“Where had he been spending his holiday meanwhile?”

“He didn’t tell me, ma’am.”

“At all events, he didn’t turn up for school next day, nor the next again, until the afternoon.  Queer sort of academy, Stimcoe’s.  Did Mr. Stimcoe make any remark on his under-teacher’s absence?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The school went on just as usual?”

“No-o, ma’am “—­I hesitated—­“not quite just as usual.  Mr. Stimcoe was unwell.”

“Drunk?”

“My dear Miss Belcher!” put in the scandalized Plinny.  “A scholar, and such a gentleman!”

“Fiddlestick-end!” snapped the unconscionable lady, not removing her eyes from mine.  “Was this man Stimcoe drunk, eh?  No; I beg your pardon,” she corrected herself.  “I oughtn’t to be asking a boy to tell tales out of school.  ’Thou shalt not say anything to get another fellow into trouble’—­that’s the first and last commandment—­eh, Harry Brooks?  But, my good soul”—­she turned on Plinny—­“if ’drunk and incapable’ isn’t written over the whole of that seminary, you may call me a Dutchwoman!”

“There’s a point or so clear enough,” she announced, after a pause, when I had finished my story.

“We must placard the whole country with a description of that prisoner chap Glass,” said Mr. Jack Rogers; “and I’d best be off to Falmouth and get the bills printed at once.”

“Indeed?” said Miss Belcher, dryly.  “And pray how are you proposing to describe him?”

“Why, as for that, I should have thought Harry’s description here, backed up by Mr. Goodfellow’s, was enough to lay a trail upon any man.  My dear Lydia, a fellow roaming the country in a red coat, drill trousers, and a japanned hat!”

“It would obviously excite remark:  so obviously that the likelihood might even occur to the man himself.”

Mr. Rogers looked crestfallen for a moment.

“You suggest that by this time he has changed his rig?”

“I suggest, rather, that he started by changing it, say, as far back as St. Mawes.  Some one must ride to St. Mawes at once and make inquiries.”  Miss Belcher drummed her fingers on the table.  “But the man,” she said thoughtfully, “will have reached Plymouth long before this.”

“You don’t think it possible he went back the same way he came?”

“In a world, Jack, where you find yourself a magistrate, all things are possible.  But I don’t think it at all likely.”

“It’s a rum story altogether,” mused Mr. Rogers.  “A couple of murders in this part of the world, and mixed up with an island full of treasure!  Why, damme, ’tis almost like Shakespeare!”

“For my part,” observed Miss Plinlimmon, with great simplicity, “though sometimes accused of leaning unduly toward the romantic, I should be inclined to set down this story of Captain Coffin’s to hallucination, or even to stigmatize it as what I believe is called in nautical parlance ‘a yarn.’”