As the shades of evening closed, and the long shadows of the
poplars stretched across the road, a man carrying a small kettle
stopped and gazed, first at the bill and then at the house. When
he had reached the corner of the fence, he again stopped and looked
cautiously up and down the road. Apparently satisfied with the
result of his scrutiny, he deliberately sat himself down in the
dark shadow of the fence, and at once busied himself in some
employment, so well concealed as to be invisible to the gaze of
passers-by. At the end of an hour he retired cautiously.
But not altogether unseen. A slim young man, with spectacles and
note-book, stepped from behind a tree as the retreating figure of
the intruder was lost in the twilight, and transferred from the
fence to his note-book the freshly stencilled inscription, "S--T--
1860--X."
CHAPTER IV.
COUNT MOSCOW'S NARRATIVE.
I am a foreigner. Observe! To be a foreigner in England is to be
mysterious, suspicious, intriguing. M. Collins has requested the
history of my complicity with certain occurrences. It is nothing,
bah! absolutely nothing.
I write with ease and fluency. Why should I not write? Tra la la?
I am what you English call corpulent.
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