"H'm!" said Sir Denzil thoughtfully. "If it should be that--as you say, it would prove beyond doubt that the boy we have is the wrong one. Gad!" he said presently, "I'm beginning to have a hankering after the other. However----" Sir George Herapath had seconded all Eager's efforts to discover the missing boy. He and Margaret had ridden with the other searchers each day, and in addition had sought out every gipsy camp in the neighbourhood and made rigorous inquisition as to its doings and membership. Sir George was favourably known to the nomads as a strict but clement justice of the peace so long as they kept within the law, and they satisfied him that they had had no hand in this matter. He and Margaret were to and fro constantly between Knoyle and Wyvveloe, eager for news, or downcastly bringing none, and when Eager himself was not there it was a very crushed and sober little lady who received them with a sadness greater even than their own. "It is quite beyond me, Sir George," you would have heard her say, with a gloomy shake of the head. "What can have become of him I can't think. And we do miss him so dreadfully. I always liked old Jim, but I never liked him so much as I do now. It's just breaking Charles's heart." "It's beyond me too, Gracie," said Sir George, with a worried pinch of the brows. "Where _can_ the boy be? I'm really beginning to be afraid we've seen the last of him." "Charles says we must go on hoping for the best," said the Little Lady forlornly. "But it is not easy when you've nothing to go on." And to them, talking so, on the afternoon of the fourth day of the search, came in Eager, very weary both of mind and body, and anything but an embodiment of the hope he enjoined on others. "Nothing," he said dejectedly. "And I do not know what to do next. I'm beginning----" And then the Little Lady's eyes, which had wandered past him from sheer dread of looking on his hopelessness, opened wider than ever they had done before. "Charles! Charles!" she shrieked, pointing past him down the path. "Jim!" And she began to dance and scream in a very allowable fit of hysterics. Eager thought it was that--that her overwrought feelings had broken down, and it was to her that he sprang. But the others had turned at her words, and had run out of the cottage, and now they came in dragging--as though having got him they would never let him go again--a very lean and dirty and draggled, but decidedly happy, Jim. Gracie broke from her brother and rushed at him with a whole-hearted "Oh, Jim! Jim!" and flung her arms round his neck and kissed him many times. And Jim, grinning joyously through his dirt, seemed to find it good, but presently wiped off the kisses with the back of his grimy hand. "Dear lad, where have you been?" cried Eager, all his weariness gone in the joy of recovery. "We have been near breaking all our hearts over you. Thank God, you are back again! . . . Now, tell us!"