It was open! He had but to put in his finger and draw it out, and read, and revel, like the parched traveler at the solitary well in the desert. Would that be dishonest? Who could blame him for that? He had not opened the envelope....
"Miss Prout, just give me the gum-pot," he said, for he could see that the gum on the flap was too thin to be of any service.
Hylda Prout handed him a brush, and he pasted down the flap, but with fingers so agitated that he made daubs with the gum on the envelope, daubs which anyone must notice on examination.
Meantime, he had dropped the telegram upon the table, and Hylda Prout read it.
CHAPTER X
THE DIARY, AND ROSALIND
Strange as a process of nature is the way in which events, themselves unimportant, work into one another to produce some foredestined result that shall astonish the world.
The sudden appearance of Inspector Clarke before Pauline Dessaulx at the front door of Mrs. Marsh's lodgings produced by its shock a thorough upset in the girl's moral and physical being. And in Clarke himself that diary of Rose de Bercy which Pauline handed him produced a hilarity, an almost drunken levity of mind, the results of which levity and of Pauline's upset dovetailed one with the other to bring about an effect which lost none of its singularity because it was preordained.
To Clarke the diary was a revelation! Moreover, it was one of those sweet revelations which placed the fact of his own wit and wisdom in a clearer light than he had seen those admitted qualities before, for it showed that, though working in the dark, he had been guided aright by that special candle of understanding that must have been lit within him before his birth.