They prattled of the dietary and idiosyncrasies of their several insomnias as though they had been so many exacting pet animals.  Miss Brown then asked me what I did for mine.

Edward spluttered merrily.  “He rises with the nightingale, comes bounding downstairs some time after tea and wants to know why breakfast isn’t ready.  Only last week I heard him exhorting Harriet to call him early next day as he was going to a dance.”

They all looked reproachfully at me because I didn’t keep a pet insomnia too.  I spoke up for myself.  I admitted I hadn’t got one, and what was more was proud of it.  All healthy massive thinkers are heavy sleepers, I insisted.  They must sleep heavily to recuperate the enormous amount of vitality expended by them in their waking hours.  Sleep, I informed my audience, is Nature’s reward to the blameless and energetic liver.  If they could not sleep now they were but paying for past years of idleness and excess, and they had only themselves to blame.  I was going on to tell them that an easy conscience is the best anodyne, etc., but they snatched up their candles and went to bed.  I went thither myself shortly afterwards.

I was awakened in the dead of night by a rapping at my door.

“Who’s there?” I growled.

“I—­Jane Brown,” said a hollow voice.

“What’s the matter?”

“Hush, there are men in the house.”

“If they’re burglars tell ’em the silver’s in the sideboard.”

“It’s the police.”

I sat up in bed.  “The police!—­why?—­what?”

“Shissh! come quickly and don’t make a noise,” breathed Miss Brown.

I hurried into a shooting-jacket and slippers and joined the lady on the landing.  She carried a candle and was adequately if somewhat grotesquely clad in a dressing-gown and an eider-down quilt secured about her waist by a knotted bath-towel.  On her head she wore a large black hat.  She put her finger to her lips and led the way downstairs.  The hall was empty.

“That’s curious,” said Miss Brown.  “There were eighteen mounted policemen in here just now.  I was talking to the Inspector—­such a nice young man, an intimate friend of the late Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN, who, he informs me privately, did not kill Cock Robin.”

She paused, winked and then suddenly dealt me three hearty smacks—­one on the shoulder, one on the arm and one in the small of the back.  I removed myself hastily out of range.

“Tarantulas, or Peruvian ant-bears, crawling all over you,” Miss Brown explained.  “Fortunate I saw them in time, as their suck is fatal in ninety-nine cases out of a million, or so GARIBALDI says in the Origin of Species.”  She sniffed.  “Tell me, do you smell blood?”

I told her that I did not.

“I do,” she said, “quite close at hand too.  Yum-yum, I like warm blood.”  She looked at me through half-closed eyelids.  “I should think you’d bleed very prettily, very prettily.”