We got to the hotel at last (the same that my poor stricken darling had stayed at after her honeymoon), and as soon as we reached my room I locked the door and said: 

“Now out with it.  And please tell me everything.”

Father Dan was the first to speak, but his pulpit style was too slow for me in my present stress of thoughts and feelings.  He had hardly got further than his difference with his Bishop, and the oath he had sworn by him who died for us to come to London and never go back until he had found my darling, when I shook his old hand and looked towards the Sister.

She was quicker by a good deal, and in a few minutes I knew something of my dear one’s story—­how she had fled from home on my account, and for my sake had become poor; how she had lodged for a while in Bloomsbury; how hard she had been hit by the report of the loss of my ship; and how (Oh my poor, suffering, heroic, little woman!) she had disappeared on the approach of another event of still more serious consequence.

It was no time for modesty, not from me at all events, so while the Father’s head was down, I asked plainly if there was a child, and was told there was, and the fear of having it taken from her (I could understand that) was perhaps the reason my poor darling had hidden herself away.

“And now, when, where, and by whom was she seen last?” I asked.

“Last week, and again to-day, to-night, here in the West End—­by a fallen woman,” answered the Sister.

“And what conclusion do you draw from that?”

The Sister hesitated for a moment and then said: 

“That her child is dead; that she does not know you are alive; and that she is throwing herself away, thinking there is nothing left to live for.”

“What?” I cried.  “You believe that?  Because she left that brute of a husband . . . and because she came to me . . . you believe that she could. . . .  Never!  Not Mary O’Neill!  She would beg her bread, or die in the streets first.”

I dare say my thickening voice was betraying me; but when I looked at Mildred and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks and heard her excuses (it was “what hundreds of poor women were driven to every day"), I was ashamed and said so, and she put her kind hand in my hand in token of her forgiveness.

“But what’s to be done now?” she asked.

O’Sullivan was for sending for the police, but I would not hear of that.  I was beginning to feel as I used to do when I lost a comrade in a blizzard down south, and (without a fact or a clue to guide me) sent a score of men in a broad circle from the camp (like spokes in a wheel) to find him or follow back on their tracks.

There were only four of us, but I mapped out our courses, where we were to go, when we were to return, and what we were to do if any of us found my lost one—­take her to Sister’s flat, which she gave the address of.

It was half-past eleven when we started on our search, and I dare say our good old Father Dan, after his fruitless journeys, thought it a hopeless quest.  But I had found myself at last.  My spirits which had been down to zero had gone up with a bound.  I had no ghost of an idea that I had been called home from the 88th latitude for nothing.  And I had no fear that I had come too late.