The professor paused, his hand on the knob of the kitchen door. "I will," he declared, "I will." And he went off as gayly as a boy. He too was a runaway. But there was a stay-at-home who, as the day wore on and he passed the empty house and repassed it, and went across the quadrangle for a long look at the windows and found them blank, was strangely perturbed. He saw the professor and the young man he had seen with him once or twice before come home from church, no bright young woman jealously guarded between them. He saw them go out alone. But for some tingling memories and some vague fears, he would have gone boldly across and asked for Frances then. But the house looked prim and silent. The curtains of her windows were drawn with exactness, and no white hand stirred them. At evening, going that way purposely, he saw no gleam through the library window or through the transom of the wide hall door. The house was utterly given over to the silence and the dark. This, when he was fierce with heart-hunger to see her, to say a hundred wild things, to touch perhaps the height of the joy of yesterday. By the afternoon of the next day it had grown an impossibility not to know the meaning of this silence. He got up from his Morris chair, in his room where he had been vainly trying to study, when he came at last to this moment of decision, picked up his cap and went with firm ringing step down the corridor to the professor's house. A scant five minutes before Susan in the kitchen had been startled by the ringing of the telephone. She climbed up on the stool, placed there for her short, spare self, and put the receiver to her ear. "Susan?" came over the wire, interrogatively. "Miss Frances," delightedly, "dat you?" "Yes, how's everything getting along?" "So--so!" "How is father?" "Ain't seen him but a minute, he went out to Marse Edward Montague's." Frances, far off in the rear of a store on the mountain-side, made a little exclamation that carried to Susan as she stood with pendant lip and wrinkled forehead, the receiver at her ear. "What did he do that for?" Susan could catch the impatient note. "Dunno! Marse Edward come to dinnah an' he 'low as how he's gwine back wid him." "How did you get along by yourself?" "All right!" "All right! Susan," with sudden brisk energy, "my small trunk is packed, I want you to send it to me." "Fo' de Lawd," groaned Susan, but her lips were away from the tube. "I need the dresses; I thought I might, and put them in there, so that if I did--and Susan, wrap my riding-habit up, fold it carefully, and slip the bundle under the trunk-straps." "Lawd a'mighty!" "Send it down this evening." "Miss Frances, you ain't gwine ride none o' Marse Tom's horses?" Tom had a stock-farm, some beauties, some beasts, all of them fiery. "There's the prettiest colt here, just broken!" "I's gwine to tell yo' pa!" "Don't you dare; send my things. You hear?" "Yes."