he called.
"Father! father!" over and over again, stopping between to listen.
There was no sound in response; there was no sound in the wood except
the soft and elusive rustling of the new foliage, like the rustling
of the silken garments of some one in hiding or some one passing out
of sight. It brought also at this early season a strange sense of a
presence in the wood. Jerome felt it, and called with greater
importunity: "Father! father! father, where be you? Father!"

Jerome looked very small among the trees--no more than a little pale
child. His voice rang out shrill and piteous. It seemed as much a
natural sound of the wood as a bird's, and was indeed one of the
primitive notes of nature: the call of that most helpless human young
for its parent and its shield.

Jerome pushed on, calling, until he came to the open space where his
father had toiled felling trees all winter. Cords of wood were there,
all neatly piled and stacked. The stumps between them were sending
out shoots of tender green. "Father! father!" Jerome called, but this
time more cautiously, hushing his voice a little. He thought that his
father might be lying there among the stumps, injured in some way. He
remembered how a log had once fallen on Samuel Lapham's leg and
broken it when he was out alone in the woods, and he had lain there a
whole day before anybody found him. He thought something like that
might have happened to his father. He searched everywhere, peering
with his sharp young eyes among the stumps and between the piles of
wood. "Mebbe father's fainted away," he muttered.

Finally he became sure that his father was nowhere in the clearing,
and he raised his voice again and shouted, and hallooed, and
listened, and hallooed again, and got no response.

Suddenly a chill seemed to strike Jerome's heart. He thought of the
pond. Little given as he was to forebodings of evil, when once he was
possessed of one it became a certainty.

"Father's fell in the pond and got drowned," he burst out with a
great sob. "What will mother do?"

The boy went forward, stumbling half blindly over the stumps. Once he
fell, bruising his knee severely, and picked himself up, sobbing
piteously. All the child in Jerome had asserted itself.

Beyond the clearing was a stone wall that bounded Abel Edwards's
property. Beyond that was a little grove of old thick-topped
pine-trees; beyond that the little woodland pond. It was very shallow
in places, but it never