They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result. They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up as though the scent went no farther. Nothing could induce them to hunt beyond it.
"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his moustache. "This is queer." He stood glancing, around him as though the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.
The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the countryside. Joyce found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.
"I know inside myself," she told Mother, "right down deep in the middle of me, that Joan's all right."
"Bless you, my chick," said poor Mother. "I wish I could feel like that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."
There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during the night Mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan, and Nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been crying.
Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night, "till she broke down, poor thing," said Nurse, and Joyce was bidden to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But Mother was about again at lunch time when Joyce went down to the dining room. She was very pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow t she seemed suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce's age, than ever before. They kissed each other, and the child would have tried to comfort.
"No," said Mother, shaking her head. "No dear. Don't let's be sorry for each other yet. It would be like giving up hope. And we haven't done that, have we?"
"I haven't," said Joyce. "I know it's all right."
After lunch again Mother said she wouldn't be hungry till Joan came home they went out together. There were no searchers now in the wood and the garden was empty; the police had left no inch unscanned and they were away, combing the countryside and spreading terror among the tramps. The sun was strong upon the lawn, and the smell of the roses was heavy on the air; across the hedge, the land rolled away to clear perspectives of peace and beauty.