“Let me have this book,” he said; “I’ll give you a hundred pounds for it.” Mrs. Burfield’s mouth opened with a spasmodic action, and for once in her life she forgot to sigh. “A hundred pounds!” “A hundred--two, if you like. Haven’t I told you that I’m a rich man? and you’ve been kind to my cousin. I’ll give you the money as a free gift, for the matter of that; but I must have this book. It’s a journal--a book in which a man writes a history of his own life. An officer I knew in Van Diemen’s Land used to write such a history by fits and starts. How do I know what this may tell me about my cousin? Let me have it. I know the book isn’t yours; but there can be no such thing as honour or faith to be kept with a man like that. Let me have the book.” There was a good deal more said upon the matter; but the end of it was that Francis Tredethlyn went back to London with the sheepskin-covered volume in his pocket; and Mrs. Burfield, retiring to rest after a heavy supper of cold meat and cucumber, dreamt that she had inherited a million of money from one of the Coltonslough tax-collectors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XII. A MODERN GENTLEMAN’S DIARY. Francis Tredethlyn went back to the hotel in Covent Garden with the little sheepskin-covered volume appertaining to the gentleman who called himself Robert Lesley, safely stowed in his pocket. He went straight back to the hotel, ate his simple dinner, drew the candles near him, and then, taking up a poker from the hearth, made short work of the lock under which the stranger had kept his secrets. All thought of those sunny gardens and drawing-rooms at Twickenham, the glancing river, the woody background, faded out of his mind for a time, and gave place to one settled purpose--the discovery of his missing cousin’s destroyer. Yes, her destroyer! He had only been able to read Mrs. Burfield’s story in one fashion. The solitary departure in the chill light of a winter’s morning, the haste and secrecy, the lonely return long afterwards; these things seemed to the young man to point only to one conclusion;--the simple Cornish girl’s faith had been betrayed by the man she had so implicitly trusted. In the little volume before him Francis Tredethlyn hoped to find some further clue to that sad history. He seemed to take a savage pleasure in punishing the neat brazen lock, which he shattered with a couple of vigorous blows from the handle of the poker. “I wonder whether, when a man’s a villain, he writes _that_ down?” thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “I can’t fancy a scoundrel putting the truth about himself even on paper; and if the truth isn’t here, I can’t see how the book will help me. And yet there must be secrets in it, too, or he’d never have had such a lock as this. Mr. Lowther used to throw his journal about any where, and I don’t think _he_ ever did anything that was particularly worth writing down.”