CHAPTER II.
The investment revealed.
Gentleman Waife passed through a turnstile, down a narrow lane, and
reached a solitary cottage. He knocked at the door; an old peasant woman
opened it, and dropped him a civil courtesy. "Indeed, sir, I am glad you
are come. I 'se most afeared he be dead."
"Dead!" exclaimed Waife. "Oh, Sophy, if he should be dead!"
"Who?"
Waife did not heed the question. "What makes you think him dead?" said
he, fumbling in his pockets, from which he at last produced a key. "You
have not been disobeying my strict orders, and tampering with the door?"
"Lor' love ye, no, sir. But he made such a noise at fust--awful! And
now he's as still as a corpse. And I did peep through the keyhole, and
he was stretched stark."
"Hunger, perhaps," said the Comedian; "'t is his way when he has been
kept fasting much over his usual hours. Follow me, Sophy." He put aside
the woman, entered the sanded kitchen, ascended a stair that led from it;
and Sophy following, stopped at a door and listened: not a sound.
Timidly he unlocked the portals and crept in, when, suddenly such a
rush,--such a spring, and a mass of something vehement yet soft, dingy
yet whitish, whirled past the actor, and came pounce against Sophy, who
therewith uttered a shriek. "Stop him, stop him, for heaven's sake,"
cried Waife. "Shut the door below,--seize him." Downstairs, however,
went the mass, and downstairs after it hobbled Waife, returning in a few
moments with the recaptured and mysterious fugitive. "There," he cried
triumphantly to Sophy, who, standing against the wall with her face
buried in her frock, long refused to look up,--"there,--tame as a lamb,
and knows me. See!" he seated himself on the floor, and Sophy,
hesitatingly opening her eyes, beheld gravely gazing at her from under a
profusion of shaggy locks an enormous--
