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 him, his head knocking against every obstacle; and she saw him lying by the roadside, white and lifeless. She saw everything that could and could not happen, and accused herself for not having sent him to school, out of danger,--for not having kept him by her side night and day.