'Robert Fletcher was clinging to a spar when he was picked up and dragged ashore. He recovered consciousness after a long illness, and then found that the leather case in which all his fortune lay had slipped from his neck and was lost. Therefore, he had to begin the world again. He went away, therefore. He went away----' Mr. Jagenal paused at this point, rattled his keys, and looked about him. He was not a story-teller by profession, but he knew instinctively that every story, in order to be dramatic--and he wished this to be a very dramatic history--should be cut up into paragraphs, illustrated by dialogue, and divided into sections. Dialogue being impossible, he stopped and rattled his keys. This meant the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. 'Do pray get along,' cried his client, now growing interested and impatient. 'He went away,' the narrator repeated, 'his treasure lost, to begin the world again. He came here, became a stockbroker, made money--and the rest you know. He appears never to have told his daughters of his loss. I have been in communication with the solicitors of the late Eleanor Fletcher, your great-aunt, and I cannot learn from them that she ever spoke of this calamity. Yet had she known of it she must have remembered it. To bring all your fortune--a considerable fortune--home in a bag tied round your neck, and to lose it in a shipwreck is a disaster which would, one thinks, be remembered to the third and fourth generations.' 'I should think so. But you said something about the sea giving up its treasure.' 'That we come to next. Five years ago, by the death of a very aged lady, her great-great-grandmother, Armorel Rosevean succeeded to an inheritance which turned out to be nothing less than the accumulated savings of many generations. Among other possessions she found in this old lady's room a sea-chest containing things apparently recovered from wrecks, or drowned men, or washed ashore by the sea--a very curious and interesting collection: there were snuff-boxes, watches, chains, rings, all kinds of things. Among these treasures she turned out, at the bottom of the chest, a case of shagreen with a leather thong. On opening this Armorel found it to contain a quantity of precious stones, and a scrap of paper which seemed to show that they had formerly been the property of one Robert Fletcher. We may suppose, if we please, that the case containing the jewels was cast up on the beach after the storm, and tossed into the chest without much knowledge of its contents or their value. We may suppose that Emanuel Rosevean found the case. We may suppose what we please, because we can prove nothing. For my own part, I think there is no reasonable doubt that the case actually contained the fortune of Robert Fletcher. The dates of the story seem to correspond: the handwriting appears to be his: we have letters of his speaking of his intention to return, and of his property being in convenient portable shape.'