In the gallery which ran above the hall there was a large chair, situated a few paces from the great staircase.  On this, in an overcoat—­for the nights were chilly—­and rubber-soled shoes, the Efficient Baxter had sat, without missing a single night, from one in the morning until daybreak, waiting, waiting, waiting.  It had been an ordeal to try the stoutest determination.  Nature had never intended Baxter for a night bird.  He loved his bed.  He knew that doctors held that insufficient sleep made a man pale and sallow, and he had always aimed at the peach-bloom complexion which comes from a sensible eight hours between the sheets.

One of the King Georges of England—­I forget which—­once said that a certain number of hours’ sleep each night—­I cannot recall at the moment how many—­made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory.  Baxter agreed with him.  It went against all his instincts to sit up in this fashion; but it was his duty and he did it.

It troubled him that, as night after night went by and Ashe, the suspect, did not walk into the trap so carefully laid for him, he found an increasing difficulty in keeping awake.  The first two or three of his series of vigils he had passed in an unimpeachable wakefulness, his chin resting on the rail of the gallery and his ears alert for the slightest sound; but he had not been able to maintain this standard of excellence.

On several occasions he had caught himself in the act of dropping off, and the last night he had actually wakened with a start to find it quite light.  As his last recollection before that was of an inky darkness impenetrable to the eye, dismay gripped him with a sudden clutch and he ran swiftly down to the museum.  His relief on finding that the scarab was still there had been tempered by thoughts of what might have been.

Baxter, then, as he bicycled to Market Blandings for tobacco, had good reason to brood.  Having bought his tobacco and observed the life and thought of the town for half an hour—­it was market day and the normal stagnation of the place was temporarily relieved and brightened by pigs that eluded their keepers, and a bull calf which caught a stout farmer at the psychological moment when he was tying his shoe lace and lifted him six feet—­he made his way to the Emsworth Arms, the most respectable of the eleven inns the citizens of Market Blandings contrived in some miraculous way to support.

In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade.  It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the innkeepers to blaming the government.

It was not the busy bar, full to overflowing with honest British yeomen—­many of them in a similar condition—­that Baxter sought.  His goal was the genteel dining-room on the first floor, where a bald and shuffling waiter, own cousin to a tortoise, served luncheon to those desiring it.  Lack of sleep had reduced Baxter to a condition where the presence and chatter of the house party were insupportable.  It was his purpose to lunch at the Emsworth Arms and take a nap in an armchair afterward.