Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 166: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

5} fags LADY BESS’S HISTORY 149 ence carried on between the financier in London and the Frenchman in Paris, and no doubt large sums of money were made from the intelligence which they were enabled so promptly to exchange, and which was thereby communi- cated in as many hours as it would otherwise have taken days to forward by the ordmary channels. When Kate Marshall left the school at Southampton two years previously to the time at which I thus saw her at Dover, she took charge of the little chamber at the top of the house, and which was fitted up with the arrangements to serve as a resting-place for the carrier-pigeons between London and Paris. Several of the birds were still kept at the Admiral’s Head, and Kate took great pleasure in cultivating the breed. “Such was the narrative that my friend Miss Marshall told me in the frank confidence of the sincere friendship which she experienced for me. Confidence begets confidence, and in return | gave her some particulars of the extraordinary adventures which had occurred to myself since we parted two years back at Southampton. I did not however mention any names, — I mean in respect to my extraordinary mar- riage, —and thus I suppressed those of the Marstons, Mrs. Lloyd, and the Marquis of Villebelle. I did however tell her frankly the incident of the jewel business at Barcelona, and how it led me to fly to the Catalan Hills and fall into the hands of Don Diego Christoval. She laughed when I assured her that I did not really take the jewels, and I was some time before | could make her believe in my innocence. It was only when I grew angry at her skepticism that she ceased from her good-natured bantering upon the subject, but she added that if I had really taken those valuables, she should not have thought a bit the worse of me; adding that “people must take care of themselves in this world.’ I therefore saw that my friend’s principles upon this subject were far from being the most correct; and I have no doubt that having been accustomed to look back so constantly on her grandfather’s privateering career and her father’s smugeling transactions, her emotions of propriety and rectitude had in certain cases been considerably damaged and warped. From the description I gave her of Count Christoval she admired him most rapturously, and vowed | that she wished she had possessed such a chance of becoming the handsome Catalan bandit’s bride. I must however do ECORNICLOOO® cS (S(O)