yed life either way quite as much or
possibly more than if I had gone on a good many years as heir to these
estates, and afterwards as Squire. Of course, now I shall make it my
business to see if it is possible to obtain some sort of clew to this
treasure, and then follow it up; but the first thing to which I shall
give my mind will be to hunt down Bastow. We shall never feel safe here
as long as that fellow is alive, and that will be the first thing I
shall devote myself to. After that I shall see about the treasure."

"As to that, Mark, I cannot impress upon you too strongly what your
uncle said. It may, of course, be a pure delusion on his part; but if
he is right, and some of these Hindoo fellows are still on the watch to
obtain that bracelet, you must use extraordinary precautions when you
get it into your hands; he advised me to take it across to Amsterdam,
and either get the stones recut or to sell them separately to different
diamond merchants there. He said that my life would not be worth an
hour's purchase as long as the stones were in my hands."

"That rather looks, father, as if the things were somewhere in England;
had they been in India, you would have had them some months in your
hands before you could get them to Amsterdam."

"I did not think of that before, Mark, and it is possible that you
are right; but I don't know; he might have thought that it would be
impossible for me to dispose of them at Madras or Calcutta, and may have
assumed that I should at once deposit them in a bank to be forwarded
with other treasure to England, or that I should get them packed away
in the treasure safe in the ship I came back by, and that I should not
really have them on my person till I landed in England, or until I
took them from the Bank. Still, I see that your supposition is the most
likely, and that they may all this time have been lying somewhere in
London until I should present myself with a gold coin and the word
'Masulipatam.'"

Suddenly Mark sprang to his feet, and pulled back the curtains across
a window, threw it up, and leaped into the garden, and there stood
listening for two or three minutes, with his pistol cocked in his hand.
He stepped for a moment into the room again.

"You had better put that light out, father or we may have another shot."

"Did you hear anything, Mark?"

"I thought I did, father. I may have been mistaken, but I certainly
thought I heard a noise, and when I pulled the curtains