V

“Well, what have you said to her?  What does she say?  What have you done with her?” questioned Eve excitedly, who had almost finished dressing when Mr. Prohack, gorgeously, but by no means without misgivings, entered her bedroom.

“I’ve talked to her very seriously and let her go,” answered Mr. Prohack.

Eve sat down as if stabbed on the chair in front of her dressing-table, and stared at Mr. Prohack.

“You’ve let her go!” cried she, with an outraged gasp, implying that she had always suspected that she was married to a nincompoop, but not to such a nincompoop.  “Where’s she gone to?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s her name?  Who is she?”

“I don’t know that either.  I only know that she’s engaged to be married, and that a certain sacristan is madly but I hope honourably in love with her, and that she’s had nothing whatever to do with the disappearance of your necklace.”

“I suppose she told you so herself!” said Eve, with an irony that might have shrivelled up a husband less philosophic.

“She did not.  She didn’t say a word about the necklace.  But she did make a full confession.  She’s mixed up in the clock-striking business.”

“The what business?”

“The striking of the church-clock.  You know it’s stopped striking since last night, under the wise dispensation of heaven.”

As he made this perfectly simple announcement, Mr. Prohack observed a sudden change in his wife’s countenance.  Her brow puckered:  a sad, protesting, worried look came into her eyes.

“Please don’t begin on the clock again, my poor Arthur!  You ought to forget it.  You know how bad it is for you to dwell on it.  It gets on your nerves and you start imagining all sorts of things, until, of course, there’s no chance of you sleeping.  If you keep on like this you’ll make me feel a perfect criminal for taking the house.  You don’t suspect it, but I’ve several times wished we never had taken it—­I’ve been so upset about your nervous condition.”

“I was merely saying,” Mr. Prohack insisted, “that our fat visitor, who apparently has enormous seductive power over sacristans, had noticed about the clock just as I had, and she thought—­”

Eve interrupted him by approaching swiftly and putting her hands on his shoulders, as he had put his hands on her shoulders a little while earlier, and gazing with supplication at him.

“Please, please!” she besought him.  “To oblige me.  Do drop the church-clock.  I know what it means for you.”

Mr. Prohack turned away, broke into uproarious and somewhat hysterical laughter, and left the bedroom, having perceived to his amazement that she thought the church-clock was undermining his sanity.

Going to his study, he rang the bell there, and Brool, with features pale and drawn, obeyed the summons.  The fact that his sanity was suspect, however absurdly, somehow caused Mr. Prohack to assume a pontifical manner of unusual dignity.