All night long Jack's parents lay awake in each other's arms, crying, praying, reproaching themselves and excusing each other, and forming self-denying resolutions for the future in which they hoped to have their boy again. With each gust of wind, Mrs. Wittingham shuddered and suggested dreadful possibilities, and the doctor comforted his wife while he kept to himself suggestions equally dreadful. The rain sat the doctor to fearing dangerous sickness to the boy who was in such unfit condition to breast a storm. When he was a scrapegrace boy himself, and away from home, he had always sense enough to go into a barn when it rained, but he never thought to attribute this much of wisdom to Jack, for his thoughts kept recurring to the boy's earlier days, when Jack was a sturdy, merry, helpless baby, and his parents had planned such a delightful future for the jolly little rogue.
A swing of the gate leading to the barn-yard brought the doctor to his feet, and hurried him out into the storm with bare head and feet, but alas, it was only the wind. A muffled step on the back piazza called him again from his bed, but he found only the family cat. He grew too weak to try to silence his wife's fears, too weak to think, too weak to examine his own apprehensions, too weak to do anything but pray and promise. At early dawn he dressed himself and hurried out to feed his horse, so that the animal might be ready for an early start. He gave the pony an extra measure of corn, and climbed into the hay-loft to push down some hay. An old hat of Jack's lay upon the hay a little way off, and the doctor snatched it and kissed it passionately, his eyes filling with tears as he did so. Then, as he wiped his eyes, he saw something else that reminded him of his boy, though he scarcely knew why. He stopped to pick it up, and a loud yell resulted, for the dingy object was Jack's hair, the owner of which had burrowed the remainder of himself deep in the warm hay. Tears, fears, prayers, good resolutions and all other products of night and penitence escaped the doctor as if they were dreams, and he exclaimed:
"Well, sir?"
"Oh, father!" said Jack.
"Is this as far as you've been?" demanded the parent, indignant about what seemed to him sympathy obtained under false pretences.
"Oh, no," said Jack, "I've had an awful time. You may punish me all you want to, but you can never make me suffer as I've done to-night." And Jack cried as if his heart would break.
"Your poor mother," said the doctor, "has been nearly crazy."
"Let me see her!" said Jack. "Just let me see her once more." And in a moment Jack had jumped from the hay-loft window and was limping toward the house.
The doctor, recalling with some shame his good resolutions, followed with all possible haste, though by the conventional means of exit, and when he entered the house, he beheld the runaway hugging and kissing his mother in most frantic fashion.