en Place--a discovery effected by a distant relation
to whom he had been referred at the famous school of which Arabella
had been the pride, and who was no doubt the owner of those sheepskin
account-books by which the poor grim woman had once vainly sought to
bribe Jasper into honest work. But the house in Podden Place was shut
up--not a soul in charge of it. The houses immediately adjoining it were
tenantless. The Colonel learned, however, from a female servant in
an opposite house, that several days ago she had seen a tall,
powerful-looking man enter Mrs. Crane's street-door; that she had not
seen him quit it; and that some evenings afterwards, as this servant
was closing up the house in which she served, she had remarked a large
private carriage driving away from Mrs. Crane's door; that it was too
dark to see who were in the carriage, but she had noticed a woman whom
she felt fully sure was Mrs. Crane's servant, Bridgett Greggs, on the
box beside the coachman.

Alban had been to the agent employed by Mrs. Crane in the letting of her
houses, but had not there gained any information. The Colonel believed
that Mrs. Crane had succeeded in removing Jasper from London--had,
perhaps, accompanied him abroad. If with her, at all events for the
present he was safe from the stings of want, and with one who had sworn
to save him from his own guilty self. If, however, still in England,
Alban had no doubt, sooner or later, to hunt him up.

Upon the whole, this conjectural information, though unsatisfactory,
allayed much anxiety. Darrell made the most of it in his representations
to Waife. And the old man, as we know, was one not hard to comfort,
never quarrelling irrevocably with Hope.

And now Waife is rapidly recovering. Darrell, after spending the greater
part of several days, intent upon a kind of study from which he had been
estranged for many years, takes to frequent absences for the whole
day; goes up to London by the earliest train, comes back by the
latest. George Morley also goes to London for a few hours. Darrell,
on returning, does not allude to the business which took him to the
metropolis; neither does George, but the latter seems unusually animated
and excited. At length, after one of these excursions, so foreign to his
habits, he and George enter together the old man's apartment not long
before the early hour at which the convalescent retires to rest. Sophy
was seated on the footstool at Waife's knee, reading the