And day after day, night after night, he did wander hither and thither through the most frequented thoroughfares of London, returning late and worn-out to his miserable lodging. A growing hopelessness lay at his heart, and made him sometimes almost unable to drag his limbs past each other, but he held on with a dogged persistence that was almost sullen. Through Godbehere's friendliness, and the pressure of his own heart agony, he had scraped acquaintance with sundry policemen, but they could give him no effective help. One would suggest that he ought to keep a close watch about the Strand, another mentioned Oxford Street and the Circus, or the Haymarket. All agreed, in their callous sort of way, that "if she had followed a man to London, she was a'most sure to find her way to the streets before long." Thomas did not doubt it. He knew the pride of his daughter too well to doubt it. Rather than bear among her kindred the brand which her unfallen sisterhood would put upon her, she would face a life of open shame, where none could cast stones at her. So Thomas held on his way, but never got a glimpse of his lost one. His means were nearly exhausted, for, pinch as he might, it costs money to live in London. Yet he would not surrender. No, he would work. But how could he get work--he, a mere street loafer, and as lonely in London as if it had been a desert. London with its hurrying crowds, its rush of vehicles, its roar and bustle, and flowing lights, fairly broke down his imagination. He felt himself a helpless atom amid a mass of atoms that knew nothing of his misery, and grew too weak-hearted almost to seek for work. But for his quest, he felt--sometimes even said to himself--that he could lie down in the gutter and die. Possibly his wretched lodging and the sleepless nights he had passed in his pain had much to do with this utter collapse of mind. I cannot decide, but he has told me that never till that time did he realise the sustaining power of a fixed idea. "I came to find Sally," he said, "and I held to that." For that he braved not only hunger and cold, but the horrors of the night in the most abandoned thoroughfares of London. For that he mingled in the crowds of educated and other roughs that frequented theatre doors, and the doors of the coffee-houses and prostitute dens in the Haymarket and Gardens. For that he endured cursing and foul language inconceivable, stood to see men and women hurrying themselves into worse than a fiend's condition by their self-indulgence and sin. Into low dancing rooms he penetrated, often to be bundled out neck and crop as a spy, or at best to be horrified by filthy jokes or still more filthy exhibitions of obscenity. That very Agar Town, in which he lived, he again and again explored, facing its stenches and miseries, its wantonness and riot, and worst of all, its terrible crowds of weary, sin-rotting, broken-hearted, down-beaten, and unfortunate humanity. Often did he see women there