Now, it so happened that in the course of the forenoon of the day following that of his second interview with Miss Baynard, as he was taking a short cut to his lodgings through one of the narrow and not over savory lanes which divided Holborn from the Strand, he came on a crowd of people gathered round a man who had fallen down in a fit, either real or simulated. Dare had pushed his way steadily, through the crowd and had got some yards beyond it, when some instinct, so to call it, caused him to clap his hand to his waistcoat. Sir Peter's jeweled snuff-box was gone! For Geoffrey Dare such an experience was certainly a novel one. No sooner did he realize his loss than he broke into a cynical but not unamused laugh. "Confound the rogue's impudence!" he exclaimed half aloud. "Where were his eyes that he failed to recognize a gentleman of his own kidney? It is to be feared that he will find himself landed at Tyburn one of these days." He was still standing with his hand pressed to his empty pocket, and staring at the fluctuating crowd, when a hand was laid on his shoulder and a voice said in his ear: "What's the matter, Mr. Dare? You look as if you had just lost something." Dare, turning, recognized the speaker for John Tipway, a famous Bow Street runner, whose acquaintance he had made a couple of days before when reporting the abduction of the young heir. "That's exactly what I have done," replied Dare. "Pocket picked, eh?" Dare nodded. "Anything of consequence?" "A very valuable snuff-box." "Ah-ha! A noted neighborhood this for petty larceny. Hardly a worse anywhere. But come along with me to the office--I'm on my way there--and lodge a description of the missing property. Who knows but we may be able to recover it for you from the pawnbroker's or somewhere else." Dare hesitated, and well he might, considering under what circumstances the box had come into his possession. But in the company of Mr. Tipway to have hesitated over a matter of that sort would have tended to provoke suspicion, and that was what he could not afford to do. So he accompanied the runner to Bow Street--not without a certain relish for the comedy of the situation--and there furnished a description of the stolen box, leaving an address, that of a humble lodging in a back street in Bloomsbury, at which any tidings of it might be communicated to him. By that night's coach he started for the North in order to take up the quest to which he had vowed himself. About a fortnight later the snuff-box was found in the possession of a swell-mobsman who had been arrested for another offence.