ng to describe it, she likened it to such a voice as she
would imagine coming from a statue.

"Next morning his door remained still locked. It was no unusual thing
for him to work all night and far into the next day, so no one thought to
be surprised. When, however, evening came, and yet he did not appear,
his servants gathered outside the room and whispered, remembering what
had happened once before.

"They listened, but could hear no sound. They shook the door and called
to him, then beat with their fists upon the wooden panels. But still no
sound came from the room.

"Becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after many
blows, it gave way, and they crowded in.

"He sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair. They thought at first he
had died in his sleep. But when they drew nearer and the light fell upon
him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his throat; and in
his eyes there was a terror such as is not often seen in human eyes."

* * * * *

Brown was the first to break the silence that followed. He asked me if I
had any brandy on board. He said he felt he should like just a nip of
brandy before going to bed. That is one of the chief charms of Jephson's
stories: they always make you feel you want a little brandy.

CHAPTER VI

"Cats," remarked Jephson to me, one afternoon, as we sat in the punt
discussing the plot of our novel, "cats are animals for whom I entertain
a very great respect. Cats and Nonconformists seem to me the only things
in this world possessed of a practicable working conscience. Watch a cat
doing something mean and wrong--if ever one gives you the chance; notice
how anxious she is that nobody should see her doing it; and how prompt,
if detected, to pretend that she was not doing it--that she was not even
thinking of doing it--that, as a matter of fact, she was just about to do
something else, quite different. You might almost think they had a soul.

"Only this morning I was watching that tortoise-shell of yours on the
houseboat. She was creeping along the roof, behind the flower-boxes,
stalking a young thrush that had perched upon a coil of rope. Murder
gleamed from her eye, assassination lurked in every twitching muscle of
her body. As she crouched to spring, Fate, for once favouring the weak,
directed her attention to myself, and she became, for the first time,
aware of my presence. It acted upon her as a heavenly vision upon a
Biblic