The next morning, and thrice in the week following, Noreen Cardinegh drove to Bookstalls and threaded the unkempt way up and down in vain for the boy. She had failed to learn the name of the pastry-cook who employed him, and it would have been her last thought to seek him in the house of Routledge’s lodgings. Though a familiar in Bookstalls, he was an unfiled human document of the ancient highway; and always she returned to Cheer Street profitless.... It would be merciless to question her father; and yet he seemed to divine her anxiety to find the boy, and to fear her success as a visitation of death. It was hard for her to see him, the man whose courage had been a point of British comment for forty years, white, shaken, and exhausted from suspense when she returned from Bookstalls. Still, he dared not ask if she had seen the boy; and she did not confess that she had been searching. Her only line on the mystery was to this effect: Routledge, though innocent, was blamed by England for some appalling, unmentionable crime, openly unpunishable. Her father and a few others knew the specific charge. Routledge had not known this at the Armory, but knew it the morning afterward. Meanwhile, her father and Johnny Brodie had been with him. All the boy’s actions denoted that he knew something, possibly a great deal in a fragmentary way, which she might be able to piece together into an illumination. He must have known something, since he apparently had been pledged to silence. At all events, he was lost. It must be understood that Noreen’s conviction of her father’s integrity had never been shaken. It was more than a family faith. His life had been as a record accessible to all men. It did not even occur to her to build a system of reasoning upon the hypothesis of any guilt of his, even though much was strange and foreboding. She had heard her father mutter that a war would bring Routledge out of his lair. She could not forget that her father had come back from India on the day of the Reception, all consumed and brain-numbed from strain. For a moment in her arms he had broken completely--acting like one who was to be dragged from her to the gallows. The next morning, after his return to Cheer Street from Routledge, the tension was gone.