tried anonymous letters, and at last, grown desperate, they resorted to watching you, burglary, and kidnapping. Their first night’s raid was unsuccessful, so last night they tried kidnapping you by the aid of a cabman--possibly one of themselves. When they had got you, and you had at last given them to understand that it was your Uncle Joseph’s snuff-box you were defending, they tried the house again, and this time were successful. On the occasion of their first burglary they avoided the top floor, because of the servant sleeping there. This time she went home--they probably saw her go--and they got at the box in the attic. I guessed they had succeeded then, from a simple circumstance. They had begun to cut out the backs of framed engravings for purposes of search, but only some of the engravings were so treated. That meant either that the article wanted was found behind one of them, or that the intruders broke off in their picture-examination to search somewhere else, and were then successful, and so under no necessity of opening the other engravings. You assured me that nothing could have been concealed in any of the engravings, so I at once assumed that they had found what they were after in the only place wherein they had not searched the night before--the attic--and probably among the papers in the trunk.” “But then if they found it there, why didn’t they return and let me go?” “Because you would have found where they had brought you. They probably intended to keep you there till the dark of the next evening, and then take you away in a cab again and leave you some distance off. To prevent my following and possibly finding you they left here on your looking-glass this note” (Hewitt produced it), “threatening all sorts of vague consequences if you were not left to them. They knew you had come to me, of course, having followed you to my office. And now Penner feels himself anything but safe. He has relinquished his greengrocery and dispensed his stock in charity, and probably, having got the seal--the only thing he coveted in the world--he has taken himself off. Not so much perhaps from fear of punishment as for fear the seal may be taken from him, and with it the salvation his odd belief teaches him it will confer.” And then Hewitt related the circumstance of the smudgy boy and his sack of coals.