"Yes, I went there twice. No one has been through the gate since this morning. By the way," he added, "Mrs. Pottle says she'll come around and see what she can do to help, she and that girl she has there, jolly looking girl,—eyes like a—like a fox terrier——" He stopped abruptly. Kate and Harriet had not waited for particulars about the Storm girl's eyes—the one was speeding toward the kitchen, the other was already half way up stairs.
Search as they would, the Reverend Horatio was nowhere to be found and his black wideawake hat was missing!
"Horatio never went out like that without speaking to me," lamented Harriet.
The afternoon hours dragged by and when dinner time came Horatio was still absent. The long oak dining table had been reduced to the comparatively small circle of its primordial unit. The curtains had not been drawn and, through the tall windows at the end of the room, the ghost of the departed day stared solemnly at the candles that were usurping its place. But the candles only shrugged their flames superciliously—their silver candelabra had once belonged to Charles I. "Anyway," they reflected, "it's better to be a live candle than a dead sun!" A remark which, to be strictly truthful, was not original, having been handed down in the candle family for generations.
The continued absence of the beloved curate cast a damper on the spirits of the diners and made conversation a burden. Even the all important servant question was for the time being forgotten.
"I don't see why we're worrying so," said Kate, after a longer pause than usual. "He's probably lost his way in the woods and is trying to find his way home by that ridiculous compass on his watch chain; he showed it to me once." She smiled at the recollection. "It has no more sense of direction than poor, dear Mr. Merle himself has. I give you my word the wretched thing never pointed twice to the same place. The dear man likes nothing better than to get lost in the woods. He told me so himself," she added, but her voice belied the optimism of her words.
In the silence that followed Hester Storm entered bearing a chocolate blanc-mange, a dark, marble-like edifice of mortuary design imbedded in a snowdrift of whipped cream.
"By Jove, Kate!" cried Lionel, eager to change the subject, "is that the thing you were making when you chucked me out of the kitchen this afternoon?"
Kate was assaulting the quaking monument with a desperate spoon. "It's Mr. Merle's favorite pudding," she said shortly.
Lionel subsided. What was the use? No matter what topic was started, it invariably led to Merle.