"Navigation? Yes; to be sure, I taught him navigation--or, rather,
tried to. But what of that?"
"Well, sir, Miss Belcher seemed to think it suspicious."
He reached out a hand, and, taking the glasses from me, sat down upon
the stone base of the flagstaff and began feebly to polish them.
"Impossible!" he said faintly, as if to himself; then aloud:
"The man was a friend of yours, too, wasn't he?"
"Yes, sir; if you mean Captain Coffin, he was a friend of mine."
"And of mine; and, as you say, he came to me to learn navigation.
Now, what connection there can be between that and his being murdered
a dozen miles inland--"
But here he broke off, and we both looked up and across the stream
as, with a click of the latch, the door there creaked and opened, and
Miss Belcher entered the garden. She wore an orange-coloured
dressing-gown, top-boots to guard her ankles from the morning dew, a
red kerchief tied over her brow to keep her iron-grey locks in place,
and over it her customary beaver hat--_et vera incessu patit dea_.
Even thus attired did Miss Belcher, a goddess of the dawn, come
striding over the footbridge and across the turf to us; and the
effect of the apparition upon Captain Branscome's nerves, after a
night of travel alongside Russell's van, I can only surmise.
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