one fine morning about a week
after Mrs. Stanmore's eventful ball, and towards the close of the
London season; eliciting at the same time criticism not altogether
favourable on the style of composition affected by our excellent
police. The man was missing no doubt, and had been missing for some
days before anxiety, created by his absence, growing into alarm for
his safety, had produced the foregoing advertisement, prompted by
certain affectionate misgivings of Mr. Bargrave, since the lost sheep
was none other than his nephew Tom Ryfe. The old man felt, indeed,
seriously discomposed by the prolonged absence of this the only member
of his family. It was unjustifiable, as he remarked twenty times a
day, unfeeling, unheard-of, unaccountable. He rang for the servants at
his private residence every quarter of an hour or so to learn if the
truant had returned. He questioned the boy at the office sharply and
repeatedly as to orders left with him by Mr. Ryfe before he went away,
only to gather from the answers of this urchin, who would, indeed,
have forgotten any number of such directions, that he looked on the
present period of anxiety in the light of a holiday and festival,
devoutly praying that his taskmaster might never come back again.
Finally in despair poor Bargrave cast himself on the sympathy of
Dorothea, who listened to his bewailings with stolid indifference when
sober, and replied to them by surmises of the wildest improbability
when drunk.

Alas, in common with so many others of her class, the charwoman
took refuge from care in constant inebriety. Her imagination thus
stimulated, pointed, like that of some old Castilian adventurer,
steadily to the west.

"Lor, Mr. Bargrave," she would say, staring helplessly in his face,
and yielding to the genial hiccough which refused to be kept down, "he
be gone to 'Merriky, poor dear, to better hisself, I make no doubt.
Don't ye take on so. It's a weary world, it is; and that's where he be
gone, for sure!"

Yet she knew quite well where he was hidden all the time; and,
inasmuch as she had some regard for her kind old employer, the
knowledge almost drove her mad. Therefore it was that Dorothea,
harassed by conflicting feelings, drowned her sorrows perseveringly in
the bowl.

For a considerable period this poor woman had suffered a mental
torture, the severest, perhaps, to which her sex can be subjected. She
had seen the man she loved--and, though she was only a drudge, and