ad to buy your cast-off finery second-hand? Speak up, you
dog," the man went on; "you can understand English, I suppose; and I
mean to have a bit of talk with you before I march you to the station."

"Indeed, sir," said Harry, "this is all a dreadful misconception; and if
you will go with me to Sir Thomas Vandeleur's in Eaton Place, I can
promise that all will be made plain. The most upright person, as I now
perceive, can be led into suspicious positions."

"My little man," replied the gardener, "I will go with you no further
than the station-house in the next street. The inspector, no doubt, will
be glad to take a stroll with you as far as Eaton Place, and have a bit
of afternoon tea with your great acquaintances. Or would you prefer to
go direct to the home secretary? Sir Thomas Vandeleur, indeed! Perhaps
you think I don't know a gentleman when I see one, from a common
run-the-hedge like you? Clothes or no clothes, I can read you like a
book. Here is a shirt that maybe cost as much as my Sunday hat; and that
coat, I take it, has never seen the inside of Rag-fair, and then your
boots----"

The man, whose eyes had fallen upon the ground, stopped short in his
insulting commentary, and remained for a moment looking intently upon
something at his feet. When he spoke his voice was strangely altered.

"What, in God's name," said he, "is all this?"

Harry, following the direction of the man's eyes, beheld a spectacle
that struck him dumb with terror and amazement. In his fall he had
descended vertically upon the bandbox and burst it open from end to end;
thence a great treasure of diamonds had poured forth, and now lay
abroad, part trodden in the soil, part scattered on the surface in regal
and glittering profusion. There was a magnificent coronet which he had
often admired on Lady Vandeleur; there were rings and brooches, eardrops
and bracelets, and even unset brilliants rolling here and there among
the rosebushes like drops of morning dew. A princely fortune lay between
the two men upon the ground--a fortune in the most inviting, solid, and
durable form, capable of being carried in an apron, beautiful in itself,
and scattering the sunlight in a million rainbow flashes.

"Good Heavens!" said Harry. "I am lost!"

His mind raced backward into the past with the incalculable velocity of
thought, and he began to comprehend his day's adventures, to conceive
them as a whole, and to recognize the sad imbroglio in which his own