"Do you think there is still a chance of your doing so?"
"There is always a chance," the other answered; "but I have exhausted nearly everything. You see, I have so little to go on, and I am obliged to say out openly, in every inquiry I make, that I am looking for a certain man of the name of Corot. And they all give me the same answer, that they never heard of such a name. Yet his name must have been Corot."
"I do not think so," Stuart said. "A Spaniard would sign an initial before his name just the same as an Englishman would, and no Englishman would sign himself simply 'Jones,' or 'Smith.'"
"It can't be a Christian name," Dobson said, "or they would have been sure to say so, and ask me 'What Corot?' or 'Corot who' is it that you are looking for?"
"Lord Penlyn thinks it is a nickname," Stuart remarked.
"Then I shall certainly never find him. A man when he is travelling in a strange country doesn't use his nickname, and, as far as I can learn, there isn't any one here from the Republic of Honduras who ever heard of him; and it isn't any good asking people from British Honduras."
"Well," Stuart said, "we must go on trying by every means, and in the hopes that the amount of the rewards will lead to something. But there seems little prospect of our ever finding the cowardly assassin who slew him. Perhaps, after all, that labourer killed him for his watch and chain, and any money he might have about him. Such things have been done before."
"I don't believe that," Dobson said. "There was a motive for his murder. But, what was that motive?"
Then they parted, Stuart to have an interview with Lord Penlyn, and Dobson to again continue his investigations in similar resorts to the Hôtel Lepanto.
Meanwhile, Penlyn had nerved himself for another interview with Ida Raughton, an interview in which he was to tell her everything, and he went down to Belmont to do so.