return or suffer her to join him, that he was not left destitute and
comfortless. Nor was this an idle promise. George, though his inquiries
were unceasing, crippled by the restraint imposed on them, was so acute
in divining, and so active in following up each clue to the wanderer's
artful doublings, that more than once he had actually come upon the
track, and found the very spot where Waife or Sir Isaac had been seen a
few days before. Still, up to the day on which Morley had last reported
progress, the ingenious ex-actor, fertile in all resources of stratagem
and disguise, had baffled his research. At first, however, Waife had
greatly relieved the minds of these anxious friends, and cheered even
Sophy's heavy heart, by letters, gay though brief. These letters having,
by their postmarks, led to his trace, he had stated, in apparent anger,
that reason for discontinuing them. And for the last six weeks no line
from him had been received. In fact, the old man, on resolving to
consummate his self-abnegation, strove more and more to wean his
grandchild's thoughts from his image. He deemed it so essential to her
whole future that, now she had found a home in so secure and so elevated
a sphere, she should gradually accustom herself to a new rank of life,
from which he was an everlasting exile; should lose all trace of his very
being; efface a connection that, ceasing to protect, could henceforth
only harm and dishonour her,--that he tried, as it were, to blot himself
out of the world which now smiled on her. He did not underrate her grief
in its first freshness; he knew that, could she learn where he was, all
else would be forgotten--she would insist on flying to him. But he
continually murmured to himself: "Youth is ever proverbially short of
memory; its sorrows poignant, but not enduring; now the wounds are
already scarring over--they will not reopen if they are left to heal."

He had, at first, thought of hiding somewhere not so far but that once
a-week, or once a-month, he might have stolen into the grounds, looked at