in my keeping? You--"

As he held up the bills a wild impulse prompted the wretched captain to
make a grab at them.

There was a short struggle. Oliphant, with his back to the cliff, kept
his hold for a moment; then a fierce blow sent him reeling backwards to
the edge, with the torn half of the documents in his hand. There was a
gasp, a half cry, and next moment only one man stood in the place,
peering with ashen face into the black darkness below.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

THE BILLIARD-MARKER AT "L'HOTEL SOULT."

In the _salon_ of a small dilapidated hotel in one of the southern
suburbs of Paris sat Roger, three weeks after the event recorded in the
last chapter. He had the dull place, apparently, to himself. The
billiard-room, visible through the folding-doors, was deserted. In the
dining-room the waiter dozed undisturbed by a single guest. The
landlady in her _bureau_ yawned and hummed, and had not even a bill to
make out.

She had already made out that of the young English gentleman, and a
pretty one it was! A guest such as he was worth a season to the
landlady of "L'Hotel Soult." Three weeks ago, half dead with cold and
weariness, he had come and asked for a bed; and in that bed till
yesterday he had remained, feverish, coughing, sometimes gasping for
breath. Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter,
this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at
hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a
voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of
getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly
whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of
all his illnesses.

He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail. The doctor, who
took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to
move. No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he
had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate. One letter
to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and
destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident. This well-to-
do young guest was worth nursing. His friends would only come and fetch
him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do
for him. The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had
carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that
Monsieur was a young g