He had pretty well voiced the general sense. They felt somehow, that a vacant place had been set up in their midst.
Later that morning Bayfield chanced to return to the house from his work outside. It seemed empty. Small Fred was away at the bottom of the garden with a catapult, keeping down the swarming numbers of predatory mouse-birds and the wilier spreuw. But where was Lyn? Just then a sound striking upon the silence brought him to a standstill, amazement and consternation personified, so utterly strange and unwonted was such a sound in that household, and it proceeded from the girl’s room. Gently, noiselessly, he opened the door.
She was seated by her bed, her back towards him. Her face was buried in her hands, and her whole form was heaving with low convulsive sobs.
“Lyn! Great Heaven! What’s the matter? Lyn—My little Lyn!”
She rose at her father’s voice and came straight into his arms. Then she looked up at him, through her tears, forcing a smile.
“My little one, what is it? There, there, tell your old father,” he pleaded, a whirlwind of tenderness and concern shaking his voice as he held her to him. “Tell me, sweetheart.”
“It’s nothing, dearest,” she answered but quaveringly, and still forcing herself to smile. “Only— No, it’s nothing. But—when people are here a long time, and you get to like them a lot and they go away—why it’s—oh, it’s beastly. That’s all, old father—” dashing away her tears, and forcing herself to smile in real earnest. “And I’m a little fool, that’s all. But I won’t be any more. See, I’m all right now.”
“My little Lyn! My own little one!” he repeated, kissing her tenderly, now rather more moved than she was.
And Lyn was as good as her word. All his solicitous but furtive watching, failed to detect any sign or symptom that her outburst of grief was anything more than a perfectly natural and childlike manifestation of her warm little heart.