but in the case of plate and jewellery the stock was too
valuable to be thus exposed, and customers had to apply for admission
within. It had been a very dull day for business, two customers only
having appeared, and one of these had gone away without purchasing.
There was one wandering about outside who would have been only too glad
to become a customer, had he known who sat behind the counter. Stephen
had searched in vain for Rudolph in the neighbourhood where he had so
mysteriously vanished from sight. He could not recognise him under the
alias of "Ralph le Juwelier," by which name alone his neighbours knew
him. Evening after evening he watched the corner of Mark Lane, and some
fifty yards on either side of it, but only to go back every time to
Ermine with no tale to tell. There were no detectives nor inquiry
offices in those days; nothing was easier than for a man to lose himself
in a great city under a feigned name. For Countess he never inquired;
nor would he have taken much by the motion had he done so, since she was
known to her acquaintances as Sarah la Juweliere. Her features were not
so patently Jewish as those of some daughters of Abraham, and most
people imagined her to be of foreign extraction.

"It seems of no use, Ermine," said Stephen mournfully, when a month had
passed and Rudolph had not been seen again. "Maybe it was the boy's
ghost I saw, come to tell us that he is not living."

Stephen was gifted with at least an average amount of common sense, but
he would have regarded a man who denied the existence of apparitions as
a simpleton.

"We can only wait," said Ermine, looking up from the tunic she was
making for her little Derette. "I have asked the Lord to send him to
us; we can only wait His time."

"But, Wife, suppose His time should be--never?"

"Then, dear," answered Ermine softly, "it will still be the right time."

The morning after that conversation was waning into afternoon, when
Rudolph, passing up Paternoster Row, heard hurried steps behind him, and
immediately felt a grasp on his shoulder--a grasp which seemed as if it
had no intention of letting him go in a hurry. He looked up in some
surprise, into the face of the man whose intent gaze and disconnected
words had so roused his attention a month earlier.

"Caught you at last!" were the first words of his captor. "Now don't
fall to and fight me, but do me so much grace as to tell me your name in
a friendly way. You would