My mistress having left us, I had leisure to think of Sergeant Cuff.

I found him sitting in a snug corner of the hall, consulting his

memorandum book, and curling up viciously at the corners of the lips.

"Making notes of the case?" I asked.

"No," said the Sergeant. "Looking to see what my next professional

engagement is."

"Oh!" I said. "You think it's all over then, here?"

"I think," answered Sergeant Cuff, "that Lady Verinder is one of the

cleverest women in England. I also think a rose much better worth

looking at than a diamond. Where is the gardener, Mr. Betteredge?"

There was no getting a word more out of him on the matter of the

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Moonstone. He had lost all interest in his own inquiry; and he would

persist in looking for the gardener. An hour afterwards, I heard them

at high words in the conservatory, with the dog-rose once more at the

bottom of the dispute.

In the meantime, it was my business to find out whether Mr. Franklin

persisted in his resolution to leave us by the afternoon train. After

having been informed of the conference in my lady's room, and of how

it had ended, he immediately decided on waiting to hear the news from

Frizinghall. This very natural alteration in his plans--which, with

ordinary people, would have led to nothing in particular--proved, in

Mr. Franklin's case, to have one objectionable result. It left him

unsettled, with a legacy of idle time on his hands, and, in so doing,

it let out all the foreign sides of his character, one on the top of

another, like rats out of a bag.

Now as an Italian-Englishman, now as a German-Englishman, and now as a

French-Englishman, he drifted in and out of all the sitting-rooms in the

house, with nothing to talk of but Miss Rachel's treatment of him; and

with nobody to address himself to but me. I found him (for example) in

the library, sitting under the map of Modern Italy, and quite unaware of

any other method of meeting his troubles, except the method of talking

about them. "I have several worthy aspirations, Betteredge; but what am

I to do with them now? I am full of dormant good qualities, if Rachel

would only have helped me to bring them out!" He was so eloquent in

drawing the picture of his own neglected merits, and so pathetic in

lamenting over it when it was done, that I felt quite at my wits' end

how to console him, when it suddenly occurred to me that here was a case

for the wholesome application of a bit of ROBINSON CRUSOE. I hobbled out

to my own room, and hobbled back with that immortal book. Nobody in the

library! The map of Modern Italy stared at ME; and I stared at the map

of Modern Italy.




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