Here the people of the house reported their life had been very unhappy; the husband had taken to drink, and there had been fierce and frequent quarrels between them, arising--the landlady had gleaned, from the loud and angry utterance of the husband--from the wife's refusal to appeal to her father for assistance. They had left this place suddenly, and in debt; thence they had moved from lodging to lodging at short intervals, their position getting worse, until they were last lodged in a wretched garret. From this point they were traced with great trouble down to Nottingham, where the husband obtained a precarious living by producing designs for embroidery and curtains. Had he been steady he might have soon done fairly, but a great part of his time was spent in public-houses, and he was seldom sober. When returning home one night in a state of drunkenness, he was run over by a heavy van and killed. As his wife possessed but a few shillings in the world, he was buried at the expense of the parish and his widow at once left the town. The people where she lodged believed that she had gone to London, taking with her her six months old child, and had started to tramp the way on foot. The woman said that she doubted whether she could ever have got there. She was an utterly broken woman, with a constant racking cough, which was like to tear her to pieces, and before she set out her landlady had urged upon her that the idea of her starting to carry a heavy child to London was nothing short of madness. After this all trace of Ella had been lost. Advertisements offering large rewards appeared in the papers; the books of every workhouse between Nottingham and London, and indeed of almost every workhouse in England, were carefully searched to see if there was any record of the death of a woman with a child about the time of her disappearance. A similar search was made at all the London hospitals, and at every institution where she might have crawled to die; but no trace had ever been found of her. That she was dead was not doubted; for it was found that at Nottingham she had once gone to the parish doctor for some medicine for her child. The physician had taken particular notice of her, had asked her some questions, and had made a note in his case-book that the mother of the child he had prescribed for was in an advanced stage of consumption, and had probably but a few weeks, certainly not more than a few months, to live. It was long before the search was given up as hopeless, and many hundreds of pounds were spent by Captain Bayley before he abandoned all hope of discovering, if not his daughter, at least her child. During the year which elapsed before he was forced to acknowledge that it was hopeless, Captain Bayley had suffered terribly. His self-reproaches were unceasing, and he aged many years in appearance.