The Deed might have appeared upon his record at Scotland Yard and dogged him through life, for he was already eight years of age and knew full well the wickedness of his act. He had been spared by the noble elasticity of the English Common Law. His sobbing widowed mother had seen, indeed, the shadow of the police across her threshold, and Ethelbert had stood in the Felons' Dock before the dud parliamentary lawyer who had got the local stipendiary job. But our Magistracy--especially that of the Stipendiary Sort--is famous throughout the whole world for its merciful wisdom. Young Bert had escaped imprisonment, as having been led away by his senior Charlie Gasket, who was nearly ten. He had, I say, been saved; but the memory of the peril had burnt into his soul. And now, though he was nearly fifteen years of age, the incident still stood out the sharpest of his memories. It was known to his lord the Butler--perhaps to his Master--but to no others. He had been taken into the Great House in spite of it all, because his father had worked upon the estate. Therefore, I say, did Ethelbert feel himself redeemed. But he trembled still at the apparatus of National Justice. [Illustration: _The Boy Ethelbert untouched by Civilisation._] In the innocence of youth he whistled gently to himself. His other work was done; this performed, he had but now to settle the last rug, the Polar Bear, and then to rouse his superiors in the hierarchy below stairs, to lay their breakfast out and to attend thereon as minister. So shook he perfunctorily the Arctic Ursine Fleece, the Hyperborean Candour, when he heard something fall sharply at his feet. He even caught a flash of it as it fell. He saw it issuing from that ear of Thule which would hear no more; he saw it sliding down the whiteness of the hair and gleaming dully in the candlelight upon the polished wood of the flooring. There was no mistake. It was _IT_. It was that pledge of respect and esteem which the ever-memorable Catherine, Empress of All the Russias, had bestowed three lives ago upon the stalwart Bones. It was the heirloom of that noble House of de Bohun which Ethelbert served. It was the Stone on which he had heard all the domestics of the house inflamed in the last hours of the previous evening. There is an instinct planted in man by Mr. Darwin, which impels him to pick up a thing, anything dropped. That instinct Ethelbert obeyed. The act was half unconscious, immediate; he had slipped the Emerald into his pocket and was already off with a candle in one hand and the other in a side pocket, fondling the stone. He was off down the long stone corridor which led along the north of the house towards the offices; and as he went his mind was full of some vague intention to hand over the treasure-trove to those in authority--in good time.