"I am afraid not. She was too proud to return to us of her own free will."
"Is she good-looking?"
"No, I think not," said the Sister, a little doubtfully. "She was tall for her age, thin and unformed; she had a brown skin and hair cut short like a boy's. Her eyes were beautiful—large and dark; but she was too pale and awkward-looking to be pretty. When she had a color—oh, then it was a different matter!"
Hubert took away with him a full description of Jane Wood's clothes and probable appearance, and on reaching London went straight to the office of a private detective. To this man he told as much of Jane's story as was necessary, and declared himself ready to spend any reasonable amount of money so long as there was a possibility of finding the lost girl. The detective was not very hopeful of success; the runaway had already had two days' start—enough for a complete change of identity. Probably she had put on boy's clothes and was lurking about the streets of London.
"But she had no money!" Hubert urged.
"She'll get some somehow," the detective answered quietly.
For some days and weeks Hubert lived in a fever of suspense. He had set his heart on finding the girl and sending her back to St. Elizabeth's—or elsewhere. Some kind of home must be secured to her. For the sake of his own peace of mind, he must know that she was safe. He could not forgive Mrs. Rumbold for having been absent in Switzerland when Sister Louisa wrote to her of Jane Wood's flight, and thus being unable to inform him of it immediately. He had an unreasonable conviction that, if he had known at once of Janie's disappearance, he would have succeeded in tracking her. But for this opinion he really had no ground at all.
So days and weeks and months went on, and brought with them the conviction that the girl was lost for ever. Nothing was heard of her either at Winstead or at Beechfield, and Hubert Lepel was obliged at last to acknowledge that all his efforts had been in vain. The girl refused to be benefited any longer; the wild blood in her veins had asserted itself; she was probably leading the outcast life from which he thought that he had rescued her; she had gone down on the tide of poverty and vice and crime which floods the London streets. He shuddered sometimes when he thought of it. He haunted the doors of theatres, the courts and alleys of East London, looking sombrely for a face which he would not have known if he had seen it. He fancied that Andrew Westwood's daughter would bear her history in her eyes—the great dark eyes that he remembered as her sole beauty when she was a child.
It was a mad fancy, born of his desire to atone for a wrong that he had done to an innocent man. The wrong seemed greater than ever when it darkened the life of a weak young girl and tortured the heart of the innocent man's own child.