niquity."

My suspicions fell entirely upon our young landlord, whose character for
such intrigues was but too well known. I therefore directed my steps
towards Thornhill Castle. He soon appeared, with the most open, familiar
air, and seemed perfectly amazed at my daughter's elopement, protesting
upon his honour that he was quite a stranger to it. A man, however,
averred that my daughter and Mr. Burchell had been seen driving very
fast towards the Wells, about thirty miles distant.

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 tem