a voice as if some person was drowning and guggling for help.  So I fit and unmoored again, and pushed across for dear life, just in time to see a man scrambling ashore.  He was as drunk as a fly, sir, even after his wetting.  Said he was a retired seaman living at Penzance, had come round to Falmouth on a lime-barge bound for the Truro river, and must get along to St. Austell in time to attend his sister’s wedding there next morning.  Told me his sister’s name, but I forget it.  Said he’d fallen in with some brave fellows at Falmouth just returned from the French war-prisons, and had taken a glass or two.  Gave me half a crown when I brought him over and landed him,’ said the ferryman, ’and too far gone in liquor to understand the mistake if I’d explained it to him, which I didn’t.’  He was dressed in what appeared to be a dark cloth jacket, duck trousers of sea-going cut, and a tarpaulin hat.  ‘There was just moon enough,’ said the ferry-man, ’to let a man take notice of his trousers, they being white; and maybe I took particular notice of his legs, because they were dripping wet.  As for his face, by the glimpse I had of it he was a middle-aged man that had seen trouble.’  I asked if he would know the man again.  He said, ‘Yes,’ he was pretty sure he would.  So there, Lydia, you have the villain dogging Coffin, tracking him to Percuil, and shamming drunk to get carried over the ferry in pursuit.  On Bogue’s testimony he was as sober as a judge at St. Mawes, and drank but one glass of grog there, and from St. Mawes to Percuil is but a step, mainly by footpath over the fields, with no public-house on the way.”

“H’m,” said Miss Belcher; “and yet he couldn’t have been following the man to murder him, or he must have taken more care to cover up his traces.  All his concern seems to have been to follow Coffin without being seen by him.  Is that all?”

“My dear Lydia, consider the amount of time I’ve had!  Almost before I’d finished with Bogue, and certainly before the filly was well rested, Mr. Goodfellow here had crossed to Falmouth and was back again, bringing the cupboard—­”

“Yes, Jack; you have done very well—­surprisingly well.  But I’ll not hand over my guinea until we’ve examined the cupboard.  Here, Mr. Goodfellow”—­she cleared a space amid the breakfast things—­“be so good as to lift it on to the table.  Harry, where’s the key?”

I produced it.

“A nice bit of work—­and Dutch, by the look of it,” she commented, pausing to admire the inlaid pattern as she inserted the key.  She turned it, and the door fell back, askew on its broken hinges.