It was dark when they left the moving-picture theatre, and well after five. Winter days seem woefully short.
"Well, what shall we do now?" asked Mr. Bennet, for the second time. "I suppose, though, it will be home. It's so late."
Arethusa stopped short in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, full of folks who were plainly impatient to get somewhere, and very probably it was home, flowing past her on either side, all unregarded. She grabbed Mr. Bennet frantically by one arm.
"Oh, Mr. Bennet!"
"What's the matter? Did you leave something in the theater?"
"No! But I've left Clay waiting in the machine for me all this time in front of that store, and I never thought of him once until you said, 'home!'"
The last part of this information was wafted on the breeze to Mr. Bennet, for Arethusa had started off down the street with the swiftness of the wind itself. He followed her immediately, but considerably more slowly as to locomotion (he was no sprinter and Mr. Bennet rarely forgot his dignity) and with the parcel containing Miss Asenath's birthday gift in one hand. Arethusa had dropped it directly at his feet in her excitement. When he caught up with her, she was standing in front of the shop gazing wildly up and down the street, for no Clay and no automobile were to be discovered anywhere.
The door attendant, when questioned by Mr. Bennet, said that he remembered the chauffeur referred to very well. He had seemed to be very worried about the young lady, and had left his car several times to ask him if he had seen her come out. But he had driven off some time ago, about three hours ago, the door attendant thought it was, to be as exact as he could.
Mr. Bennet took Arethusa home in a taxicab to an excited and distraught household.
When Clay had come back without her, with his strange story of having waited for her, and that she had never returned to the machine, Ross had been perfectly sure that she had been kidnapped, and he had gone impetuously to the police station to start an immediate search. Elinor was prostrate in her room, visioning all sorts of dreadful things that might have happened to an Arethusa always too prone to make chance acquaintances, when Arethusa herself, as repentant and contrite a cause of it all as it was possible for her to be, walked in.