Twenty minutes may have elapsed, and Pauline and Molly were approaching the dry moat, that half surrounded the hoary fortress, when they were startled by piercing shrieks from Weezy, following one another in quick succession.
Shrieking in their turn to Captain Bradstreet and Paul above them, they rushed madly down the descent, and as they drew near the foot, met Weezy herself, sobbing wildly,—
“Donald’s drownded. I know he’s drownded.”
And choking with grief and terror, she faltered out her pitiful story:—
Tired of waiting for Kirke, she had left Donald for “just a teeny second,” and skipped away to look at the kneeling washer-women. On her return the child had vanished, and his little blue sailor-suit lay in a tumbled heap upon the brink of the pool.
“Donny had been teasing again to go in bathing, and I wouldn’t let him go,” wailed his despairing little sister; “so I s’pect when I wasn’t there he skipped into the ocean all alone by himself. Donald, Don-ald, where are you? Oh, dear, dear. I wish I was dead!”
“Run to the inn, Weezy, for papa and mamma; run as fast as you can,” cried Molly, in a husky voice.
The sympathetic peasant women, having discovered the cause of the outcry, had deserted their washings and clattered in their hob-nailed shoes toward the base of the cliff, near the tell-tale garments. Here the water was deeper than on the beach in front of the boat-house, and it dashed over a ledge worn into many chambers. The peasants were pointing to these deep chambers with gloomy looks, and muttering low to one another, when Mr. and Mrs. Rowe and Weezy came flying from the inn, and met Captain Bradstreet and the boys upon the shore.
Though pale with anguish, Mrs. Rowe had shed no tears. But when her eyes fell upon the little empty sailor-suit, she gathered it in her arms with the bitter cry, “O Donald, my little Donald, come back to your poor mamma!”
Then it was that something unexpected happened—something which changed her mourning into gladness. A little golden head shot suddenly up from behind a neighboring rock, and a shrill little voice cried out, “Here I is, mamma. Oh, please come qui-ck.”