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 quiet feat gave the presses of the world columns upon columns of excited narrative and conjecture; it drew from them scores of pictures of the missing child and every person and place connected with her. The Honorable John Ruffin would read interesting, but perhaps fatuous, extracts to her as he ate his breakfast; and he brought her a collection of the illustrated weeklies that she might have the pictures of the affair.

Pollyooly was very pleased to have the pictures because many of them were of Ricksborough Court; but her interest in the matter soon waned. It was fortunate that only the cheaper illustrated papers circulated in Alsatia; and in those the portraits of Marion were unvarying and not to be recognized. Had the more expensive weeklies circulated in it, it is Lombard Street to a China orange that the solicitors of the Duke of Osterley would have had the vain task of investigating Pollyooly's past.

In nine days the clamor died down. The newspapers and the amateur detectives found other affairs no less important to the community; and the Honorable John Ruffin declared that the worst was