Crime -- England -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
Lord Flanborough had been Mr. George Felton of Felton, Heinrich and
Somes, a firm which controlled extensive mining properties in various
parts of the world, and the one bright spot in his succession to the
peerage lay in the fact that he brought some two millions sterling to
the task of freeing the estates of their encumbrances.
He was a shrewd man and an unpleasant man, but he had never been so
objectionably unpleasant until he assumed the style and title of
Flanborough and never so completely and impossibly unpleasant in the
period of his lordship as he had been that morning.
“Now, what did I want you for?” asked Lord Flanborough in vexation. “I
rang for something--if you had only answered at once instead of
dawdling about, I should--ah, yes--tell Lady Moya that I wish to see
her.”
Sibble made his escape thankfully.
Lord Flanborough pulled at his weedy moustache and looked at the
virgin sheet of paper before him. Then he took up his pen and wrote:
“Lost or Stolen: Valuable pearl chain consisting of eighty-three
graduated pearls. Any person giving information which will lead to
their recovery will receive a reward of two hundred pounds.”
He paused; scratched out “two hundred pounds” and substituted “one
hundred pounds.” This did not satisfy him and he altered the sum to
“fifty pounds.” He sat considering even this modest figure and
eventually struck out that amount and wrote, “will be suitably
rewarded.”
He heard the door click and looked up.
“Ah--Moya. I am just tinkering away at an advertisement,” he said with
a smile.
The Lady Moya Felton was twenty-two and pretty. She re-collected in
her admirable person many of the traditional family graces which had
so malignantly avoided her parent. Well-shaped and of a gracious
carriage, though no more than medium in height, the face with its
delicacy of moulding was wholly Felton. If the stubborn chin, the firm
mouth and the china-blue eyes had come from the dead and gone
Sedgelys, the hair of bronze gold was peculiarly Feltonesque.
When she spoke, however, the carping critic might complain that her
voice lacked the rich quality upon which the family prided itself, for
the Feltons were orators in those days when a parliamentary speech
read like something out of a book. Moya’s voice was a trifle hard and
without body; it was also just a little unsympathetic. Lord
Flanborough boasted with good cause that his daughter was a “practical
little woman” and at least one man beside her father could testify to
this quality.
“Dear, don’t you think it is a little absurd--advertising?” asked the
girl.
She seated herself at the other side of the desk and, reaching out her
hand, opened a silver box and helped herself to one of her father’s
cigarettes.
“Why absurd, darling?” asked Lord Flanborough testily; “lost property
has been found before now, by means of advertising. I remember years
ago when I was in the city, there was a fellow named Goldberg--”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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