“Oh, my dear, my dear, where have you been—where have you been?”
As she spoke, she buried her face upon the lad’s shoulder, while Macey looked up speechlessly at the doctor, and he, choked with emotion as he was, could not for some moments find a word to utter.
Still, clinging to him in the darkness Aunt Hannah now took tightly hold of the boy’s arm, as if fearing he might again escape from her, and drawing him up toward the door from which the light shone now, showing Eliza and Martha both waiting, she suddenly grasped the truth, and uttered a low wail of agony.
“Not found?” she cried. “Oh, how could you let me, how could you! It was too cruel, indeed, indeed!”
Aunt Hannah’s sobs broke out loudly now; and, unable to bear more, Macey glided away, and did not stop running after passing the gate till he reached the rectory door.
Chapter Twenty One.
In the Early Morning.
Churchwarden Rounds kept his word, for at the first break of day his vigorous arms sent the ting-tang ringing in a very different way to that adopted by old Chakes for the last few minutes before service commenced on Sunday morning and afternoon. And he did not ring in vain, for though the search was given up in the night the objections were very genuine. Everyone was eager to help so respected a neighbour as the doctor, and to a man the searchers surrounded him as he walked up to the church; even Wrench the carpenter, and Chakes the sexton putting in an appearance in a different suit to that worn over-night and apparently none the worse for the cold plunge into peaty water they had had.