65 A Heart Is Stolen Read Free Page A

hands and seen at once that it was not only valuable but unique.
    It was not the diamonds that encircled it which interested him, but the fact that in the centre, skilfully enamelled and ornamented with small gems, was a battleship.
    It was depicted with billowing sails and rubies to portray the fire coming from its guns, while the sea was encrusted with very small emeralds.
    The Marquis stared at it and then he said,
    “I am sure I have seen this before.”
    “You have?” Peregrine Percival asked curiously. “I bought it from a dealer, but he did not tell me who it had belonged to.”
    “I remember now!” the Marquis exclaimed. “It must be the twin of one I actually own myself.”
    He saw the surprise in the face of the man listening and went on,
    “My father collected a great many things that concerned the sea, for the house where he lived on the coast. The very replica of this box, unless I am mistaken, is among those he possessed.”
    “How interesting!” Peregrine Percival replied. “We must compare them sometime.”
    “Yes, we must do that,” the Marquis agreed.
    “I wonder what its history is. I imagine it was made some fifty or even a hundred years ago.”
    “Quite that, I should think,” the Marquis replied.
    “It would be amusing to trace it, especially as we are both interested.”
    Then Rose had claimed the Marquis’s attention and he had not thought of the snuffbox again.
    Now the conversation came back to him and he thought that if he went to Heathcliffe he would certainly look for his snuffbox with the ship on it and see if his father had listed anything about it in the very accurate catalogue he had made of all his possessions that particularly interested him.
    He suddenly thought how much he would enjoy being at Heathcliffe again. He had nearly forgotten, or rather it had not occurred to him for a long time, to think about the estate he owned on the South coast.
    The last three summers he had accompanied the Prince Regent to Brighton because His Royal Highness specially requested his presence, but three weeks had been enough to bore him with the same entertainments, the same gambling and meeting the same people night after night.
    That happened again this year and he had left Brighton at the end of July to come to Veryan Hall where he had been ever since.
    There was a great deal to occupy him on his large estate in Kent where he owned ten thousand acres. He prided himself it was a model of its kind that definitely impressed everyone from the Prince himself downwards.
    The Marquis entertained large house parties and he had been training a number of horses with which he intended to win every important Classic race for a great number of years to come.
    It was not surprising that Heathcliffe, like his estate in Cornwall and another in the North, had not recently had the pleasure of his company, but he had received reports on them and had left what he believed to be able agents in charge.
    When he had time, he went through the accounts of each establishment and made it his duty occasionally to query some particular item and ask for an explanation of it, just to keep those who represented him up to scratch.
    Heathcliffe was actually the smallest of his possessions, being less than two thousand acres in extent, a great deal of it unfarmable.
    His father had lived there the last years of his life, because the doctors considered the sunshine of the South was better for his health than the weather elsewhere in the British Isles.
    It would have been even better for him had he been able to spend his time abroad, but first the French Revolution then the war with Bonaparte had kept him in his native land.
    Looking back now the Marquis remembered how much he had loved Heathcliffe when he was young, how he had enjoyed swimming in the sea and being able to feel freer there than in any of the other houses his father owned.
    ‘Anthony and I will be on our own,’ he thought, ‘and that is what I want.’
    He