One day Mrs. Baron sought her son alone in his attic. Said she: “Do you suppose she’s not coming back at all?” She looked quite wan and bereft as she asked the question.
Baron felt remorseful. “Of course she is,” he assured her. “I’m going over to the Thornburgs’. I’m going to see about it.”
Bonnie May was acting foolishly, he thought. The Thornburgs were not keeping faith. Yet it was a difficult matter for him to make a clear case against either Bonnie May or the Thornburgs, and he was by no means comforted by a little event which transpired one morning.
He encountered the two actors as he was leaving the mansion, and his impulse was to speak to them cordially. But in returning his greeting they manifested a well-simulated faint surprise, as if they felt sure Baron had made a mistake. They nodded politely and vaguely and passed on.
In his mind Baron charged them angrily with being miserable cads, and he was the more angry because they had snubbed him in such an irreproachable fashion.
Even Baron, Sr., became impatient over the long absence of Bonnie May. Realizing that his usual practise of watching and listening was not to be effective in the present instance, he leaned back in his chair at dinner one evening and asked blandly: “What’s become of the little girl?”
And Mrs. Baron made a flat failure of her effort to be indifferent. Her hand trembled as she adjusted her knife and fork on her plate. “Why, I don’t know,” said she. “You know, she has two homes.” But she was afraid to attempt to look anywhere but at her plate.
Baron was astounded by the utter dejection which his mother tried to conceal. Why, she loved the child—really. She was grieving for her.
And that evening he emerged from the house with much grimness of manner and made for the Thornburgs’.
The dusk had fallen when he reached the quiet street on which the manager lived. Street-lamps cast their light among the trees at intervals. In the distance a group of children were playing on the pavement. Before the Thornburg home silence reigned, and no one was visible.