Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/243

 he had been relying to secure a livelihood and a shelter! Little more had he learned at the cottage, for Mr. and Mrs. Gooch had been cautioned to be as brief as possible, and give him no clew to regain his lost treasure, beyond the note which informed him it was with a lawful possessor. And, indeed, the worthy pair were now prejudiced against the vagrant, and were rude to him. But he had not tarried to cross-examine and inquire. He had rushed at once to the Mayor. Sophy was with one whose legal right to dispose of her he could not question. But where that person would take her, where he resided, what he would do with her, he had no means to conjecture. Most probably (he thought and guessed) she would be carried abroad, was already out of the country. But the woman with Losely, he had not heard her described; his guesses did not turn towards Mrs. Crane: the woman was evidently hostile to him; it was the woman who had spoken against him,—not Losely; the woman whose tongue had poisoned Hartopp's mind, and turned into scorn all that admiring respect which had before greeted the great Comedian. Why was that woman his enemy? Who could she be? What had she to do with Sophy? He was half beside himself with terror. It was to save her less even from Losely than from such direful women as Losely made his confidants and associates that Waife had taken Sophy to himself. As for Mrs. Crane, she had never seemed a foe to him; she had ceded the child to him willingly: he had no reason to believe, from the way in which she had spoken of Losely when he last saw her, that she could henceforth aid the interests or share the schemes of the man whose perfidies she then denounced; and as to Rugge, he had not appeared at Gatesboro'. Mrs. Crane had prudently suggested that his presence would not be propitiatory or discreet, and that all reference to him, or to the contract with him, should be suppressed. Thus Waife was wholly without one guiding evidence, one groundwork for conjecture, that might enable him to track the lost; all he knew was, that she had been given up to a man whose whereabouts it was difficult to discover,—a vagrant, of life darker and more hidden than his own.

But how had the hunters discovered the place where he had treasured up his Sophy? how dogged that retreat? Perhaps from the village in which we first saw him. Ay, doubtless, learned from Mrs. Saunders of the dog he had purchased, and the dog would have served to direct them on his path. At that thought he pushed away Sir Isaac, who had been