The escape of Lionel Dering from Duxley Gaol created an extraordinary sensation throughout the country. Government at once offered a reward of two hundred pounds, which, a week later, was increased to four hundred. The telegraph was set to work in every direction, and at every sea-port in England and on the Continent sharp eyes were made sharper still by the possibility of winning so magnificent a prize. But day passed after day till a fortnight had come and gone, and still there was not the slightest clue to the whereabouts of the missing man; nor the smallest scrap of comfort for the disconsolate soul of Mr. Drayton, the superintendent of the Duxley police. However positive Jabez Creede, his landlady, and the various prison warders might be that Mr. Hoskyns, and no one but he, was the man who had assisted Lionel Dering to escape, it was easily proved that they were one and all in the wrong. On the evening of the escape Mr. Hoskyns had dined with Mr. Tressil and three or four other members of the bar, and had not parted from them till after midnight. This fact the gentlemen in question all came forward and swore to, and Mr. Hoskyns was at once exculpated from any share in the extraordinary escape of his client. With Jabez Creede it fared somewhat more hardly. Every one at first was inclined to regard him in the light of an accomplice, and it was not till after he had spent upwards of a week in prison, and had been examined and remanded about a dozen times, that he was able to prove how really innocent he was of any complicity in the heinous crime of which he was accused. But who, then, was the consummate actor who had so cleverly outwitted, not only drink-soddened Jabez Creede, but the keen-eyed warders of the prison, who, for weeks past, had been in the habit of seeing the real Hoskyns almost daily, and who, one would have thought, were about the last men in the world to be so easily deceived? Government supplemented its second reward for the capture of the escaped prisoner by offering a hundred and fifty pounds for the capture of the man who had helped him to escape. But Government, to all appearance, might as well have never offered to unloosen its purse-strings. From the moment Lionel Dering and the arch-impostor who aided and abetted him in his nefarious scheme set foot outside the walls of Duxley Gaol, they seemed to have vanished into thinnest air. Like creatures of a dream, they had melted utterly away; and not all the ten thousand practised eyes that were on the look-out for them here, there, and everywhere, could succeed in finding the faintest clue to their hiding-place.