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