And Maria laughed again till the tip of her nose

“Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother.”

Mrs. Mooney intervened

priest

Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

“Damned Italians! coming over here!”

She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl;

priest

caps

priest

The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq.

I knew that I was under observation so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me.

pipe

I thought

were coming into flower; the pinkish, bluish masses of flower lay like light among the spreading leaves.

Charlotte

nd the homeward-looking crowd hurried by, the trams clanked, the light carts clattered, the big swinging cabs bowled along with that reckless, defiant indifference that one knows only in dreams...

cried

the

“Oh, shut up, mother,

I thought then how very much he’d appreciate a top-hat. We ought to give him a present, too. He was always very nice to father.

terrified

she

Marmalade

It’s all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped up or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions.

tallest of the men, a lanky, freckled fellow,

Hans

And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond

Gravesend

“Now, sir, do you believe in Robinson Crusoe?” I asked, with a solemnity, suitable to the occasion.

Godfrey Ablewhite!

Sorry to disappoint you, sir. But that can’t be done either.”

I have been compelled once more to give up my dose of opium.

I have no sort of doubt that the agitation which a meeting between them would produce on both sides–reviving dormant feelings, appealing to old memories, awakening new hopes–would, in their effect on the mind of Mr. Blake, be almost certainly fatal to the success of our experiment.

A charming letter!

the vengeance of yesterday’s opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams. At one time I was whirling through empty space with the phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies together. At another, the one beloved face which I shall never see again, rose at my bedside, hideously phosphorescent in the black darkness, and glared and grinned at me

Ezra Jennings.

laudanum

opium?

“You villain, I saw you take the diamond with my own eyes!”

He had a reason for wishing particularly to speak to me; and when I was next in the neighbourhood of Frizinghall,

In my opinion, it concerns Rachel quite as nearly as it concerns you. Her extraordinary conduct is no mystery now. She believes you have stolen the Diamond.

I poured you out half a wineglass-full of our fifty year old Cognac

His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable.

I am as innocent of all knowledge of having taken the Diamond as you are,” I said. “But there is the witness against me! The paint on the nightgown, and the name on the nightgown are facts.”

Myself as the Thief.

I found the mark, and read–my own name.

I tried the undermost side, next–and instantly discovered the smear of the paint from the door of Rachel’s boudoir!

The man came down again with an impenetrable face, and informed me that Miss Verinder was out.

JUNE, ’FORTY-NINE. EXPECT NEWS OF THE INDIANS, TOWARDS THE END OF THE MONTH.

revealed Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite’s motive for submission as plainly as if he had acknowledged it himself. He needed a large sum of money; and he needed it by a given time. Rachel’s income, which would have helped him to anything else, would not help him here;

She was just as immovable as ever. My mind was in a strange conflict of feelings about her when I left her that day. She was obstinate; she was wrong. She was interesting; she was admirable; she was deeply to be pitied.

a meanly deceitful man.

If he attempted to defend himself, or to deny the facts, she was, in that event, to refer him to me.

Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite

. This house has necessarily been hired in my name. I take the entire responsibility of it on my shoulders. It is my house. I can keep it, or let it, just as I please. I have no wish to hurry Miss Verinder. On the contrary, I beg her to remove her guest and her luggage, at her own entire convenience.

But the distressing domestic emergency which now confronted me, was most marvellously and beautifully provided for in the Correspondence of Miss Jane Ann Stamper–Letter one thousand and one, on “Peace in Families.” I rose in my modest corner, and I opened my precious book.

“My son is a mean-spirited hound!” cried this furious old worldling. “In justice to myself as his father–not in justice to him–I beg to ask you, Miss Verinder, what complaint you have to make of Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite?”

He pressed my hands alternately to his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph of having got him back among us, I let him do what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder.

. I don’t know when I have felt the solemn duty of interfering so strongly as I felt it at that moment.

Drusilla

My Aunt Ablewhite is a large, silent, fair-complexioned woman, with one noteworthy point in her character. From the hour of her birth she has never been known to do anything for herself. She has gone through life, accepting everybody’s help, and adopting everybody’s opinions. A more hopeless person, in a spiritual point of view,

hat she had also died without giving me my little legacy.

As for me, my sense of propriety was completely bewildered.

He

“Quite useless! I break the agreement every time I think of you. Oh, Rachel! how kindly you told me, only the other day, that my place in your estimation was a higher place than it had ever been yet! Am I mad to build the hopes I do on those dear words? Am I mad to dream of some future day when your heart may soften to me? Don’t tell me so, if I am! Leave me my delusion, dearest! I must have that to cherish, and to comfort me, if I have nothing else!”

Using these and other similar forms of courteous appeal, we reintroduced all my precious passages under a form which not even the doctor’s watchful materialism could suspect.

“Suppose anything you please, Miss Clack, it wouldn’t shake my belief in Rachel Verinder by a hair’s-breadth.”

Mr. Bruff looked surprised to see me. He is the family solicitor, and we had met more than once, on previous occasions, under Lady Verinder’s roof. A man, I grieve to say, grown old and grizzled in the service of the world. A man who, in his hours of business, was the chosen prophet of Law and Mammon; and who, in his hours of leisure, was equally capable of reading a novel and of tearing up a tract.

When no interests but my own are involved, I am humbly content to get from place to place by the omnibus. Permit me to give an idea of my devotion to my aunt’s interests by recording that, on this occasion, I committed the prodigality of taking a cab.

I know the hand that took the Moonstone. I know–

But, oh, don’t let us judge! My Christian friends, don’t let us judge!

For a valuable gem which he had placed in the safe keeping of the bank.

He was not so far behind as to cause us the double inconvenience of a pause and an open door. It is in the completeness of his daily life that the true Christian appears. This dear man was very complete.

sinful

Here surely was a case for a clergyman, if ever there was one yet! Lady Verinder had thought it a case for a physician.

There was an absence of all lady-like restraint in her language and manner most painful to see. She was possessed by some feverish excitement which made her distressingly loud when she laughed, and sinfully wasteful and capricious in what she ate and drank at lunch.

devout

My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.

alas!

I am going to the devil!”

Mr. Septimus Luker, Middlesex-place, Lambeth, London.”

I am an average good Christian, when you don’t push my Christianity too far.

The Deeps of the Quicksand have got her.

My girl, tried as Rosanna was tried, might have lived that miserable life, and died this dreadful death.

His assistant–a certain Mr. Ezra Jennings–was at our disposal, to be sure. But nobody knew much about him in our parts. He had been engaged by Mr. Candy under rather peculiar circumstances; and, right or wrong, we none of us liked him or trusted him.

that Miss Rachel has stolen her own Diamond?” “Yes,”

“Light or heavy whatever goes into the Shivering Sand is sucked down, and seen no more

She has joined the two chains, and has fastened them to the hasp in the tin case. She has sunk the case, in the water or in the quicksand. She has made the loose end of the chain fast to some place under the rocks, known only to herself.

Sand–in respect of its printing off people’s footsteps–is one of the best detective officers I know. If we don’t meet with Rosanna Spearman by coming round on her in this way, the sand may tell us what she has been at, if the light only lasts long enough.

“Because, sir, if you tell her ladyship, her ladyship will tell Miss Verinder.”

quicksand

“The Last Rose of Summer”

“I saw Rosanna Spearman hiding in the shrubbery as we went by,”

everybody

“Must I see him?” she asked. “Can’t you represent me, Gabriel?”

Nobody has stolen the diamond,”

you

He had seen her before either I or the gardener had seen her, though we knew which way to look, and he didn’t. I began to think him rather a quicker man than he appeared to be at first sight.

I began my life among them in my father’s nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses. There will be grass walks, Mr. Gardener, between my beds

a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him. He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker–or anything else you like, except what he really was. A more complete opposite to Superintendent Seegrave than Sergeant Cuff, and a less comforting officer to look at, for a family in distress, I defy

On inquiry, I found that she had been suddenly taken ill, and had gone up-stairs to her own room to lie down.

pony-chaise

She said, ‘They will never find the Diamond, sir, will they? No! nor the person who took it–I’ll answer for that.’ She actually nodded and smiled at me!

The girl’s face was all in a flush as she made me that answer; and she walked away with a toss of her head and a look of self-importance which I was quite at a loss to account for.

Neither you nor anybody else will ever find it!

Mr. Seegrave was tall and portly, and military in his manners. He had a fine commanding voice, and a mighty resolute eye, and a grand frock-coat which buttoned beautifully up to his leather stock. “I’m the man you want!” was written all over his face;

The more I turned it over in my mind, the less satisfactory Mr. Franklin’s explanation appeared to be.

Nota bene

Father Time

and had accepted it

Finally, she had missed Mr. Candy, the doctor, who had mysteriously disappeared from the drawing-room, and had then mysteriously returned, and entered into conversation with Mr. Godfrey.

The man who doesn’t believe in Robinson Crusoe, after that, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit!

“Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”

his

those men are high-caste Brahmins.

I noticed that the fellow’s coffee-coloured face had turned grey since Mr. Murthwaite had spoken to him.

“I shall be delighted,” says he, “to send the Professor my card, if you will oblige me by mentioning his present address.”

I know a certain city, and a certain temple in that city, where, dressed as you are now, your life would not be worth five minutes’ purchase.”

This was a long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye.

compassionately backwards and forwards between the Diamond and me

I never remember her breaking her word; I never remember her saying No, and meaning Yes.

thick sweet-smelling liquor, as black as ink.

stone

They

Hindoo

He never attempted to sell it–not being in need of money, and not (to give him his due again) making money an object.

There was more than one slur on the Colonel that made people shy of him;

I have made some discoveries in London about my uncle Herncastle and his Diamond, which have rather an ugly look to my eyes; and I want you to confirm them.

“that ‘It’ means This. And ‘this,’ Betteredge, means my uncle Herncastle’s famous Diamond.”

Persons and Things

Has the English gentleman got It about him?”

How many years he went on worrying the tribunals of his country to turn out the Duke in possession, and to put himself in the Duke’s place–how many lawyer’s purses he filled to bursting, and how many otherwise harmless people he set by the ears together disputing whether he was right or wrong–is more by a great deal than I can reckon up.

He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.

This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness

Nothing that I know of, except for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for the third time.

prophecy

“The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!”

I modestly declared myself to be quite unequal to the task imposed upon me–and I privately felt, all the time, that I was quite clever enough to perform it, if I only gave my own abilities a fair chance.

I have not only no proof that he killed the two men at the door; I cannot even declare that he killed the third man inside–for I cannot say that my own eyes saw the deed committed. It is true that I heard the dying Indian’s words; but if those words were pronounced to be the ravings of delirium, how could I contradict the assertion from my own knowledge?

he was absurdly angry with me, and with others

Herncastle’s fiery temper had been, as I could plainly see, exasperated to a kind of frenzy by the terrible slaughter through which we had passed

In order that the circumstances may be clearly understood, I must revert for a moment to the period before the assault