The next morning there again sat Mr. Spelt at his work--working and watching. With the queerest look of inquiry and doubtful expectation, Poppie appeared from under the archway, with her head already turned toward El Dorado--namely, the flag-stone upon which the gifts of Providence had been set forth on other mornings. There--could she, might she, believe her eyes?--lay a splendid polyhedral lump of rock; white as snow, and veined with lovely red. It was not quartz and porphyry, reader, but the most melting compound of sugar and lemon-juice that the sweet inventing Genius--why should she not have the name of a tenth muse? Polyhedia, let us call her--had ever hatched in her brooding brain, as she bent over melting sugar or dark treacle, "in linked sweetness long drawn out." This time Poppie hesitated a little, and glanced up and around. She saw nobody but the tailor, and he was too cunning even for her. Busy as a bee, he toiled away lightly and earnestly. Then, as if the sweetmeat had been a bird for which she was laying snares, as her would-be father was laying them for her, she took two steps nearer on tiptoe, then stopped and gazed again. It was not that she thought of stealing, any more than the birds who take what they find in the fields and on the hedges; it was only from a sort of fear that it was too good fortune for her, and that there must be something evanescent about it--wings somewhere. Or perhaps she vaguely fancied there must be some unfathomable design in it, awful and inscrutable, and therefore glanced around her once more--this time all but surprising the tailor, with uplifted head and the eager eyes of a fowler. But the temptation soon overcame any suspicion she might have. She made one bound upon the prize, and scudded as she had never scudded before. Mr. Spelt ran his needle in under the nail of his left thumb, and so overcame his delight in time to save his senses. And now came a part of the design which Mr. Spelt regarded as a very triumph of cunning invention. That evening he drove two tiny staples of wire--one into Mr. Dolman's door-post close to the ground; the other into his own. The next morning, as soon as he arrived, he chose a thread as near the color of the flag-stones that paved the passage as he could find, fastened one end with a plug of toffee into a hole he bored with his scissors in another splendor of rock, laid the bait in the usual place, drew the long thread through the two eyes of the staples, and sat down in his lair with the end attached to the little finger of his left hand.