Page:The Millbank Case - 1905 - Eldridge.djvu/306

 How long he lay on the walk under the poplars he did not know, excepting that his first sensation of returning consciousness was of the soft white light that comes before the sun steals up from behind the earth. The next was of a heaviness of the head and a numbness that was giving way to pain. He put up his hand feebly, and brought it down again wet with blood.

Then came the thought of the box. He reached out his hand and, groping, it fell upon it. He had barely strength enough yet to draw it to him, but at last succeeded, though not without much pain. He lifted it feebly and the lid fell back, showing the breakage where it had been wrenched from its hinges. With a paroxysm of strength born of terror, he sat upright and looked into the box. It was empty; not even a shred of paper remaining. For one instant he gazed in uncomprehending stupidity, and then, as the truth flashed on him, he fell again to the earth, and lost in temporary unconsciousness alike the sense of pain and the power to follow his interrupted quest.

Almost at the very moment when Trafford dis