“Margret found out that Charpentier had disappeared, and all our efforts to get hold of him, then or since, were useless. He had no ties, no responsibilities, nobody cared whether he lived or died. He simply went away.
“So a few weeks went by, and I was sick with anxiety and shame. Lily—I used to marvel at it—was perfectly serene and quiet. She was so simple, poor soul!—that she would go in to the village and buy pink baby-ribbons—God alone knows how many hints she gave or whom she told!
“Finally, I planned to take her to my apartment in Boston, live quietly there with the baby—that is, my Sylvia, and perhaps one other servant, and tell Roger and Cecily that Lily wanted to study art—or music. Afterward, we could place her poor baby in some good institution, and then, maybe, I could tell Roger.
“That was August—late July and August. And that was the August that Tom ran away from school.”
She opened her eyes, looked about the circle.
“We didn’t hear of it until three days later,” Flora went on, presently, addressing herself now to Tom. “For that master you had was positive that he would find you. After three days he telegraphed Roger: ‘Is your son with you? Missing since Monday morning.’
“Roger, poor fellow, was proud at first. His son, fourteen years old, had run away to sea—the young monkey! ‘He ought to be thrashed for this,’ he would say, chuckling. He notified the police and went down to New York that week, getting the whole machinery in motion. ‘You’ll not thrash him,’ I used to say. ‘You’ll give him a new bicycle—that’ll be your thrashing!’”
“Proud, hey?” Tom interrupted the narrative, with a grin.
“Oh, yes—just at first. But after a few weeks—perhaps not so long, he began to speak more seriously. ‘He couldn’t have given us all the slip—he isn’t more than a child,’ he would say, as he came and went.”
“I told them I was fifteen,” Tom contributed. “All I did was sign up with the whaling fleet!—I’d thought it all out. The Saturday before, on a school hike, I shipped a bundle to New York harbour. There were some clothes in it that I didn’t want—it was all a blind. And in my note to Dad I said that I had seen the Panama fruit boats going out, and they made me sick to get to sea.”