We returned home.
"Miss Eastinhoe is dead!" I said to Mr. Jacobs.
"It is really better," remarked Lamb Ral, who chanced to be astrally
present, being also in Ireland with Number One at the same moment.
"There was absolutely no other way of concluding the story. She
wouldn't be a fourth wife; besides, she was so shadowy a personage
that nobody cared anything about her."
"No," said Mr. Jacobs. "I had wholly forgotten that."
"You had better go and be a nun," Lamb Ral continued, reclining upon
a tiffin. "Trade is dull, and your last trick in glass emeralds has
been discovered."
"On the whole I think I will," replied Jacobs. "Briggs, I have given
my fortune to Miss Eastinhoe's brother, who rescued me from the
gutter. To you I give this diamond. I know you too well to trust you
with anything else. Nay," he added, seeing my inquiring look, "do not
ask its price or try it with a file until I am gone."
"You won't come and be a nun yourself, Mr. Briggs?" Lamb Ral inquired,
with some apprehension.
"Thanks, no," I answered, drawing my tiffin over my shoulders, "I'll
write the thing up."
"Thank you, noble friend," Jacobs said, grasping my hand with emotion.
"You have been the instructor and the genius of my love. I go to be a
nun. Be yourself what you have made me."
One last, loving look,--one more pressure of the reluctant fingers,
and those two went out, hand in hand, under the clear stars, and I saw
them no more.
POSTSCRIPT.
I afterwards ascertained that the fortune left to Mr. Eastinhoe
consisted chiefly of the three discarded wives of Mr. Jacobs.
"I had no means of supporting them," Mr. Eastinhoe remarked,
gravely,--he was from Bombay, and Bombay men never smile,--"so I was
forced to have them served for tiffin. What will you take?"
"A peg of tiffin," I replied, with a pensive sigh.
FINIS.