that Emily wished they had refused. But on the whole they enjoyed the forenoon, especially when an excellent early dinner in a hospitable farmhouse on the Western Road filled up the aching void left by a few crackers and a night on a haystack.
“S’pose you didn’t come across any stray children today?” asked their host.
“No. Have any been lost?”
“Little Allan Bradshaw—Will Bradshaw’s son, downriver at Malvern Point—has been missing ever since Tuesday morning. He walked out of the house that morning, singing, and hasn’t been seen or heard of since.”
Emily and Ilse exchanged shocked glances.
“How old was he?”
“Just seven—and an only child. They say his poor ma is plumb distracted. All the Malvern Point men have been s’arching for him for two days, and not a trace of him kin they discover.”
“What can have happened to him?” said Emily, pale with horror.
“It’s a mystery. Some think he fell off the wharf at the Point—it was only about a quarter of a mile from the house and he used to like sitting there and watching the boats. But nobody saw anything of him ’round the wharf or the bridge that morning. There’s a lot of marshland west of the Bradshaw farm, full of bogs and pools. Some think he must have wandered there and got lost and perished—ye remember Tuesday night was terrible cold. That's where his mother thinks he is—and if you ask me, she’s right. If he’d been anywhere else he’d have been found by the s’arching parties. They’ve combed the country.”
The story haunted Emily all the rest of the day and she walked under its shadow. Anything like that always took almost a morbid hold on her. She could not bear the thought of the poor mother at Malvern Point. And the little lad—where was he? Where had he been the previous night when she had lain in the ecstasy of wild,
