it is, of course, impossible for a small boy to disappear from the face of the earth without a good deal of uneasiness being felt regarding his disappearance.

by midday the uneasiness had approached to something like alarm. the gardens, the paddocks, the park, had been searched unavailingly; inquiry had been made of every villager. no clue was forthcoming; no possible reason for the disappearance.

a conscience-stricken louisa kept a discreet silence on the matter. there was, to her mind, no occasion to incriminate herself unnecessarily. the cause could afford no solution of the effect; or, at any rate she told herself it could not, which, after all, came to the same thing as far as her silence was concerned.

a distraught rosamund finally made swift way [pg 321]to the white cottage, there to seek aid from john.

father maloney went off to the green man to find david. he saw the scouting propensities he conceived men of his type to possess, standing them in good stead at the moment. having enlisted his services, and likewise those of elizabeth, as already seen, he set off once again for the castle.

the day was as hot as the previous days had been. the earth lay panting and breathless. there was something almost ominous about the brazen blueness of the sky, the extraordinary stillness that hung over the earth.

father maloney, breasting the hill, wondered vaguely whether the world would ever again breathe in comfort. personally he considered asphyxiation a not remote possibility.

and then, all at once, he became aware of a subtle change in the atmosphere. it wasn’t that the sky was less blue, or the air less heavy, or the sun less brilliant. and, having said what it was not, i find myself at a loss to say what it was. it lay more in a curious foreboding, a certain indefinable prescience of change.

[pg 322]

“i believe,” said father maloney, addressing himself to the sky, “that we are going to have a storm.”