And now Caroline was speaking again, looking confidingly up into the large patronising face of the Police.
‘That’s where I should look,’ she was saying, ‘if we were playing hide-and-seek. But as it is—— You see we’ve been there all the morning, and he couldn’t have come into the wood without our hearing him, you know. Have you tried the other wood, beyond the garden? And the thatched summer-house? And the lodge that isn’t used? Over by the other gates, you know.’
‘The old lodge,’ the Police echoed. ‘A very likely spot, I shouldn’t wonder. You lead the way, young gentleman,’ he said to Charles.
‘Good old Caro—oh, good old Caro!’ Charlotte was saying to herself as the party started.
‘I’ll dispose my search-party proper later on,’ said the Police importantly, and turned to say, ‘Ain’t you coming, Miss?’ to Caroline, who was stooping down, doing something to her foot.
‘I can’t,’ she said; ‘I’ve got a stone in my shoe. And it hurts,’ she added, standing up firmly on it.
Caroline went indoors, and the search-party threaded the woods and converged at last on the empty lodge. Its lattice-paned windows were dusty, its door hung on a broken hinge, and little black balls of hard moss were dotted between the flagstones of its yard. Its thatch was loose in places, ruffled like the plumage of an old stuffed bird, and its garden had been so long untilled that it had ceased to be the weed-grown earth patch that a neglected garden first becomes, and had grown green all over, covered itself with grass and fern and bramble and baby oak-trees, and become just a fenced-in patch of the wood beyond.
‘Halt!’ said the Police; ‘just the place. I’ll warrant we’ve run the young gentleman to earth this time.’
But they hadn’t. There was nothing in the lodge but an old hamper with a hole in it, a litter of straw and old damp paper, some cold ashes in the grate, and in the upper rooms two last year’s birds’-nests, and a chair with three legs and half a back.
The Police stooped his helmeted head to the low door lintel, and came out into the sunshine a disappointed man.