her
heart. "I'm," she said, panting, "I'm very foolish, I know, but it has
given me a turn."

He rose to his feet. He knew it then! As well as he ever knew it in the
after time, Richard Gilbert knew it all at that moment, Norine had fled.

"It was she, then, who left the house last night," he said, in a hushed
voice; "and it was a man's laugh! Was it-- My God! Was it--"

He stopped, turning white with the horror of that thought.

"Call your brothers," he said, his voice ringing, his face setting white
and stern as stone. "We must search for her at once. At all costs we
must find her--must bring her back. Quick, Miss Kent! Your brothers! I
am afraid Norine has fled."

"Fled!"

"Fled--run away from home, for fear of marrying me. Don't you
understand, Miss Kent? Call your brothers, I say every minute may be
worth a life--or more! Quick!"

She obeyed--stunned, stupefied by the shock, the horror of her amaze.
The two men rushed wildly in, frightened by their sister's incoherent
words. Rapidly, clearly, Richard Gilbert told them what he had heard
last night, told them even what he feared most.

"Thorndyke has come back, and either persuaded her to run away with him
or forcibly abducted her. I feel sure of it. I heard him laugh, and her
cry last night as plainly as I hear my own voice now. There is not a
moment to be lost. On with your coats! out with the horses, and let us
be off. Better she were dead than with him."

They are gone, and the woman sits alone, stunned, speechless, unable to
realize it, only dumbly conscious that something awful has happened.
Norine has gone! Fled on the very eve of her bridal with another man.
Norine--little Norrie, who but yesterday seemed to her as a young
innocent child.

The woman sits and weeps alone by her desolate hearth. The men go forth
into the world, and forget their grief for the time in the excitement of
the search--the men, who have the best of it always.

All his life long that miserable day remained in Richard Gilbert's
memory more as a sickening dream than as a reality. He suffered
afterward--horribly--to-day he was too dazed to suffer or feel. Whether
found or not, Norine Bourdon was lost to him forever; dumbly he felt
that, but she must be found. At all costs, she must be brought back from
Laurence Thorndyke.

The two men acted passively under his orders--awed into silence by the
look on his set, white face. Even to them that day remained as a dizzy
dream. Now