ing indifferent food and shelter
to London's floating population, but after his fiftieth repulse he had no
difficulty in reaching the conclusion that the police were again ahead of
him with their inquiries.

Nevertheless he persevered fruitlessly until a late hour before returning
to his hotel to pass a sleepless night in a fever of baffled excitement.
Not till then did he realize how much he had been upheld by the hope of
finding Sisily at Charleswood. He was lost in a maze of conjectures,
fears, and impossible plans, though his intelligence told him that no plan
of search he could form was likely to be of the slightest use. Only luck
could help him there, and it was part of the hopelessness of the situation
that he dared not invoke the aid of any of those agencies or organizations
which make it their business to find persons who have disappeared in
London. His search must be a solitary one.

The morning saw him enter upon it with a feverish energy borrowed from the
future and the desperate optimism of a temperament willing to gamble with
Fortune against such incalculable odds. At first he attempted to divine
the motives likely to actuate a girl ignorant of London in seeking a
hiding-place there, and shaped his search accordingly; but he gave that up
after a while, and decided to search the streets of the inner suburbs, in
the hope of encountering her sooner or later. His method was to purchase a
map of each district, and explore it thoroughly from one end to the other.
He got his meals anywhere, and slept in the nearest hotel where he
happened to find himself late at night. But his meals were often missed
and his broken sleep haunted with nightmare visions of the pitfalls and
snares spread for inexperienced girls in London.

So Charles passed nearly a week of interminable tramping of London
streets, scanning the endless medley of faces in the hope of a chance
glimpse of Sisily's wistful eyes and pale features. But it is one thing to
gamble with Fortune, and another to win from her. Sometimes she flattered
Charles with a chance resemblance which sent him flying across the traffic
at the risk of his life, and once he sprang off a 'bus after a girl he saw
vanishing into an Underground lift, but it was not Sisily. The end of the
week saw him returning from uncharted areas of outer London to the more
familiar thoroughfares of the city's life, for in that time his dauntless
spirit had realized the colossal folly of any att