The return of his horse to the stable with the fragments of the trap clinging to the harness told what had happened to him, and no one suspected that a beautiful young girl had been his companion on that mad ride. He could not speak and tell the story, for he lay ill and unconscious many days, and none guessed that the strange and continued disappearance of Berry Vining lay at his door. The mother herself had found a plausible reason for her daughter’s absence. She believed that Berry had fled in anger over their quarrel that night, dreading lest she should be coerced into a marriage with the merchant tailor. “We had a quarrel, and I believe she ran away in a fret. No, I don’t think she has committed suicide. Berry wasn’t that kind of a girl,” she said, adding hopefully, “she has maybe gone and got a situation in a store in New York, and will write to me when she gets over her mad spell.” The neighbors accepted this view of the matter, and no one could gainsay it. Mrs. Vining’s misfortunes with her children were an old story! She was always bewailing the disappearance of her handsome son by a former marriage: a son who had deserted her and gone none knew where. Berry did not return, and no tidings came of her, but the deserted mother kept on at her work in patient sadness, hoping and praying for the welfare of her headstrong child, though too poor to make a search for the truant. Thus the hand of Fate abruptly closed the first chapter in the acquaintance of Charley Bonair and the pretty village maid. For when he recovered memory and consciousness far into October, they told him weeks had elapsed since he had been thrown from his trap and nearly killed, and that only the most skillful nursing had saved his life. No one could answer the mute question in his eyes, for the secret of that night had never transpired, though he wondered how it had been so, saying to himself that Berry was a girl in a thousand to have held her tongue over such an accident. “It is better so,” he said to himself, in keen relief, yet he resolved he would write her a note of thanks, which he hastily did, only to get it returned with the information that Miss Vining was gone away. When cautious inquiries brought out the reputed facts of her disappearance, he was dazed with wonder. He made a secret trip to the old inn, but he found it closed and uninhabited. It was a very bad moment that came just then to handsome, reckless Charley Bonair. He was terrified at the mysterious disappearance of the winsome little beauty. He asked himself in an agony what had been her fate, cursing himself for having left her at the inn that night.