tood that he must not be mixed up in the matter, or Mrs. Harriwell
either.

The dear thing! thought Jones, who saw him, a tall, thin-lipped beast of
a brute, with a haw-haw manner and an arrogant air. God bless him!

But, Jones resumed to himself, voyons! The opera was Aida. Paliser came
in during the third act. The house then is brilliant. But during the
fourth--the duo in the crypt--it is dark. It was then that he was done
for and with what is assumed to have been a stiletto.

To cut out the account, Jones turned in search of a dagger, long, thin,
wicked, which, one adventurous night in Naples, he had found--just in
time--in his back. On the blade was inscribed a promise, Penetrabo. Now
his eyes roamed the table. He lifted the tray, lifted his copy, looked
on the floor. Yet only the evening before, when Lennox was there and
Cassy Cara had come, he had seen it. Since then it had gone.

The disappearance did not disturb him. Occasionally, in hunting for an
object, he found it in his hand. It is somewhere, he cogently reflected
and, taking a pencil, set to work.

But the muse was timorous as a chicken. The metaphor is entirely
metaphorical. Jones had no faith in the wanton. He believed in regular
hours, in silence and no interruptions. No intrusions of any kind. A
letter was an intrusion, so also was the news of the day. These things
he considered, when he did consider them, after his work was done.
Sometimes he ignored them entirely. Usually he had a bushel of letters
that he had not opened, a bale of papers at which he had not looked. Of
such is the life known as literary or, at any rate, such was the life
led by Jones.

On this morning, his copy, ordinarily fluent enough, would not come.
Ideas fluttered away just out of reach. The sequence of a chapter had
been in his head. Like the dagger, it had gone. He could not account for
that disappearance, nor did he try. It would turn up again. So,
ultimately, would the ousted sequence. For the latter's departure he did
not try to account either. The effort was needless. He knew. An
interruption had occurred. The news of the day had intruded itself upon
him. A headline had entangled his thoughts.

Abandoning the pencil, he lit a cigarette. Across the room, above the
bookcase, was a stretch of silk, a flight of dragons that he had got in
Rangoon. Above the silk was an ivory mask, the spoil of a sarcophagus,
which he had found in Seville. He looked at them. The dragons f