he gravel of the driveway. I wandered
about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with
Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might
keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor
kiddie. I heard the twelve o'clock whistles, at last, and then the
Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce
that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.

And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on
the gravel and my heart started to pound.

But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and
inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid
walking.

"Where's Dinkie?" I asked.

She stopped short, still smiling.

"That's exactly what I was going to ask?" I heard her saying. Then her
smile faded as she searched my face. "There's--there's nothing
happened, has there?"

I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochere and leaned against
it.

"Didn't Dinkie come to school this morning?" I asked as the earth
wavered under my feet.

"No," acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of
perplexity came into her own.

I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to
Dinkie's room and started my frantic search through his things. I
could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were
gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some
hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his
books and broken toys, at the still open copy of _The Count of Monte
Cristo_ which he must have been poring over only the night before, at
his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn
shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial.
Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into
tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself
becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging
like lead from my heart.

I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan's office. He was
still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get
in touch with him.

I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the
message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy
had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, and remind me
that much worse things could have happened.

But I knew at once that