“I am for sale! Hogarth! I _smelled_ it about you, the myrrh of your garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development! That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold--brittle, bright, orpimented--” “And diamonds?” “Hogarth, have you diamonds?” “Yes”, said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara. “Prismic diamond!” cried the prelate: “but how--?” “Do you want to enter my service?” “Do I _want_?” “Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake, then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you--how much?--twenty thousand pounds a year”. “My son”, whispered O'Hara, “what a development--!” “Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there to-night at seven”. He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow, O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered. XXVI FRANKL AND O'HARA Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie, finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him to a room above, to listen to his story of escape. “And to think”, said she, “there is the very box your sister, poor thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway, _there's_ the box--” pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's “papers”--a box double-bottomed, on its top the letters “P. O.”, with a cross-of-Christ under them. “But, sir”, said Mrs. Sturgess, “you must be in great danger here. I hope”--with a titter--“I shan't be implicated--” “Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough--don't think me crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak”. Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been strange--uplifted and apart--a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though walking the common ways. He _might_ be a “very rich man”... His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.