“The third of July.”
“This was written June 30th, only four days ago. It is the last entry in the book. Listen!” She read, while the tears started to her eyes:
“I must try to get in some good books on natural history. If I could make better friends with the little wild things around me I need never be lonely. There is a young rabbit who seems disposed to hit it off with me. I toss him a bit of biscuit after breakfast every morning. He comes and waits for it now. He eats it daintily in my sight; then, with a flirt of his absurd tail for ‘thank you,’ scampers down to the river to wash it down.”
“Those are not the thoughts of a man out of his mind.”
“No,” he admitted, “but everything you have read shows him to be of a sensitive, high-strung nature. On such a man the sudden shock of our coming——”
“Oh, then I have waited too long!” she cried despairingly. “And now I can never repay!”
“Not necessarily,” said Stonor with a dogged patience. “Such cases are common in the North. But I never knew one to be incurable.”
She took this in, and it comforted her partly; but her thoughts were still busy with matters remote from Stonor. After a while she asked abruptly: “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Start up the river at once,” he said. “We’ll hear news of him on the way. We’ll overtake him in the end.”
She stared at him with troubled eyes, pondering this suggestion. At last she slowly shook her head. “I don’t think we ought to go,” she murmured.