ich the Dawn had so unaccountably failed to supply.

"I wore a tunic of white Nepaulese silk, with a collar of pearls, real
pearls. Round my waist I had a girdle of twisted serpents in beaten
gold, studded all over with amethysts. My sandals were of gold, laced
with scarlet thread, and I had seven bracelets of gold on each arm. Round
my head I had a wreath of golden laurel leaves set with scarlet berries,
and hanging over my left shoulder was a silk robe of mulberry purple,
broidered with the signs of the zodiac in gold and scarlet; I had it made
specially for the occasion. At my side I had an ivory-sheathed dagger,
with a green jade handle, hung in a green Cordova leather--"

At this point of the recital his companion rose softly, flung his
cigarette end into the little water-bowl, and passed into the further
swelter room. Cornelian Valpy was left, still clothed in a look of
ineffable complacency, still engaged, in all probability, in reclothing
himself in the finery of the previous evening.

CHAPTER XVIII: THE DEAD WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND

The pale light of a November afternoon faded rapidly into the dusk of a
November evening. Far over the countryside housewives put up their
cottage shutters, lit their lamps, and made the customary remark that the
days were drawing in. In barn yards and poultry-runs the greediest
pullets made a final tour of inspection, picking up the stray remaining
morsels of the evening meal, and then, with much scrambling and
squawking, sought the places on the roosting-pole that they thought
should belong to them. Labourers working in yard and field began to turn
their thoughts homeward or tavernward as the case might be. And through
the cold squelching slush of a water-logged meadow a weary, bedraggled,
but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble-grown
bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching
tangle of woods. The pack of fierce-mouthed things that had rattled him
from copse and gorse-cover, along fallow and plough, hedgerow and wooded
lane, for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last
few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences. The
cold, wet meadow, the thick mask of woods, and the oncoming dusk had
stayed the chase--and the fox had outstayed it. In a short time he would
fall mechanically to licking off some of the mud that caked on his weary
pads; in a shorter time horsemen and