"Well, and if she did," said Mrs. Alfrick, "it's no business of yours, as I can see. You ain't married to John yet. When you are, take my word for it, you'll have a bigger dose of Lily than you care for. Him and his mother, they're both right down silly over that child."
Mary knew her stepmother too well to go on asking questions. After all, it did not much matter how Lily got there. The next thing was to find the two children, who had evidently strayed away and lost themselves in the fair. This was not an easy business, for the crowd had thickened very much since Mary first came, and the advancing dusk, and the lights which were beginning to glimmer everywhere, made it extremely difficult to find anybody.
Mary set out to make her way along that crowded street once more. It was becoming like a bad dream, this perpetual hurrying up and down through the noisy fair, her ears and brain bewildered by the sound of voices, of music, or the discordant shriek of penny trumpets. She pushed along through the people. There were plenty of children wedged in among those groups that surrounded the lighted booths, but nowhere could she find either of the children she was looking for. She soon, being active and not encumbered with clinging hands, had left Mrs. Alfrick and her family some distance behind, and was working her way desperately through those stationary crowds. Flushed with trouble and fatigue, no summer night could have seemed to her more exhausting. The heavy air of that street weighed on her as if it had been a close and suffocating room, though some of the people were shivering, and a cold little October wind was whistling along, shaking the tents and making the lights flicker wildly.
"It's going to rain," said a voice. "It always do rain on Carsham Fair."
Mary searched to the end of the street, and round the market-place, without success. Then she turned back, and after a little while met her stepmother and the children. Mrs. Alfrick was crying now, and telling one or two sympathisers in the crowd that she had lost her little girl, that Lizzie had been led away into mischief by the worst child in the village, a nasty good-for-nothing who had been picked up in a ditch.
"I've heard tell of that child," said one of the women near. "It was John Randal, the blacksmith over at Markwood, weren't it? He was a soft, not to send the child to the Union."
"I wish to goodness he had," said Mrs. Alfrick, with a deep sigh.
At that moment Mary pushed her way through the crowd to her stepmother's side.
"It's no good," she said. "I've looked in every corner. We must fetch father out of the Wheatsheaf and have a proper search made. There's bad characters about, and those children may have been stolen. We must go to the police."
"Fetch your father out of the Wheatsheaf! You may do it yourself, then!" cried Mrs. Alfrick, sobbing again, while several of the bystanders laughed.