Ada being in our room with a cold, Mr. Skimpole was left alone all this time and entertained himself by playing snatches of pathetic airs and sometimes singing to them (as we heard at a distance) with great expression and feeling.  When we rejoined him in the drawing-room he said he would give us a little ballad which had come into his head “apropos of our young friend,” and he sang one about a peasant boy,

   “Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam,
    Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home.”

quite exquisitely.  It was a song that always made him cry, he told us.

He was extremely gay all the rest of the evening, for he absolutely chirped—­those were his delighted words—­when he thought by what a happy talent for business he was surrounded.  He gave us, in his glass of negus, “Better health to our young friend!” and supposed and gaily pursued the case of his being reserved like Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London.  In that event, no doubt, he would establish the Jarndyce Institution and the Summerson Almshouses, and a little annual Corporation Pilgrimage to St. Albans.  He had no doubt, he said, that our young friend was an excellent boy in his way, but his way was not the Harold Skimpole way; what Harold Skimpole was, Harold Skimpole had found himself, to his considerable surprise, when he first made his own acquaintance; he had accepted himself with all his failings and had thought it sound philosophy to make the best of the bargain; and he hoped we would do the same.

Charley’s last report was that the boy was quiet.  I could see, from my window, the lantern they had left him burning quietly; and I went to bed very happy to think that he was sheltered.

There was more movement and more talking than usual a little before daybreak, and it awoke me.  As I was dressing, I looked out of my window and asked one of our men who had been among the active sympathizers last night whether there was anything wrong about the house.  The lantern was still burning in the loft-window.

“It’s the boy, miss,” said he.

“Is he worse?” I inquired.

“Gone, miss.”

“Dead!”

“Dead, miss?  No.  Gone clean off.”

At what time of the night he had gone, or how, or why, it seemed hopeless ever to divine.  The door remaining as it had been left, and the lantern standing in the window, it could only be supposed that he had got out by a trap in the floor which communicated with an empty cart-house below.  But he had shut it down again, if that were so; and it looked as if it had not been raised.  Nothing of any kind was missing.  On this fact being clearly ascertained, we all yielded to the painful belief that delirium had come upon him in the night and that, allured by some imaginary object or pursued by some imaginary horror, he had strayed away in that worse than helpless state; all of us, that is to say, but Mr. Skimpole, who repeatedly suggested, in his usual easy light style, that it had occurred to our young friend that he was not a safe inmate, having a bad kind of fever upon him, and that he had with great natural politeness taken himself off.