“Later on, his old housekeeper, going her final round, tapped at his door and wished him good-night, as was her custom.  She received no response, at first, and, growing nervous, tapped louder and called again; and at length an answering ‘good-night’ came back to her.

“She thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she remembered that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely grating and mechanical.  Trying 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