"Someone seems to have left it at a Tube cloak-room," I replied, "and sent the Director the ticket." "That was very clever," Naomi said. "I wonder how you would set about it if you had to restore a stolen picture. Not like that, I feel certain. You'd do something at once more clever and less clever." "Yes," I said. "I should like to see the picture so much," Naomi continued. "Do you think it is on view?" "Sure to be," I said. "Then let's look in this morning, shall we?" I was only too willing, and together we stood before the little Verrocchio in its new position, screwed to the wall, with a custodian on either side. Never have I been so glad to see any picture in its right place. "Why do you sigh like that?" Naomi asked. "It's so satisfying," I said, but I did not mean quite what she thought. And so ended not only my first, and I hope last, participation in the higher crime, but also my first, and I hope last, deception of Naomi. CHAPTER XXXIV IN WHICH I BRING TOGETHER THREE MEN WHO WERE DUE TO MEET, AND A NOVEL AND BENEFICIAL SCHEME IS DECIDED UPON Heaven, I am glad to say, has been pleased to remove Mr. Wiles's adopted daughter from this transitory sphere. She was sickly when she came, and she never rallied, in spite of the most assiduous care on his part, in which he was more or less assisted by a loyal wife. "Wiles does nothing but mope," Mrs. Wiles told Naomi. "At first, after he found it was no good and the creature was bound to die, he was a little excited and above himself with a scheme he had for getting it Christian burial. I don't know what's come over the man--he never used to have such ideas--but he actually thought of trying to smuggle it into a cemetery as though it was a real child. Went about peering in undertakers' windows and wondering which looked most like helping him. But I put a stop to all that. It wasn't fair to the real people buried there, I said. A pretty thing to pay money for a nice grave or comfortable family vault, and then have a heathen ape laid near you! Wiles came round to my way of thinking, but he's never recovered his spirits. In the end, he paid good money to have it buried in the dogs' cemetery in the Bayswater Road, and he let me have the scullery new whitewashed without saying a word. If he doesn't get something to do soon I don't know what will happen. But I'm afraid of the drink and the Stock Exchange, both, for he's begun to be interested in tin mines and things like that. If only Mr. Falconer could find him an occupation!" The good woman's concern about her husband had long made me want to help, and after Mrs. Duckie's statement that the head waiter of the "Golden Horn" had saved enough to start an eating-house of his own, the finger of Providence seemed to be in it, pointing directly at the homely features of Mordecai Wiles, late of the New Ape House.