"Daddy," said Sally, struck with a sudden fear, "is it a good un?" The alarming suggestion caused Seth to run out of the place, as though he were running for his life, and this display of excitement on his part was so novel that the neighbours who were still waiting in the street for news concerning the letter came, first to the usual conclusion that the house was on fire, and next to the more appetising one that Seth Dumbrick had suddenly gone mad. He was a long time absent, for it was no easy matter to get a ten-pound note changed in Rosemary Lane. There were hundreds who had never seen such a thing, and to whom a sight of it would have been an eighth wonder of the world. At the end of an hour Seth returned in a calmer mood, with a fistful of gold, which he let fall, piece by piece, on the table, before Sally's wondering eyes. She, who never experienced a pleasure, new or old, without desiring that her idol should share it, caught up the Duchess, crying: "Look, Duchess, look!" The Duchess stretched forth her hand with eager delight, and the children sat close to the table, playing gleefully with the bright pieces, Seth standing at their back, looking at them and at the gold, with one hand resting on the Duchess's shoulder, and the other rasping his chin. His declaration that he did not care where the money came from was not ingenious. If he had wished, he could not have banished so singular an adventure from his mind, and the more he thought of it the more it puzzled him. He had no friend who was likely or able to commit an action so quixotic; neither had Sally. Turning his attention to the letter again, he held it up to the light and peered closely at it, in the endeavour to discover a clue. Then it came into his mind that there was a kind of colourless ink with which persons wishing to communicate secretly could write, and which heat alone would render visible, and he placed the paper to the fire without arriving at any satisfactory result. He could not detect even the scratch of a pen. It was the most unsolvable of riddles. "I am afraid I must give it up," he said to himself, but he could not give it up. With the subject still in his mind, he ascended to his stall to finish some work he had in hand before he started on the contemplated holiday. During his work, a hundred ingenious theories started up, all to be dismissed but one, which took strong possession of him. "Some rich person," he thought, "perhaps a lady who once had a pretty child, that she was ashamed to call her own, has seen the Duchess by chance, and has fallen in love with her beautiful face, because it reminds her of old days. Then she finds out the Duchess's name; then she discovers that the Duchess has been ill; and then she sends a present of money in this mysterious way." The sentiment attaching to this fanciful speculation rendered it peculiarly attractive to Seth. "We'll put it down to that," he mused; "stranger things have happened in the world."