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the clock.
    Swindle slept. And Sherris Hall, like some palace appropriately disposed round its Sleeping Beauty, slept too. Doves cooed behind the stables; faintly from woods beyond came the caw of rooks; in the rose garden the last belated bees were making their rounds. Cobweb and dead leaves possessed the racquet-court; the billiard-table showed white and shrouded like some gigantic mortuary slab; in the kitchens culinary preparations proceeded on the unambitious level and restricted scale proper to a masterless house. But it was over Sir Oliver’s study, a handsome room giving on the west terrace, that the heaviest sense of suspended animation hung. Dust and soot were gathering on the elaborately laid fire in the enormous fireplace. On one side of the desk was ranged a row of unopened financial journals and on the other, ominously high, a pile of bills. In the tantalus nearby the decanters were filled to the brim and beneath them stood a file of glasses in undisturbed repose. Every day housemaids went dutifully through the room with dusters. But for weeks, and apart from this, almost nothing had been touched except the cigar cabinet, a repository which Swindle found occasion to visit each morning shortly after breakfast.
    Everyone was idle.
    In the slanting rays of the declining sun Grubb the gardener sat on a barrow and smoked his pipe. His day’s work had consisted in walking slowly through the greenhouses and pinching off appropriate parts of the tomato plants. Although only in late middle age, Grubb had memories of Sherris stretching back to very different times, and he mingled the irritating role of laudatory temporis acti with some immemorial grudge against the whole establishment for which he laboured or was employed to labour. Now he was watching, censoriously but without any prompting to appropriate action, his assistant William neglect the necessary repair of the lawn-mower to gossip with a groom who was failing to exercise Miss Lucy’s mare.
    Nor were matters anywhere more actively ordered within doors, and Miss Lucy herself was now sitting idly at her bureau, a bookseller’s bill and two letters from a dressmaker lying forlornly before her. Lady Dromio alone was unaffected by the spell; she prowled from room to room, vague but yet alert, and whenever her eye fell upon a calendar she paused before it and her lips moved in silent calculation. And silence held the house. Only in the dining-room where the parlourmaid, being sulky, was contriving to extract noise out of laying silver for three, could a sound be heard. Sherris, like the house of Morpheus in the poem, might have been conceived as wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies. But this, as it happened, would have been an error. Fate was marching upon Sherris now.
    High above the offices the hands of the stable clock moved to the minute before seven. A deep whir, as of the clock gathering its forces to strike the hour, floated down and through the nearer gardens and the house itself. Almost imperceptibly the household stirred uneasily. Swindle set down his glass and opened an eye. Grubb took his pipe from his mouth as if about to admonish Williams in the matter of the mower. The parlourmaid set two forks silently on the table and turned briskly for the spoons. Lucy made as if to take up her pen. Lady Dromio laid a decisive finger on the calendar before her…
    But only silence followed. Some months ago the stable clock had ceased to strike and any preliminary mustering of its powers was in vain. Swindle closed his eye, Grubb returned to sucking his pipe, the parlourmaid set down the salt-cellars with a slap, Lucy’s hand fell to her side, Lady Dromio turned and drifted restlessly to the next room.
     
    At five minutes past seven the blast of a motor horn sounded from the highroad half a mile off. Not many seconds later it was heard more loudly at the lodge gates. Then again, and most unnecessarily, it blared out on the drive.
    Instantaneously Sherris