“Now, that won’t do, Jane Bright. Where did you leave her?”
“’Twas in the corner,” answered Jane Bright, apparently making desperate efforts of memory. “When I was Puss, and runned across and came back again, I didn’t see her there.”
“Surely, the child has not stolen out by herself and run off home!” cried Mrs. Coney: and the schoolmistress took up the suggestion.
“It is the very thought that has been in my mind the last minute or two,” avowed she. “Yes, Mrs. Coney, that’s it, depend upon it. She has decamped through the snow and gone back to her mother’s.”
“Then she has gone without her things,” interposed Maria Lease, who was entering the room with a little black cloak and bonnet in her hand. “Are not these Nettie’s things, children?” And a dozen voices all speaking together, hastened to say Yes, they were Nettie’s.
“Then she must be in the house,” decided Miss Timmens. “She wouldn’t be silly enough to go out this cold night with her neck and arms bare. The child has her share of sense. She has run away to hide herself, and may have dropped asleep.”
“It must be in the chimbleys, then,” cried free Molly from the back of the room. “We’ve looked everywhere else.”
“You had better look again,” said the Squire. “Take plenty of light—two or three candles.”
It seemed rather a queer thing. And, while this talking had been going on, there flashed into my mind the old Modena story, related by the poet Rogers, of the lovely young heiress of the Donatis: and which has been embodied in our song “The Mistletoe Bough.” Could this timid child have imprisoned herself in any place that she was unable to get out of? Going to the kitchen for a candle, I went upstairs, taking the garret first, with its boxes and lumber, and then the rooms. And nowhere could I find the least trace or sign of Nettie.
Stepping into the kitchen to leave the candle, there stood Luke Mackintosh, whiter than death; his back propped against Molly’s press, his hands trembling, his hair on end. Tod stood in front of him suppressing his laughter. Mackintosh had just burst in at the back-door in a desperate state of fright, declaring he had seen a ghost.