“Yes,” answered the girl wonderingly.
“Well that was one of Nashby’s pickets.”
“What? That old yokel who just passed?”
Mervyn nodded, with a whimsical smile on his face.
“But what in the world does he think he’s going to discover?”
“Ah, exactly. Well, that’s his job, not mine. Only he’s wasting a precious lot of valuable time.”
All the same the speaker was just a trifle—and unaccountably—disposed to uneasiness. What a curious coincidence it was, for instance, that his niece should have suddenly slipped and so nearly fallen, headlong, on that very stone that custodied this infernal thing! Then again, that the plain clothes man, with his unmistakable imprint of Scotland Yard, and his transparent affectation of local speech and dialect, should have happened upon the spot at the very moment of that coincidence! There was nothing in coincidence. Coincidence spelt accident:—sheer accident. Still, this one set John Seward Mervyn thinking—thinking more than a bit.