“The master and Mr. Reste. Talking sharply at one another, they were, like two savages. I could hear ’em through my deafness. Ben Gibbon was here when I went out, but he’d gone when I came in with the brandy.”
What with one thing and another, Katrine felt more uncomfortable than an oyster out of its shell. Mr. Reste came in at dinner-time, and she saw nothing amiss then, except that he and her father were both unusually silent.
Afterwards they went out together, and Katrine hoped that the unpleasantness between them was at an end.
She was standing at the front gate late in the afternoon, looking up and down the solitary road, which was no better than a wide field path, when Tod and I shot out of the dark grove by Caramel’s Farm, and made up to her.
“You look hot and tired,” she said to us.
“So would you, Miss Barbary, if you had been scouring the fields in search of Don, as we have,” answered Tod, who was in a desperate mood.
At that moment Mr. Barbary came swinging round the corner of the short lane that led to the high-road, his guest following him. They nodded to us and went in at the gate.
“You do not happen to have seen anything of our Newfoundland dog to-day, I suppose, Mr. Barbary?” questioned Tod.
“No, I have not,” he answered. “My daughter mentioned to me that he had strayed away.”
“Strayed away or been stolen,” corrected Tod. “The dog was a favourite, and it has put my father out more than you’d believe. He thinks the Standishes may have got him: especially if it is they who were out in the night.”