He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat; he searched his other pockets; he turned over the objects on his writing-table.  The book was gone.

Moody watched him with a feeling of despair.  “Oh!  Mr. Hardyman, don’t say you have lost your pocketbook!”

He sat down again at his desk, with sullen submission to the new disaster.  “All I can say is you’re at liberty to look for it,” he replied.  “I must have dropped it somewhere.”  He turned impatiently to the foreman, “Now then!  What is the next check wanted?  I shall go mad if I wait in this damned place much longer!”

Moody left him, and found his way to the servants’ offices.  “Mr. Hardyman has lost his pocketbook,” he said.  “Look for it, indoors and out—­on the lawn, and in the tent.  Ten pounds reward for the man who finds it!”

Servants and waiters instantly dispersed, eager for the promised reward.  The men who pursued the search outside the cottage divided their forces.  Some of them examined the lawn and the flower-beds.  Others went straight to the empty tent.  These last were too completely absorbed in pursuing the object in view to notice that they disturbed a dog, eating a stolen lunch of his own from the morsels left on the plates.  The dog slunk away under the canvas when the men came in, waited in hiding until they had gone, then returned to the tent, and went on with his luncheon.

Moody hastened back to the part of the grounds (close to the shrubbery) in which Isabel was waiting his return.

She looked at him, while he was telling her of his interview with Hardyman, with an expression in her eyes which he had never seen in them before—­an expression which set his heart beating wildly, and made him break off in his narrative before he had reached the end.

“I understand,” she said quietly, as he stopped in confusion.  “You have made one more sacrifice to my welfare.  Robert!  I believe you are the noblest man that ever breathed the breath of life!”

His eyes sank before hers; he blushed like a boy.  “I have done nothing for you yet,” he said.  “Don’t despair of the future, if the pocketbook should not be found.  I know who the man is who received the bank note; and I have only to find him to decide the question whether it is the stolen note or not.”

She smiled sadly as his enthusiasm.  “Are you going back to Mr. Sharon to help you?” she asked.  “That trick he played me has destroyed my belief in him.  He no more knows than I do who the thief really is.”

“You are mistaken, Isabel.  He knows—­and I know.”  He stopped there, and made a sign to her to be silent.  One of the servants was approaching them.

“Is the pocketbook found?” Moody asked.

“No, sir.”

“Has Mr. Hardyman left the cottage?”

“He has just gone, sir.  Have you any further instructions to give us?”

“No.  There is my address in London, if the pocketbook should be found.”