"Did you with your own eyes see Mr. and Miss Van Loal start by the Southampton boat this morning?"
"I did, sir. I was instructed to look after their luggage this morning. I took it down to the boat and saw the old gentleman and the young lady safe aboard. They went below deck at once, and two minutes later the steamer was off."
"A very clear and conclusive narrative," said Ducie. "You are the man, I believe, who looks after the letters and attends to the post bag?"
"I am, sir."
"Were there any letters by the afternoon post yesterday for Mr. Van Loal?"
"No, sir, not one. I can speak positively to that."
Left alone, Captain Ducie sat down in a perfect maze of perplexity. That Van Loal and his daughter were gone he could no longer doubt. But why had they gone without a hint or word of farewell? They must have known at the time they were dining with him the previous evening that they were about to sail on the following morning, and yet they allowed him to plan and arrange for the day's excursion as though any thought of change were the last thing in their minds. And Mirpah, too--what of her? What of the woman whom it was his intention to have proposed to that very day? Had she merely been playing with him all along in order that she might jilt him at last? He could not understand the thing at all. He was mazed, utterly dumbfounded, like a man walking in a dream. The more he thought of the affair, the less comprehensible it seemed to him. His amour propre was terribly wounded. More intolerable than all else was the sense there was upon him of having been outwitted, of having in some mysterious way been made the victim of a plot with the beginning and ending of which he was utterly unacquainted. He had been hoodwinked--bamboozled--he felt sure of it: but how and for what purpose he was quite at a loss to fathom. His Diamond was perfectly safe; he had never gambled with Van Loal; whatever his looks might have conveyed, he had never spoken a word of love to Mirpah, so that it was impossible she could have taken offence with him on that score. What, then, was the meaning of it all? He rang the bell to inquire whether Mr. Van Loal had left no note, or message of any kind for him. None whatever, was the reply.
"What a preposterous idiot I must have been," murmured Ducie, "to fancy that this woman whom I proposed to make my wife, cared for me the least bit in the world! She is like the rest of her sex--neither better nor worse. From highest to lowest they are false and fickle--every one."
He spent a miserable day, wandering aimlessly about, he neither knew nor cared whither; nursing his wounds, and vainly striving to understand for what reason he had been struck so mercilessly and in the dark. A thousand times that day he cursed the name of Mirpah Van Loal. Once he paused in his pacing of the lonely sands, and not satisfied with the evidence of his fingers that the Diamond was safe in its sealskin pocket, he took it out of its hiding-place and gazed on it, and pressed it to his lips, even as M. Paul Platzoff had done in his time, and as, in all probability, hundreds had done before him.
"Fool! after all my experience of life and the world, to believe in the chimera of woman's love!" he said bitterly to himself. "Man's only real friend in this world is money, or that which can command money. The rest is only a shadow on the wall, gone ere it can be clutched."