"Tell me first how the doctor managed to make a hole in the floor
just in the nick of time."

"What! did you see the trap sprung?"
"I saw everything."

"The devil you did! Had you any notion that signals were going
on, all the while you were on the watch? We have a regular set of

them in case of accidents. It's a rule that father, and me, and
the doctor are never to be in the workroom together--so as to

keep one of us always at liberty to act on the signals.--Where
are you going to?"

"Only to get the gardener's ladder to help us over the wall. Go
on."

"The first signal is a private bell--that means, _Listen at the
pipe._ The next is a call down the pipe for 'Moses'--that means,

_ Danger! Lock the door._ 'Stilton Cheese' means, _Put the Mare
to;_ and 'Old Madeira' _Stand by the trap._ The trap works in

that locked-up room you never got into; and when our hands are on
the machinery, we are awkward enough to have a little accident

with the luncheon tray. 'Quite Ready' is the signal to lower the
trap, which we do in the regular theater-fashion. We lowered the

doctor smartly enough, as you saw, and got out by the back
staircase. Father went in the gig, and I let them out and locked

the gates after them. Now you know as much as I've got breath to
tell you."

We scaled the wall easily by the help of the ladder. When we were
down on the other side, Young File suggested that the safest

course for us was to separate, and for each to take his own way.
We shook hands and parted. He went southward, toward London, and

I went westward, toward the sea-coast, with Doctor Dulcifer's
precious writing-desk safe under my arm.

---- * The "Bow Street runners" of those days were the
predecessors of the detective police of the present time.

CHAPTER XII.
FOR a couple of hours I walked on briskly, careless in what

direction I went, so long as I kept my back turned on Barkingham.
By the time I had put seven miles of ground, according to my

calculations, between me and the red-brick house, I began to look
upon the doctor's writing-desk rather in the light of an

incumbrance, and determined to examine it without further delay.
Accordingly I picked up the first large stone I could find in the

road, crossed a common, burst through a hedge, and came to a
halt, on the other side, in a thick wood. Here, finding myself

well screened from public view, I broke open the desk with the
help of the stone, and began to look over the contents.

To my unspeakabledisappointment I found but few papers of any
kind to examine. The desk was beautifully fitted with all the

necessary materials for keeping up a large correspondence; but
there were not more than half a dozen letters in it altogether.

Four were on business matters, and the other two were of a
friendly nature, referring to persons and things in which I did

not feel the smallest interest. I found besides half a dozen
bills receipted (the doctor was a mirror of punctuality in the

payment of tradesmen), note and letter-paper of the finest
quality, clarified pens, a pretty little pin-cushion, two small

account-books filled with the neatest entries, and some leaves of
blotting-paper. Nothing else; absolutely nothing else, in the

treacherous writing-desk on which I had implicitly relied to
guide me to Alicia's hiding-place.

I groaned in sheer wretchedness over the destruction of all my
dearest plans and hopes. If the Bow Street runners had come into

the plantation just as I had completed the rifling of the desk I
think I should have let them take me without making the slightest

effort at escape. As it was, no living soul appeared within sight
of me. I must have sat at the foot of a tree for full half an

hour, with the doctor's useless bills and letters before me, with
my head in my hands, and with all my energies of body and mind

utterly crushed by despair.
At the end of the half hour, the natural restlessness of my

faculties began to make itself felt.
Whatever may be said about it in books, no emotion in this world

ever did, or ever will, last for long together. The strong
feeling may return over and over again; but it must have its

constant intervals of change or repose. In real life the
bitterest grief doggedly takes its rest and dries its eyes; the

heaviest despair sinks to a certain level, and stops there to
give hope a chance of rising, in spite of us. Even the joy of an

unexpected meeting is always an imperfectsensation, for it never
lasts long enough to justify our secret anticipations--our

happiness dwindles to mere every-day contentment before we have
half done with it.

I raised my head, and gathered the bills and letters together,
and stood up a man again, wondering at the variableness of my own

temper, at the curious elasticity of that toughest of all the
vital substances within us, which we call Hope. "Sitting and

sighing at the foot of this tree," I thought, "is not the way to
find Alicia, or to secure my own safety. Let me circulate my

blood and rouse my ingenuity, by taking to the road again."
Before I forced my way back to the open side of the hedge, I

thought it desirable to tear up the bills and letters, for fear
of being traced by them if they were found in the plantation. The

desk I left where it was, there being no name on it. The
note-paper and pens I pocketed--forlorn as my situation was, it

did not authorize me to waste stationery. The blotting-paper was
the last thing left to dispose of: two neatly-folded sheets,

quite clean, except in one place, where the impression of a few
lines of writing appeared. I was about to put the blotting-paper

into my pocket after the pens, when something in the look of the
writing impressed on it, stopped me.

Four blurred lines appeared of not more than two or three words
each, running out one beyond another regularly from left to

right. Had the doctor been composing poetry and blotting it in a
violent hurry? At a first glance, that was more than I could

tell. The order of the written letters, whatever they might be,
was reversed on the face of the impression taken of them by the

blotting-paper. I turned to the other side of the leaf. The order
of the letters was now right, but the letters themselves were

sometimes too faintly impressed, sometimes too much blurred
together to be legible. I held the leaf up to the light--and

there was a complete change: the blurred letters grew clearer,
the invisible connecting lines appeared--I could read the words

from first to last.
The writing must have been hurried, and it had to all appearance

been hurriedly dried toward the corner of a perfectly clean leaf
of the blotting-paper. After twice reading, I felt sure that I

had made out correctly the following address:
Miss Giles, 2 Zion Place, Crickgelly, N. Wales.

It was hard under the circumstances, to form an opinion as to the
handwriting; but I thought I could recognize the character of

some of the doctor's letters, even in the blotted impression of
them. Supposing I was right, who was Miss Giles?

Some Welsh friend of the doctor's, unknown to me? Probably
enough. But why not Alicia herself under an assumed name? Having

sent her from home to keep her out of my way, it seemed next to a
certainty that her father would take all possible measures to

prevent my tracing her, and would, therefore, as a common act of
precaution, forbid her to travel under her own name. Crickgelly,

North Wales, was assuredly a very remote place to banish her to;
but then the doctor was not a man to do things by halves: he knew

the lengths to which my cunning and resolution were capable of
carrying me; and he would have been innocent indeed if he had

hidden his daughter from me in any place within reasonable