"It is only some foolish trick that Frans is playing upon us!" Alma had said at first, but as the hours wore away she too had become really anxious.
The colonel, who went himself at once to the village, came home late, discouraged and distressed. Telegraphing and sending off messengers in every direction had been in vain. The morning brought terrible news. A theft had been committed in a shop near the schoolhouse the evening before, and an older pupil of bad repute had disappeared. It was generally whispered that he and Frans had gone off together.
Alma's feelings can easily be imagined. Shame, anger, righteous indignation, and real distress were strangely mingled together. Her father left home as soon as these horrible rumours were told him. Alma was alone all day, save when she was called on to hear the moans of the housekeeper over her "dear boy who had gone wrong; such a sweet boy as he had always been towards her."
At such a mention of himself Frans would have been much astonished, as this faithful friend of the family had not failed to set his shortcomings fully before him. She now reproached Alma for not making home more pleasant for her brother, for "worrying and worrying at him until he had no peace of his life. Such a knowing boy as he was, too, with the ways and doings of beasts and birds at his tongue's end. As for the Swedish kings, he could tell stories about them all a long midsummer day, if a body had patience to listen. And he not do well at an examination!" and the housekeeper snapped her fingers in contempt of the whole pedagogical corps.
To these various forms of lamenting Alma listened in convicted silence. She was glad of any company in the dismal loneliness of the house, and felt she deserved much blame, if not all the burden of responsibility that was cast upon her, for Frans's misdoings.
The colonel had been unwearied in his efforts to find his son; but when he was at last convinced that he had gone off in company with a boy suspected of actual theft, he would not seek for his son to be brought home to public trial and possible conviction. The authorities might find the boys if they could, he would take no further steps in the matter.
The colonel locked himself into his room, and not even Alma's gentle knock was answered. Like the housekeeper, he had a deep sense of Alma's coldness and bitterness towards her brother, and he understood how Frans must have dreaded to meet her after his disgrace at the examination. He understood, too, how much Frans must have feared his displeasure; but that such a mother's son should be so degraded as to consort with a thief and possibly share his guilt! The thought was madness. He pictured the desperate boy, flying perhaps to a far country, to suffer, and sin and go down to the lowest depths of degradation. The prayer burst forth from the depths of the colonel's heart, "God have mercy on my son! God have mercy on me, a sinner!" There was a thoroughgoing penitence in that closed room. The colonel's whole life stood before him, with all its shortcomings and its sins. To the world it had been an outwardly blameless life, but within there had been an uncertain faith, a half-heartedness, an indecision in his inner life, that ill befitted one who so well knew the love and purity of his heavenly Father. He cast himself upon his knees, to rise forgiven, and strengthened to lead a decided, devoted Christian life. With his own humiliation came back his tenderness towards his absent, erring boy.
When the door was opened at last to Alma, she saw the traces of sorrow and deep emotion on her father's face. She threw herself into his arms, exclaiming, "Dear, dear papa!" She could say no more. He gently closed the door by which she had entered. No human being ever knew the words that then passed between them, but they were henceforward to be bound together by a new and a holier tie than ever before.