Probably Thomas in the end might have been badly beaten by the fiends among whom he had fallen, but from that his daughter saved him. Roused, perhaps, at the sight of the unholy hands laid upon her father, and sickened by the foul jibes of men and women around her, she sprang to her feet, and, pushing round the end of the table where she sat, rushed between the combatants, and flung herself on her father's bosom, in a passion of weeping. "Do not get yourself hurt for me," she sobbed, "go away and leave me. I'm not worth caring for any more." Thomas answered by clasping her closer to his bosom, and then putting his arm in hers, he led her from the house, none daring to say him nay. Oaths, shrieks of hysterical laughter, and obscenities followed them as they went, but the look on the peasant's face, and the remembrance of his strength of arm, were enough to protect his daughter and him from further ill-usage. "Thanks be to God I've found ye, my lass; found ye, never to let ye out o' my sight again in this world," Thomas murmured when he found himself alone in the street with his long-lost one, and there welled up in him a holy joy which was unutterable. His daughter hung her head, and answered not, but she suffered him to lead her to his lodging. A 'bus took them to the head of Portland Road, and thence they walked. It was past midnight before they got home, and all the house was silent; but Thomas gave his daughter his bedroom, and groped his way to the parlour, where he hoped to get a sleep in an easy chair--first prudently turning the key in Sarah's door, to give her no room for untimely repentance. There was no sleep for his eyelids that night. The cold alone might have kept him awake in any case; but he was too excited to feel it as other than a stimulus to his thoughts. Past and future rolled before him--his daughter lost, joy at her discovery, pain at the life she had led. The grey dawn found him fevered with his thoughts, shivering in body, burning at the heart. Nevertheless, he had resolved to go home that day by the early train; and with that view he roused the landlady to beg an early breakfast for himself and his child. "I have found my lass," was all he ventured to explain, and the woman answered she was glad to hear it. In his eagerness to go home he forgot to tell the coal agent for whom he worked, and forgot also to draw four days' wages due to him--did not remember till the day after he and his daughter reached Ashbrook.