usiness to
unravel. And as he was obliged to keep his limited legal connection
together while he devoted himself to this task, the work promised to
extend over months, or indeed years; and in the meanwhile there was
always the fear that some one else, as quick-witted and indefatigable
as himself, would take up the same tangled skein and succeed in the
unravelment of it. Looking this fact full in the face, Mr. Sheldon
decided that he must have an able and reliable coadjutor; but to find
such a coadjutor, to find a man who would help him, on the chance of
success, and not claim too large a share of the prize if success came,
was more than the speculative attorney could hope. In the meantime his
work progressed very slowly; and he was tormented by perpetual terror
of that other sharp practitioner who might be following up the same
clue, and whose agents might watch him in and out of parish churches,
and listen at street-corners when he was hunting an oldest inhabitant.

CHAPTER IV.

DIANA FINDS A NEW HOME.

The holidays at Hyde Lodge brought at least repose for Diana Paget. The
little ones had gone home, with the exception of two or three young
colonists, and even they had perpetual liberty from lessons; so Diana
had nothing to do but sit in the shady garden, reading or thinking, in
the drowsy summer afternoons. Priscilla Paget had departed with the
chief of the teachers for a seaside holiday; other governesses had gone
to their homes; and but for the presence of an elderly Frenchwoman, who
slept through one half of the day, and wrote letters to her kindred
during the other half, Diana would have been the only responsible
person in the deserted habitation.

She did not complain of her loneliness, or envy the delights of those
who had departed. She was very glad to be quite alone, free to think
her own thoughts, free to brood over those unforgotten years in which
she had wandered over the face of the earth with her father and
Valentine Hawkehurst. The few elder girls remaining at the Lodge
thought Miss Paget unsociable because she preferred a lonely corner in
the gardens and some battered old book of namby-pamby stories to the
delights of their society, and criticised her very severely as they
walked listlessly to and fro upon the lawn with big garden-hats, and
arms entwined about each other's waists.

Alas for Diana, the battered book was only an excuse for solitude, and
for a morbid indulgence in her own sad