"Why Charles!" exclaimed she, "what on earth has happened? What is the matter?"
"Nothing," he replied. "Where's Frances?"
"Nothing," she rejoined, indignantly, "to come into the room in such a plight as this! Look at the splashed state of your boots; and then your face. No one can look at that and not suspect something dreadful having happened. I never saw anything so changed and altered as it is."
"I dare say. I don't much care."
"Are you mad? Where have you been?"
"Nowhere. Where's Frances?" he asked again.
"I do not know. But I advise you to make yourself a little more presentable before you seek her. These freaks—mad freaks of riding half over the country, no one knows where, are not agreeable to those you come in contact with afterwards," and Mrs. Linchmore pushed her chair further away from him, and smoothed the rich folds of her dress, as though the act of doing that would soothe her ruffled temper.
"It was a mad freak," replied he, and without waiting for another word, or tendering an apology for his disordered dress, he strode away again, with the full determination of finding Frances.
Every room below stairs he searched, but in vain; she was nowhere, and driven reckless by the agony of his thoughts he went straight up to her own room, and opened the door.
She was lying on the sofa, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, passionate, hopeless tears at the thought that long before now he and Amy had met, and he consequently lost to herself for ever.