"By the time we have landed on the other side," I answered, "there'll still be a clear fortnight to do the first, and I think we may accomplish the latter transaction simultaneously."
CHAPTER XXVII
Too Late!
We had a stormy passage, and arrived at Southampton four-and-twenty hours later than we should have done. It was Cunningham who bought a paper as we got into the train. I was too completely preoccupied to have absorbed a line of news, even had my eyes mechanically perused the printed matter. Cunningham (who was always restless, and could not bear to be left at the mercy of his own thoughts) read incessantly, however, and at the end of half an hour or so handed over his paper to me.
"Look at this," he said, with some eagerness, pointing out a paragraph. I glanced at it carelessly at first, but in an instant I was as keen as Cunningham had been.
"Another Fortune for a Millionaire," the paragraph was headed, and beneath was set forth the interesting fact that Mr. Carson Wildred, who was shortly to marry Miss Cunningham, the celebrated beauty and heiress, had just heard of a legacy of half a million pounds, left him by an American friend, Mr. Harvey Farnham, lately burned to death in a San Francisco hotel.
"So you see it wasn't only the mine, and the money he should have paid for the mine, he wanted," said Cunningham. "Oh, he's a marvellous chap, this Wildred!"
I acquiesced in this opinion, and recalled a remark made in the club by a mutual acquaintance. "Carson Wildred is always inheriting fortunes from chaps that die at the four corners of the globe," he had curiously announced. I wondered grimly, as I remembered the speech, whether all these benefactors had met their death after the manner of poor Harvey Farnham.
Time was pressing now, and our idea was to go straight to Karine, I to appear only as the supporter of her brother. A desire for the punishment of Wildred might have held a prominent place both in Cunningham's mind and mine, but our first thought was to save Karine from becoming the murderer's wife.
She must be disabused of the belief that her brother was in any way in Wildred's power. She must know that, as Cunningham expressed it, the "shoe was on the other foot." She must be shown the black depths of Carson Wildred's villainy, and be dragged back from the brink of the precipice on which she had stood.