most irremediable of
losses, the famous ruby seal which George IV had given to Dorrington's
grandfather, Sir Arthur Deering, as a token of his personal esteem during
the period of the Regency. This was a flawless ruby, valued at some six or
seven thousand pounds sterling, in which had been cut the Deering arms
surrounded by a garter upon which were engraved the words, 'Deering Ton,'
which the family, upon Sir Arthur's elevation to the peerage in 1836, took
as its title, or Dorrington. His lordship was almost prostrated by the loss.
The diamonds and the rings, although valued at thirty thousand pounds, he
could easily replace, but the personal associations of the seal were such
that nothing, no amount of money, could duplicate the lost ruby."

"So that his first act," I broke in, breathlessly, "was to send for--"

"Sherlock Holmes, my father," said Raffles Holmes. "Yes, Mr. Jenkins, the
first thing Lord Dorrington did was to telegraph to London for Sherlock
Holmes, requesting him to come immediately to Dorrington Castle and assume
charge of the case. Needless to say, Mr. Holmes dropped everything else and
came. He inspected the gardens, measured the road from the railway station
to the castle, questioned all the servants; was particularly insistent upon
knowing where the parlor-maid was on the 13th of January; secured accurate
information as to the personal habits of his lordship's dachshund Nicholas;
subjected the chef to a cross-examination that covered every point of his
life, from his remote ancestry to his receipt for baking apples; gathered up
three suit-cases of sweeping from his lordship's private apartment, and two
boxes containing three each of every variety of cigars that Lord Dorrington
had laid down in his cellar. As you are aware, Sherlock Holmes, in his
prime, was a great master of detail. He then departed for London, taking
with him an impression in wax of the missing seal, which Lord Dorrington
happened to have preserved in his escritoire.

"On his return to London, Holmes inspected the seal carefully under a
magnifying-glass, and was instantly impressed with the fact that it was not
unfamiliar to him. He had seen it somewhere before, but where? That was now
the question upper-most in his mind. Prior to this, he had never had any
communication with Lord Dorrington, so that, if it was in his correspondence
that the seal had formerly come to him, most assuredly the person who had
used it had come by it di