“I say, where are you? Is any one about? Evelyn!”
Windows and doors were open; the summer wind blew through the house. There was a vacancy about it all which impressed the man.
“There was somethin’ or other goin’ on when I hitched up,” the coachman ventured to remark. “There were a lot of hollerin’ and screamin’, sir; somethin’ up with the children.”
He had the air of being able to tell more if necessary. Mr. Simmons jumped to the ground and entered the house. A servant, who finally appeared in answer to his repeated calls, told him that she had seen Mrs. Simmons crossing the meadow below the lawn, in the direction of the little river at the bottom of the grounds. She had little Oscar with her, so said the maid, and she seemed to be hurrying.
He hastened to the little boat-house on the river. Hot summer afternoons it was a common thing for his wife to row upon the river, yet every moment he quickened his steps until he was on the run. From the meadow wall he could see his boat tied to a stake in the stream, riding tranquilly. Evelyn was not on the river. He followed the foot-path, hesitatingly, beside the sluggish stream, calling in a voice which he tried to make quite natural:
“Evelyn! Oscar! Evelyn—where are you?”
There was a yard or two of sandy beach beside the boat-house, and there he found them. His wife was kneeling down on the sand, her face to the river, engaged in hurriedly undressing the child. She had him almost stripped of his clothes, and she was talking to him, while he listened with the attention, the thoughtfulness, of a man. Suddenly spying his father, he laughed and broke from his mother’s arms.
“There’s Dad!” he cried. “Are you going away, too, with mamma and me? She’s going to take me far out into the river, away and away, and we are never coming back any more, never going to play any more up there on the lawn!”
His voice rose in the childish treble of wonder, and he added, after a moment:
