"We'll wait a bit, Rose, to see whether your father comes. Don't put the tea in yet."
Rose was kneeling before the fire at the moment. She turned at the words, a wild look in her eyes, and seemed about to say something; but checked herself.
Half-an-hour passed: Dame Bell growing more angry each minute, and rehearsing a sharper reception for Bell in her mind. At last they sat down to breakfast. Rose could not eat; she seemed ill: but her mother, taken up with the ill-doings of the truant, did not observe her as much as she would otherwise have done. Breakfast was at an end, although Mrs. Bell had lingered over it, when Tomson returned; and with him appeared the tall ungainly form of Float the miner.
"Well?" cried the dame, rising briskly from her chair in expectation, as Tomson raised the latch of the door.
"Well, 'tis as I said," said Tomson. "Bell didn't come back to the Golden Shaaft last night after he cleared out just afore dark. He ain't nowheres about as we can see."
Mrs. Bell looked from one to the other: at Tomson's rather sullen countenance, at Float's good-natured one. She might have thought the men were deceiving her, but she could see no motive for their doing so. Unless, indeed, Bell was lying somewhere in Trennach, so ill after his bout that they did not like to tell her.
"Where is he, then, I should like to know?" she retorted, in reply to Tomson.
"Caan't tell," said Tomson. "None o' they men heve seen him."
"Now this won't do," cried Dame Bell. "You must know where he is. Do you suppose he's lost? Don't stand simpering there on one leg, Andrew Float, but just tell me where he is hiding."
"I'd tell ye if I knew, ma'am," said Andrew, in his meek way. "I'd like to know where he is myself."