on this autumn afternoon, when the sun seemed to rejoice coldly over the
havoc of yesterday's gale and the passing of things spared to die a
natural death, the eye was fain to look beyond to the beauty of the
eternal waters and the glory of the everlasting hills.

Turning from the window, one noticed that the brown walls harboured but
four pictures, a couple of Bone etchings and a couple by Laguilermie
after Orchardson. There were three doors, that in the left wall being the
entrance; the other two, in the right and back walls, near the angle,
suggested presses, being without handles. In the middle of the back wall,
a yard's distance from the floor, was a niche, four feet in height by one
in breadth by the latter in depth, a plain oblong, at present unoccupied.
Close inspection would have revealed signs of its recent construction.

Near the centre of the room a writing-table stood at such an angle that
the man seated at it, in the invalid's wheeled chair, could look from the
window to the fire with the least possible movement of the head. You
would have called him an old man, though his age was barely sixty. Hair
and short beard were white. He was thin to fragility, yet his hand,
fingering some documents, was steady, and his eyes, while sunken, were
astonishingly bright. His mobile pale lips hinted at a nature kindly, if
not positively tender, yet they could smile grimly, bitterly, in secret.
Such was Christopher Craig, a person of no importance publicly or
socially, yet the man who, to the knowledge of those two individuals now
sitting at his hearth, had left the Cape, five years ago, with a moderate
fortune in cash and shares, and half a million pounds in diamonds. And he
had just told those two, his favoured friends and trusted associates of
the old South African days, that he was about to die.

Robert Lancaster and Francis Bullard, summoned by telegraph from London