Professor, the other day, in speaking of her.  Whether the Professor is in love with her or not is more than I can say, but I am sure that he goes to her for literary sympathy and counsel, just as I do.  The reader may remember what Number Five said about the possibility of her getting a sprained ankle, and her asking the young Doctor whether he felt equal to taking charge of her if she did.  I would not for the world insinuate that he wishes she would slip and twist her foot a little,—­just a little, you know, but so that it would have to be laid on a pillow in a chair, and inspected, and bandaged, and delicately manipulated.  There was a banana-skin which she might naturally have trodden on, in her way to the tea-table.  Nobody can suppose that it was there except by the most innocent of accidents.  There are people who will suspect everybody.  The idea of the Doctor’s putting that banana-skin there!  People love to talk in that silly way about doctors.

Number Five had promised to read us a narrative which she thought would interest some of the company.  Who wrote it she did not tell us, but I inferred from various circumstances that she had known the writer.  She read the story most effectively in her rich, musical voice.  I noticed that when it came to the sounds of the striking clock, the ringing of the notes was so like that which reaches us from some far-off cathedral tower that we wanted to bow our heads, as if we had just heard a summons to the Angelus.  This was the short story that Number Five read to The Teacups:—­

I have somewhere read this anecdote.  Louis the Fourteenth was looking out, one day, from, a window of his palace of Saint-Germain.  It was a beautiful landscape which spread out before him, and the monarch, exulting in health, strength, and the splendors of his exalted position, felt his bosom swell with emotions of pride and happiness:  Presently he noticed the towers of a church in the distance, above the treetops.  “What building is that?” he asked.  “May it please your Majesty, that is the Church of St. Denis, where your royal ancestors have been buried for many generations.”  The answer did not “please his Royal Majesty.”  There, then, was the place where he too was to lie and moulder in the dust.  He turned, sick at heart, from the window, and was uneasy until he had built him another palace, from which he could never be appalled by that fatal prospect.

Something like the experience of Louis the Fourteenth was that of the owner of

        Theterrible clock.

I give the story as transcribed from the original manuscript:—­

The clock was bequeathed to me by an old friend who had recently died.  His mind had been a good deal disordered in the later period of his life.  This clock, I am told; seemed to have a strange fascination for him.  His eyes were fastened on it during the last hours of his life.  He died just at midnight.  The clock struck twelve, the nurse told me, as he drew his last breath, and then, without any known cause, stopped, with both hands upon the hour.