“Oh, won’t she! She will. No one will enjoy it more. She might have taken it seriously if the emeralds had been in the bag, but they weren’t.”
“Not in the bag, my lord!”
“No. Lady Trent’s maid ran off with the bag, thinking that your mistress had put the jewels in it. But she had not. Lady Trent came to the top of the stairs to call her back, as soon as she found the bag gone, but you and Berry were out of the house. So the emeralds stayed here for one night. They are on Lady Trent’s dressing-table at the present moment. Go and get a stiff whisky, Saunders. You need it. And then may I suggest that you should return for the sleeping Berry? By the way, the least you can do is to marry her, Saunders.”
“Never, my lord!” I said with decision. “I have meddled sufficiently with women.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIMA DONNA.
MANY years ago the fear of dynamite stalked through the land. An immense organisation of anarchists whose headquarters were in the United States had arranged for a number of simultaneous displays in London, Glasgow, and Quebec. As is well known now, the Parliament House at Quebec and the gasworks at Glasgow were to be blown up, while the programme for London included Scotland Yard, most of Whitehall, the House of Commons, the Tower, and four great railway stations thrown in.
This plot was laid bare, stopped, and made public, and—except a number of people who happened quite innocently to carry black bags—no one was put to the slightest inconvenience.
The dynamite scare was deemed to be at an end. But the dread organisation was in fact still active, as the sixty policemen who were injured in what is called the “Haymarket Massacre” explosion at Chicago, on May 4, 1886, have dire occasion to know.