felt these
forces, as actual emanations from the
strongest personality that had ever im-
pinged upon her own. Not only was he
I86


QUID PRO QUO
strong, but capable and cultivated; and
he knew the whole world as most people
only knew some hole or corner of it; and
could be most interesting without ever
talking about himself or other people.
In the day of reaction, such considera-
tions were bound to steal in as single
spies, each with a certain consolation, not
altogether innocent of comparisons. But
the battalion of Toye's virtues only
marched on Blanche when Martha came
to her, on the little green rug of a lawn
behind the house, to say that Mr. Toye
himself had called and was in the draw-
ing-room.
Blanche stole up past the door, and
quickly made herself smarter than she
had ever done by day for Walter Cazalet;
at least she put on a “dressy” blouse, her
calling skirt (which always looked new),
and did what she could to her hair. All
187


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
this was only because Mr. Toye always
came down as if it were Mayfair, and it
was rotten to make people feel awkward
if you could help it. So in sailed Blanche,
in her very best for the light of day, to
be followed as soon as possible by the
silver teapot, though she had just had tea
herself. And there stood Hilton Toye,
chin blue and collar black, his trousers all
knees and no creases, exactly as he had
jumped out of the boat-train.
“I guess I’m not fit to speak to you,”
he said, “but that's just what I’ve come to
do—for the third time!”
“Oh, Mr. Toye!” cried Blanche, really
frightened by the face that made his
meaning clear. It relaxed a little as she
shrank involuntarily, but the compassion
in his eyes and mouth did not lessen their
steady determination. -
“I didn't have time to make myself
I88


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“It’s not what I am that counts. Swear
that to me, and I swear, on my side, that
I won't give him away to you or any one
else. But it must be the most solemn con-
tract man and woman ever made.”
The silver teapot arrived at this junc-
ture, and not inopportunely. She had to
give him his tea, with her young maid’s
help, and to play a tiny part in which he
supported her really beautifully. She had
time to think, almost coolly; and one
thought brought a thrill. If it was a ques-
tion of her marrying or not marrying
Walter Cazalet, then he must be free, and
only the doer of some dreadful deed!
“What has he done?” she begged, with
a pathetic abandonment of her previous
attitude, the moment they were by them-
selves.
“Must I tell you?” His reluctance
rang genuine.
I92


QUID PRO QUO
“I insist upon it!” she flashed again.
“Well, it's a long story.”
“Never mind. I can listen.”
“You know, I had to go back to
Italy—”
“Had you?”
“Well, I did go.” He had slurred the
first statement; this one was characteris-
tically deliberate. “I did go, and before
I went I asked Cazalet for an introduction
to some friends of his down in Rome.”
“I didn't know he had any,” said
Blanche. She was not listening so very
well; she was, in fact, instinctively pre-
pared to challenge every statement, on
Cazalet's behalf; and here her instinct de-
feated itself.
“No more he has,” said Toye, “but he
claimed to have some. He left the Kaiser
Fritz the other day at Naples—just when
I came aboard. I guess he told you?” .
I93


QUID PRO QUO
grasped the arms of her chair, as though
about to bear physical pain. “The Kaiser
Fritz”—Toye was speaking from his book
—“got to Naples late Monday afternoon,
September eighth. She was overdue, and
I was mad about it, and madder still when
I went aboard and she never sailed till
morning. I guess I’d wasted—”
“Do tell me about Walter Cazalet!”
cried Blanche. It was like small talk from
a dentist at the last moment.
“I want you to understand about the
steamer first,” said Toye. “She waited
Monday night in the Bay of Naples, only
sailed Tuesday morning, only reached
Genoa Wednesday morning, and lay there
forty-eight hours, as the German boats
do, anyhow. That brings us to Friday
morning before the Kaiser Fritz gets quit
of Italy, doesn't it?”
“Yes—do tell me about Walter!”
I95


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
among many others; until this morning
she had never missed it, for she seemed
hardly to have been in her room all the
week; but she had been wondering who
had removed it, whether Cazalet himself
(who had spoken of doing so, she now
knew why), or Martha (whom she would
not question about it) in a fit of ungov-
ernable disapproval. And now there was
the photograph back in its place, leather
frame and all!
“I know what you did,” said Blanche.
“You took that photograph with you—
the one on that table—and had him iden-
tified by it!”
Yet she stated the fact, for his bowed
head admitted it to be one, as nothing but
a fact, in the same dull voice of apathetic
acquiescence in an act of which the man
himself was ashamed. She could see him
wondering at her; she even wondered at
198


QUID PRO QUO
herself. Yet if all this were true, what
matter how the truth had come to light?
“It was the night I came down to bid
you good-by,” he confessed, “and didn't
have time to wait. I didn’t come down
for the photo. I never thought of it till
I saw it there. I came down to kind of
warn you, Miss Blanche!”
“Against him?” she said, as if there
was only one man left in the world.
“Yes—I guess I’d already warned
Cazalet that I was starting on his tracks.”
And then Blanche just said, “Poor—
old—Sweep!” as one talking to herself.
And Toye seized upon the words as she
had seized on nothing from him.
“Have you only pity for the fellow?”
he cried; for she was gazing at the
bearded photograph without revulsion.
“Of course,” she answered, hardly at-
tending.
I99


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Even though he killed this man—
even though he came across Europe to
kill him P”
“You don’t think it was deliberate
yourself, even if he did do it.”
“But can you doubt that he did?” cried
Toye, quick to ignore the point she had
made, yet none the less sincerely con-
vinced upon the other. “I guess you
wouldn't if you'd heard some of the
things he said to me on the steamer; and
he's made good every syllable since he
landed. Why, it explains every single
thing he's done and left undone. He'll
strain every nerve to have Scruton ably
defended, but he won't see the man he's
defending; says himself that he can't face
him l’’
“Yes. He said so to me,” said Blanche,
nodding in confirmation.
“To you?”
“I didn’t understand him.”
2OO


QUID PRO QUO
“But you're been seeing him all this
While P”
“Every day,” said Blanche, her soft
eyes filling suddenly. “We’ve had—we've
had the time of our lives!”
“My God!” said Toye. “The time of
your life with a man who's got another
man's blood on his hands—and that
makes no difference to you! The time of
your life with the man who knew where
to lay hands on the weapon he'd done it
with, who went as far as that to save the
innocent, but no farther!”
“He would; he will still, if it's still nec-
essary. You don't know him, Mr. Toye;
you haven’t known him all your life.”
“And all this makes no difference to a
good and gentle woman—one of the gen-
tlest and the best God ever made?”
“If you mean me, I won't go so far as
that,” said Blanche. “I must see him
first.”
2OI


QUID PRO QUO
of downright bullying did her good. “I
didn't know you were a blackmailer, Mr.
Toye!”
“You know I’m not; but I mean to save
you from Cazalet, blackmail or white.”
“To save me from a mere old friend—
nothing more—nothing—all our lives!”
“I believe that,” he said, searching her
with his smoldering eyes. “You couldn't
tell a lie, I guess, not if you tried But
you would do something; it's just a man
being next door to hell that would bring
a God's angel—” His voice shook.
She was as quick to soften on her side.
“Don’t talk nonsense, please,” she
begged, forcing a smile through her dis-
tress. “Will you promise to do nothing
if-if I promise?”
“Not to go near him?”
“No.”
“Nor to see him here?”
2O3


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“No.”
“Nor anywhere else?”
“No. I give you my word.”
“If you break it, I break mine that
minute? Is it a deal that way?”
“Yes! Yes! I promise!”
“Then so do I, by God!” said Hilton
Toye.


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
|
scribed the whole thing as only he could
describe a given episode, down to the ulti-
mate dismissal of the charge against
Scruton, with a gusto the more cynical
for the deliberately low pitch of his voice.
It was in the little lodging-house sitting-
room at Nell Gwynne's Cottages; he stood
with his back to the crackling fire that he
had just lighted himself, as it were, al-
ready at bay; for the folding-doors were
in front of his nose, and his eyes roved
incessantly from the landing door on one
side to the curtained casement on the
other. Yet sometimes he paused to gaze
at the friend who had come to warn him
of his danger; and there was nothing
cynical or grim about him then.
Blanche had broken her word for per-
haps the first time in her life; but it had
never before been extorted from her by
duress, and it would be affectation to
2O6


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“I know. And nothing can undo that,”
she only said; but her voice swelled with
thanksgiving. And Cazalet looked reas-
sured; the hot suspicion died out of his
eyes, but left them gloomily perplexed.
“Still, I can't understand it. I don't be-
lieve it, either! I'm in his hands. What
have I done to be saved by Toye? He's
probably scouring London for me—if he
isn't watching this window at this min-
ute!”
He went to the curtains as he spoke.
Simultaneously Blanche sprang up, to en-
treat him to fly while he could. That had
been her first object in coming to him
as she had done, and yet, once with him,
she had left it to the last! And now it
was too late; he was at the window,
chuckling significantly to himself; he had
opened it, and he was leaning out.
“That you, Toye, down there? Come
2IO


FAITH UNFAITHFUL
up and show yourself! I want to see
you.”
He turned in time to dart in front of
the folding-doors as Blanche reached
them, white and shuddering. The flush of
impulsive bravado fled from his face at
the sight of hers.
“You can't go in there. What's the
matter?” he whispered. “Why should you
be afraid of Hilton Toye?”
How could she tell him? Before she
had found a word, the landing door
opened, and Hilton Toye was in the room,
looking at her.
“Keep your voice down,” said Cazalet
anxiously. “Even if it's all over with me
but the shouting, we needn't start the
shouting here!”
He chuckled savagely at his jest; and
now Toye stood looking at him.
“I’ve heard all you've done,” continued
2II


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Cazalet. “I don't blame you a bit. If it
had been the other way about, I might
have given you less run for your money.
I've heard what you've found out about
my mysterious movements, and you're ab-
solutely right as far as you go. You don't
know why I took the train at Naples, and
traveled across Europe without a hand-
bag. It wasn't quite the put-up job you
may think. But, if it makes you any hap-
pier, I may as well tell you that I was
at Uplands that night, and I did get out
through the foundations!”
The insane impetuosity of the man was
his master now. He was a living fire of
impulse that had burst into a blaze. His
voice was raised in spite of his warning
to the others, and the very first sound of
Toye's was to remind him that he was
forgetting his own advice. Toye had not
looked a second time at Blanche; nor did
2I2


FAITH UNFAITHFUL
he now; but he took in the silenced Caz-
alet from head to heel, by inches.
“I always guessed you might be crazy,
and I now know it,” said Hilton Toye.
“Still, I judge you're not so crazy as to
deny that while you were in that house
you struck down Henry Craven, and left
him for dead?”
Cazalet stood like a red-hot stone.
“Miss Blanche,” said Toye, turning to
her rather shyly, “I guess I can’t do what
I said just yet. I haven't breathed a word,
not yet, and perhaps I never will, if
you'll come away with me now—back to
your home—and never see Henry Cra-
ven's murderer again!”
“And who may he be?” cried a voice
that brought all three face-about.
The folding-doors had opened, and a
fourth figure was standing between the
tWO rooms.


XV
THE PERSON UNIKNOWN
HE intruder was a shaggy elderly
man, of so cadaverous an aspect
that his face alone cried for his death-bed;
and his gaunt frame took up the cry, as
it swayed upon the threshold in dressing-
gown and bedroom slippers that Toye in-
stantly recognized as belonging to Caza-
let. The man had a shock of almost white
hair, and a less gray beard clipped roughly
to a point. An unwholesome pallor
marked the fallen features; and the en-
venomed eyes burned low in their sockets,
as they dealt with Blanche but fastened on
Hilton Toye.
“What do you know about Henry Cra-
2I4


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
years isn't long enough to have you as a
dishonored guest. “Won't you come back
for another week, and see if we can't ar-
range a nice little sudden death and bur-
ial for you?' But they couldn't you see,
blast ’em ſ”
He subsided into the best chair in the
room, which Blanche had wheeled up be-
hind him; a moment later he looked
round, thanked her curtly, and lay back
with closed eyes until suddenly he opened
them on Cazalet.
“And what was that you were saying
—that about traveling across Europe and
being at Uplands that night? I thought
you came round by sea? And what night
do you mean?”
“The night it all happened,” said Caz-
alet steadily.
“You mean the night some person un-
known knocked Craven on the head?”
216





THE PERSON UNKNOWN
“Yes.”
The sick man threw himself forward in
the chair. “You never told me this!” he
cried suspiciously; both the voice and the
man seemed stronger.
“There was no point in telling you.”
“Did you see the person?”
“Yes.”
“Then he isn't unknown to you?”
“I didn't see him well.”
Scruton looked sharply at the two mute
listeners. They were very intent, indeed.
“Who are these people, Cazalet? No! I
know one of 'em,” he answered himself
in the next breath. “It’s Blanche Mac-
nair, isn't it? I thought at first it must be
a younger sister grown up like her. You'll
forgive prison manners, Miss Macnair, if
that's still your name. You look a wom-
an to trust—if there is one—and you gave
me your chair. Anyhow, you've been in
217


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
for a penny and you can stay in for a
pound, as far as I care! But who's your
Amer'can friend, Cazalet?”
“Mr. Hilton Toye, who spotted that
I’d been all the way to Uplands and back
when I claimed to have been in Rome!”
There was a touch of Scruton's bitter-
ness in Cazalet's voice; and by some sub-
tle process it had a distinctly mollifying
effect on the really embittered man.
“What on earth were you doing at Up-
lands?” he asked, in a kind of confidential
bewilderment.
“I went down to see a man.”
Toye himself could not have cut and
measured more deliberate monosyllables.
“Craven?” suggested Scruton.
“No ; a man I expected to find at Cra-
ven’s.”
“The writer of the letter you found at
218


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
Cook's office in Naples the night you
landed there, I guess!”
It really was Toye this time, and there
was no guesswork in his tone. Obviously
he was speaking by his little book, though
he had not got it out again.
“How do you know I went to Cook's?”
“I know every step you took between
the Kaiser Fritz and Charing Cross and
Charing Cross and the Kaiser Fritz!”
Scruton listened to this interchange
with keen attention, hanging on each
man's lips with his sunken eyes; both took
it calmly, but Scruton's surprise was not
hidden by a sardonic grin.
“You’ve evidently had a stern chase
with a Yankee clipper!” said he. “If he's
right about the letter, Cazalet, I should
say so; presumably it wasn't from Craven
himself?”
219


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“But you did see the man you went to
see?” said Scruton.
Cazalet paused. “I don't know. Even-
tually somebody brushed past me in the
dark. I did think then—but I can’t swear
to him even now !”
“Tell us about it.”
“Do you mean that, Scruton? Do you
insist on hearing all that happened. I'm
not asking Toye; he can do what he likes.
But you, Scruton—you've been through a
lot, you know—you ought to have
stopped in bed—do you really want this
on top of all?”
“Go ahead,” said Scruton. “I’ll have a
drink when you've done; somebody give
me a cigarette meanwhile.”
Cazalet supplied the cigarette, struck
the match, and held it with unfaltering
hand. The two men's eyes met strangely
across the flame.
222


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
“I’ll tell you all exactly what happened;
you can believe me or not as you like.
You won't forget that I knew every inch
of the ground—except one altered bit
that explained itself.” Cazalet turned to
Blanche with a significant look, but she
only drew an inch nearer still. “Well, it
was in the little creek, where the boat-
house is, that I waited for my man. He
never came—by the river. I heard the
motor, but it wasn't Henry Craven that
I wanted to see, but the man who was
coming to see him. Eventually I thought
I must have made a mistake, or he might
have changed his mind and come by road.
The dressing-gong had gone; at least I
supposed it was that by the time. It was
almost quite dark, and I landed and went
up the path past the back premises to the
front of the house. So far I hadn't seen
a soul, or been seen by one, evidently; but
223


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
the French windows were open in what
used to be my father's library, the room
was all lit up, and just as I got there a
man ran out into the flood of light and—”
“I thought you said he brushed by you
in the dark?” interrupted Toye.
“I was in the dark; so was he in an-
other second; and no power on earth
would induce me to swear to him. Do you
want to hear the rest, Scruton, or are you
another unbeliever?”
“I want to hear every word—more
than ever !”
Toye cocked his head at both question
and answer, but inclined it quickly as
Cazalet turned to him before proceeding.
“I went in and found Henry Craven
lying in his blood. That's gospel—it was
So I found him—lying just where he had
fallen in a heap out of the leather chair
at his desk. The top right-hand drawer
224


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“It was a mad idea, but I had gone
mad,” continued Cazalet. “I had hated
the victim alive, and it couldn't change
me that he was dead or dying; that didn't
make him a white man, and neither did
it necessarily blacken the poor devil who
had probably suffered from him like the
rest of us and only struck him down in
self-defense. The revolver on the desk
made that pretty plain. It was out of the
way, but now I saw blood all over the
desk as well; it was soaking into the blot-
ter, and it knocked the bottom out of my
idea. What was to be done? I had med-
dled already; how could I give the alarm
without giving myself away to that ex-
tent, and God knows how much further?
The most awful moment of the lot came
as I hesitated—the dinner-gong went off
in the hall outside the door! I remember
226


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
ther's objects had been to make his re-
treat sound-tight, and I could scarcely
hear what was going on in the room.
That encouraged me; and two of you
don't need telling how I got out through
the foundations, because you know all
about the hole I made myself as a boy in
the floor under the oilcloth. It took some
finding with single matches; but the fear
of your neck gives you eyes in your fin-
ger-ends, and gimlets, too, by Jove! The
worst part was getting out at the other
end, into the cellars; there were heaps of
empty bottles to move, one by one, before
there was room to open the manhole door
and to squirm out over the slab; and I
thought they rang like a peal of bells, but
I put them all back again, and apparently
nobody overheard in the scullery.
“The big dog barked at me like blazes—
he did again the other day—but nobody
228


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
seemed to hear him either. I got to my
boat, tipped a fellow on the towing path
to take it back and pay for it—why
haven't the police got hold of him?—and
ran down to the bridge over the weir. I
stopped a big car with a smart shaver
smoking his pipe at the wheel. I should
have thought he'd have come forward for
the reward that was put up; but I pre-
tended I was late for dinner I had in
town, and I let him drop me at the Grand
Hotel. He cost me a fiver, but I had on a
waistcoat lined with notes, and I'd more
than five minutes in hand at Charing
Cross. If you want to know, it was the
time in hand that gave me the whole idea
of doubling back to Genoa; I must have
been half-way up to town before I
thought of it!”
He had told the whole thing as he al-
ways could tell an actual experience; that
229


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
under a serpent's spell, as Toye made her
a sardonic bow from the landing door.
“You broke your side of the contract,
Miss Blanche! I guess it's up to me to
complete.”
“Wait!”
It was Scruton's raven croak; he had
tottered to his feet.
“Sure,” said Toye, “if you've anything
you want to say as an interested party.”
“Only this—he's told the truth!”
“Well, can he prove it?”
“I don't know,” said Scruton. “But I
can l’”
“You?” Blanche chimed in there.
“Yes, I’d like that drink first, if you
don't mind, Cazalet.” It was Blanche who
got it for him, in an instant. “Thank
you! I'd say more if my blessing was
worth having—but here's something that
is. Listen to this, you American gentle-
23 I


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
did to save what wasn't worth saving!
But—I think—I’ll hold out long enough
to thank you—just a little!” He was gone
with a gibbering smile.
Cazalet turned straight to Toye at the
other door. “Well? Aren't you going,
too? You were near enough, you see!
I'm an accessory all right”—he dropped
his voice—“but I’d be principal if I could
instead of him!”
But Toye had come back into the room,
twinkling with triumph, even rubbing his
hands. “You didn't see? You didn't see?
I never meant to go at all; it was a bit
of bluff to make him own up, and it did,
too, bully!”
The couple gasped.
“You mean to tell me,” cried Cazalet,
“that you believed my story all the time?”
“Why, I didn't have a moment's doubt
about it!”
235


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
Cazalet drew away from the chuckling
creature and his crafty glee. But Blanche
came forward and held out her hand.
“Will you forgive me, Mr. Toye?”
“Sure, if I had anything to forgive.
It's the other way around, I guess, and
about time I did something to help.” He
edged up to the folding-door. “This is a
two-man job, Cazalet, the way I make it
out. Guess it's my watch on deck!”
“The other's the way to the police sta-
tion,” said Cazalet densely.
Toye turned solemn on the word. “It’s
the way to hell, if Miss Blanche will for-
give me! This is more like the other
place, thanks to you folks. Guess I’ll leave
the angels in charge!”
Angelic or not, the pair were alone at
last; and through the doors they heard a
quavering croak of welcome to the rather
human god from the American machine.
236


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
“I'm afraid he'll never go back with
you to the bush,” whispered Blanche.
“Scruton P”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid, too. But I wanted to take
somebody else out, too. I was trying
to say so over a week ago, when we were
talking about old Venus Potts. Blanchie,
will you come?”
THE END








THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
was one reason why it rang so true to one
listener at every point. But the sick man's
sunken eyes had advanced from their
sockets in cumulative amazement. And
Hilton Toye laughed shortly when the
end was reached.
“You figure some on our credulity”
was his first comment.
“I don't figure on anything from you,
Toye, except a pair of handcuffs as a first
instalment!”
Toye rose in prompt acceptance of the
challenge. “Seriously, Cazalet, you ask
us to believe that you did all this to screen
a man you didn't have time to recog-
nize P”
“I’ve told you the facts.”
“Well, I guess you'd better tell them
to the police.” Toye took his hat and
stick. Scruton was struggling from his
chair. Blanche stood petrified, a dove
230


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
man: I was the man who wrote to him in
Naples. Leave it at that a minute; it was
my second letter to him; the first was to
Australia, in answer to one from him. It
was the full history of my downfall. I
got a warder to smuggle it out. That
letter was my one chance.”
“I know it by heart,” said Cazalet. “It
was that and nothing else that made me
leave before the shearing.”
“To meet me when I came out !” Scru-
ton explained in a hoarse whisper. “To
—to keep me from going straight to that
man, as I’d told him I should in my first
letter! But you can't hit these things off
to the day or the week; he'd told me
where to write to him on his voyage, and
I wrote to Naples, but that letter did not
get smuggled out. My warder friend had
got the sack. I had to put what I’d got to
say so that you could read it two ways.
So I told you, Cazalet, I was going
232


THE THOUSANDTH WOMAN
“Pretending it was going to be his
check-book!” said Scruton through his
teeth. “But I heard him trying to cock
it inside his drawer. There was his spe-
cial constable's truncheon hanging on the
wall—silver mounted, for all the world
to know how he'd stood up for law and
order in the sight of men! I tell you it
was a joy to feel the weight of that trun-
cheon, and to see the hero of Trafalgar
Square fumbling with a thing he didn't
understand! I hit him as hard as God
would let me—and the rest you know—
except that I nearly did trip over the man
who swore it was broad daylight at the
time!”
He tottered to the folding-doors, and
stood there a moment, pointing to Cazalet
with a hand that twitched as terribly as
his dreadful face.
“No-the rest you did—the rest you
234


THE PERSON UNKNOWN
did to save what wasn't worth saving!
But—I think—I’ll hold out long enough
to thank you—just a little!” He was gone
with a gibbering smile.
Cazalet turned straight to Toye at the
other door. “Well? Aren't you going,
too? You were near enough, you see!
I'm an accessory all right”—he dropped
his voice—“but I'd be principal if I could
instead of him t”
But Toye had come back into the room,
twinkling with triumph, even rubbing his
hands. “You didn't see? You didn't see?
I never meant to go at all; it was a bit
of bluff to make him own up, and it did,
too, bully!”
The couple gasped.
“You mean to tell me,” cried Cazalet,
“that you believed my story all the time?”
“Why, I didn't have a moment's doubt
about it!”
235








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