12, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, W.C.

1891.
PRINTED BY
KELLY AND CO., MIDDLE MILL, KINGSTON-ON-THAMES
AND GATE STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, W.C.

CONTENTS

CHAP.
I.--[Welford Bridge.]
II.--[Crawford's House.]
III.--[The Pine Groves of Leeham.]
IV.--[The Missing Man.]
V.--[A Second Apparition.]
VI.--[Crawford's Investigations.]
VII.--[A Visitor at Boland's Ait.]
VIII.--[Father and Son.]
IX.--[Crawford's Home.]
X.--[Father and Son.]
XI.--["Can I Play with that Little Boy?"]
XII.--[Philip Ray at Richmond.]
XIII.--[An Invitation Accepted.]
XIV.--[The Fire at Richmond.]
XV.--[How William Goddard changed his Name.]
XVI.--[At Play.]
XVII.--[The Postman's Hail.]
XVIII.--[Private Theatricals.]
XIX.--[The Tow-path by Night.]
XX.--[A Hostage at Crawford's House.]
XXI.--[Crawford Sells a Patent.]
XXII.--[William Crawford's Nightmare.]
XXIII.--["Man Overboard!"]
XXIV.--[Reward for a Life.]
XXV.--[A New Visitor at Crawford's House.]
XXVI.--[A Bridge of Sighs.]
XXVII.--[A Last Resolve.]
XXVIII.--[William Crawford's Luck.]
XXIX.--[An Intruder upon the Ait.]
XXX.--[Hetty's Visit to the Ait.]
XXXI.--[By the Boy's Bedside.]
XXXII.--[Bramwell finds a Sister.]
XXXIII.--["I must go to fetch her Home."]
XXXIV.--[Crawford's Plans for the Future.]
XXXV.--[Husband and Wife.]
XXXVI.--[Tea at Crawford's House.]
XXXVII.--[Crawford Writes Home.]
XXXVIII.--[William Crawford Free.]
XXXIX.--[Crawford is Sleepless.]
XL.--[Crawford Sleeps]

AN ISLE OF SURREY.

CHAPTER I.

[WELFORD BRIDGE.]

There was not a cloud in the heavens. The sun lay low in the west. The eastern sky of a May evening was growing from blue to a violet dusk. Not a breath of wind stirred. It was long past the end of the workman's day.

A group of miserably clad men lounged on Welford Bridge, some gazing vacantly into the empty sky, and some gazing vacantly into the turbid water of the South London Canal, crawling beneath the bridge at the rate of a foot a minute towards its outlet in the Mercantile Docks, on the Surrey shore between Greenwich and the Pool.

The men were all on the southern side of the bridge: they were loafers and long-shoremen. Most of them had pipes in their mouths. They were a disreputable-looking group, belonging to that section of the residuum which is the despair of philanthropists--the man who has nothing before him but work or crime, and can hardly be got to work.