"I meant, have you any private theory of your own--as to what can have become of her?"
"I know no more what could have become of her than that," returned the Squire, touching his stick, and then striking it on the ground to enforce emphasis. "It has troubled me above a bit, Gertrude, I can tell you. She was as nice and inoffensive a young girl as could be. Only the day before she disappeared she ran all across the garden to me to put my umbrella up, because a drop or two of rain began to fall. You can't think what a modest, kind, good little thing she was."
"I always thought it," assented Mrs. Carlyon. "And I esteem her mother; she is so hard-working and respectable. What a trial it must have been for her, poor woman! I shall call and see her before I leave."
"Ay. Why not? Well, it is altogether a very mysterious and unpleasant thing to have happened in this old house, and my pretty lassie, I see, does not forget it. She seems to mope, and to get a bit melancholy now and then. I fancy her eyes are not so bright as they used to be; she doesn't talk so much, or sing so much about the house. It's just as if there was always something hanging over her."
"Of course she must have a change," spoke Mrs. Carlyon.
"She was all the better for her visit to London in spring, but she was not long enough away," went on the Squire. "You know how lonely we are here. My health won't allow of my seeing much company, and Ella doesn't seem to care about extending her acquaintances. It will be horribly dull for her here this winter, with nobody in the house but a sick and cantankerous old man. I wish she could get right away out of England for six or eight months. She would come back to us next spring as merry as a blackbird. Why not, now?"
"I need not say how glad I should be to take Ella with me," said Mrs. Carlyon. "But there's one question--would she go?--would she leave you?"
"Odds bodikins!" cried the Squire, angrily, "is the child to set up her will against mine--and yours? It is for her good--and, go she must."
"Do you think you are in a state to be left for a whole winter alone?" debated Mrs. Carlyon, remembering how greatly she at first thought him changed. "Will Ella think it?"
"I! why I am twenty per cent, better than I was a month ago. There's no fear for me. And, if I became ill at any time, couldn't you be telegraphed to? I say that Ella must have a change for her own sake; and what I say I mean. Come now!"