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I believe he loved Miss Nowell, and that's about all the good I do believe of him." After this, there was no more to be asked of Miss Long; so Gilbert thanked her for her civility, and bade good evening at once to her and to Miss Stoneham. There was time for him to catch the last coach to Grangewick station. He determined upon going from Grangewick to Lidford, instead of returning to London.
Stoneham, when he pondered upon these things as he smoked his churchwarden pipe; "but what would become of a parish in which there was no clerk?" This gentleman, seeing Gilbert Fenton approach, was quick to surmise that the stranger came in answer to the letter he had written the day before.
While Miss Stoneham was engaged in putting on her bonnet for this expedition, the clerk proposed to take Gilbert across to the church and show him the entry of the marriage in the register. "With a view to the satisfactory settlement of the reward," Mr. Stoneham added in a fat voice, and with the air of a man to whom twenty pounds more or less was an affair of very little moment.
Stoneham, with a craft worthy of all commendation, kept back from the early issue a small fraction of the figures that were in his possession, so that he might print them in the so-called fourth edition, and thus put upon the second lot of contents bills sent out, in huge, startling black type, "Further Revelations of the Board of Construction Scandal;" and his scathing leading article, in which he indignantly demanded a Parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the Board, was recognized, even by the friends of that public body, as having seriously shaken confidence in it.
Up the old West Cambridge road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the hallowed borders of the academic town.
A pleasant clattering of tea-things sounded from the neat little parlour within, showing that, early as it was, there were already preparations for the cup which cheers without inebriating in the Stoneham household. Thomas Stoneham, supported by a freshly-painted door of a vivid green and an extensive brass plate engraved with his name and functions, was a personage of some dignity.
"What! a defalcation?" cried Stoneham eagerly. "No; merely a shifting round." "Ah," said the editor, in a disappointed tone. "Oh, you needn't say 'Ah. It's very serious; it is indeed. The accounts are calculated to deceive the dear and confiding public, to whose interests all the daily papers, morning and evening, pretend to be devoted. The very fact of such deception being attempted, Mr.
Stoneham," Gilbert began, when he had seated himself in a shining mahogany arm-chair by the empty fire-place. "First and foremost, I want you to tell me where Mr. and Mrs. Holbrook are now living." The parish-clerk shook his head with a stately slowness. "Not to be done, sir," he said: "when Mr. and Mrs. Holbrook left here they went the Lord knows where.
Light in the room of the evening journalist usually indicates that something important is on hand. A glance at the papers Miss Baxter brought to him showed Mr. Stoneham that he had at least got the worth of his fifty pounds. There would be a fluttering in high places next day.
When the hansom drew up in front of the Cafe Royal, Miss Jennie Baxter did not step put of it, but waited until the stalwart servitor in gold lace, who ornamented the entrance, hurried from the door to the vehicle. "Do you know Mr. Stoneham?" she asked with suppressed excitement, "the editor of the Evening Graphite? He is usually here playing dominoes with somebody about this hour."
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