"Are you getting straight, Nancy?" asked Miss Timmens, looking round the room, and not noticing the question about David. "Straight! and only moved in this morning! and me with this ankle!" Miss Timmens laughed. She was just as capable as her sister was the contrary. "About David?" added Mrs. Hill, "I was so vexed that he went over in his old clothes! It was Hill's fault. Have you brought me a letter from him?" "How could I bring you a letter from him?" returned Miss Timmens. "A letter from where?" It was a minute or two before elucidation was arrived at, for both were at cross-purposes. David Garth had not been at Worcester at all, so far as Miss Timmens knew; certainly not at his grandmother's. To see Mrs. Hill sink back into her chair at this information, and let her hands fall on her lap, and gaze helplessly from her frightened eyes, was only to be expected. Miss Timmens kept asking what it all meant, and where David was, but she could get no answer. So I told her what Mother Hill had just told me--about Hill's sending him off to Worcester. She stared like anything. "Why, where in the name of wonder can the boy have got to?" "I see it all," spoke the mother then, in a whisper. "Davy did find his way out of this house; and it was his voice I heard, and not a dream. I knew it. I knew it at the time." These words would have sounded mysterious to any one given to mystery. Miss Timmens was not. She was a long, thin female, with a chronic redness on her nose and one cheek, and she was as practical as could be. Demanding what Mrs. Hill meant by "not a dream," she stood warming her boots at the fire while she was enlightened. "The boy is keeping away for fear of Hill tanning him," spoke Miss Timmens, summing up the question. "Don't you think so, Master Ludlow?" "I should, if I could see how he got out of the cottage, after Hill had locked him in it." "Luke Macintosh put him out at this window," said Miss Timmens, decisively. "Hill couldn't lock that up. They'd open the shutters, and Luke would pop him out: to get rid of the boy, no doubt. Mr. Luke ought to be punished for it." I did not contradict her. Of course it might have been so; but knowing Luke, I did not think he would care to be left in the house alone. Unless--the thought flashed over me--unless Luke sent away David that he might be off himself. Amidst a good deal of uncertainty, this view seemed the most probable. "Where is David?" bemoaned Mrs. Hill; "where is he? And with these bitter cold nights----" "Now don't you worry yourself, Nanny," interrupted strong-minded Miss Timmens. "I'll see to David; and bring him home, too." Hill's cough was heard outside. Miss Timmens--who had been in a dead rage at the marriage, and consequently hated Hill like poison--hastened to depart. We went away together, passing Hill by the dried-up brook. He looked stealthily at us, and threw back a surly good night to me.