Dod went away, unsolved and uncomforting. Hour by hour the seekers, conquered by fatigue and the growing assurance of futility, stopped more often for breath. They had time to gather more and more berries, from bushes which obviously hid no dying man. They refreshed themselves more and more frequently in waters wherein no drowned man was floating. Most of them went home in time for their neglected chores that night, discouraged, hopeless. Isobel McLaughlin was still at the Keiths’, detained by Libby’s need of her. Libby, though she used men easily for her purpose, was not a woman to depend on them. Her mild old husband could give her no sufficient support in her affliction. He had never been a mother. He was just a man whom life and marriage had left blinking, swallowing as best he might his realization of his own unimportance in the universe. Libby would have Isobel with her. So Chirstie in her mother-in-law’s house put the younger McLaughlins and Bonnie Wee Johnnie to bed, and came out to sit on the doorstep with her weary and outraged husband. Presently she asked him wistfully; “Do you really think he’s dead, Wully?” “It’s getting to look like it.” She gave a great sigh. If only she could be _sure_ he was dead! “You don’t think he’s just gone away now?” she continued. “Nobody thinks that now.” “Why don’t they?” “It don’t look reasonable to them.” “It looks reasonable enough to me.” He longed to reassure her. “If he had gone back to town, he would have had to stop in some place to get something to eat. He didn’t stop anywhere.” She slapped away a mosquito. “But if he didn’t stop as he came, why should he stop going back?” “He may have stopped at a dozen places coming, and found no one at home. He may have gone to his mother’s when she was at the picnic. That’s what she keeps wailing about--because she wasn’t there when he came!” In the silence of the starlight, she gave a great sigh. “It’s all my fault!” she declared. He was too tired to listen to that. “Our fault, indeed!” he answered sharply. “We never told him to come sneaking back and get lost, did we! We didn’t tell him never to write to his mother.” “I didn’t say it was your fault. I said mine! Really, all auntie’s trouble seems to come from me. Sometimes I just seem to make everybody miserable.” She had been wondering what she was to do if Peter’s death made Wully’s lie permanent. “Havers, Chirstie!” he remonstrated, “her trouble comes through her own foolishness. She was never less than a fool about that--that----” “She was always good to me, Wully, whatever you say. I mind how she stayed with me after mother’s death. If she’s been foolish about Peter, she’s paid well for it.”