But before Williams got to the door, the cripple and his dog had
vanished; vanished down a dark narrow alley on the opposite side of the
street. The rude workmen had followed him to the mouth of the alley,
mocking him. Of the exact charge against the Comedian's good name they
were not informed; that knowledge was confined to the Mayor and Mr.
Williams. But the latter had dropped such harsh expressions, that bad as
the charge might really be, all in Mr. Hartopp's employment probably
deemed it worse, if possible, than it really was. And wretch indeed must
be the man by whom the Mayor had been confessedly taken in, and whom the
Mayor had indignantly given up to the reproaches of his own conscience.
But the cripple was now out of sight, lost amidst those labyrinths of
squalid homes which, in great towns, are thrust beyond view, branching
off abruptly behind High Streets and Market Places, so that strangers
passing only along the broad thoroughfares, with glittering shops and
gaslit causeways, exclaim, "Ah here do the poor live?"




CHAPTER III.

Ecce iterum Crispinus!

It 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