getting a letter which asked him to meet a man, near midnight, and in
about as lonely a spot as you could select out of the whole district. Why
at such a place, and at such an hour? And why was this meeting of so much
importance that Mr. Gilverthwaite, being unable to keep the appointment
himself, must pay as much as ten pounds to another person to keep it for
him? What I had said to Maisie about Mr. Gilverthwaite having so much
money that ten pounds was no more to him than ten pence to me was, of
course, all nonsense, said just to quieten her fears and suspicions--I
knew well enough, having seen a bit of the world in a solicitor's office
for the past six years, that even millionaires don't throw their money
about as if pounds were empty peascods. No! Mr. Gilverthwaite was giving
me that money because he thought that I, as a lawyer's clerk, would see
the thing in its right light as a secret and an important business, and
hold my tongue about it. And see it as a secret business I did--for what
else could it be that would make two men meet near an old ruin at
midnight, when in a town where, at any rate, one of them was a stranger,
and the other probably just as much so, they could have met by broad day
at a more convenient trysting-place without anybody having the least
concern in their doings? There was strange and subtle mystery in all
this, and the thinking and pondering it over led me before long to
wondering about its first natural consequence--who and what was the man I
was now on my way to meet, and where on earth could he be coming from to
keep a tryst at a place like that, and at that hour?

However, before I had covered three parts of that outward journey, I was
to meet another man who, all unknown to me, was to come into this truly
extraordinary series of events in which I, with no will of my own, was
just beginning--all unawares--to be mixed up. Taking it roughly, and as
the crow flies, it is a distance of some nine or ten miles from Berwick
town to Twizel Bridge on the Till, whereat I was to turn off from the