Explore "The Great Skene Mystery" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar's remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a certain event in which I was interested.
An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him -- he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller -- a tentative explorer, at least -- and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.