Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/143

 For this service he will charge no salary, providing the five hundred pounds reward is sent to him by return."

"Generous man! Nevertheless, the waste-paper basket yawns."

There came another knock at the door, and a boy handed in four of the London morning papers, which showed that it was just past eleven o'clock in the forenoon. Blake took the journals and gave them to Stranleigh.

"If you'll will seat yourself in that comfortable arm-chair on the balcony, and read the news, I'll see what impression I can make on this pile during the next two hours."

Had Stranleigh, instead of opening his morning papers, gazed to the west, he would have seen part of the water-front of the most picturesque, unfashionable, and unconventional seaside resort in England. Towards the end of the Parade, the Cobb made a sort of climax to it, Cobb being Lyme's name for a very stout wharf or breakwater which sticks out into the Channel, and then turns to the east, enclosing a little harbour. No one knows when the Cobb was first built, although it is mentioned in a document bearing the date 1313, a doubly unlucky year, if we believe the superstition