He walked down that narrow way, where luxuriant branches
of fresh green blackberry bushes encroached upon the track, still
seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him
by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each
bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous
dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream,
he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would,
no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come
out at the other end, into the upland road, of which the porters
at Mambury Station had told him.
At last he arrived at a delicious green nook, where the shade of
the trees overhead was exceptionally dense, and where the ferns
by the side were somewhat torn and trodden. Casting his eye on
the ground to the left, a metal clasp, gleaming silvery among the
bracken, happened to attract his cursory attention. Something about
that clasp looked strangely familiar. He paused and stared hard at
it. Surely, surely he had seen those metal knobs before. A flash
of recognition ran electric through his brain. Why, yes; it was
the fastener of Montague Nevitt's pocket-book--the pocket-book in
which he carried his most private documents; the pocket-book that
must have held Cyril's stolen six thousand.
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