So Martha, nothing doubting, went in search of Aunt Lorena, and when she came back grandmother was missing. She had been in the little upstairs sitting room, but she was not to be found there nor in her bedroom. Unfortunately, Martha wasted a few minutes in looking for her on the second story, and then she came trembling down to the first floor, her old knees quaking under her, and looked there without success. Old James had been tidying up the walk in front of the house—for there had been a rain and a cold wind, and twigs and branches were lying all about the ground—and he said she had not come out. So more time was spent in searching for her all about the great rambling house. The servants began looking in the rooms we never use, and then they ran up to the attic, thinking she might be up there looking over her chests and boxes as she likes to do sometimes. But she was not there either. Then Uncle David, Keefe and I came home. I had noticed as we swept around the drive which goes by the east wing of the house, that a certain little side door opening into the garden, stood ajar, which was curious for this time of the year. It is a door used only in the summer time, and then usually by someone who wishes to escape quietly into the garden without being seen by those in the front of the house. “It’s a cold day for a door to be standing open like that,” I said to Uncle David. “Curious,” he said. “Mr. O’Connor, as you go in, be kind enough to close it. It leads from the little coat room beneath the stairs.” Keefe and I went in together, and then we heard the tumult in the house. “We can’t find your grandmother!” said Aunt Lorena to me, showing her white face at the head of the stairs. With that it flashed through me at once that she had escaped by the side door. I flung off my motor coat and ran for the coat room and through the door into the garden. There, sure enough, by the narrow brick terrace was the imprint of her little shoe. “Come, Keefe, come,” I called, for I felt there was great trouble ahead, and I wanted him to be with me, Carin. Yes, I can tell you, my dear, to whom every event, almost every feeling of my life, is known, that I wanted him above everyone else in the world. It was almost dark by this time, and the two of us ran out, hand in hand, and down the gray garden in the mist. Nothing looked natural to me. The very shrubbery, wreathed all in white as it was, frightened me. The bushes looked like strange, unheard-of beasts, crouching to spring. And the whole place was so terribly still! I could feel my breath catching in my throat and strangling me. “It is at the end of the garden she goes to meet him,” I managed to say through my throat. “To meet whom?” asked Keefe. (I never had told him the story of my father.) “Her dead son,” I gasped, and said no more. For how could I explain then? Keefe looked at me as if he thought I was out of my head, but I said nothing, and we ran on.