Just as she was beginning to remove the leather purses of gold she had brought him from the well of the desk, so as to search beneath, a prolonged, curious, hissing snore seemed to arrest her very breath. She stopped and went to him. The hissing sound was barely over--how curious it was, that half-snore, half breath! He lay still still--still as---- "Oh, no, no! It cannot be that! He looks asleep, and as happy as if he were an innocent little child!" she assured herself, returning to the table and to her task. Out she quickly took them, one by one, those silly purses--how puerile money and all those things seemed, she told herself, at such a moment--and then peered anxiously at the packets of papers. Eureka! Her girlish handwriting! There was a package--she drew it out, and in the middle projected a paper--she could not undo the knots--there was no time--but she turned down a corner and saw printed letters--a margin---- Seizing her little bag, she thrust them in, and rapidly restoring the purses to their place, locked the desk. "Shall I put the keys back in his pocket?" she asked herself. "No! I can leave them on the table. It is of no use trying to hide my having taken the letters. He will discover it." She glanced round the room. What else must she do? She frowned and bit her lip as the brandy bottle caught her eye. There was still remaining a certain quantity of the drugged liquid. "Any more would certainly make him very ill, if it did not kill him--and he will very likely start drinking again when he wakes up," she mused. "Can I pour it away?" She looked uncertainly at the door. No, it was too hazardous. Then she remembered she had seen some brown paper in that cupboard where the skeleton hung. Once more she went to the cupboard and took out a crumpled sheet of brown paper, smiling almost derisively at the grinning skull of the hanging skeleton. "How true you were when you said there were worse things than skeletons," she thought, inwardly apostrophizing the sleeper, as she quickly wrapped the bottle in the paper. Then, mentally wishing him a better and more generous spirit in her regard when he awoke, she ran rapidly downstairs with bag and bottle, and in another moment was in the street. Her success, her escape, filled her with a joy which made her feel almost delirious. Still, she noticed a hansom with a lady in it drive past, and with an almost contemptuous mental comment--"she cannot be living at Number 12," she looked back over her shoulder, then stopped short, and leaning against the rails, watched. The hansom did stop at the house she had left. More, the lady alighted--briskly, as if she were as young as she was slim and alert--looked up and down the street, as if, indeed, Joan thought, she, too, had noticed herself, and wondered what she was doing in Haythorn Street at that hour, and then, after paying the driver, ran up the steps and let herself in with her latchkey.