They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry. Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce’s hand, followed. The hounds made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and crashed after them. Joyce and mother came up with them at a place where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without interest about him. “Dash it all,” the colonel was saying; “she can’t—she simply can’t have been kidnapped in a balloon.” They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result. They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up as though the scent went no further. Nothing could induce them to hunt beyond it. “I can’t understand this,” said Colonel Warden, dragging at his mustache. “This is queer.” He stood glancing around him as though the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies. The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the country-side. Joyce found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all. “I know inside myself,” she told mother, “right down deep in the middle of me, that Joan’s all right.” “Bless you, my chick,” said poor mother. “I wish I could feel like that. Go to bed now, like a good girl.” There was discomfort in the sight of Joan’s railed cot standing empty in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during the night mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream, too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning, being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan and nurse was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been crying. Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night, “till she broke down, poor thing,” said nurse, and Joyce was bidden to amuse herself quietly in the nursery. But mother was about again at lunch-time when Joyce went down to the dining-room. She was very pale and her eyes looked black and deep, and somehow she seemed suddenly smaller and younger, more nearly Joyce’s age, than ever before. They kissed each other and the child would have tried to comfort.