the joy of
an unexpected meeting is always an imperfect sensation, 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 t