visitor."

"He came back in a few minutes, but so transformed in outward
appearance that Ducie scarcely knew him."

"Behold!"

"Sister Agnes knelt for a few moments and bent her head in silent
prayer."

"He put his hand to his side, and motioned Mirpah to open the letter."

* * * * *

Illustrations to "The Bretons at Home."

[Illustration: "BEHOLD!"]

THE ARGOSY.

_APRIL, 1891._

THE FATE OF THE HARA DIAMOND.

CHAPTER XIV.

DRASHKIL-SMOKING.

"It must and shall be mine!"

So spoke Captain Ducie on the spur of the moment as he wrote the last
word of his translation of M. Platzoff's MS. And yet there was a keen
sense of disappointment working within him. His blood had been at fever
heat during the latter part of his task. Each fresh sentence of the
cryptogram as he began to decipher it would, he hoped, before he reached
the end of it, reveal to him the hiding-place of the great Diamond. Up
to the very last sentence he had thus fondly deluded himself, only to
find that the abrupt ending of the MS. left him still on the brink of
the secret, and left him there without any clue by which he could
advance a single step beyond that point. He was terribly disappointed,
and the longer he brooded over the case the more entirely hopeless was
the aspect it put on.

But there was an elasticity of mind about Captain Ducie that would not
allow him to despair utterly for any length of time. In the course of a
few days, as he began to recover from his first chagrin, he at the same
time began to turn the affair of the Diamond over and over in his mind,
now in one way, now in another, looking at it in this light and in that;
trying to find the first faint indications of a clue which, judiciously
followed up, might conduct him step by step to the heart of the mystery.
Two questions naturally offered themselves for solution. First: Did
Platzoff habitually carry the Diamond about his person? Second: Was it
kept in some skilfully-devised hiding-place about the house? These were
questions that could be answered only by time and observation.

So Captain Ducie went about Bon Repos like a man with half-a-dozen pairs
of eyes, seeing, and not only seeing but noting, a hundred little things
such as would never have been observed by him under ordinary
circumstances. But when, at the end of a week, he came to sum up and
classify his observations, and to consid