It was all done very quietly, and nobody in town was told. Judge Peterson was friends with everybody, but he had been able to go about that town for a good many years without letting his neighbors so much as dream that he knew aught about them and their affairs, or anybody else’s, and he was not going to begin now by disgracing the family of his old friend Mary Massey. Eugene and Nannette simply were made to understand that they must walk carefully, and that they were under surveillance. Nannette grew to have a hunted, ingratiating look, and stayed at home more than had been her custom. She spent much time writing letters to Joyce and addressing them to “General Delivery” in every part of the country. She even put advertisements in the personal columns of one or two big city papers in parts of the country where her fancy thought Joyce might have wandered. She questioned Dorothea and Junior nightly on what they knew about Joyce’s friends, and habits in the village; and concerning anything that had been said to them during the day about her. They acquired the habit of being sharply alert to any scrap of news that might bear in the remotest degree upon the tragedy in their home. For even to their childish minds this that had happened in their family had assumed the proportions of a tragedy. Their mother cried a good deal and scarcely ever made desserts for dinner. Their father had locked up cousin Joyce’s room and taken the key. They were forbidden to go into the parlor and play on the piano, and anything that had been very especially nice in the way of furniture was guarded carefully. Their father explained to them that it might mean some one had to go to jail if it turned out that they had no right to things and any thing had been injured. Scarcely a night passed that their father and their mother did not have a wild orgy of argument ending in a fit of weeping on their mother’s part. Dorothea and Junior decided that it would have been better to have Joyce back. Besides, they were hungry for jelly roll. They even set out on one or two expeditions of their own to find their cousin, but only got into some trouble each time, and once Junior barely escaped with his life from under the wheels of an automobile. But the worst of all to their thinking was when their father decided that they must all go to church every Sunday. Dorothea didn’t mind so much because she could wear her prettiest clothes, but Junior hated the white stiff collar his mother made him wear, and the sitting so long without wriggling, for Eugene was very strict, and the time seemed endless.