The winter was moving away thus, and Thomas Wanless was rapidly losing his vigour. Hard work and constant vigils, coupled with a sore heart, and a weak appetite, pulled the man down, and by February he had to confess that the long walks were too much for his strength. Mercifully, the weather often made it impossible for him to go out at night, and when it did clear up, he contented himself with going somewhere to watch the stream of people passing by. "I will wait," he said to himself, "for my darling to come to me." He could not even stand very long, but usually sought the rest of a friendly doorstep, and at times a recess on a bridge, watching, with tender wistfulness, the stream of life hurrying on around him. Strange to say, he had more than once seen Adelaide Codling since that night at the theatre, and somehow that always gave him hope. Her face seemed to say to him, "Your daughter cannot be far away." Often the "unfortunates" came and talked to him, not rudely in their wantonness--alas! poor, forsaken waifs--forsaken by all save God--but soberly, as if moved to speak to this still, sad-eyed, grey-faced old man, who looked out on the world so keenly, and withal, with such tenderness in his look. They would tell him fragments of their stories--sad enough all, and wonderfully alike--tales of seduction, and heartless desertion, varied only by the degree of turpitude usually exhibited in the man. At one time it would be the tale of a light-headed girl, seduced by her master--a married man--who huddled her out of sight, to hide his shame. Many came from garrison towns, the seduced of the officers there; quiet country parsonages gave their quota of girls educated to feel, and therefore hurrying the faster to their doom, when once cut off from their families by the devices of their betrayers. One woman excited Thomas's pity deeply. Though wasted and fast dying, she still had traces of great beauty when he first met her, leaning wearily on the parapet of Waterloo Bridge, looking out on the water below. She flashed defiance--the defiance of a hunted being--at him when he first spoke to her, but he soon won her heart, and got her story. A fair blonde, oval-faced English girl, she had been comely to look upon, and was wholesome at the heart even yet, for all her misery. She was the victim of a parson, now high in the counsels of the church. The villain was but a curate when he seduced her--the only child of her mother, and she a widow. He promised to marry her, of course, and wiled his way to her heart. Then when he had got all he wanted, and found that she was with child, he cast her off, daring her to lay the babe to his paternity, and spreading a story to the effect that he had found other lovers at her heels. Broken hearted, she buried her head and obeyed, but the shame killed her mother. "I could not die," the daughter said to Wanless; "I have often tried to kill myself, but fear keeps me back now,