"'Everything maybe--because it is yours, if you'll come and get it; every farthing. It's anyone's who finds it, anyone's--I don't care who it is. What does it matter to me who has it--now? Why shouldn't it be yours? There's heaps and heaps of money, heaps! More than you suppose. It'll make a rich man of you--set you up for life, buy you houses, carriages and all. You have only got to come and get it, and it is yours. Think of what a difference it'll make to you--of all that it will do for you--of all that it will mean. It will pick you out of the gutter, and place you in a mansion, with as many servants as you like to pay for at your beck and call. And all yours for the fetching--or anyone's for the matter of that. But why shouldn't you make it yours? Don't be a fool, but come, man, come!' "He continued urging and entreating Ballingall to come and take for his own the treasures which he declared were hidden away in Clover Cottage, until, turning round, without a farewell word, he walked down the street and disappeared into the Strand. "Ballingall assured me that he didn't know what to make of it; and if he was speaking the truth, I quite understand his difficulty. He was aware that, neither physically nor mentally, was he in the best of health, and he knew also that Ossington was continually in his mind. He might be the victim of hallucination; but if so, it was hallucination of an extraordinary sort. He himself had not touched Ossington, but Ossington had touched him. His touch had been solid enough, he looked solid enough, but how came he to be in Southampton Street if he was lying in Wandsworth Churchyard? On the other hand, the story of the hidden fortune was quite in accordance with what he knew of the man's character. He always had a trick of concealing money, valuables, all sorts of things, in unusual places. And for him to have secreted the bulk of his capital, or even the whole of it, or what represented the whole of it, and then to have left the hiding-place unrevealed, for some one to discover after he was dead and gone, was just the sort of thing he might have been expected to do. "Anyhow, Ballingall did not go to Clover Cottage the following day. He found a job when the market opened, and that probably had a good deal to do with his staying away. The next night Ossington returned--if I remember rightly, just as Ballingall was about to enter a common lodging-house. And he came back not that night only, but over and over again, so far as I could understand, for weeks together, and always with the same urgent request, that he would come and fetch the fortune which lay hidden in Clover Cottage.