tie's arm under
her cloak as they made their way home through the now dark streets,
Auntie preferring to walk now that there was plainly no more to be done
that called for haste.

"That is the worst of it--I have made this New Year time still sadder
than it need have been for you two, my darlings."

It was hard to go in with no good news for Molly, whose spirits, as
Sylvia had foreseen, had already risen to the point of feeling sure her
aunt and sister would return triumphant, treasure-retrove in hand! But
even now she was not disconcerted. "A week or ten days," she repeated,
when she had heard all there was to tell; "ah, that shows, Auntie dear,
we need not give up hope for ever so long."

She had need of her good spirits for herself, and the others too, during
the days that followed. It would be impossible and wearisome to relate
all that Auntie did and tried to do. The letters to "all in authority"
in such matters, the visits to the Prefecture de Police, to the company
who took charge of printing and posting handbills promising rewards for
the restoring to their owners of lost objects, to the famous "Montde
Piete," the great central pawnbroker's of Paris, even---- For a week and
more Auntie and the two girls, so far as it was possible for them to
help her, did little else than exhaust themselves in such efforts,
seizing every suggestion held out by sympathising friends, from the
_concierge_ to their old friend the white-haired Duchesse de St.
Gervais, who related to them a long and interesting but slightly
irrelevant story of how a diamond ring of her great-grandmother's had
been found by the cook in the heart of a cauliflower just as she was
about to boil it for dinner!

"I really think," said Auntie weariedly, as she threw herself down on
the sofa after an expedition to the office of the most widely read Paris
daily paper, where she had spent a small fortune in advertisements, "I
really think quite half the world is constantly employed in finding, or
rather searching for, the things that the other half is as constantly
employed in losing. I could fill a three-volumed novel with all I have
seen in the last few days--the strange scenes, the real tragedies of
feeling--the truly wonderful mechanism of all this world of
functionaries and offices and regulations. And some of these people have
been really so kind and sympathising--it is astonishing--one would think
they would be too sick of it all to have any feeling