conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about George, Jane, Lord entitled The Golden Ball and Other Stories.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Golden Ball and Other Stories: Mrs st Vincent is a genteel lady living in reduced circumstances with her son and daughter, Rupert and Barbara.\nAfter her husband\'s financial speculations went wrong, he died, and they were forced to vacate the house, which had been in their family for generations.\nThey now live in rooms in a boarding house (which has seen better times) and, due to these surroundings, are unable to entertain people of similar class and upbringing.\nRupert has just started a job in the city, with excellent prospects but, at this point in time, only a small income.\nBarbara enjoyed a trip to Egypt the previous winter with – and paid for by – her richer cousin.\nOn this trip she met a young man called Jim Masterson, who is interested in courting her, but who would be put off if he saw their reduced circumstances.\nLooking through the Morning Post, Mrs st Vincent sees an advertisement for a house to let in Westminster, furnished, and with a nominal rent.\nAlthough she thinks she has little chance of being able to afford the house, she goes to see the house agents and then the house itself, and is instantly taken with it and pleasantly surprised at its very low rent.\nThe agents offer her the house for a six-month rental.\nBarbara is delighted, but Rupert is suspicious – the house belonged to Lord Listerdale, who disappeared eighteen months previously and supposedly turned up in East Africa, supplying his cousin, Colonel Carfax, with power of attorney.\nThey take the house and are looked after in style by Quentin, the butler, whose wages are paid for by Lord Listerdale\'s estate, as are the wages of the two other servants.\nDelicious food regularly turns up on the table.\nIt is sent up regularly from his Lordship\'s country seat of King\'s Cheviot – an old custom.\nAfter three months, Mrs st Vincent is very happy in the house and Jim has proposed to Barbara.\nRupert still entertains his suspicions, and is somewhat convinced that Listerdale is not in Africa, but has perhaps been murdered, and his body hidden in the house.\nRupert also suspects Quentin of being part of whatever plot has occurred.\nRupert goes on a motorcycling holiday, which takes him near to King\'s Cheviot.\nSpotting someone who resembles Quentin, he questions the man, who tells him he is really called Quentin; was butler to Lord Listerdale; but retired on a pension to an estate cottage some time before.\nRupert brings the real butler to London and to confronts the fake one.\nThe real butler tells an astonished st Vincent family that the fake is in fact Lord Listerdale himself.\nHis Lordship explains that, ashamed of his selfish life to date, he faked his relocation to Africa, and has since spent his time helping people like the st Vincents, whose lives have been reduced to something akin to begging.\nOver the past few months, he has fallen in love with Mrs st Vincent, and now proposes marriage to the delighted lady.\nGeorge Rowland is a mildly dissolute young man who is dependent on his rich uncle for both his keep and his job at the family\'s city firm.\nAnnoyed with his nephew\'s late night carousing, his uncle sacks him.\nAnnoyed in turn with his uncle, George makes plans to leave home.\nAbandoning ambitious plans to go to the colonies, George decides instead to travel by train from Waterloo to a place he spots in an ABC guide called Rowland\'s Castle where he is sure he will be welcomed with open arms by the feudal inhabitants.\nHe is happily alone in the first class carriage when a girl jumps onto the train begging to be hidden.\nGeorge chivalrously hides her under the train seat before a moustached foreign man appears at the window and "demands" his niece back.\nGeorge calls a platform guard who detains the foreign man, and the train departs.\nThe girl introduces herself as Elizabeth but tells George that she can\'t give him an explanation of her actions.\nAt the next station, she gets off the train.\nWhile speaking to George through the window, she spots a man with a small dark beard further down the platform getting into the train and tells George to keep an eye on him and to guard safely a package that she hands to him.\nGeorge follows the bearded man down to Portsmouth, books into the same commercial hotel, and watches him carefully.\nHe is aware that there is another, ginger-haired man carefully watching both of them.\nHe follows the bearded man as he goes on a quick walk through the streets, which ends up taking them both back to their hotel with no sign of any assignation.\nGeorge wonders if the bearded man has spotted that he is being watched.\nHis suspicions grow further when the ginger-haired man returns to the hotel, also seemingly after a night\'s walk.\nHis puzzlement increases when two foreign men call at the hotel and ask George (although calling him "Lord Rowland") where the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Catonia, a small Balkan state, has gone to.\nThe younger of the two men grows violent but George is able to subdue him with Jiu-Jitsu.\nThe two men leave, uttering threats.\nThat night, George watches the black-bearded man as he secretes a small packet behind the skirting board in the bathroom.\nReturning to his own room, George finds the package Elizabeth gave him has gone from its hiding place under the pillow.\nAfter breakfast, the package has returned to his room but, investigating its contents at last, George finds only a box with a wedding ring inside it.\nHe hears from the chambermaid that she is unable to gain access to the black-bearded man\'s room and decides to gain access himself via a parapet outside the window.\nHe deduces that the man escaped via the fire escape just before he hears a noise from inside the wardrobe and, investigating, is attacked from within by the ginger-haired man.\nThe latter identifies himself as DI Jarrold of Scotland Yard.\nThe black-bearded man was called Mardenberg and was a foreign spy who secreted the plans of the Portsmouth harbour defences behind the skirting board.\nHis accomplice is a young girl, and George wonders if this could have been Elizabeth.\nHe is on the train back to London when he reads of a secret wedding between the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Catonia and Lord Roland Gaigh.\nAt the next station Elizabeth gets onto the train and explains events to George.\nShe was acting as a decoy for Anastasia to throw her uncle, who opposed the romance, off the scent, and the black-bearded man and the packet were simply a ruse to distract George – another wedding ring could easily have been procured, and George\'s adventures with the spy were a remarkable coincidence.\nGeorge realises that Elizabeth is actually Lord Gaigh\'s sister.\nHe proposes to her.\nHis uncle will be delighted he is marrying into the aristocracy, and Elizabeth\'s parents, with five daughters, will be delighted that she is marrying into money.\nShe accepts.\nEdward Robinson is a young man firmly under the thumb of his fiancée, Maud, who does not wish to rush into marriage until his prospects and income improve.\nHe is a romantic at heart who wishes he was masterful and rugged like the men he reads of in novels.\nSomewhat impetuous in nature, he enters a competition and wins the first prize of £500.\nHe doesn\'t tell Maud of this, knowing she will insist the money is wisely invested for the future, and instead uses it to buy a small two-seater car.\nOn Christmas Eve, on holiday from his work as a clerk, he goes for a drive into the country.\nStopping off in the dark evening at the Devil\'s Punch Bowl, he gets out of his car to admire the view and takes a short walk.\nHe returns to his vehicle and drives back to London but on the way, reaching into the door pocket for his muffler, he instead finds a diamond necklace.\nIn shock, he realises that although it is the same model car as his, it is not the same car.\nBy coincidence, he got into the wrong car after his walk and drove off.\nHe returns to the Punch Bowl but his car has gone.\nSearching further, he finds a note in the car he is driving which gives instructions to meet someone at a local village at ten o\'clock.\nHe keeps the assignation and meets a beautiful woman in evening dress and cloak who thinks he is someone called Gerald.\nTelling her his name is Edward, she is not thrown by the mistake and in conversation reveals that \'Gerald\'s\' brother is called Edward but she hasn\'t seen him since she was six years old.\nShe gets in the car but realises quickly that Edward has only recently learnt to drive and takes the wheel herself.\nShe tells Edward a story about her and \'Jimmy\' having successfully stolen the necklace from a rich lady called Agnes Larella.\nShe drives him to a London townhouse where the butler arranges evening dress for him and the lady drives them onto Ritson\'s – the nightclub of the rich and famous.\nHe drinks cocktails and dances with the lady who he discovers is Lady Noreen Elliot, a famous society debutante and the theft of the necklace was in fact an elaboration of a treasure hunt, the rule being that the \'stolen\' item must be worn in public for one hour to claim the prize.\nAs Edward and Lady Noreen leave the nightclub, the real Gerald turns up in Edward\'s car and also reveals Edward not to be the one Noreen thought he was.\nEdward hurriedly retrieves his car and is about to drive off when Noreen begs him to \'be a sport\' and give her the necklace so she can return it.\nHe does so and receives a passionate kiss in return.\nEdward arrives at Maud\'s home in Clapham the next day.\nHe happily admits to the competition win and buying the car and tells her that he means to marry her next month, despite her objections.\nMaud is much taken with her newly masterful fiancé and agrees.\nJane Cleveland, a young woman of twenty-six, is in need of a job.\nHer financial position is precarious and she lives in a shabby boarding house.\nBrowsing the Daily Leader jobs column, she finds nothing of note, but in the personal column she sees an advert for a young woman of her age, build and height who is a good mimic and can speak French.\nShe goes to the address given and is one of many girls queuing up in answer to the advert.\nGetting through to the final six, she is interviewed by a foreign gentleman and told to go to Harridge\'s hotel and ask for Count Streptitch.\nPresenting herself there as instructed, Jane is again interviewed by the Count and then introduced to an ugly middle-aged lady by the title of Princess Poporensky who both declare her to be suitable.\nThey ask Jane if she doesn\'t mind the prospect of danger, to which she answers that she doesn\'t.\nFinally, Jane is introduced to the Grand Duchess Pauline of Ostrava, exiled from her country after a Communist revolution.\nJane is similar in looks and colouring to the Grand Duchess although she is slightly smaller in height.\nIt is explained to Jane that the Grand Duchess is the target of assassination attempts by the people who overthrew and slaughtered her family and that they want Jane to act as a decoy for her during the next two weeks when she is in Britain and has to attend several charitable events.\nJane agrees and is given money to stay at the nearby Blitz hotel (under the assumed name of Miss Montresor of New York) and to buy a dress to wear when she is following the Grand Duchess to the events, during which they will swap dresses when they suspect that a kidnap or murder attempt is imminent.\nJane suggests a bright red dress in contrast to the Grand Duchess\' dress of choice for a charity bazaar at Orion House ten miles outside London and that she will wear high-heeled boots to cover up the difference in height.\nThree days later, the bazaar is taking place.\nThe main feature of it is that one-hundred society women will each donate one pearl, which will be auctioned the next day.\nThe real Grand Duchess declares the bazaar open and meets the people there.\nWhen it is time to depart, she and Jane swap dresses in a side room, and Jane leaves in the Duchess\' place – news having reached them that the assassins will make an attempt on the journey back to Harridge\'s.\nJane is travelling back with the Princess Poporensky when the chauffeur takes them down a side road and down an unknown and secluded route, stops the car and holds up the two women with a pistol.\nThey are at an empty house, which they are locked in.\nA short time later, bowls of soup are given to the two women, which Jane eats but the Princess refuses.\nJane falls asleep suddenly.\nThe next day Jane wakes up.\nShe is alone in the house and inexplicably back in her red dress.\nShe finds a newspaper in the house, which states that the charity bazaar was help up by a girl in a red dress and three other men.\nThey stole the pearls and got away.\nThe girl in the red dress has been traced as staying at the Blitz hotel under the name of Miss Montresor of New York – Jane realises that she has been set up by a gang of jewel thieves.\nShe hears someone in garden and finds a young man coming round from having been knocked out.\nHe and Jane swap stories and the young man reveals that he was at the bazaar and was puzzled when he saw the Grand Duchess enter a room in low-heeled shoes and exit in high-heeled ones.\nHe followed her to the empty house and saw a second car arrive with three men and a woman in a red dress.\nPresently, this woman came out in the Duchess\' dress and all except Jane seemed to have departed but when the young man went to investigate he was knocked out.\nThey suddenly become aware that another man is nearby and listening to them.\nHe introduces himself as Detective-Inspector Farrell and, having overheard the stories that the two told, all has become clear to him; and he realises what really happened at the bazaar hold-up and that Jane is innocent.\nThe young man reveals that having seen Jane at the bazaar, he has fallen in love with her… Dorothy Pratt, a housemaid, is enjoying a Sunday drive in a cheap old car with her young man, Edward Palgrove.\nThey stop at a roadside fruit stall and buy a basket of fruit from the seller who tells them with a leer on his face that they are getting more than their money\'s worth.\nStopping off near a stream, they sit by the road to eat the fruit and read in a discarded Sunday paper of the theft of a ruby necklace worth fifty thousand pounds.\nA moment later, they find such a necklace in the bottom of the basket.\nEdward is shocked and scared of the sight, seeing the possibility of arrest and imprisonment but Dorothy sees the possibility of a new and better life from selling the jewels to a \'fence\'.\nEdward is shocked by the suggestion and demands that she hand them over which she reluctantly does.\nThe next day, Dorothy contacts Edward.\nShe has come to her senses after a sleepless night and realises that they must hand the necklace back.\nOn the way back from his office-clerk job that night, Edward reads the latest developments on the jewel robbery in the newspaper but it is another adjacent story, which catches his attention.\nHe meets Dorothy that night and shows her the second story – it is about a successful advertising stunt in which one out of fifty baskets of fruit sold will contain an imitation necklace.\nTo their mutual relief, they realise that they are not the possessors of the stolen necklace.\nGeorge Dundas is sacked by his uncle from his job for taking too much time off work.\nHe is accused of not grasping the "golden ball of opportunity".\nWalking through the city, he is stopped by a society girl, Mary Montresor, in her expensive touring car who driving past Hyde Park Corner questions George as to whether or not he would like to marry her.\nSomewhat distracted by Mary\'s reckless driving, he has answered yes when he sees newspaper bills, which tell that Mary is to marry the Duke of Edgehill.\nMary doesn\'t seem interested in her commitment and suggests they drive into the country and find a place to live.\nGoing along with her, George agrees.\nHeading southwest they spot a house on the brow of a hill that Mary likes and go to investigate.\nMary states that they will suggest to anyone that is there that they thought it belonged to a "Mrs Pardonstenger" to cover up their investigations.\nPeeping through the windows they are approached by a butler who does not seem surprised by the pseudonym Mary uses and asks them into the house.\nOnce inside they are quickly accosted by a man and a woman.\nThe man produces a revolver and tells George and Mary to go upstairs at gunpoint.\nAt the top of the stairs, George suddenly fights back and knocks the man out badly.\nGeorge is all for tying the man up but Mary begs him to leave the house, which they do, George taking the revolver with him.\nOnce in the car, he checks the gun and is astonished to find that it isn\'t loaded.\nMary confesses that the house is hers and the situation they found themselves in was staged by her as a test of any prospective husband and how he would react instinctively to protect her from danger.\nAll so far have failed the test.\nThe couple in the house were engaged by her for the purpose, the man being Rube Wallace, a film actor.\nAs George has been proposed to and passed the test, he suggests getting a special licence for the wedding.\nMary however wants him to go down on bended knee, which George refuses to do, telling her that it is degrading.\nWhen they arrive in London and he contrives to slip on a banana skin when he gets out of the car, thereby getting down on one knee.\nGeorge enjoys going back to his uncle and telling him that he is going to marry a rich young society girl – he has grasped the golden ball.\nJames Bond, a young man, is on holiday at a fashionable coastal resort with his young lady, Grace.\nThey observe the proprieties of the age by staying in separate accommodation.\nHe is in a cheap boarding house while she has put herself up in the high-class Esplanade Hotel on the front where she has discovered friends are staying – Claud Sopworth and his three sisters.\nAt almost every opportunity James is being treated in a fairly cavalier manner by Grace and one more arises when Claud suggests they all go bathing in the sea.\nThe Esplanade has its own changing huts on the beach, which James, as a non-resident, is not allowed to use.\nHe therefore has to leave his "friends" and use the public huts, all of which have long queues.\nHe takes a chance and uses an unlocked private hut belonging to one of the large private villas in the resort.\nAfter their sea-bathe, James changes back into his clothes which he left in the hut but doesn\'t join Grace or the others for lunch as he has taken offence at her jibes at the cheap trousers he is wearing.\nEating in a dingy café, James is astounded to find a large emerald in his pocket.\nFrom reading stories in the resort\'s weekly paper, he has no doubt it belongs to the Rajah of Maraputna who is staying at Lord Edward Campion\'s private villa and that when he changed out of his bathing clothes, he put on the wrong trousers (the beach hut belonging to Lord Campion).\nLeaving the café he sees newspaper bills stating that the Rajah\'s emerald has been stolen.\nWondering why a priceless emerald was left in a beach hut in the first place, he goes back to the hut to change back into his own trousers when he is suddenly stopped by a man who shows him his badge and identifies himself as Detective-Inspector Merrilees of Scotland Yard who is on the track of the emerald.\nJames is arrested and claims that the emerald is at his lodging.\nThe policeman is taking him back there but on the way they pass a police station and James suddenly grabs the man and shouts for the police himself, claiming that Merrilees has picked his pocket.\nThe police search Merrilees and find the emerald, which James secreted there.\nJames is in turned accused but Lord Campion arrives and identifies Merrilees as Jones, his suspected valet.\nWhat James doesn\'t tell Lord Campion is that the badge that "Merrilees" showed him was a badge for a cycling club that, by coincidence, James also belongs to.\nLord Campion invites James to his villa for lunch, an invitation he is delighted to accept, also enjoying the opportunity to turn down a half-hearted invitation from Grace and the Sopwith siblings in the process.\nMadame Paula Nazorkoff, the famous but temperamental operatic soprano, is in London for a short series of appearances.\nHer manager, Mr Cowan, has arranged five appearances at Covent Garden as well as a single appearance at the Albert Hall and also a performance of Madame Butterfly at the private theatre in the castle home of Lord and Lady Rustonbury where royalty will be present.\nThe name seems familiar to Madame Nazorkoff and she realises that she read of it in an illustrated magazine, which is still with her in her Ritz Hotel room.\nScanning through it, she immediately becomes less scornful of the idea but insists that the performance be changed to Tosca.\nMr Cowan hears her mutter, "At last, at last – after all these years".\nPreparations on the day at the home of Lord Rustonbury are going well until Signor Roscari, due to sing the part of Scarpia, suddenly falls strangely ill.\nLady Rustonbury remembers that a nearby neighbour is Edouard Bréon, the retired French baritone and she drives off to ask him to step in at the last moment.\nHe agrees and returns.\nIn the hall of the castle he reminisces over past performances of Tosca that he has heard, stating that the best one was over twenty years before by a young girl called Bianca Capelli.\nShe was foolish though as she was in love with a man involved with the Camorra and begged Breon to use his influence to save his life when he was condemned to death.\nBréon states he did nothing for the man as he was not worth it and, after his execution, Capelli entered a convent.\nBlanche, the Rustonbury\'s daughter, watches Mr Cowan as Nazorkoff claims that as a Russian she is not so fickle.\nThe performance goes well and the invited audience are appreciative.\nThe second act reaches its climax as the character of Tosca stabs Scarpia.\nAfter the curtain has fallen, one of stagehands rushes out and a doctor is called for.\nNazorkoff was apparently so involved with her performance that she really did stab Bréon.\nBlanche knows differently though and she tells how she has realised that Nazorkoff was in fact Capelli, who has waited years for her revenge on the man who let her lover die – the story of Tosca has come to life.\nAs the police take Nazorkoff away, she quotes another line from opera – "La commedia e finite.\n" ("The show is over").\nWilliam Ryan, an American journalist, is having lunch with a friend called Anstruther when he hears that the latter is about to visit his sister in Folbridge, Cornwall, at her house called "Treane".\nRyan has heard of the place, and tells a story from the recent First World War when he heard of a German attempt to take over a convent during the Rape of Belgium.\nAs soon as the soldiers entered the building it blew up, killing them all.\nIt was proven that the soldiers had no high explosives on them, and speaking with the locals afterwards Ryan was told of one of the nuns having miraculous powers: she brought down a lightning bolt from heaven that destroyed the convent and killed the Germans.\nAll that was left of the building were two walls, one of which had a powder mark in the shape of a giant hound.\nThis scared the local peasants who avoided the area after dark.\nThe nun in question survived and went with other refugees to "Treane" in Cornwall, and Anstruther confirms that his sister did take in some Belgians at the time.\nIn Cornwall, Anstruther finds out from his sister that the nun, Marie Angelique, is still in the area.\nShe has constant hallucinations and is being studied by a local, new, young doctor by the name of Rose, who intends to write a monograph on her condition.\nAnstruther meets Rose and persuades him to let him meet the young nun.\nShe is boarding with the local district nurse.\nShe talks of her dreams, but when Anstruther tells her of the story he heard from Ryan, she is shocked to realise that what she thought was a dream was true – that of unleashing the "Hound of Death" on the Germans as they approached the altar.\nShe rambles on about the "City of Circles" and the "People of the Crystal", and when they have left her, Rose tells Anstruther that he has heard her mention crystals before, and on a previous occasion he produced a crystal and showed it to her to test her reaction.\nShe gasped, "Then the faith still lives.\n" The next day, the young nun tells Anstruther that she feels that the crystal is a symbol of faith, possibly a second Christ, and the faith has endured for many centuries.\nRose tries a word association test in which Marie Angelique makes references to signs – and the sixth sign is destruction.\nAnstruther starts to feel uneasy about Rose\'s interest in the case, suspecting something more than purely medical motives.\nSome time later, Anstruther receives a letter from the nun in which she voices her fears of Rose and says that the doctor is trying to obtain her powers by progressing to the sixth sign.\nThe same day he hears from his sister that both Rose and the nun are dead.\nA landslide swept away the cliffside cottage they were in, and the debris on the beach is in the shape of a giant hound.\nHe also hears that Rose\'s rich uncle died the same night, struck by lightning, although there were no storms in the area, and the burn-mark on him is in an unusual shape.\nRemembering comments from Marie Angelique, Anstruther wonders if Rose acquired the ancient (or possibly future.\n) powers of the crystal but failed to control them properly, resulting in his own death.\nHis fears are confirmed when he comes into possession of Rose\'s notes which detail his attempts to become a superman with "the Power of Death" in his hands.\nDickie Carpenter breaks off his recent engagement to Esther Lawes and confides the reason to Mcfarlane, a dour Scot who is the fiancée of Rachel Lawes, Esther\'s younger sister.\nDickie, a former naval man, has had an aversion to gypsies since his childhood, when he started to have recurring dreams in which a he would be in a given situation and suddenly feel a presence.\nWhen he looked up, a gypsy woman would be stood there looking at him.\nThe sudden appearance of this woman always unnerved him, although it wasn\'t until some years after these dreams started that he encountered a real gypsy.\nThis happened on a walk in the New Forest, and she warned him not to take a certain path.\nHe ignored her and the wooden bridge he was crossing broke beneath his weight, casting him into the fast-running stream below and nearly drowning him.\nThese occurrences came back to him when he returned to England and started to see the Lawes family.\nAt one dinner party he saw a woman called Alistair Haworth whom he seemed to see in his own eyes as wearing a red scarf on her head, just like the gypsy of his dreams.\nHe walked on the terrace with her after dinner and she warned him not to go back into the house.\nHe did so and found himself falling for Esther Lawes.\nThey became engaged a week later and two weeks after that he again caught sight of Mrs Haworth who once more warned him.\nHe again ignored her and that very night Esther stated that, after all, she didn\'t love him.\nThe reason he is now confiding in Macfarlane is that he is due for a routine operation, and he thought he saw in one of the nurses in the hospital the image of Mrs Haworth, who warned him not to go ahead with the surgery.\nDickie subsequently dies during the operation and some impulse makes Macfarlane go to see Mrs Haworth at her moorland home.\nThere he is surprised to find that her husband is not really suited to such a striking woman as her.\nThe two walk on the moors and Mrs Haworth tells Macfarlane that he too has second sight.\nFor proof, she asks him to look at a rock and he fancies he sees a hollow filled with blood.\nShe tells him it is a sacrificial stone from olden times and he has had his own vision.\nShe confides that she married her husband because she saw some portent hanging over him and wanted to prevent it.\nShe also tells Macfarlane that they won\'t meet again.\nDetermined to challenge the fates, Macfarlane drives back from his inn to the Haworth\'s cottage the next day and finds that the lady is dead.\nShe drank something poisonous thinking it was her tonic and her husband is beside himself with grief.\nBack at his inn, the landlady tells him stories of long-gone ghosts seen on the moor, including a sailor and a gypsy.\nMacfarlane wonders if they will walk again.\nA Mrs Lancaster takes a lease on an empty house that sits in a square in an old cathedral town.\nSuspicious of the extremely low rent, she correctly guesses that the house is haunted and pushes the agent for details.\nHe reluctantly tells her the version of the story that he has heard, about a man called Williams living there some thirty years ago with his young son.\nWilliams went up to London for the day and, being a wanted man on the run, was arrested and jailed by the police.\nHis young son was left to fend for himself in the house but died of starvation.\nThe story goes that the boy\'s sobbing as he waits for his father to return can sometimes be heard.\nMrs Lancaster soon moves into the house with her elderly father, Mr Winburn, and her lively young son, Geoffrey.\nMr Winburn knows that the house is haunted and hears another set of footsteps on the stairs following his grandson down.\nHe also has a disturbing dream that he is in a town populated by no one but children who are begging him to know if he has "brought him".\nIn addition, he overhears the servants gossiping about hearing a child cry.\nSomewhat oblivious to this, Geoffrey nevertheless asks his startled mother if he can play with the little boy that he sometimes sees watching him, but Mrs Lancaster brusquely stops all such talk.\nA month later, Geoffrey starts to fall ill and even his mother begins to hear the sobs of the other little boy with whom they seem to share the house.\nThe doctor confesses to his grandfather that there is little they can do as Geoffrey\'s lungs were never strong.\nOne night, Geoffrey dies and his mother and grandfather suddenly hear the sound of the other child\'s joyous laughter and the receding sound of two pairs of footsteps.\nThe little boy has a playmate at last.\nDr Edward Carstairs, a noted psychologist, is called in to investigate the case of Sir Arthur Carmichael, a young man of twenty-three who woke up the previous morning at his estate in Herefordshire with a totally changed personality.\nCarstairs travels down there with a colleague called Dr Settle, who tells him that he feels that the house could be haunted, and that this phenomenon has connections with the case.\nThe household consists of Sir Arthur, his stepmother, Lady Carmichael, his half-brother of eight years of age, and a Miss Phyllis Patterson to whom Arthur is engaged to be married.\nAs their horse carriage comes up the drive, they see Miss Patterson walking across the lawn, and Carstairs remarks on the cat at her feet which provokes a startled reaction from Settle.\nGoing into the house, they make the acquaintance of Lady Carmichael and Miss Patterson, and again Carstairs causes a reaction when he mentions seeing the cat.\nThey then see their patient and observe his strange behaviour – sitting hunched, without speaking, then stretching and yawning and drinking a cup of milk without using his hands.\nAfter dinner that night, Carstairs hears a cat meowing, and this sound is repeated during the night outside his bedroom door, but he is unable to find the animal in the house.\nThe next morning he does spy the cat from the bedroom window as it walks across the lawn and straight through a flock of birds which seem oblivious to its presence.\nHe is further puzzled when Lady Carmichael insists that there is no cat in their home.\nTalking to a footman, Carstairs is informed that there used to be a cat, but it was destroyed a week ago and buried in the grounds.\nThere are further appearances of this apparition, and they realise that it is targeting Lady Carmichael.\nCarstairs even dreams of the cat the following night: in the dream, he follows it into the library and it shows him to a gap in the volumes on the bookshelf.\nThe next morning, Carstairs and Settle find that there is a book missing from that very spot in the room, and Carstairs glimpses the truth later on in the day when Sir Arthur jumps off his chair when he spots a mouse, and crouches near the wainscoting, waiting for it to appear.\nThat night, Lady Carmichael is badly attacked in her bed by the ghostly creature, and this prompts Carstairs to insist that the body of the dead cat be dug up.\nIt is, and he sees that it is the very creature that he has spotted several times, and a smell shows that it was killed by prussic acid.\nSeveral days pass, as Lady Carmichael starts to recover, until one day Sir Arthur falls into the water of the lake.\nPulled out onto the bank, he is first thought that to be dead, but he comes round and he has also recovered his personality, but he has no recollection of the intervening days.\nThe sight of him gives Lady Carmichael such a shock that she dies on the spot, and the missing book from the library is found – a volume on the subject of the transformation of people into animals.\nThe inference is that lady Carmichael used the book to put Sir Arthur\'s soul into the cat, then killed it to ensure that her own son would inherit the title and estate.\nAs stated at the beginning of the story, Carstairs later died, and his notes containing the details of the case were subsequently found.\nMillionaire Silas Hamer and East-End Parson Dick Borrow, after having dinner with their friend Bertrand Seldon, discuss how they are completely opposite in nature, yet both contentedly happy.\nHamer is economically happy because he has risen from his poverty-ridden background and built up a fortune, whereas Borrow is spiritually happy because he aids the poor.\nThe two go their separate ways home, and on his way Silas witnesses a homeless man being hit by a bus and killed.\nThinking he could have saved the man, Silas goes home mentally troubled.\nBefore he goes through his front door, he hears a legless piper playing a tune that he feels lifts him off the ground in joy.\nHaving heard this tune for several days before falling asleep, he thinks that he floats around his bedroom with joy, witnessing amazing scenes of red sand, and a completely new colour that he nicknames Wing Colour.\nHowever, every time something pulls him back to the ground, causing him physical pain.\nHe talks to his friend Seldon about it, to which the nerve-specialist replies he should talk to the piper and ask about the music.\nSilas confronts the piper, and demands to know who he is.\nIn response, the piper draws a picture of the faun god Pan (who has goat\'s legs) playing his pipes on a rock, and saying "They were evil", implying that the piper is the god Pan, who had his legs cut off to appear human.\nNow addicted to the music, Silas feels that his wealth is the only thing stopping him from reaching true happiness.\nIn response, he donates all of his money to Dick Borrow, so that he can help the whole of East London.\nDeciding to get the train home, Silas waits and the platform with a homeless man.\nThe man, in a drunken stupor, walks to the edge and accidentally falls off as the train is about to arrive.\nRemembering the man hit by a bus, Silas pulls the man off the tracks and throws him onto the platform, himself falling onto the tracks in the process.\nBefore he is killed, he briefly hears a piper playing.