"You have kept your secret mercifully, and used it wisely, sir; and I and others shall be always your debtors for it. Now I dare tell you in turn, in strictest confidence of course--" "I am far too poor to afford the luxury of babbling." And the Major told him what we all know. "I expected as much," said he drily. "Now, I suppose that you wish me to exert myself in finding the man?" "I do." "Were Mrs. Vavasour only concerned, I should say--Not I! Better that she should never set eyes on him again." "Better, indeed!" said he bitterly: "but it is I who must see him, if but for five minutes. I must!" "Major Campbell's wish is a command. Where have you searched for him?" "At his address, at his publisher's, at the houses of various literary friends of his, and yet no trace." "Has he gone to the Continent?" "Heaven knows! I have inquired at every passport office for news of any one answering his description; indeed, I have two detectives, I may tell you, at this moment, watching every possible place. There is but one hope, if he be alive. Can he have gone home to his native town?" "Never! Anywhere but there." "Is there any old friend of the lower class with whom he may have taken lodgings?" Tom pondered. "There was a fellow, a noisy blackguard, whom Briggs was asking after this very summer--a fellow who went off from Whitbury with some players. I know Briggs used to go to the theatre with him as a boy--what was his name? He tried acting, but did not succeed; and then became a scene-shifter, or something of the kind, at the Adelphi. He has some complaint, I forget what, which made him an out-patient at St. Mumpsimus's, some months every year. I know that he was there this summer, for I wrote to ask, at Briggs's request, and Briggs sent him a sovereign through me." "But what makes you fancy that he can have taken shelter with such a man, and one who knows his secret?" "It is but a chance: but he may have done it from the mere feeling of loneliness--just to hold by some one whom he knows in this great wilderness; especially a man in whose eyes he will be a great man, and to whom he has done a kindness; still, it is the merest chance." "We will take it, nevertheless, forlorn hope though it be." They took a cab to the hospital, and, with some trouble, got the man's name and address, and drove in search of him. They had some difficulty in finding his abode, for it was up an alley at the back of Drury Lane, in the top of one of those foul old houses which hold a family in every room; but, by dint of knocking at one door and the other, and bearing meekly much reviling consequent thereon, they arrived, "_per modum tollendi_" at a door which must be the right one, as all the rest were wrong. "Does John Barker live here?" asks Thurnall, putting his head in cautiously for fear of drunken Irishmen, who might be seized with the national impulse to "slate" him.