rtainly twelve inches long, and more than that in girth. But it turned
up nowhere. I never felt nearer fainting than at that moment.

"Could Miss Clifton have carried it off?" suggested Tom Morville.

"No," I said, indignantly but thoughtfully, "she couldn't have carried
off such a bulky thing as that, without our seeing it. It would not go
into one of our pockets, Tom, and she wore a tight-fitting jacket that
would not conceal anything."

"No, she can't have it," assented Tom; "then it must be somewhere about."
We searched again and again, turning over everything in the van, but
without success. The Premier's despatch-box was gone; and all we could
do at first was to stand and stare at one another. Our trance of blank
dismay was of short duration, for the van was assailed by the postmen
from St. Martin's-le-Grand, who were waiting for our charge. In a stupor
of bewilderment we completed our work, and delivered up the mails; then,
once more we confronted one another with pale faces, frightened out of
our seven senses. All the scrapes we had ever been in (and we had had
our usual share of errors and blunders) faded into utter insignificance
compared with this. My eye fell upon Mr. Huntingdon's order lying among
some scraps of waste paper on the floor, and I picked it up, and put it
carefully, with its official envelope, into my pocket.

"We can't stay here," said Tom. The porters were looking in
inquisitively; we were seldom so long in quitting oar empty van.

"No," I replied, a sudden gleam of sense darting across the blank
bewilderment of my brain; "no, we must go to head-quarters at once, and
make a clean breast of it. This is no private business, Tom."

We made one more ineffectual search, and then we hailed a cab and drove
as hard as we could to the General Post-office. The secretary of the
Post-office was not there, of course, but we obtained the address of his
residence in one of the suburbs, four or five miles from the City, and we
told no one of our misfortune, my idea being that the fewer who were made
acquainted with the loss the better. My judgment was in the right there.

We had to knock up the household of the secretary--a formidable personage
with whom I had never been brought into contact before--and in a short
time we were holding a strictly private and confidential interview with
him, by the glimmer of a solitary candle, just serving to light up his
severe face, which changed its expres