meerschaum. "I'll tell you what we'll do, George: there's a glorious inn
at Audley, and plenty of fishing in the neighborhood; we'll go there and
have a week's sport. Fishing is much better than shooting; you've only
to lie on a bank and stare at your line; I don't find that you often
catch anything, but it's very pleasant."

He held the twisted letter to the feeble spark of fire glimmering in the
grate, as he spoke, and then changing his mind, deliberately unfolded
it, and smoothed the crumpled paper with his hand.

"Poor little Alicia!" he said, thoughtfully; "it's rather hard to treat
her letter so cavalierly--I'll keep it;" upon which Mr. Robert Audley
put the note back into its envelope, and afterward thrust it into a
pigeon-hole in his office desk, marked _important_. Heaven knows what
wonderful documents there were in this particular pigeon-hole, but I do
not think it likely to have contained anything of great judicial value.
If any one could at that moment have told the young barrister that so
simple a thing as his cousin's brief letter would one day come to be a
link in that terrible chain of evidence afterward to be slowly forged in
the only criminal case in which he was ever to be concerned, perhaps Mr.
Robert Audley would have lifted his eyebrows a little higher than usual.

So the two young men left London the next day, with one portmanteau and
a rod and tackle between them, and reached the straggling,
old-fashioned, fast-decaying village of Audley, in time to order a good
dinner at the Sun Inn.

Audley Court was about three-quarters of a mile from the village, lying,
as I have said, deep down in the hollow, shut in by luxuriant timber.
You could only reach it by a cross-road bordered by trees, and as trimly