He found himself presently in his room at the paper-shop, and lay biting the bed-clothes, spasm after spasm traversing his body. Then, turning on his back, he lay with his face now toward the trunk, and a little clock ticked ten more minutes before the fact stole into his consciousness that the bag was not on the trunk. For some time the disappearance was too stupendous to find room in his brain. He got up and paced, stunned, just conscious of a feeling of unease. Now he was searching the room mechanically. It was not there.... And again he paced, tapping his top teeth with a finger-nail; and now he called down the stair: “Have you seen, Mrs. Sturgess, the calico bag you gave me to-day?” “Why, no”. “Has anyone been in my room?” “Why, _no_, sir! Only myself”. Again he began to pace, and suddenly the grand reality stabbed his brain like a dagger: he was poor.... O'Hara! Where was he....? His forehead dropped upon the mantel-board, and he leant staring downward there, a miserable man. But suddenly the man said quietly aloud, raising himself: “All right: better so. O, I have not been myself--virtue has gone out of me--!” Presently he noticed that it was near the hour of her unexpected _rendezvous_ under the elm.... And nearly all the way he ran--wild to see her again--until he neared the tree, when, descrying a female form, he came stooping with humility, but soon saw that it was a girl, her head in a shawl, whom he did not know. And she, coming to meet him, said: “What is your name, sir?” “Why?” “I am Miss Frankl's messenger”. “My name is Hogarth”. “Will you turn this way that I may see your eyes?...All right: Miss Frankl directs me to give you these”. The girl, who had been weighted down toward the left, handed him an envelope, and a steel box. Never was he so bewildered! On the way home, he observed that the box had three knobs of gold, surrounded by rays, and, inlaid in the top, the letters “R. F.”; when he tore open the envelope in his room he found in pencil on one half-sheet: “Turn the 10 of the right knob to the ray 5; the 5 of the middle knob to the ray 0; the 15 of the left knob to the ray 10: and the box will open”. No more. When he had set wildly to work, and the lid turned back, his eyes beheld the calico bag.