ctacles which he had evidently discarded in his flight, and
which unfortunately precluded a close description of his appearance. But
a hue and cry had been started, and it was believed that the criminal was
still in hiding in the immediate neighbourhood, which was being subjected
to a thorough search under the direction of responsible officers from
Scotland Yard.

Such was the news which the young girl had shrunk from showing to her
companion. She had left him, indeed, to read it by himself. And the next
thing he remembered was finding her quite insensible in the big chair in
the back room.

The afternoon was a blank broken by no more moments such as these. It was
a period of dull misery and gnawing dread; but the pair saw each other
through it, they were not divided any more. Now they listened for his
step no longer, but for more newsboys crying his capture to the world.
And in the hours that they spent thus listening, and listening, the girl
had much to say, that it did her good to say, about this Dr. Baumgartner
as she had known and almost loved him in the past.

Lovable, however, he had never been, though more than good and kind to her
for all that. He had never taken her into his life, or entered into hers,
in the many years they had been more or less together. All she really
knew of him was from her mother, whose elder sister he had married soon
after the Franco-Prussian War, and lost soon after marriage. He must have
been settled in England many years before Phillida's mother, herself an
Englishman's widow, came to keep house for him. The girl could not
remember her father, but her mother had lived to see her in her teens, and
in her lifetime Dr. Baumgartner had seemed much as other men. It was only
of late years that he had withdrawn from a world in which he was justly
honoured, and buried himself ever deeper in his books and his photographic
experiments. His niece had never known anything of these; he had told her
nothing, and she had always gone in awe of him. But he had sent her to
school, he was going to send her to college, he had only just given her
six months in Switzerland. It was during those months that all his
eccentricities had become pronounced; that he had given up servants, and
taken to doing half the work of the house himself, with the casual aid of
charwomen, and saving the other half by having the meals in from a
restaurant. Phillida had no influence with him in these or any other