ich had never been touched by such a presence
before. She said to herself that it would never come to anything but
misery and pain; yet even misery was better than nothingness, and he who
had loved had lived. To think that a quiet, middle-aged Englishwoman,
a pattern of domestic duty, should think thus, and exult in her son's
inconceivable and, as she believed, unhappy passion, is almost too much
to be credible. Yet so it was.

Geoff's absence was not discovered until two o'clock, when Lady
Markland, at the end of a long and troublesome consultation over matters
only partially understood, suggested luncheon to her man of business.
"Geoff will be waiting and very impatient," she said, with a smile. Mr.
Longstaffe was not anxious to see Geoff, nor disturbed that the little
boy's midday meal should have been postponed to business, though this
disturbed Geoff's mother, who had been in the habit of thinking his
comfort the rule of her life. She was much startled not to find him in
the dining-room, and to hear that he had not come back. "Not come back!
and it is two o'clock! But Black will take good care of him," she said,
with a forced smile, to Mr. Longstaffe, "and I must not keep you waiting."
"If you please, my lady," said the butler, "Black's not gone with him."
At this Lady Markland stared at the man, the colour dying out of her
face. "You have let him go out alone!" "I had nothing to do with it, my
lady. The colt's lame, and Black----" "Oh," she cried, stamping her
foot, "don't talk to me of excuses, but go, go, and look for my child!"
Then she was told that Black had gone some time since, and was scouring
all the roads about; that he had come back once, having seen nothing;
and that now the coachman and gardener were gone too. From this time
until the hasty messenger arrived with Theo's hurried note, Lady
Markland spent the time in such distraction as only mothers know,
representing to herself a hundred dangers, which reason told her were
unlikely, but which imagination, more strong than reason, placed again
and again before her eyes, till she felt a certainty that they were
true. All those stories of kidnapping, which people in their senses
laugh at, Lady Markland as much as any, being when in her right mind a
very sensible woman--came before her now as possible, likely, almost
certain. And she saw Geoff, with his little foot caught in the stirrup,
dragged at the pony's frightened heels, the stones on the road tearing