“Do you know what my darling says to me in my letter?”

“No.”

“Would you like to see it?”

“Indeed I should; but I have no right.”

“Every right.  It is the only mark of esteem, worth anything, I can show you.”

She handed him the letter, and buried her own face in her hands.

He read it, and acted the deepest emotion.

He handed it back, without a word.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

From this time Falcon was always welcome at Kent Villa.  He fascinated everybody in the house.  He renewed his acquaintance with Mr. Lusignan, and got asked to stay a week in the house.  He showed Rosa and her father the diamonds, and, the truth must be owned, they made Rosa’s eyes sparkle for the first time this eighteen months.  He insinuated rather than declared his enormous wealth.

In reply to the old man’s eager questions, as the large diamonds lay glittering on the table, and pointed every word, he said that a few of his Hottentots had found these for him; he had made them dig on a diamondiferous part of his estate, just by way of testing the matter; and this was the result; this, and a much larger stone, for which he had received eight thousand pounds from Posno.

“If I was a young man,” said Lusignan, “I would go out directly, and dig on your estate.”

“I would not let you do anything so paltry,” said “le Menteur.”  “Why, my dear sir, there are no fortunes to be made by grubbing for diamonds; the fortunes are made out of the diamonds, but not in that way.  Now, I have thirty thousand acres, and am just concluding a bargain for thirty thousand more, on which I happen to know there are diamonds in a sly corner.  Well, of my thirty thousand tried acres, a hundred only are diamondiferous.  But I have four thousand thirty-foot claims leased at ten shillings per month.  Count that up.”

“Why, it is twenty-four thousand pounds a year.”

“Excuse me:  you must deduct a thousand a year for the expenses of collection.  But this is only one phase of the business.  I have a large inn upon each of the three great routes from the diamonds to the coast; and these inns are supplied with the produce of my own farms.  Mark the effect of the diamonds on property.  My sixty thousand acres, which are not diamondiferous, will very soon be worth as much as sixty thousand English acres, say two pounds the acre per annum.  That is under the mark, because in Africa the land is not burdened with poor-rates, tithes, and all the other iniquities that crush the English land-owner, as I know to my cost.  But that is not all, sir.  Would you believe it? even after the diamonds were declared, the people out there had so little foresight that they allowed me to buy land all round Port Elizabeth, Natal, and Cape Town, the three ports through which the world get at the diamonds, and the diamonds get at the world.  I