What had become of Madeline Payne?

The question went the round of the village, as such questions do. The servants of Oakley fed upon it. They held secret conferences[99] in the kitchen, and grew loud and argumentative when they knew John Arthur was safely out of hearing. They bore themselves with an air of subdued, unobservant melancholy in his presence, and waxed important, mysterious and unsatisfactory, when in converse with the towns folk—as was quite right and proper, for were they not, in the eyes of mystery hunters, objects of curiosity secondary only to their master himself?

[99]

The somber-faced old housekeeper gave utterance to a doleful croak or two, and a more doleful prophecy. But after a summons from John Arthur, and a brief interview with him in the closely shut sacredness of his especial den, not even the social intercourse of the kitchen and the inspiration that the prolonged absence of the master always lent to things below stairs, could beguile from her anything beyond the terse statement that "she didn't meddle with her master's affairs," and she "s'posed Miss Madeline knew where she was."

The housemaid, who read novels and was rather fond of Miss Payne, grieved for a very little while, but found in this "visitation of providence," as John Arthur piously termed it, food for romance weaving on her own responsibility. She entertained Peter, the groom, coachman and general factotum, with divers suggestions and suppositions, each more soul harrowing than the last, making of poor Madeline a lay figure upon which she fitted all the catastrophes that had ever befallen her yellow-covered "heroinesses."

The villagers talked. It was all they could do, and their tongues were very busy for a time until, in fact, a fresher sensation arrived. Nurse Hagar was viewed and interviewed; but beyond sincere expression of grief at her disappearance, and the unvarying statement that she had not even the slightest conjecture as to the fate of the lost girl, nothing could be gained from her.[100]

[100]

Hagar was somewhat given to rather bluntly spoken opinions of folk who happened to run counter to her notions in regard to prying, or, in fact, her notions on any subject. In the present emergency she became a veritable social hedgehog, and was soon left to solitude and her own devices.

Whatever were Hagar's opinions on the subject, she kept them discreetly locked within her own breast. She had received, at their last 

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