My mistress rang the bell, and ordered her
waterproof things. It was still pouring with
rain; and the close carriage had gone, as you
know, with Miss Rachel to Frizinghall. I tried
to dissuade her ladyship from facing the severity
of the weather. Quite useless! I asked leave
to go with her, and hold the umbrella. She
wouldn't hear of it. The pony-chaise came
round, with the groom in charge. "You may
rely on two things," she said to Sergeant Cuff,
in the hall. "I will try the experiment on Miss
Verinder as boldly as you could try it yourself.
And I will inform you of the result, either
personally or by letter, before the last train leaves
for London to-night."

With that, she stepped into the chaise, and,
taking the reins herself, drove off to
Frizinghall.

CHAPTER XXI.

MY mistress having left us, I had leisure to
think of Sergeant Cuff. I found him sitting in
a snug corner of the hall, consulting his
memorandum book, and curling up viciously at the
corners of the lips.

"Making notes of the case?" I asked.

"No," said the Sergeant. "Looking to see
what my next professional engagement is."

"Oh !" I said. "You think it's all over, then,
here?"

"I think," answered Sergeant Cuff, "that
Lady Verinder is one of the cleverest women in
England. I also think a rose much better worth
looking at than a diamond. Where is the
gardener, Mr. Betteredge?"

There was no getting a word more out of
him on the matter of the Moonstone. He had
lost all interest in his own inquiry; and he
would persist in looking for the gardener. An
hour afterwards, I heard them at high words
in the conservatory, with the dog-rose once
more at the bottom of the dispute.

In the mean time, it was my business to find
out whether Mr. Franklin persisted in his
resolution to leave us by the afternoon train. After
having been informed of the conference in my
lady's room, and of how it had ended, he
immediately decided on waiting to hear the news
from Frizinghall. This very natural alteration
in his plans—which, with ordinary
people, would have led to nothing in particular
—proved, in Mr. Franklin's case, to have one
objectionable result. It left him unsettled, with
a legacy of idle time on his hands, and in so
doing it let out all the foreign sides of his
character, one on the top of another, like rats out
of a bag.

Now as an Italian-Englishman, now as a
German-Englishman, and now as a French-
Englishman, he drifted in and out of all the
sitting-rooms in the house, with nothing to talk of
but Miss Rachel's treatment of him; and with
nobody to address himself to but me. I found
him (for example) in the library, sitting under
the map of Modern Italy, and quite unaware
of any other method of meeting his troubles,
except the method of talking about them. "I
have several worthy aspirations, Betteredge; but
what am I to do with them now? I am full of
dormant good qualities, if Rachel would only
have helped me to bring them out!" He was so
eloquent in drawing the picture of his own
neglected merits, and so pathetic in lamenting
over it when it was done, that I felt quite at
my wits' end how to console him, when it
suddenly occurred to me that here was a case
for the wholesome application of a bit of Robinson
Crusoe. I hobbled out to my own room,
and hobbled back with that immortal book.
Nobody in the library! The map of Modern
Italy stared at me; and I stared at the map of
Modern Italy.

I tried the drawing-room. There was his
handkerchief on the floor, to prove that he had
drifted in. And there was the empty room, to
prove that he had drifted out again.

I tried the dining-room, and discovered
Samuel with a biscuit and a glass of sherry,
silently investigating the empty air. A minute
since, Mr. Franklin had rung furiously for a
little light refreshment. On its production, in
a violent hurry, by Samuel, Mr. Franklin had
vanished before the bell down-stairs had quite
done ringing with the pull he had given to it.

I tried the morning-room, and found him at
last. There he was at the window, drawing
hieroglyphics with his finger in the damp on
the glass.

"Your sherry is waiting for you, sir,"
I said to him. I might as well have
addressed myself to one of the four walls
of the room; he was down in the bottomless
deep of his own meditations, past all pulling
up. "How do you explain Rachel's conduct,
Betteredge?" was the only answer I received.
Not being ready with the needful reply, I
produced Robinson Crusoe, in which I am firmly
persuaded some explanation might have been
found, if we had only searched long enough for
it. Mr. Franklin shut up Robinson Crusoe, and
floundered into his German-English gibberish on
the spot. "Why not look into it?" he said, as
if I had personally objected to looking into it.
"Why the devil lose your patience, Betteredge,
when patience is all that's wanted to arrive at
the truth? Don't interrupt me. Rachel's
conduct is perfectly intelligible, if you will only
do her the common justice to take the Objective
view first, and the Subjective view next,
and the Objective-Subjective view to wind up
with. What do we know? We know that the
loss of the Moonstone, on Thursday morning
last, threw her into a state of nervous excitement,
from which she has not recovered yet.
Do you mean to deny the Objective view, so
far? Very well, then—don't interrupt me.
Now, being in a state of nervous excitement,
how are we to expect that she should behave as
she might otherwise have behaved to any of the
people about her? Arguing in this way, from
within outwards, what do we reach? We
reach the Subjective view. I defy you to
controvert the Subjective view. Very well,
then—what follows? Good Heavens! the