Page:What will he do with it.djvu/239

Rh

was by no calculation, but by involuntary impulse, that Waife, thus escaping from the harsh looks and taunting murmurs of the gossips round the Mayor's door, dived into those sordid devious lanes. Vaguely he felt that a ban was upon him; that the covering he had thrown over his brand of outcast was lifted up; that a sentence of expulsion from the High Streets and Market-places of decorous life was passed against him. He had been robbed of his child, and Society, speaking in the voice of the Mayor of Gatesboro', said, "Rightly! thou art not fit companion for the innocent!"

At length he found himself out of the town, beyond its straggling suburbs, and once more on the solitary road. He had already walked far that day. He was thoroughly exhausted. He sat himself down in a dry ditch by the hedgerow, and taking his head between his hands, strove to re-collect his thoughts, and re-arrange his plans.

Waife had returned that day to the bailiff's cottage joyous and elated. He had spent the week in travelling—partly, though not all the way on foot, to the distant village in which he had learned in youth the basket-maker's art! He had found the very cottage wherein he had then lodged, vacant, and to be let. There seemed a ready opening for the humble but pleasant craft to which he had diverted his ambition.

The bailiff intrusted with the letting of the cottage and osier-ground, had, it is true, requested some reference—not, of course, as to all a tenant's antecedents, but as to the reasonable probability that the tenant would be a quiet, sober man, who would pay his rent, and abstain from poaching. Waife thought he might safely presume that the Mayor of Gatesboro' would not, so far as that went, object to take his past upon trust, and give him a good word toward securing so harmless and obscure a future. Waife had never asked such a favor before of any man; he shrunk from doing so now; but for his grandchild's sake he would waive his scruples or humble his pride.

Thus, then, he had come back, full of Elysian dreams, to his Sophy—his Enchanted Princess. Gone—taken away, and with the Mayor's consent—the consent of the very man upon whom he had been relying to secure a livelihood and a shelter! Little