"What did she do, Bill?" asked one boy of another.
"Why, didn't ye see? She chucked that man's watch in the river."
"Garn! that wasn't his watch!" interrupted a third, "it was a little glass tumbler. I see it!"
"Have you got my diamond?" asked the agonised Léon Bouvier of Dorrington a day later.
"No, I have not," Dorrington replied drily. "Nor has your cousin Jacques. But I know where it is, and you can get it as easily as I."
"Mon Dieu! Where?"
"At the bottom of the river Thames, exactly in the centre, rather to the right of Vauxhall Bridge, looking from this side. I expect it will be rediscovered in some future age, when the bed of the Thames is a diamond field."
The rest of Bouvier's savings went in the purchase of a boat, and in this, with a pail on a long rope, he was very busy for some time afterward. But he only got a great deal of mud into his boat.
[ THE AFFAIR OF THE "AVALANCHE BICYCLE AND TYRE CO., LIMITED"]