Jimmy, unabashed, faced her. “Ma,” he began, in his shrill voice, “wants to know if Mr. Murdock is over here. He ain’t been at our house since before supper. He said he was going to the barber shop and he never came back.”
For an instant, Mrs. Tolliver, wisely, held her tongue. The old instinct, working rapidly, told her that she must protect Ellen. It was clear then that the girl had not gone to the Setons’. Where could she be? Where was Mr. Murdock? Within the space of a second unspeakable catastrophes framed themselves in her mind. But she managed to answer. “He’s not here. He hasn’t been here. I don’t know anything about him.”
“All right,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell her.”
He made a faint gesture toward the button of the doorbell but Mrs. Tolliver thrust her powerful body between him and the object of his temptation, so that Jimmy, with a baffled air, turned and sped away into the darkness. When he had vanished she closed the door slowly, and stood for an instant leaning against it. Then, before she moved away, she raised her voice in a summons.
“Papa!” she called, “Papa! Something has happened. Ellen wasn’t at the Setons’ and Mr. Murdock is missing.”
In the moment or two while she stood thus with her hand resting on the knob of the door, there passed quickly through her mind in a series of isolated fragments all the events and the forebodings of the past few weeks. Gradually these fitted into a pattern. She understood well enough what had happened; she knew that Ellen had gone. Yet she refused to admit this, as if by refusing to acknowledge the fact it might come gradually to have no existence. She understood Gramp Tolliver’s ominous outburst of restlessness, Ellen’s strange look of triumph, the air almost of happiness which had come over the girl. Only one thing she could not understand.... Clarence Murdock! After all, Ellen had mocked him as something quite beneath her consideration. Why had she chosen him?
In that single brief moment she was hurt more deeply than she was ever hurt again. Those things which came afterward were not so cruel because she came in time to be used to them. But this ... this was so sudden, so cruel. She had no defenses ready, not even the defense which the less primitive have—a capacity for putting themselves into the shoes of the other fellow, of understanding why he should have acted thus and so. No, there was nothing, save only a sudden sharp physical pain and that which was far greater—a fear for a child who was gone suddenly from her protection.
When she reëntered the warm living room, she found her husband sitting on the edge of his sofa. Because he was a man who enjoyed his sleep and was reluctant to shake it off, he was not altogether awake.
“You say,” he murmured drowsily, “that Ellen has run off with that Murdock?”
“They are both gone.... They must have gone together.”