with their
luggage, and we tracked her to Inverness; but there the trail
stopped short, no spoor lay farther. It was a most singular and
insoluble mystery.

Charles lived in hopes of catching his man in London.

But for my part, I felt there was a show of reason in one last
taunt which the rascal flung back at us as the boat receded: "Sir
Charles Vandrift, we are a pair of rogues. The law protects _you_.
It persecutes _me_. That's all the difference."

VI

THE EPISODE OF THE GERMAN PROFESSOR

That winter in town my respected brother-in-law had little time
on his hands to bother himself about trifles like Colonel Clay.
A thunderclap burst upon him. He saw his chief interest in South
Africa threatened by a serious, an unexpected, and a crushing
danger.

Charles does a little in gold, and a little in land; but his
principal operations have always lain in the direction of diamonds.
Only once in my life, indeed, have I seen him pay the slightest
attention to poetry, and that was when I happened one day to
recite the lines:--

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear.

He rubbed his hands at once and murmured enthusiastically, "I never
thought of that. We might get up an Atlantic Exploration Syndicate,
Limited." So attached is he to diamonds. You may gather, therefore,
what a shock it was to that gigantic brain to learn that science was
rapidly reaching a point where his favourite gems might become all
at once a mere drug in the market. Depreciation is the one bugbear
that perpetually torments Sir Charles's soul; that winter he stood
within measurable distance of so appalling a calamity.

It happened after this manner.

We were strolling along Piccadilly towards Charles's club one
afternoon--he is a prominent member of the Croesus, in Pall
Mall--when, near Burlington House, whom should we happen to knock
up against but Sir Adolphus Cordery, the famous mineralogist, and
leading spirit of the Royal Society! He nodded to us pleasantly.
"Halloa, Vandrift," he cried, in his peculiarly loud and piercing
voice; "you're the very man I wanted to meet to-day. Good morning,
Wentworth. Well, how about diamonds now, Sir Gorgius? You'll have to
sing small. It's all up with you Midases. Heard about this marvellous
new discovery of Schleiermacher's? It's calculated to make you
diamond kings squirm like an eel in a frying-pan."

I could see Charles wriggle inside his clothes.