The little girl curtsied as he put the string in her hand.
"Thank you very much!" they chorused.
Mrs. Congdon had walked a little way toward the path but now that the children were again scampering over the lawn she paused and made a slight, the slightest, inclination of the head as Archie lifted his hat and continued on his way.
Edith was the name used in the telegram he had found in the Bailey Harbor house, and this coupled with his closer view of the child disposed of Archie's last hope that after all it might not be Mrs. Congdon and her children he had stumbled upon. She had no business to throw herself across his path, he fumed. The appearance of Putney Congdon's father at Cornford had shaken him sufficiently, but that he should be haunted by the man's wife and children angered him. He wanted to fly from the park and hide himself again in his room at the Governor's house, but he was without will to leave. The decent thing for him to do was to take the first train for Bailey, and begin diligent search for Putney Congdon, dead or alive. He had no right to assume that the man's serious injury or death would be any consolation to the wife and children. And the quarrel between husband and wife might have been only a tiff, something that would have been adjusted without further bitterness but for his interference. There was no joy in the fate that kept continually bringing his crime to his attention. Thoroughly miserable, he threw himself upon a bench and lapsed into gloomy meditations. The light-hearted laughter of the children—Putney Congdon's children—was borne to him fitfully to add to his discomfiture, but he was held to the spot. There was something weirdly fascinating in their propinquity, and in the thought that he alone of all men on earth could ever tell them just what had happened in their house when their father went there to search for them.
He sat half an hour pensively, noting an occasional pedestrian or the flash of a motor that rolled through the unfrequented driveway. But for the hum of the cars the deep calm of a June afternoon lay upon the landscape.
Then a piercing scream, the shrill cry of a child in terror, brought him to his feet.
"Help! Help! Oh, Edith! Edith!"
The cries sent him at a run toward the place in which he had left the Congdons.
Rounding a curve in the path he saw a man rushing down the road with Edith in his arms. The mother was racing after him, while the little boy lay wailing where he had fallen in his frantic effort to follow. In the distance stood a car, with a woman waiting beside the open door.
Archie redoubled his pace, passed Mrs. Congdon and gained the car as the man with the child in his arms jumped into it. The woman, who had evidently been acting as watcher, stumbled as she attempted to spring in after them and delayed flight for an instant. The door slammed viciously on Archie's arm as he landed on the running board. The car was moving rapidly and a man's voice bade the driver hurry. Within the child's screams were suddenly stifled, the door swung open for an instant and a blow, delivered full in the face, sent Archie reeling into the road.