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"Well, of course, Guyler doesn't know yet about the Chinese development," said Lauriston. "Guyler thinks the robbery has been the work of a gang a clever lot of diamond thieves who knew about Stephen Purvis's find of the orange-yellow thing and put in a lot of big work about getting it when it reached England.
His dreamy gaze and soft voice heightened the suggestion, and it was needful at the outset to discount Mr. Purvis's appearance altogether before accepting the fact that his mental powers were above the average. Purvis sat down, wiped his pale forehead with the bar of red across it, and returned his handkerchief to the pocket of his dark tweed coat.
He looked after him with a woman's carefulness, was over-anxious about his health, and treated him as though he were much younger than his actual age. Peter greeted Mr. Purvis's visits to Las Lomas with cordiality, induced by the feeling that even a chance word dropped by a man who knew the country and its people as intimately as Purvis did might throw some light on his quest.
What I now thought was this one of them had called on the old man to do some business, or to pay the rent, and had found him in a fit, or dead, as the result of one, had seen the diamond and the money on the table, placed there in readiness for Purvis's coming, and had possessed himself of both and made off. Purvis agreed with me.
The conversation of the three public-school men who knew the world of London, and still spoke its language and discussed its news, who knew moreover their friends' stories and jokes, and had stayed in a dozen country houses together, was widely different from Mr. Purvis's constant melancholy comments upon the state of Argentine finance.
And then he saw a smile on Purvis's face the usual watery, mirthless smile, and the pale, wide-open blue eyes; and, looking back, Peter saw that the boat behind them was overturned in the stream, and that the men who had been in it were struggling to the bank, while the boat itself was being carried rapidly down with the current.
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