Entirely unconscious of the attention and interest they were arousing, the party escaped. Robert was hungry and insisted on having oysters. As they ate them they discussed the play. Robert and Matilda were enthusiastic, Old Mole was dubious and depressed, and Panoukian contemptuous. "I've seen worse," he said, "but nothing with quite so much effrontery. It was like having your face dabbed with a baby's powder puff. I felt all the time that in a moment they would have a child saying its prayers on the stage. But they never did, and there was extraordinary pleasure in the continual dread of it, and the continual sense of relief. And every now and then they made one laugh. I believe it will succeed." It succeeded. The critics unanimously agreed that the new play had charm, and, said one of them: "It is with plays, as with women; if they have charm, you need look no further. All London will be at Lossie's feet." At the end of the first week Old Mole received a check for one hundred and ten pounds; at the end of the second a check for one hundred and twenty-five. He sent two cablegrams to Carlton Timmis and Cuthbert Jones at Crown Imperial, British Columbia. No answer. Timmis (or Jones) had disappeared. Money poured in. The play was bought by cable for America, and five hundred pounds passed into Old Mole's account. It became almost a horror to him to open his letters lest they should contain a check. Worst of all, the newspapers scented "copy." A successful play, a vanished author, no one to claim the fame and fortune lying there. One paper undertook to find Carlton Timmis. It published photographs of him, scraps of biography and anecdotes, but Timmis remained hidden, and the newspapers yelled, in effect, "Where is Timmis? The public wants Timmis. Wireless has tracked a murderer to his doom, surely it cannot fail to reveal the whereabouts of the public's new darling?" Another journal found its way to the heart (_i.e.,_ the box office) of the theater and asked in headlines, "_Is Butcher Paying Royalties_?" Butcher wrote to say that he was paying royalties to the owner of the play, whose name was not Carlton Timmis. And at last a third newspaper announced the name of the beneficiary of the play--H. J. Beenham. Gray's Inn was besieged. Old Mole was in despair and declared that they would have to pack up and go away until the uproar had died down, but, more sensibly, Matilda invited a journalist in, gave him a drink, and told him the little there was to tell. The next check was for a hundred and eighty pounds. Money poured in.