"What writing do you mean?" he inquired, quite in the dark.
"The address on the parcel."
"What sort of parcel?" he exclaimed, as the truth flashed across him. "Quite small? Brown paper? Quick! Quick! I want to know!"
"Yes—yes—and you don't know what was in it! Oh, Denis!"
"I know what should have been," he said, grimly: "my first nugget—according to promise. But it was stolen, and afterward found."
"And you don't know what was put in instead? Did you lose nothing else?"
Denis stood stock-still in the deepening dusk. No, he had never thought of that; even now his simplicity could not credit it until he had drawn every detail from Nan's lips. The ring had possessed intrinsic value. He had always looked upon that as an ordinary theft. The discovery of the stolen nugget on Jewson's body had puzzled him, but it was partially accounted for by another strange fact which had come to light after the man's death, namely, that the nugget had been purchased by Jewson in the first instance, elsewhere on the diggings, and deliberately planted at the bottom of the shaft where Denis found it. And not till this moment, months afterward, had Denis penetrated the dead man's design.
"You have indeed been cheated," he said, bitterly. "Yet to believe me capable of behaving like that without a word! To have known me as little as all that! Why, there was trickery on the face of it. But how can I talk? They took me in, too—decent people don't dream of such villainy—so I was fair game at one end, and you at the other. I begin to see the whole thing. Do you remember when we said good-bye on board your ship?"
"Do I remember!"
"It was then you gave me what I wore night and day until it was stolen and sent back to you."