Read "The Mystery of Crocksands" by Fred M. White online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The City office of a respectable family solicitor is hardly the place to find mystery and romance, and Ellen Bland went back to her own room with her head in a whirl. No doubt Peter would explain all in good time; meanwhile the mystery remained. Why had he been so madly keen on retaining those letters, and why had he spoken so strangely when Sir Christopher Wrath's name was mentioned. The man who more or less had ousted Ellen from the succession of Crocksands Abbey was a client of her employer's, though she had never known him to come to the office before. Not that it was any business of hers so long as Wrath knew nothing of her identity. But why did Peter Gabb hate him so, and what did he mean, by his allusion to what might happen in God's good time? Why had the placid air of Martin's Inn so suddenly become charged with electricity?
All this was still uppermost in Ellen's mind as she put on her hat presently and went out to lunch. As she turned into the quiet place just off Carey-street where she usually ate her modest meal, she was conscious of a young man coming in her direction. He smiled something more than a welcome as he swept off his hat and showed a set of even white teeth in a face singularly open and honest, and tanned with the brown of a hard, open-air life. He was beautifully turned out, and his grey tweeds fitted him to perfection. He looked just a little out of place in the City.