"Merciful God!" ejaculated her husband, and put his hand to his breast, pierced by a shooting pain.
"I left her with you," repeated Flutter-Duck with white lips. "Why did you let her go out? Why didn't you look after her?"
"Silence, you sinful mother!" cried Lewis. "You shamed her before strangers, and she has gone out—to drown herself—what do I know?"
Flutter-Duck burst into hysterical sobbing.
"Yes, take her part against me! You always make me out wrong."
"Restrain yourself!" he whispered imperiously. "Do you wish to have the neighbours hear you again?"
"I daresay she's only hiding somewhere, sulking, as she did when a child," said Flutter-Duck. "Have you looked under the bed?"
Foolish as he knew her words were, they gave him a gleam of hope. He led the way upstairs without answering, and taking a candle, examined her bedroom again with ludicrous minuteness. This time the sight of her old clothes was comforting; if she had wanted to drown herself, she would not—he reasoned with perhaps too masculine a logic—have taken her best clothes to spoil. With a sudden thought he displaced the hearthstone. He had early discovered where she kept her savings, though he had neither tampered with them nor betrayed his knowledge. The tin box was broken open, empty! In the drawers there was not a single article of her jewellery. Rachel had evidently left home! She had gone by way of Jacob's ladder—secretly.
Prostrated by the discovery, the parents sat down in helpless silence. Then Flutter-Duck began to wring her white-gloved hands, and to babble incoherent suggestions and reproaches, and protestations that she was not to blame. The hot coffee cooled untasted, the pink wrap lay crumpled on the floor.
Lewis revolved the situation rapidly. What could be done? Evidently nothing—for that night at least. Even the police could do nothing till the morning, and to call them in at all would be to publish the scandal to the whole world. Rachel had gone to some lodging—there could be no doubt about that. And yet he could not go to bed, his heart still expected her, though his brain had given up hope. He walked about restlessly, racked by fits of coughing, then he dropped back into his seat before the decaying fire. And Flutter-Duck, frightened into silence at last, sat on the sofa, dazed, in her trappings and gewgaws, with the white flowers glistening in her false hair, and her pallid cheeks stained with tears.