I walked towards the Wells with earnestness, and on entering the town I was met by a person on horseback, whom I remembered to have seen at the squire’s, and he assured me that if I followed them to the races, which were but thirty miles further, I might depend upon overtaking them.

Early the next day I walked forward to the races, but saw nothing of my daughter or of Mr. Burchell.

The agitations of my mind, and the fatigues I had undergone, now threw me into a fever.  I retired to a little ale-house by the roadside, and here I languished for nearly three weeks.

The night coming on as I was twenty miles from home on my return journey, I put up at a little public-house, and asked for the landlord’s company over a pint of wine.  I could hear the landlady upstairs bitterly reproaching a lodger who could not pay.

“Out, I say,” she cried; “pack out this moment!”

“Oh, dear madame,” replied the stranger, “pity a poor, abandoned creature for one night and death will soon do the rest!”

I instantly knew the voice of my poor ruined child, Olivia, and flew to her rescue.

“Welcome, anyway welcome, my dearest lost one, to your poor old father’s bosom!”

“Oh, my own dear”—­for minutes she could say no more—­“my own dearest, good papa!  You can’t forgive me—­I know you cannot!”

“Yes, my child, from my heart I do forgive thee.”  After we had talked ourselves into some tranquillity, I said, “It surprises me how a person of Mr. Burchell’s seeming honour could be guilty of such deliberate baseness.”

“My dear papa,” returned my daughter, “you labour under a strange mistake.  It is Mr. Thornhill who has ruined me; who employed the two ladies, as he called them, but who, in fact, were abandoned women of the town, to decoy us up to London.  Their artifices would certainly have succeeded but for Mr. Burchell’s letter, who directed those reproaches at them which we all applied to ourselves.”

“You amaze me, my dear!” cried I.  “But tell me, what temptation was it that could thus obliterate your virtue?”

“He offered me marriage,” replied she.  “We were indeed married secretly by a popish priest, whose name I was sworn to conceal.”

“What!” interrupted I.  “And were you indeed married?”

“Alas!” she said, “he has been married already by the same priest to six or eight wives more, whom, like me, he has deceived and abandoned.”

“Have patience, my child,” cried I, “and I hope things will yet be better.  To-morrow I’ll carry you home to your mother.  Poor woman, this has gone to her heart; but she loves you still, Olivia, and will forget it.”

IV.—­Fresh Calamities