In the middle of the little path stood Theodore Biron, with the same clothes that he had worn on the morning of the previous day, but without the hunting-crop. He was white, with livid lips, and his limbs trembled. “What’s the matter?” asked Bram in a muffled voice. “Claire, my daughter Claire!” stammered Theodore in a voice which sounded shrill with real feeling. All the jauntiness, all the vivacity, had gone out of him. He shivered with something which was keener than cold. “Well?” said Bram, with a horrible chill at his heart. “She’s--she’s gone, gone!” said Theodore, reeling back against the fence of the little garden. “She’s run away. She’s run right away. She’s left me, left her poor old father! Don’t you understand? She is gone, man, gone!” And Mr. Biron, for once roused to genuine emotion, broke into sobs. Bram stood like a stone. CHAPTER XV. PARENT AND LOVER. For some minutes after he had made the announcement of his daughter’s flight Mr. Biron gave himself up openly and without restraint to the expression of a sorrow which, while it might be selfish, was certainly profound. “My daughter! My daughter!” he sobbed. “My little Claire! My little, bright-faced darling! Oh, I can’t believe it! It must be a dream, a nightmare! Do you think, Elshaw,” and he suddenly drew himself up, with a quick change to bright hope, in the midst of his distress, “that she can have gone up to the Park to stay at her uncle’s for the night?” But Bram shook his head. “I don’t think it’s likely,” he said in a hollow voice. “They were none so kind to her that she should do that.” A pause. “When did you miss her?” “This morning when I got back,” replied Theodore, who looked blue with cold and misery. “I went out with the hounds yesterday as you know. And we got such a long way out that I couldn’t get back, and I put up at an inn for the night. Don’t you think,” and again his face brightened with one of those volatile changes from misery to hope which made him seem so womanish, “that she may have been afraid to spend a night in the house by herself, and that she may have gone down to Joan’s place to sleep? I’ll go there and see. Will you come? Yes, yes, you’d better come. I don’t care for Joan; she’s a rough, unfeeling sort of person. I should like you to come with me.” “I’ll come--in a minute,” said Bram shortly. He knew very well that there was nothing in Mr. Biron’s idea. He spoke as if this were the first time that Claire had been left to spend the night alone in the farmhouse; but, as a matter of fact, Bram knew very well that it had been Theodore’s frequent custom to spend the night away from home, and that his daughter was too much used to his vagaries to trouble herself seriously about his absence.