ould not do better this
warm evening than have another bottle fetched up out of the cool depths
of the cellar. Mr. Cleon, being pressed, was nothing loth to join Mr.
Deedes over this bottle. Mr. Deedes, without condescending into
familiarity, made himself very agreeable, but did not sit long. After
imbibing a couple of glasses, he bade the landlord and the valet an
affable good-night, and went off decorously to bed.

Mr. Deedes was up betimes next morning, and took a three miles' trudge
over the hills before breakfast. He spent a quiet day mooning about the
neighbourhood, and really enjoying himself after his own fashion,
although his mind was busily engaged all the time in trying to solve the
mystery of the Great Diamond. In the evening he took care to have a few
pleasant words with Cleon, and then early to bed. Two more days passed
away after a similar quiet fashion, and then Mr. Deedes began to chafe
inwardly at the small progress he was making.

Although he had been so successful in tracing out M. Platzoff, and in
working the case up to its present point in a remarkably short space of
time, he acknowledged to himself that he was completely baffled when he
came to consider what his next step ought to be. He could not, indeed,
see his way to a single step beyond his present standpoint. Much as he
seemed to have gained at a single leap, was he in reality one
hair's-breadth nearer the secret object of his quest than on that day
when the name of the Great Hara Diamond first made music in his ears? He
doubted it greatly.

When he first decided on coming down to Bon Repos, he trusted that the
chapter of accidents and the good fortune which had so far attended him
would somehow put it in his power to scrape an acquaintance with M.
Platzoff himself, and such an acquaintance once made, it would be his
own fault if, in one way or another, he did not make it subservient to
the ambitious end he had in view.

But in M. Platzoff he found a recluse: a man who made no fresh
acquaintanceships; who held the whole tourist tribe in horror, and who
even kept himself aloof from such of the neighbouring families as might
be considered his equals in social position. It was quite evident to Mr.
Deedes that he might reside close to Bon Repos for twenty years, and at
the end of that time not have succeeded in addressing half-a-dozen words
to its owner.

Then again he had succeeded little better with regard to Cleon than with
regard to Cl