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391 FL UTTER-D UCK. 39 1

comforting ; if she had wanted to drown herself, she would not — he reasoned with perhaps too masculine a logic — have taken her best clothes to spoil. With a sudden thought he displaced the hearthstone. He had early discovered where she kept her savings, though he had neither tampered with them nor betrayed his knowledge. The tin box was broken open, empty ! In the drawers there was not a single article of her jewellery. Rachel had evidently left home ! She had gone by way of Jacob's ladder — secretly.

Prostrated by the discovery, the parents sat down in help- less silence. Then Flutter-Duck began to wring her white- gloved hands, and to babble incoherent suggestions and reproaches, and protestations that she was not to blame. The hot coffee cooled untasted, the pink wrap lay crumpled on the floor.

Lewis revolved the situation rapidly. What could be done ? Evidently nothing — for that night at least. Even the police could do nothing till the morning, and to call them in at all would be to publish the scandal to the whole world. Rachel had gone to some lodging — there could be no doubt about that. And yet he could not go to bed, his heart still expected her, though his brain had given up hope. He walked about restlessly, racked by fits of coughing, then he dropped back into his seat before the decaying fire. And Flutter-Duck, frightened into silence at last, sat on the sofa, dazed, in her trappings and gewgaws, with the white flowers glistening in her false hair, and her pallid cheeks stained with tears.

And so they waited in the uncouth room in the solemn watches of the night, pricking up their ears at a rare footstep in the street, and hastening to peep out of the window ; waiting for the knock that came not, and the dawn that was distant. The silence lay upon them like a pall.