“It is all true,” James said. “We and all the place are in sad trouble. I think our friends had better go home and leave it to strangers to stare about this place.”
This produced a little effect, and Bessie, picking up the cue, hustled off the younger ones, telling them “to go in and not to be a-staring. Wasn’t Miss Mysie always telling them as little girls shouldn’t run after crowds like that of evenings?”
James ran up into the copse and out on the heath behind it; but he saw no signs of Hugh, and as the light failed he went home in despair, with the picture of his brother, as George had described him, more vividly impressed on his mind than any other of the sad events of the evening. Poor James! he did not know how to contend with the difficulties that he was left alone to bear. He was frightened to death at Hugh’s disappearance, and was almost ready to hope that Arthur might have awakened in his absence to bring his quicker powers of action to bear on the matter. For James felt that he had done just nothing.
It was some relief to find that no one could suggest any other course of action. Miss Venning had arrived and had persuaded his mother to go to bed; and James sat up, waiting and speculating on every possible and impossible cause and result of Hugh’s absence. The unalterable fact of Mysie’s death left no room for fear. Arthur was, for the moment, at rest; but what was Hugh doing?
Part 3, Chapter XXI.
The Morning Light.
“All joys took wing,
And fled before the dawn.
Oh, love, I knew that I should meet my love—
Should find my love no more.”
In the still grey silence of early morning Arthur awoke slowly, and with a confused sense that things were not as usual. He looked round the room. It had been a hot night, and the window was wide open and the blind up, so that he could see the quiet cloudy sky and hear the twittering of the birds in the ivy. He put his hand to feel for his watch, and could not find it. Then he tried to recollect what he had done with it the night before, and could recollect nothing. Presently the church clock chimed four. It was very early; what could bring James into his room fully dressed, and with a pale wide-awake look on his face? James came up to the bed without speaking, and put his hand on Arthur’s.