He went upstairs after he had smoked his cigar and read his paper. There was the slipper! It all came back to him, that never-to-be-forgotten night, when she rebuked him for the folly of kissing her foot, and he begged the slipper and determined to preserve it for ever, and thought how delightful it would be to take it out and look at it when he was an old man. Even now he did not like to destroy it, but Cecilia might have seen it and might ask him what he had done with it, and what could he say? Finally he decided to burn it. There was no fire, however, in the room, and while he stood meditating, Cecilia called him. He replaced the slipper in the drawer. He could not return that evening, but he intended to go back the next morning, take the little parcel away in his pocket and burn it at his office. At breakfast some letters came which put everything else out of mind. The first thing he did that evening was to revisit the garret, but the slipper had gone. Cecilia had been there and had found it carefully folded up in the drawer. She pulled it out, snipped and tore it into fifty pieces, carried them downstairs, threw them on the dining-room fire, sat down before it, poking them further and further into the flames, and watched them till every vestige had vanished. Frank did not like to make any inquiries; Cecilia made none, and thence-forward no trace existed at Waltham Lodge of Madge Hopgood. CHAPTER XXVI BARUCH went neither to Barnes’s shop nor to the Marshalls for nearly a month. One Sunday morning he was poring over the _Moreh Nevochim_, for it had proved too powerful a temptation for him, and he fell upon the theorem that without God the Universe could not continue to exist, for God is its Form. It was one of those sayings which may be nothing or much to the reader. Whether it be nothing or much depends upon the quality of his mind. There was certainly nothing in it particularly adapted to Baruch’s condition at that moment, but an antidote may be none the less efficacious because it is not direct. It removed him to another region. It was like the sight and sound of the sea to the man who has been in trouble in an inland city. His self-confidence was restored, for he to whom an idea is revealed becomes the idea, and is no longer personal and consequently poor. His room seemed too small for him; he shut his book and went to Great Ormond Street. He found there Marshall, Mrs Caffyn, Clara and a friend of Marshall’s named Dennis. ‘Where is your wife?’ said Baruch to Marshall. ‘Gone with Miss Madge to the Catholic chapel to hear a mass of Mozart’s.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Caffyn. ‘I tell them they’ll turn Papists if they do not mind. They are always going to that place, and there’s no knowing, so I’ve hear’d, what them priests can do. They aren’t like our parsons. Catch that man at Great Oakhurst a-turnin’ anybody.’ ‘I suppose,’ said Baruch to Clara, ‘it is the music takes your sister there?’