Explore "The Spider" by Fergus Hume on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Within a week of the episode at Isleworth Colonel Towton took Vernon with him to Yorkshire. Inspector Drench was still searching for the fugitives and was still unable to find them. True to his reputation, The Spider had covered up his tracks in a most masterly manner, and there was not the slightest clue to indicate his whereabouts. Presumably Maunders was with him, as he had not returned to his rooms in Planet Street, nor had he been seen in any of his usual haunts about town. This was to be expected, as Maunders had, as the saying goes, "gone under," and the society wherein he had glittered so gaily would henceforth know him no more. It seemed a pity that a young man with talents and good looks and social position should have ruined his life at the very outset of a promising career. But there must have been some criminal strain in Maunders, which came to the surface in prosperity instead of being revealed by poverty.
He was, as Coleridge says about people with such natures, "a fool in a circumbendibus."