“All right, Beaumont, I’ll put things to ship-shape. Well, I shan’t see you again before I start, so ta-ta. Hope biz. will brighten up before I come back. It’s been as dull as ditch-water this month back.” Mr. Storth returned to his own room and began to set to rights, as he styled it, the heterogeneous mass of papers that accumulate about a busy lawyer’s desk and pigeon-holes and drawers. He was routing out the contents of a deep recess, lettered XYZ, a receptacle apparently for odds and ends of documents that could find no other home, reading the endorsements, tearing up some, transferring others to their appropriate resting-place, when he chanced upon a document bearing no endorsement—an omission not a little irritating to the methodic mind. “If I knew the clerk who’s responsible for this I’d give him a piece of my mind,” muttered Mr. Storth, vindictively, as he opened the folded paper and set about ascertaining its nature, with a view to duly marking its date and character upon its back. He read a few lines and then whistled softly. “Well, I’m jiggered! The missing certificate! ‘Can recommend an advance of £3,000 (three thousand) to £3,500 (three thousand five hundred pounds).’ Now, what shall I do with this precious bit of paper? What a load the finding of this will take off Beaumont’s mind! I’ve a good mind to pop it in the fire. I know a young lady who would say that’s what I ought to do. Shall I? No; hanged if I play it as low as that, not even to pleasure Miss Amelia Wrigley.” Mr. Storth was so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear a gentle tap at his room door, did not hear the door open, did not hear the deprecating cough by which the clerk who entered sought to attract his attention, and only when the clerk stood by his side, and had cast a quick glance at the document that engrossed his thoughts did he turn swiftly round in his chair. “That you, Barnes. What the deuce do you mean stealing into my room like a confounded ghost? What do you want any way?” And Mr. Storth huddled up the papers he had taken from the pigeon-hole XYZ, the long lost, anxiously-searched certificate among them and thrust them into that receptacle. And though, later, Mr. Storth searched high and low for the document, he found it not. It had again vanished. And so had Mr. Barnes. CHAPTER VII.