Asking for my lady, and hearing that she was in one of the conservatories, we went round to the gardens at the back, and sent a servant to seek her.  While we were waiting, Sergeant Cuff looked through the evergreen arch on our left, spied out our rosery, and walked straight in, with the first appearance of anything like interest that he had shown yet.  To the gardener’s astonishment, and to my disgust, this celebrated policeman proved to be quite a mine of learning on the trumpery subject of rose-gardens.

“Ah, you’ve got the right exposure here to the south and sou’-west,” says the Sergeant, with a wag of his grizzled head, and a streak of pleasure in his melancholy voice.  “This is the shape for a rosery—­nothing like a circle set in a square.  Yes, yes; with walks between all the beds.  But they oughtn’t to be gravel walks like these.  Grass, Mr. Gardener—­grass walks between your roses; gravel’s too hard for them.  That’s a sweet pretty bed of white roses and blush roses.  They always mix well together, don’t they?  Here’s the white musk rose, Mr. Betteredge—­our old English rose holding up its head along with the best and the newest of them.  Pretty dear!” says the Sergeant, fondling the Musk Rose with his lanky fingers, and speaking to it as if he was speaking to a child.

This was a nice sort of man to recover Miss Rachel’s Diamond, and to find out the thief who stole it!

“You seem to be fond of roses, Sergeant?” I remarked.

“I haven’t much time to be fond of anything,” says Sergeant Cuff.  “But when I have a moment’s fondness to bestow, most times, Mr. Betteredge, the roses get it.  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,” says the Sergeant, on whose mind the gravel paths of our rosery seemed to dwell unpleasantly.

“It seems an odd taste, sir,” I ventured to say, “for a man in your line of life.”

“If you will look about you (which most people won’t do),” says Sergeant Cuff, “you will see that the nature of a man’s tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man’s business.  Show me any two things more opposite one from the other than a rose and a thief; and I’ll correct my tastes accordingly—­if it isn’t too late at my time of life.  You find the damask rose a goodish stock for most of the tender sorts, don’t you, Mr. Gardener?  Ah!  I thought so.  Here’s a lady coming.  Is it Lady Verinder?”

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.

The Sergeant’s appearance, or the Sergeant’s errand—­one or both—­seemed to cause my lady some little embarrassment.  She was, for the first time in all my experience of her, at a loss what to say at an interview with a stranger.  Sergeant Cuff put her at her ease directly.  He asked if any other person had been employed about the robbery before we sent for him; and hearing that another person had been called in, and was now in the house, begged leave to speak to him before anything else was done.