On the desk in the office was a small cardboard box in which somebody at some time in history had once received false teeth from a dentist. This box was the receptacle for stamp-paper. In the shadowy and reproachful and menacing office Elsie slid open the box and stole from it quite six good inches of stamp-paper. Contrition for sin had perished in her. She was the hardened sinner. She could not learn from experience. It seemed to her that she sinned nightly now. Here her master was dying, her mistress ill and in misery, and she was thieving stamp-paper! She arrived upstairs again without discovery. Her nerves were as shaken as if she had crossed Niagara on a tight-rope.
Mr. Earlforward could do marvels of repair with stamp-paper, but Elsie had not his skill. Working on the emptied toilet-table, she did little but make the letter adhere to the surface of the table. Then through a too brusque movement she seriously tore the letter, and not in the line of a crease either. The paper was worn out by use, and had no virtue left. This was too much for Elsie's self-control. She had stood everything, but she could not stand the trifling accident. She scrunched the pieces of the letter in her powerful hand. Why should she keep the letter? She was a perfect fool to keep the letter, reminding her and reminding her.... She held the ball of paper to the candle. It lit slowly, but it lit. The paper spread a little with the heat. She could read: "I know I shall get better." She dropped the burning letter, and it smoked and blackened and writhed on the floor, and nothing survived of it save some charred corners, a lot of smoke, and a strong smell of fire.
Elsie now had the sensation of being alone in the world. The reaction was hunger. Hunger swept over her like a visitation. For twenty-four hours she had not eaten enough to satisfy a cat, to say nothing of a robust and active young woman. Her fancy could taste the lovely taste of bacon. She thought of all other lovely tastes, and there were many. She thought obscurely, perhaps not in actual words: "Eating is my only joy now. All else is vain, but eating is real." She thought of the cage and its contents. But Mr. Earlforward was dying, and Mrs. Earlforward in misery. And death was waiting to spring out from some dark corner of the house. The house was peopled with the mysterious harbingers of death. Still, the idea of the bacon bewitched her.