“Whenever I’ve heard a grown man say he wished he was a boy again,” he mused, “I always set him down for a liar. But, for once in my life, I honestly wish I was a boy, once more. A boy one day younger and one inch shorter and one pound lighter than Cyril. I’d follow him out of doors, yonder, and give him the thrashing of his sweet young life. I’d—”
“Oh, do call him back!” begged the Mistress. “He’ll catch his death of cold, and—”
“Why will he?” challenged the Master, without stirring. “For all his noble rage, I noticed he took thought to grab up his cap and his overcoat from the hall, as he wafted himself away. And he still had his arctics on, from this afternoon. He won’t—”
“But suppose he should really go over to one of the neighbours,” urged the Mistress, “and tell such an awful story as he threatened to? Or suppose—”
“Not a chance!” the master reassured her. “Now that the summer people are away, there isn’t an occupied house within half a mile of here. And he’s not going to trudge a half-mile through the snow, in this bitter cold, for the joy of telling lies. No, he’s down at the stables or else he’s sneaked in through the kitchen; the way he did that other time when he made a grandstand exit after I’d ventured to lecture him on his general rottenness. Remember how worried about him you were, that time; till we found him sitting in the kitchen and pestering the maids? He—”
“But that time, he was only sulky,” said the Mistress. “Not insanely angry, as he is now. I do hope—”
“Stop worrying!” adjured the Master. “He’s all right.”
Which proved, for perhaps the trillionth time in history, that a woman’s intuitions are better worth following than a man’s saner logic. For Cyril was not all right. And, at every passing minute he was less and less all right; until presently he was all wrong.
For the best part of an hour, in pursuance of her husband’s counsel, the Mistress sat and waited for the prodigal’s return. Then, surreptitiously, she made a round of the house; sent a man to ransack the stables, telephoned to the gate lodge, and finally came into the Master’s study, big-eyed and pale.
“He isn’t anywhere around,” she reported, frightened. “It’s dinner time. He’s been gone an hour. Nobody’s seen him. He isn’t on the Place. Oh, I wonder if—”