nt at
your body as it goes tossing out to sea. To-night--but let me tell
the rest in a word or two, for time presses. How I was brought up,
how my mad mother--for she is mad on every point but one--trained me
to the sea, how I left it at length and became an attorney's clerk,
all this I need not dwell upon. But all this time the thought of
revenge never left me for an hour; and if it had, my mother would
have recalled it.

"Well, we settled in Plymouth and I was bound a clerk to your
grandfather's attorney, still with the same purpose. There I learnt
of Amos Trenoweth's affairs, but only to a certain extent; for of the
wealth which he had so bloodily won I could discover nothing; and yet
I knew he possessed riches which make the heart faint even to think
upon. Yet for all I could discover, his possessions were simply
those of a struggling farmer, his business absolutely nothing.
I was almost desperate, when one day a tall, gaunt and aged man
stepped into the office, asked for my employer, and gave the name of
Amos Trenoweth. Oh, how I longed to kill him as he stood there!
And how little did he guess that the clerk of whom he took no more
notice than of a stone, would one day strike his descendants off the
face of the earth and inherit the wealth for which he had sold his
soul--the great Ruby of Ceylon!

"My voice trembled with hate as I announced him and showed him into
the inner room. Then I closed the door and listened. He was uneasy
about his Will--the fool--and did not know that all his possessions
would necessarily become his son's. In my heart I laughed at his
ignorance; but I learnt enough--enough to wait patiently for years
and finally to track Ezekiel Trenoweth to his death.

"It was about this time that I fell in love. In this as in
everything through life I have been cursed with the foulest luck, but
in this as in everything else my patience has won in the end. Lucy
Luttrell loved another man called Railton--John Railton. He was
another fool--you are all fools--but she married him and had a
daughter. I wonder if you can guess who that daughter was?"

He broke off and looked at me with fiendish malice.

"You hound!" I cried, "she was Janet Railton--Claire Luttrell; and
you murdered her father as you say Amos Trenoweth murdered yours."

"Right," he answered coolly. "Quite right. Oh, the arts by which I
enticed that man to drink and then to crime! Even now I could sit
and laugh over them