"Then I shall find her," said Jack. "She is somewhere in the city, and I'll find her sooner or later."
Peg was not one to betray her feelings, but this arrest was a great disappointment to her. It interfered with a plan she had of making a large sum out of Ida. To understand what this was, we must go back a day or two, and introduce a new character.
CHAPTER XXXI
MR. JOHN SOMERVILLE
Jack's appearance on the scene had set Mrs. Hardwick to thinking. This was the substance of her reflections: Ida, whom she had kidnaped for certain reasons of her own, was likely to prove an incumbrance rather than a source of profit. The child, her suspicions awakened in regard to the character of the money she had been employed to pass off, was no longer available for that purpose.
Under these circumstances Peg bethought herself of the ultimate object which she had proposed to herself in kidnaping Ida—that of extorting money from a man who has not hitherto figured in our story.
John Somerville occupied a suite of apartments in a handsome lodging house in Walnut Street. A man wanting yet several years of forty, he looked many years older than that age. Late hours and dissipated habits, though kept within respectable limits, left their traces on his face. At twenty-one he inherited a considerable fortune, which, combined with some professional income—for he was a lawyer, and not without ability—was quite sufficient to support him handsomely, and leave a considerable surplus every year. But latterly he had contracted a passion for gaming, and, shrewd though he might be naturally, he could hardly be expected to prove a match for the wily habitues of the gaming table, who had marked him for their prey.
The evening before his introduction to the reader he had passed till a late hour at a fashionable gaming house, where he had lost heavily.
His reflections on waking were not the most pleasant. For the first time within fifteen years he realized the folly and imprudence of the course he had pursued. The evening previous he had lost a thousand dollars, for which he had given his IOU. Where to raise the money he did not know. After making his toilet, he rang the bell and ordered breakfast.