But his fears were only too well grounded, for one day, Sally, too, disappeared. Watching her opportunity when the babe was asleep, her mother busy washing, and her father away at the farm, she dressed herself as if for a walk, went out, and did not return. All day her mother had endured the keenest anxiety in the hope that Sally would come back. She was unwilling to send for her husband, and could only make one or two cautious inquiries through her nearest neighbours. They knew nothing; Sally had been seen, of course, but she looked and walked as usual, with hasty steps and eyes bent on the ground. Though startled at the news, Thomas was not surprised. The flight only fulfilled his own forebodings. Swallowing a morsel of food he started for Warwick, and soon learnt there that a girl answering to Sally's description had left by the slow London train at eleven o'clock. On his way home he bitterly reproached himself that he had not taken means to make such a step impossible. The two or three pounds that Sally had brought home with her he had scrupulously left untouched, and these she had taken with her, as also the few trinkets given to her by the Captain. Thomas had no doubt whatever that Sally had fled to London. For a time this blow positively dazed Thomas and his wife. Once more their nights were nights of sorrow and tears, and for them the mornings brought no joy. Only the little one that lay sleeping in its wee cot was all unconscious of trouble, or that its presence added poignancy to the bitterness with which the labourer and his wife mourned for their lost one. Thomas Wanless, however, was not a man to abandon himself long to useless grief. The more keen the pain the more certain was his nature to rise and fight for deliverance, and before long he had made up his mind that, while he had life, his child should not be abandoned. Cost what it would, he must follow her to that dreadful city whose horrors darkened his imagination. The lost one should be found, and, if God would but help him, saved. So he resolved, although as yet he knew not how his resolution could be carried out. For a day or two he brooded over it, afraid almost to tell his wife. The fear was weak. No sooner did Mrs. Wanless know what her husband meant to do than she became almost cheerful, and brought her ready wit to bear on all possible plans for enabling him to go. Full of a true woman's self-sacrificing spirit, she at first proposed to go out charring, and so make a living, but the child made that impossible. The utmost she could do was to continue to take in washing, and even that would be a severe strain upon her, with a babe to tend. At best, too, it would afford her only a precarious living, and nothing possible could be left to help her husband in London.