Explore "The Prisoner in the Opal" by A.E.W. Mason on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For half an hour Hanaud was busy with the Commissaire Herbesthal and his own assistant, Moreau, in a room which had been put aside for them. Mr. Ricardo, left to his own devices and being in a maze of doubts, speculations, prejudices and ignorance, snatched some luncheon and set himself down in the library in front of the window. Halfway between the terrace and the hedge at the bottom of the garden a gendarme stood sentinel at the edge of a round flowerbed. There were three little brown mounds on the surface of the bed, as though a mole had been at work; and the thought of that industrious animal became to Julius Ricardo a reproach and an inspiration. He took a sheet of paper from the stand to make a table for his own guidance. He drew a dividing line down the middle of the sheet, set the facts, so far as he knew them, upon the left-hand side, and his questions and suspicions upon the right. After half an hour of laborious breathing and deep cogitation, he had produced the following compendium; upon the top of which he wrote the rather pretentious legend: "The Affair at the Château Suvlac" -- so:
The Affair at the Château Suvlac