“Then it may not be after all,” said Leslie excitedly.
The detective shrugged his shoulders, and took a packet from a little black bag. This he opened carefully, and placed before Leslie a morocco pocket-book and a card-case, both stamped with a gold coronet and the motto Roy et Foy, while, when the card-case was drawn open and its water-soaked contents were taken out, the cards separated easily, and there, plainly enough, was the inscription, the result of Aunt Marguerite’s inciting—
“Henri Comte des Vignes.”
Chapter Thirty Eight.
Poll Perrow goes a-Begging.
Dark days of clouds with gloomy days of rain, such as washes the fertile soil from the tops of the granite hills, leaving all bare and desolate, with nothing to break the savage desolation of the Cornish prospect but a few projecting blocks, and here and there a grim-looking, desolate engine-house standing up like a rough mausoleum erected to the memory of so much dead coin.
There were several of these in the neighbourhood of Hakemouth, records of mining adventures where blasting and piercing had gone on for years in search of that rich vein of copper or tin, which experts said existed so many feet below grass, but which always proved to be a few feet lower than was ever reached, and instead of the working leading to the resurrection of capital, it only became its grave.
The rain fell, and on the third day the wind beat, and much soil was washed down into the verdant ferny gullies, and out to sea. The waves beat and eddied and churned up the viscous sea-wrack till the foam was fixed, and sent flying in balls and flakes up the rocks and over the fields, where it lay like dirty snow.