His own bed! The irony struck him even as he said the words. He was none the less glad to sit down on it; and so sitting he made his first close examination of two or three tiny squares of paper which he had picked out of the basket in the doctor’s room instead of Boismont’s book on hallucinations. There had been no hallucination about those scraps of paper; they were fragments of the boy’s own letter to his sister, which Dr. Baumgartner had never posted at all. CHAPTER XV. A LIKELY STORY At that moment help was as far away as it had been near the day before, when Eugene Thrush was closeted in the doctor’s dining-room; for not only had Mr. Upton decamped for Leicestershire, without a word of warning to anybody, on the Saturday afternoon, but Thrush himself had followed by the only Sunday train. A bell was ringing for evening service when he landed in a market town which reversed the natural order by dozing all summer and waking up for the hunting season. And now the famous grass country was lying in its beauty-sleep, under a gay counterpane of buttercups and daisies, and leafy coverts, with but one blot in the sky-line, in the shape of a permanent plume of sluggish smoke. But the works lay hidden, and the hall came first; and Thrush, having ascertained that this was it, abandoned the decrepit vessel he had boarded at the station, and entered the grounds on foot. A tall girl, pacing the walks with a terribly anxious face, was encountered and accosted before he reached the house. “I believe Mr. Upton lives here. Can you tell me if he’s at home? I want to see him about something.” Lettice flushed and shrank. “I know who you are! Have you found my brother?” “No; not yet,” said Thrush, after a pause. “But you take my breath away, my dear young lady! How could you be so sure of me? Is it no longer to be kept a secret, and is that why your father bolted out of town without a word?” “It’s still a secret,” whispered Lettice, as though the shrubs had ears, “only I’m in it. Nobody else is—nobody fresh—but I guessed, and my mother was beginning to suspect. My father never stays away a Sunday unless he’s out of England altogether; she couldn’t understand it, and was worrying so about him that I wired begging him to come back if only for the night. So it’s all my fault, Mr. Thrush; and I know everything but what you’ve come down to tell us!” “That’s next to nothing,” he shrugged. “It’s neither good nor bad. But if you can find your father I’ll tell you both exactly what I have found out.”