When they sent me away at last I returned to the garage down West, and so to my bed, but not to sleep. It must have been three o'clock of the morning by this time, and I lay until I heard some noisy church-clock striking seven, when I determined to stop there tossing about no longer, but to get up and read the morning papers. Few of them, however, had more than a brief paragraph announcing the fact, and we had to wait for the "evenings" to discover the real sensation. My word, how thick they laid it on--and what a hero they made of me. I must have been interviewed a dozen times that day, and when the following morning's papers came, I read for the first time that a reward of five hundred pounds had been offered for the capture of the perpetrators of this outrage, and that it would be paid by the Editor of the _Daily Herald_ on the day that the mystery was solved. Of course, there were many theories. Some believed it to be a case of abduction pure and simple, some of revenge; a few recommended the doctors to follow the poison clue and to ascertain if the child had been drugged before she was put into the basket. Speaking for myself, I had an idea in my head, which I didn't mention even to Betsy Chambers, whom it was necessary for me to see pretty often about that time, and generally of evenings. This idea, I suppose, would have knocked the Scotland Yard braves silly with laughing; but I had no fancy to share five hundred with them--more especially since they took seven fifteen off me at Kingston last Petty Sessions--so I just kept a quiet tongue in my head and mentioned the matter to nobody. Perhaps it was unfortunate I did not; I can't tell you more than this, that the next ten days found me walking about Soho as though I had a fancy to buy up the neighbourhood, and that on the eleventh day precisely I found what I wanted--found it by what I might have called a turn of Providence if I didn't know now it was something very different. I should remind you hereabouts that the case was still the rage of the town, though hope of bringing the would-be assassins to justice had almost been abandoned. The little girl now began to remember her past in a dim sort of way, and had told the police that she lived in a foreign country by the sea--which was not the same as saying Southend-on-the-Mud by a long way. Her father she recollected distinctly, and cried out for him very often in her sleep. She did not seem to think she had a mother, and of what happened in the Richmond Road her mind recalled nothing. I had seen her twice; but she was so frightened when I went near her that the police forbade me to go at all--and I do believe, upon my solemn word, that if it hadn't been for the witnesses they would have said I had something to do with the job myself.