In silence Constance obeyed him. Pulling over her head a hood that, like a deep cowl, was attached to her coat, she followed her father into the storm, and walked beside him toward the marshy shore whither, without speaking to her, he strode.
Arrived at the sedgy ocean line he halted, and turned upon her.
"Constance," he began, sternly, "my wife tells me that valuable papers which I entrusted to her keeping have disappeared. She tells me further that she had dropped them—carelessly, as I have told her—into the hammock in which your little sister slept and that you saw them there, commenting upon it; that you soon called Giles to set right some slight matter in the hammock; and that shortly after you and he had left her, she discovered her loss. What do you know of this? Tell me all that you know, and tell me the truth."
Constance's fear left her at this word. Throwing up her head she looked her father in the eyes, nearly on a level with her own as she stood upon a sandy hummock. "It needs not telling me to speak the truth, Father. I am your daughter and my mother's daughter; it runs not in my blood to lie," she said.
Stephen Hopkins touched her arm lightly, a look of relief upon his face.
"Thank you for that reminder, my girl," he said. "It is true, and Giles is of the same strain. Know you aught of this misfortune?"
"Nothing, Father," said Constance. "And because I know nothing whatever about it, in answering you I have told you all that I have to tell."
"And Giles——" began her father, but stopped.
"Nor Giles," Constance repeated, amending his beginning. "Giles is headstrong, Father, and I fear for him often, but you know that he is honourable, truth-telling. Would your son steal from you?"
"But your stepmother says no one entered the cabin after you had left it before she discovered her loss," insisted Stephen Hopkins. "What am I to think? What do you think, Constance?"