Since the letter she had received on the night of his arrest, the daughter heard no word from the father. Had he again forgotten, or were his messages intercepted? She did not know and was never to know. She had written to him, saying she had obeyed him, but there was no acknowledgment that her letter had reached its destination. Thus she waited and waited, gnawing impatience and dread chasing the rose from her cheeks, until she could wait no longer. Her horse and the southern road were at her disposal, with none to hinder, so she set forth for London, excusing herself for thus in spirit breaking her father’s command, by the assurance that he had not forbidden her return. She avoided her father’s mansion, knowing that Lady Strafford and her children were now in residence there, and went to the inn where she had formerly lodged. She soon learned that it was one thing to go to London, and quite another to obtain entrance to Westminster Hall, where the great trial, now approaching its end, was the fashionable magnet of the town. No place of amusement ever collected such audiences, and although money will overcome many difficulties, she found it could not purchase admission to the trial through any source that was available. Perhaps if she had been more conversant with the ways of the metropolis the golden key might have shot back the bolt, but with her present knowledge she was at her wit’s end. Almost in despair, a happy thought occurred to her. She wrote a note to John Vollins, her father’s treasurer, and asked him to call upon her, which the good man did at the hour she set. “Your father would be troubled to know you are in London, when he thinks you safe at home,” he said. “I could not help it, Mr. Vollins. I was in a fever of distraction and must have come even if I had walked. But my father need never know, and you remember he wrote that you were to help me.’ I wish a place in Westminster Hall and cannot attain it by any other means in my power than by asking you.” “It is difficult of attainment. I advise you not to go there, for if his lordship happened to catch sight of you in that throng, who knows but at a critical moment it might unnerve him, for he is a man fighting with his back to the wall against implacable and unscrupulous enemies.” “Could you not get me some station where I might look upon my father unseen by him?” “Seats in the Hall are not to be picked or chosen.. If a place can be come by, it will be because some person who thought to attend cannot be present.” “Do you think that where there are so many faces a chance recognition is possible? I should be but an atom in the multitude.” “Doubtless his seeing you is most unlikely. I shall do my best for you, and hope to obtain an entrance for to-morrow.”