Miss Withers Regrets by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

making a nuisance of myself in police matters. Can’t you understand that and go away?”
    Pat pulled at his sleeve, but the lawyer stood firm. “Miss Withers, I can’t believe that you’ve retired, not with your record of successes.”
    “My successes, as you call them, were mostly beginner’s luck. I was younger and more impetuous in those days. As Emerson, a very fine poet you have no doubt never read, once said, ‘It is time to be old, to take in sail.’ ”
    Jed Nicolet smiled. “That’s from Terminus. I’ll give you a topper—the same poet wrote something about life never being so short but that there is time for courtesy. And he said,‘ ’Tis man’s perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die!’ ”
    The spinster seemed to soften just a little, and then she shook her head again. “I’ve still retired. There’s an excellent precedent. Even Sherlock Holmes retired, you know. He went off to keep bees in the country. Well, I’ve taken a leaf out of his book, only not to keep bees because I hate the nasty, stinging things.”
    “You chose tropical fish instead!” interrupted Nicolet, looking past the schoolteacher towards the big glass tank in the front window. “I got into that once. Lots of fun. But is it exciting enough for a person like yourself, with your capacity for mystery and adventure?”
    She hardened her heart. “Besides, gentlemen, I have problems of my own at the moment. I have a scalare, an angelfish, which is in worse trouble than you are. If you’ll excuse me—”
    Jed Nicolet winked at Pat and turned back to the schoolma’am. “That is a shame,” he said. “I suppose you found him leaning sideways, and then after a while he floated up to the top of the tank?”
    Miss Withers stared at him blankly, and then her face cracked into something of a smile. “So you do know fish! Yes, it was like that. Yet I did everything they said. It’s a twenty-gallon tank, with indirect lighting and water that was ripened for two whole weeks, and there’s an aerator and two heaters and umpteen varieties of aquarium plants. I’ve kept the temperature at seventy-seven degrees, I’ve—”
    “Salt water is the only thing,” Nicolet advised her. “Put the fish into a panful of warm water with half a cup of salt. I’ll show you, if I may.”
    Miss Withers hesitated and was lost. A moment later Nicolet was fishing the dying scalare from the marine wonderland, the miniature world of bright yellow sand and softly plumed Paris-green plants, through which a score or so of tiny jeweled fishes floated, like Disney drawings come to life.
    “Swinburne,” Jed Nicolet said, “wasn’t kidding when he wrote so much about our mother the sea. The blood in our veins is almost identical with sea water, less the corpuscles, of course. It’s that way with fish too. Dying salmon carried out to sea at the mouth of a river usually survive.” He dumped the limp angelfish into the saline solution, where it floated helplessly at the surface. Not even its gill fins were moving, and the broad bands of velvety black which normally striped its body were faded to a dull brownish-gray.
    Pat Montague, all this while, stood by the door, waiting for a chance to make an exit. But nobody was paying him the slightest attention. He could, he reflected, go to the chair for all they cared.
    The lawyer and Miss Withers bent over the lifeless fish. “Too late, I’m afraid,” she was saying. “It’s the end of poor Gabriel.”
    “And it looks like the end of me!” Pat put in. “If you—”
    “Hush!” said Jed Nicolet. He was gently swishing the water around in the saucepan. Suddenly he gave a sharp exclamation as there came a faint flicker of the transparent gill fins, a movement of the goggled mouth. And then the angelfish Gabriel miraculously wriggled, fought drunkenly back to an even keel.
    “So what does it all prove?” Pat demanded. “I suppose if we’d put the body of Huntley Cairns into warm