“What dog?”
“The Farver's dorg. It was scratching at the front dawer afore I was up this morning. 'It's the milk,' sez I. But the minute I opened the dawer up it came ter the drawerin' room and went snuffling rahnd everywhere.”
“Where is it now?”
“Gorn, mum.”
“Did anybody else see it? No? You say no? You're sure? Then say nothing about it, Liza—nothing whatever—that's a good girl.”
The newspaper was full of the mysterious disappearance. Not a trace of the Father had yet been found. The idea had been started that he had gone into seclusion at the Anglican monastery with which he was associated, but on inquiry at Bishopsgate Street it was found that nothing had been seen of him there. Since yesterday the whole of London had been scoured by the police, but not one fact had been brought to light to make clearer the mystery of his going away. With the most noticeable face and habit in London he had evaded scrutiny and gone into a retirement which baffled discovery. No master of the stage art could have devised a more sensational disappearance. He had vanished as though whirled to heaven in a cloud, and that was literally what the more fanatical of his followers believed to have been his fate. Among these persons there were wild-eyed hangers-on telling of a flight upward on a fiery chariot, as well as a predicted disappearance and reappearance after three days. Such were the stories being gulped down by the thousands who still clung with an indefinable fascination to the memory of the charlatan. Meantime the soldier Wilkes had died of his injuries, and the coroner's inquiry was to be opened that day.
“Unfeeling brutes! The bloodhound is an angel of mercy compared to them,” thought Glory, but the worst sting was in the thought that John had fled out of fear and was now in hiding somewhere.
Toward noon the newsboys were rushing through the Inn, crying their papers against all regulations, and at the same moment Rosa came in to say that John Storm had surrendered.
“I knew it!” cried Glory; “I knew he would!”
Then Rosa told her of Brother Andrew's attempt to personate his master, and with what pitiful circumstances it had ended.