Mr. Deedes was up betimes next morning, and took a three miles’ trudge over the hills before breakfast.  He spent a quiet day mooning about the neighbourhood, and really enjoying himself after his own fashion, although his mind was busily engaged all the time in trying to solve the mystery of the Great Diamond.  In the evening he took care to have a few pleasant words with Cleon, and then early to bed.  Two more days passed away after a similar quiet fashion, and then Mr. Deedes began to chafe inwardly at the small progress he was making.

Although he had been so successful in tracing out M. Platzoff, and in working the case up to its present point in a remarkably short space of time, he acknowledged to himself that he was completely baffled when he came to consider what his next step ought to be.  He could not, indeed, see his way to a single step beyond his present standpoint.  Much as he seemed to have gained at a single leap, was he in reality one hair’s-breadth nearer the secret object of his quest than on that day when the name of the Great Hara Diamond first made music in his ears?  He doubted it greatly.

When he first decided on coming down to Bon Repos, he trusted that the chapter of accidents and the good fortune which had so far attended him would somehow put it in his power to scrape an acquaintance with M. Platzoff himself, and such an acquaintance once made, it would be his own fault if, in one way or another, he did not make it subservient to the ambitious end he had in view.

But in M. Platzoff he found a recluse:  a man who made no fresh acquaintanceships; who held the whole tourist tribe in horror, and who even kept himself aloof from such of the neighbouring families as might be considered his equals in social position.  It was quite evident to Mr. Deedes that he might reside close to Bon Repos for twenty years, and at the end of that time not have succeeded in addressing half-a-dozen words to its owner.

Then again he had succeeded little better with regard to Cleon than with regard to Cleon’s master.  All his advances, made with a mixture of affability and bonhommie which Mr. Deedes flattered himself was irresistible with most people, were productive of little or no effect upon the mulatto.  He received them, not with suspicion, for he had nothing of which to suspect harmless Mr. Deedes, but with a sort of sulky indifference, as though he considered them rather a nuisance than otherwise, and would have preferred their being offered to anyone else.  Did Mr. Deedes, in conversation with him and the landlord, venture to bring the talk round to Bon Repos and M. Platzoff; did he hazard the remark that since his arrival in Lakeland several people had spoken to him of the strange character and eccentric mode of life of Mr. Cleon’s employer—­he was met with a stony silence, which told him as plainly as any words could have done that M. Platzoff and his affairs were matters that in no wise concerned him.  It was quite evident that neither the Russian nor his dark-skinned valet was of any avail for the furtherance of that scheme which had brought Mr. Deedes all the way to the wilds of Westmoreland.