babe remained. With one anguished knitting of her hands over it she left
it, and fled in her night-dress. Arthur's course was made plain by his
moanings, and easily avoiding him, she glided down a back stair, out
into the arbor, and across to her mother's cottage and bed-chamber. As
she did so he returned hurriedly to his room, with low cries of less
wretched conviction, and looked eagerly under his bed and then under
hers. Thereupon the last hope died, and he dropped to his face on the
floor in abject agony.




XVIII

MISSING


After a time a new conjecture brought him to his feet. To solve it he
would go to the pond. If he had truly been there and done this appalling
thing, he would know it by the empty imprint of the boulder he had taken
from its resting place of years. If he had not, then Isabel had fled to
her mother and would be found with her in the morning, and the blot of
her murder, though it blackened his soul, was yet not on his hands.

He went to the water, and soon he came again with the step and face of
one called out of his grave. Slowly he counted the disordered coverings
of his wife's couch, stood a moment in desolate perplexity, and then
went quickly and counted those of his own. A sheet and a blanket were
gone. He turned to a closet and supplied the lack, and then paced the
floor until dawn.