"But where are you going to look?" Frieda questioned. And either her brother-in-law did not hear her, or preferred to pretend he did not, since he made no reply.
The fact of the matter was he had no plan. He thought it was rather absurd for him to look at all, but had suddenly been overtaken with a sense of uneasiness, a strange foreboding of disaster. We all yield to these sensations now and then, but as they were not usual with Lord Kent he was the more uncomfortable.
He could not even decide whether it would be wiser for him to ride or to walk, but concluded he had best ride, in order to cover a greater distance in a shorter time.
He searched very carefully for Jack down the long road which divided the estate. And naturally he remembered the other evening, not so very many months ago, when he had ridden down this same avenue peering through the rain for her and Captain MacDonnell. Then he had discovered both of them with but little difficulty.
Tonight Frank wished that he felt sure Jack had someone with her to take care of her, as she had on that other evening. He would not then have felt so ridiculously worried.
"Poor Bryan, one did not like to allow oneself to think of him too often these days, yet he must be brought back home as soon as possible," Frank thought. Some time ago he had decided that when the time came he would himself go for Bryan. Perhaps this would be partly an act of expiation, although Lord Kent had not said this to himself, or to his wife.
This evening he rode directly into the village, but although it was only a little after eight o'clock, Granchester had long practiced the daylight saving habit, not because of the war, but because of a fixed habit of early sleep and early rising. There were only two or three scattered lights in the little stone houses and only a few old men outdoors talking together in front of a closed public house.
Nevertheless Frank rode up to the home of Frieda's old friend and dismounted, for he had known Mrs. Huggins many long years. She was accepted by everybody as a kind of unprinted village newspaper. If Jack had been in Granchester during the afternoon, Mrs. Huggins would know just where she had been and what she had done.
The old woman's light was out, but a moment after his knocking she opened her door. In her hand she held a lamp and her old eyes shone through the half darkness.
She was probably excited by the idea that someone had come to confide a piece of news to her.