“These are the steps which I think it needful to take at present.  If you are of another opinion, you have only to give me your directions, and I will carefully attend to the same.  I don’t by any means despair of our finding the young lady and bringing her back to her friends safe and well.  Please to tell them so; and allow me to subscribe myself, yours respectfully,

“ABRAHAM BULMER.”

V.

Anonymous Letter addressed to Mr. Pendril.

“SIR—­A word to the wise.  The friends of a certain young lady are wasting time and money to no purpose.  Your confidential clerk and your detective policeman are looking for a needle in a bottle of hay.  This is the ninth of October, and they have not found her yet:  they will as soon find the Northwest Passage.  Call your dogs off; and you may hear of the young lady’s safety under her own hand.  The longer you look for her, the longer she will remain, what she is now—­lost.”

[The preceding letter is thus indorsed, in Mr. Pendril’s handwriting:  “No apparent means of tracing the inclosed to its source.  Post-mark, ‘Charing Cross.’  Stationer’s stamp cut off the inside of the envelope.  Handwriting, probably a man’s, in disguise.  Writer, whoever he is, correctly informed.  No further trace of the younger Miss Vanstone discovered yet.”]

THE SECOND SCENE.

SKELDERGATE, YORK.

CHAPTER I.

IN that part of the city of York which is situated on the western bank of the Ouse there is a narrow street, called Skeldergate, running nearly north and south, parallel with the course of the river.  The postern by which Skeldergate was formerly approached no longer exists; and the few old houses left in the street are disguised in melancholy modern costume of whitewash and cement.  Shops of the smaller and poorer order, intermixed here and there with dingy warehouses and joyless private residences of red brick, compose the present a spect of Skeldergate.  On the river-side the houses are separated at intervals by lanes running down to the water, and disclosing lonely little plots of open ground, with the masts of sailing-barges rising beyond.  At its southward extremity the street ceases on a sudden, and the broad flow of the Ouse, the trees, the meadows, the public-walk on one bank and the towing-path on the other, open to view.

Here, where the street ends, and on the side of it furthest from the river, a narrow little lane leads up to the paved footway surmounting the ancient Walls of York.  The one small row of buildings, which is all that the lane possesses, is composed of cheap lodging-houses, with an opposite view, at the distance of a few feet, of a portion of the massive city wall.  This place is called Rosemary Lane.  Very little light enters it; very few people live in it; the floating population of Skeldergate passes it by; and visitors to the Walk on the Walls, who use it as the way up or the way down, get out of the dreary little passage as fast as they can.