The swing door near the back staircase creaked. In the Vicarage you could hear everything.
Mr. and Mrs. Gresley looked eagerly at the door. The parlor-maid came in with a note between her finger and thumb.
"She is not there," said Mr. Gresley, in a shaking voice. "I wrote Mr. Pratt such a guarded letter, saying Hester had imprudently run across to see them on her return home, and how grateful I was to Mrs. Pratt for not allowing her to return, as it had begun to snow. He says he and Mrs. Pratt have not seen her."
"James," said Mrs. Gresley, "where is she?"
A second step shuffled across the hail, and Fräulein stood in the door-way. Her pale face was drawn with anxiety. In both hands she clutched a trailing skirt plastered with snow, hitched above a pair of large goloshed feet, into which the legs were grafted without ankles.
"She has not return?"
"No," said Mr. Gresley, "and she is not with the Pratts."
"I know always she is not wiz ze Pratts," said Fräulein, scornfully. "She never go to Pratt if she is in grief. I go out at half seven this morning to ze Br-r-rowns, but Miss Br-r-rown know nozing. I go to Wilderleigh, I see Mrs. Loftus still in bed, but she is not there. I go to Evannses, I go to Smeeth, I go last to Mistair Valsh, but she is not there."
Mr. Gresley began to experience something of what Fräulein had been enduring all night.
"She would certainly not go from my house to a Dissenter's," he said, stiffly. "You might have saved yourself the trouble of calling there, Fräulein."