iety, speaking in the voice of the
Mayor of Gatesboro', said, "Rightly! thou art not fit companion for the
innocent!"

At length he found himself out of the town, beyond its straggling
suburbs, and once more on the solitary road. He had already walked far
that day. He was thoroughly exhausted. He sat himself down in a dry
ditch by the hedgerow, and taking his head between his hands, strove to
recollect his thoughts and rearrange his plans.

Waife had returned that day to the bailiff's cottage joyous and elated.
He had spent the week in travelling; partly, though not all the way,
on foot, to the distant village, in which he had learned in youth the
basketmaker's art! He had found the very cottage wherein he had then
lodged vacant and to be let. There seemed a ready opening for the humble
but pleasant craft to which he had diverted his ambition.

The bailiff intrusted with the letting of the cottage and osier-ground
had, it is true, requested some reference; not, of course, as to all
a tenant's antecedents, but as to the reasonable probability that the
tenant would be a quiet sober man, who would pay his rent and abstain
from poaching. Waife thought he might safely presume that the Mayor of
Gatesboro' would not, so far as that went, object to take his past upon
trust, and give him a good word towards securing so harmless and obscure
a future. Waife had never before asked such a favour of any man; he
shrank from doing so now; but for his grandchild's sake, he would waive
his scruples or humble his pride.

Thus, then, he had come back, full of Elysian dreams, to his Sophy,--his
Enchanted Princess. Gone, taken away, and with the Mayor's consent,--the
consent of the very man upon whom he had been relying to 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