They searched and searched.

Of course it must be at the corner by the rubbish-heap, for she had stood there and waved her basket.  It would be lying among the broken bottles.

The pale, thin rim of the autumn moon had risen over the yards while they were searching there step by step, Silla every now and then uttering a despondent, monotonous “Suppose I don’t find it!” and Nikolai plunging his arm up to the elbow into puddles in which the roll of money might have fallen.

They had been by the bridge, they had searched the rubbish-heap, they had looked up and down and everywhere; it was not to be found.

It was beginning to be late, and Mrs. Holman was waiting at home.  She would be really waiting now.

Silla began to cry.

Nikolai had only asked her once or twice to be quiet, and he would find the money.  Now he suddenly said: 

“I should like to give you another good feed of cakes to-day, and then throw myself into the sea with you, Silla.  It would be no lie that we lay there.”

Whether his proposition was meant seriously or not, it did not gain a hearing with her.  She sat hopeless and despairing on a log while the big tears ran down her cheeks.

The seventeen-year-old workshop apprentice stood thoughtfully, with his flat cap pushed back over his rough hair, blackened by the week’s work.  He was gazing intently into an old rotten hole in the log.  The hole became more and more rotten, more and more hollow, more and more empty while his busy thoughts were trying to find an expedient.  But none came.

Fully aware of her fate, Silla rose, took her basket, and started homewards with her eyes fixed on the ground.  She was going to the scaffold.  Nikolai accompanied her as far as he dared, reiterating in different ways:  “Don’t be afraid, Silla, they can’t kill you!”

Something like a low wail said that she heard him.

When she disappeared round the corner, he made a short cut which only he and one or two old yard cats knew of; and from the hoarding at the bottom of the square he saw her go, with bent head and the same quiet step, without stopping, down the cellar stairs.

When it was dark, he stood outside the window and listened.  He heard her still sobbing quietly, after the storm that had passed over her.

Mrs. Holman had examined and cross-examined, and at last extracted from Silla the confession that she had been with Nikolai.  That she, Mrs. Holman’s daughter, in spite of all prohibitions, sought the society of that misled prodigal, who had rewarded her with such ingratitude, was enough to bring her to her grave.  And no one would persuade her either that Holman’s hardly-earned week’s wages could vanish like steam from a kettle.  A half-starved apprentice-boy, walking beside a well-filled pocket—­any one could understand what the result of that would be.  Master Nikolai had only carefully and craftily watched his time, when he knew that Silla had her father’s money in her pocket, to get it shuffled into his own.