Finally Gene got up from his reading chair and went downstairs to see if all the doors were locked, he said; but in reality he went softly out the kitchen door and walked down to the garage with slow, careful tread, stopping to listen, every minute or two. But no sound reached his ear save the dreamy notes of a tree toad. The little gray clouds drifting through the sky were hiding the moon and making the back yard quite dark. Somehow a vision of his mother’s face came to him, that last day when she had called him to the bed side and reminded him that she[25] left Joyce as a sacred trust to his care. She told him that of course he would understand the home was always hers and something like reproach came and stood before his self-centred, satisfied soul and gave him strange uneasiness.

[25]

He stepped quietly into the garage and looked around in the darkness. There was no car as yet, but he meant to purchase one the minute the estate was settled up. He felt sure there would be plenty of money to do a number of the things to the house that he had already planned. It was not really a garage, though he had called it that ever since he came home to live with his mother, it was only the old barn with a new door.

But there was no sign of any Joyce inside the old barn, though he searched every corner and even opened the door of what used to be the harness closet.

He closed the door and went outside, puzzled, a trifle anxious, not for the safety of the girl whom he had driven from the only home she had by his unsympathetic words, but for the possibility of what she might have said to some neighbor with whom she might have taken refuge for the night. And yet he could not bring himself to believe, that Joyce would be so disloyal to his mother’s family as to let others know of a rupture between them.

He went outside and walked around, but there was no sign of any one, and the dew glistened evenly on the new grass in the sudden light as the moon swept out from behind a cloud and poured down a moment’s radiance. There were no marks of footprints on the tender grass anywhere near the building.

Standing in the shadow of the big maple half way to the house he called: “Joyce!” once, sharply, curtly, in a tone that startled himself and shocked the tree toads into[26] sudden brief silence, but the echo of the meadow came in sweet drifts of violet breath as his only answer. His voice sounded gruff even to himself and he realized that she would not come to a call like that. If she had 

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