But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid walking.
“Where’s Dinkie?” I asked.
She stopped short, still smiling.
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask?” I heard her saying. Then her smile faded as she searched my face. “There’s—there’s nothing happened, has there?”
I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochère and leaned against it.
“Didn’t Dinkie come to school this morning?” I asked as the earth wavered under my feet.
“No,” acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of perplexity came into her own. 337
I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to Dinkie’s room and started my frantic search through his things. I could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his books and broken toys, at the still open copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which he must have been poring over only the night before, at his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial. Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging like lead from my heart.
I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan’s office. He was still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get in touch with him.
I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, 338 and remind me that much worse things could have happened.