overty, by the simple process of coining his own money. The poor
woman still held fast by some of the principles imparted to her in
happier days; and she was devotedly fond of her daughter. At the time
of her sudden death, she was secretly making arrangements to leave
the doctor, and find a refuge for herself and her child in a foreign
country, under the care of the one friend of her family who had not cast
her off. Questioning my informant about Alicia next, I found that he
knew very little about her relations with her father in later years.
That she must long since have discovered him to be not quite so
respectable a man as he looked, and that she might suspect something
wrong was going on in the house at the present time, were, in Old File's
opinion, matters of certainty; but that she knew anything positively on
the subject of her father's occupations, he seemed to doubt. The doctor
was not the sort of man to give his daughter, or any other woman, the
slightest chance of surprising his secrets.

These particulars I gleaned during one long month of servitude and
imprisonment in the fatal red-brick house.

During all that time not the slightest intimation reached me of Alicia's
whereabouts. Had she forgotten me? I could not believe it. Unless
the dear brown eyes were the falsest hypocrites in the world, it was
impossible that she should have forgotten me. Was she watched? Were all
means of communicating with me, even in secret, carefully removed from
her? I looked oftener and oftener into the doctor's study as those
questions occurred to me; but he never quitted it without locking the
writing-desk first--he never left any papers scattered on the table, and
he was never absent from the room at any special times and seasons that
could be previously calculated upon. I began to despair, and to feel
in my lonely moments a yearning to renew that childish experiment of
crying, which I have already adverted to, in the way of confession.
Moralists will be glad to hear that I really suffered acute mental
misery at this time of my life. My state of depression would have
gratified the most exacting of Methodists; and my penitent face
would have made my fortune if I could only have been exhibited by a
reformatory association on the platform of Exeter Hall.

How much longer was this to last? Whither should I turn my steps when I
regained my freedom? In what direction throughout all England should I
begin to look for Alicia?

Sle