ies (which must, in parenthesis, be of extraordinary
fullness) occupied him into the small hours, and to go to bed at
half-past nine on one night and after one o'clock on the next implied a
complicated kind of regularity which cried aloud for elucidation. If he
had only breakfasted early on the mornings after he had gone to bed
early, she might have allowed herself to be weakly credulous, but he
never qui-hied earlier than half-past nine, and she could not but think
that to believe blindly in such habits would be a triumph not for faith
but for foolishness. "People," said Miss Mapp to herself, as her
attention refused to concentrate on the evening paper, "don't do it. I
never heard of a similar case."

She had been spending the evening alone, and even the conviction that
her cold apple tart had suffered diminution by at least a slice, since
she had so much enjoyed it hot at lunch, failed to occupy her mind for
long, for this matter had presented itself with a clamouring insistence
that drowned all other voices. She had tried, when, at the conclusion of
her supper, she had gone back to the garden-room, to immerse herself in
a book, in an evening paper, in the portmanteau problem, in a jig-saw
puzzle, and in Patience, but none of these supplied the stimulus to lead
her mind away from Major Benjy's evenings, or the narcotic to dull her
unslumbering desire to solve a problem that was rapidly becoming one of
the greater mysteries.

Her radiator made a seat in the window agreeably warm, and a chink in
the curtains gave her a view of the Major's lighted window. Even as she
looked, the illumination was extinguished. She had expected this, as he
had been at his diaries late--quite naughtily late--the evening before,
so this would be a night of infant slumber for twelve hours or so.

Even as she looked, a chink of light came from his front door, which
immediately enlarged itself into a full oblong. Then it went completely
out. "He has opened the door, and has put out the hall-light," whispered
Miss Mapp to herself.... "He has gone out and shut the door.... (Perhaps
he is going to post a letter.) ... He has gone into Captain Puffin's
house without knocking. So he is expected."

Miss Mapp did not at once guess that she held in her hand the key to the
mystery. It was certainly Major Benjy's night for going to bed early....
Then a fierce illumination beat on her brain. Had she not, so
providentially, actually observed the Major cr