Davis made no reply. He was very pale, but looked defiant. Mrs Davis sat down on a chair and sobbed.
Leaving them in charge of Blunt, Mr Sharp then paid a visit to all the men of the place, and ere long succeeded in capturing all who had been engaged in the recent robberies, with the various proofs of their guilt—in the shape of cloth, loaves of sugar, fruit, boxes of tea, etcetera, in their apartments.
It had cost Mr Sharp and his men many weary hours of waiting and investigation, but their perseverance was at length well rewarded, for the “nest” was thoroughly “harried;” the men were dismissed and variously punished, and that portion of the Grand National Trunk Railway was, for the time, most effectually purified.
Chapter Twenty One.
The Diamond Ring and the Railway Clearing-House.
Let us turn now, for a brief space, to Edwin Gurwood. He is seated before a desk in one of the rooms of that large building in Seymour Street, Euston Square, London, where a perfect army of clerks—about a thousand—clear up many of the mysteries, and overcome a number of the difficulties, incident to the railway traffic of the kingdom.
At the particular time we write of, Edwin was frowning very hard at a business-book and thinking of Emma Lee. The cause of his frown, no doubt, was owing to the conflict between duty and inclination that happened to rage in his bosom just then. His time belonged to the railways of the United Kingdom; to Emma belonged his heart. The latter was absent without leave, and the mind, thus basely forsaken, became distracted, and refused to make good use of time.
That day Edwin met with a coincidence, he made what he believed to be a discovery, and almost at the same moment received an inquiry as to the subject of that discovery. While endeavouring, without much success, to fix his attention on a case of lost-luggage which it was his duty to investigate, and frowning as we have said, at the business-book, his eye was suddenly arrested by the name of “Durby.”