‘Don’t cry, Kitty dear,’ said Miss Miller, soothingly; ‘Micky can’t be very far off’; but, in spite of her cheering words, the governess’s face was very anxious. She herself had just returned from looking for Micky in the village, where nothing had been heard or seen of him. ‘I wonder if we ought to wire to Miss Bolton,’ she added, in a lower voice.
‘I don’t see that there’s any call for that,’ said Jane, grumpily. ‘She’d only be worried to death between thinking she ought to come back here and not liking to leave Miss King. Besides, as likely as not Master Micky’s only hiding somewhere near about for fun, for a more mischieful boy I never did see.’
‘Well, perhaps it would be best not to telegraph just yet, at all events,’ said Miss Miller, rather stiffly—she thought Jane apt to presume on her privileges as an old servant—‘but one step I’m sure we ought to take is to give notice at Chudstone Police-Station that the child’s missing. Then they’ll telephone on to the other police-stations in the neighbourhood. I think that will be far more effective than going out to look for him, for as we don’t know in the least which way to go, we might be wandering about the whole day without getting any nearer finding him. I’ll just bicycle over to Chudstone now. While I’m gone you can be reading to Kitty the next story in the Greek history,’ she added to Emmeline, with an idea of diverting their attention.
‘Oh, Miss Miller,’ broke in Kitty, with a fresh outbreak of tears, ‘people just can’t do Greek history when their twins are lost! Do let us go and look for him in the wood just once more!’
Miss Miller did not think the search likely to be any more successful than before, but she had not the heart to refuse. ‘Well, you may go then,’ she said, kindly, ‘but don’t go outside the wood, and come back as soon as it’s eleven o’clock by Emmeline’s watch, even if you haven’t found him.’
Five minutes later Miss Miller had set out on her bicycle for Chudstone, and the two girls and Punch had begun another expedition through the woods. It had been a brilliant idea of Kitty’s to include Punch in the party. ‘In all the stories of children getting lost there’s always a gallant Newfoundland who rescues them,’ she had remarked. To be sure Punch was about as much like a gallant Newfoundland as the Feudal Castle was like a castle, but that was a detail.
‘I expect Punch’ll scent Micky out long before the police could find him,’ said Kitty, almost cheering up again as she and Emmeline climbed the railings dividing the wood from the road. ‘What shall we do supposing he tracks him out of the wood?’ she went on as Emmeline kept silence, feeling too miserable to answer. ‘For we promised Miss Miller not to go outside.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Emmeline impatiently. ‘There’ll be time enough to think of that when he does track him out.’
There certainly was time enough. Punch’s behaviour in the wood was most disappointing. It was in vain that they urged him to ‘go find Micky, like a good dog.’ He only stood stock still, wagging his tail apologetically, and staring up at them with a worried expression in his wistful brown eyes. It was so impossible to make him realise that for the first time in his life he was expected to take the lead in a walk, that at last, in despair, they had to give up trying to do. After that Punch trotted along happily a few feet behind them, except once when he raised their hopes cruelly by sniffing the ground violently and then rushing away among the bushes, only to come back a minute or two later with the rather crestfallen look he always had after wild and unsuccessful pursuits. It was only too plain that it had been a hunting expedition, not a rescue one.