She went many times to the east window to look down the road for him, and sent Jennie to the top of the hill to see if she could discover in the distance a boy riding toward her on a gray horse. But Jennie, whose eyes had been full of tears all day, came back at dusk to say that she had seen nothing. Then she went weeping to bed. The next day came, and many days thereafter; but Joe’s room was still vacant, and Old Charlie’s stall was still empty. Farmer Gaston’s grief was less touching than his wife’s perhaps, but it was really as deep as hers. The habitual sternness of his face was tempered with the lines of sorrow. He had made no effort to find the horse. There was no doubt in his mind that Joe had taken him; but he did not care to bring the boy into deeper disgrace by making public search. Mr. Gaston sometimes wondered if he had taken the right course with Joe. His theory had been that the more strictly a boy was held to his work and duty as a boy, the more earnestly would he follow both as a man. But he began now to think that possibly he had been too strict with Joe. Had he not left too little room for independence of thought and action? Had he tried to smother those boyish instincts of freedom and fair play that go, no less than other qualities, to make up the man? His grief was mingled thus with a degree of remorse; but he still believed that it would not be wise to go out in search of Joe, offering terms of forgiveness. The boy’s offence had been too great for that. His own salvation depended on his coming back voluntarily in repentance and humiliation, with a full confession of his fault. The hot days of July went by, and the hotter days of August. The summer tasks went on as of old about the farm, but the old place had never before been so silent and lonely. The lines on Mr. Gaston’s face grew deeper. He went about with shoulders bent, as if bearing some heavy burden. Joe’s mother, pitifully silent and anxious-eyed, not venturing to question the wisdom or oppose the will of her husband, went every day to place fresh flowers in Joe’s room. Every night she sat and looked up the long road to the east till darkness came and swallowed it, hoping, waiting, and yearning for the sight of her returning boy. Meantime there had been, after a long delay, a movement in the community to look a little more deeply into the matter of the disappearance of Joe and the horse. Squire Bidwell, who happened to be at once the local justice of the peace and a good friend of Joe Gaston, found it hard to believe that the boy who had been an apt and receptive pupil in his Sunday school had proved to be a common thief. The squire, moreover, had been Farmer Gaston’s friend from boyhood, and he saw with great pain the havoc which Joe’s disappearance, and his father’s belief in his guilt, was making in the family. He resolved to do what he could to probe the matter to the bottom.