The Prophet's Mantle by Edith Nesbit

John Hatfield had left Dartford, his wife, and his work, driven by an impulse as vague as it was irresistible. He did not know what he meant to do; his one idea was that he must face his daughter's betrayer, and tax him with his crime. He did not very much care what came after. But the long tramp through England, broken though it was by many a lift from good-natured waggoners, had given him time for thinking. Reflection did not soften his resentment. On the contrary, the more he thought, the harder his heart felt, and each new hour of solitary musing left him more bitter, more vindictive, more angered than he had been the hour before. His wife's story convicted him of the one fault from which he had always believed himself to be free -- blind stupidity.

The loss of his daughter had never been out of his mind for half an hour at a time since she had gone away, and he had thought and thought, till his brain had seemed to spin round, over every least detail of her flight, and of the time just before it, in the hope of finding out who was her betrayer. And yet in all his thinking he had never come anywhere near the truth. Other people had, though; he knew that, as he remembered hints he had sneered at from some of the least brilliant of the hands -- fools he had often called them. Yet, fools as they were, they had been able to see more clearly than he, the father, whose brain sharpest love and sorrow ought surely to have had power to quicken.