At nights she would return to the farmhouse, heavy and dispirited, so that the old farmer and his wife would rally her on her dejected appearance, and declare to each other that she must either be in love, or have committed some offence over which she now brooded with remorse. Yet her youth appeared to contradict the probability of the latter supposition, and she looked them both so straight in the face when she spoke, that the old man remarked that no one who did _that_ could be guilty of anything serious. Meanwhile, it may be supposed that the Baron was not very well pleased when the news reached him that his daughter had disappeared. He hurried off at once to the convent, and refused for some time to believe that it {115}could really be the case. If he had lived a little later there would have been plenty of people to suggest to him that Mathilde’s disappearance was only an invention of the Lady Superior’s, and that the poor girl was certainly either bricked up alive, or immersed in some dungeon below the convent. [Illustration: 130] As it was, however, that age being comparatively ignorant, the Baron was told the simple truth, and actually believed it. His daughter had disappeared, and no one was more distressed thereat than the Lady Superior herself. The discipline of her convent was so good, and the sisterhood were all so much attached to her, that it was with difficulty that she could {116}bring herself to believe that any of them had assisted the runaway to escape; and as to the washerwoman, no thought of her connivance ever entered the Lady Superior’s head. Had it done so, indeed, she would never have believed that a daughter of the noble house of Guerre-à-mort would have so far demeaned herself as to hide in a box of dirty clothes, or wander forth, alone and unattended, into the country. The good Lady, never having admitted the god of love into her well-regulated breast, did not know his powers, which experience has proved to be such as are able to overcome all considerations of rank and dignity, and occasionally to make people do things even more strange and incongruous than hide in dirty-linen boxes or keep pigs on a hill-side. The Baron was easily convinced that no blame was to be attributed to his saintly relative, but this by no means put an end to his trouble. His daughter had gone, and he had no clue whatever to her place of concealment. Under these circumstances, he determined that the best thing he could do was to consult the powers of magic, who in those days were the substitute for our present Rural Police, and occasionally discharged their functions in a manner equally satisfactory. Those were not days in which witches and warlocks were so common as in earlier ages; but, scattered about the country, there were a goodly number of the creatures; and the Baron had little difficulty in determining whom to consult.