ome seconds. Then the colonel unleashed them.

They smelled round and about like any other dogs for a while, till
one of them lifted his great head and uttered a long moaning cry.
Then, noses down, the men running behind them, they set off across
the ferns. Mother, still holding Joyce's hand, followed. The hounds
made a straight line for the wood at the point at which Joan had
entered it, slid in like frogs into water, while the men dodged and
crashed after them. Joyce and Mother came up with them at a place
where the bushes stood back, enclosing a little quiet space of turf
that lay open to the sky. The hounds were here, one lying down and
scratching himself, the other nosing casually and clearly without
interest about him.

"Dash it all," the colonel was saying; "she can't she simply can't
have been kidnapped in a balloon."

They tried the hounds again and again, always with the same result.
They ran their line to the same spot unhesitatingly, and then gave up
as though the scent went no farther. Nothing could induce them to
hunt beyond it.

"I can't understand this," said Colonel Warden, dragging at his
moustache. "This is queer." He stood glancing, around him as though
the shrubs and trees had suddenly become enemies.

The search was still going on when the time came for Joyce to go to
bed. It had spread from the wood across the fields, reinforced by
scores of sturdy volunteers, and automobiles had puffed away to
thread the mesh of little lanes that covered the countryside. Joyce
found it all terribly exciting. Fear for Joan she felt not at all.

"I know inside myself," she told Mother, "right down deep in the
middle of me, that Joan's all right."

"Bless you, my chick," said poor Mother. "I wish I could feel like
that. Go to bed now, like a good girl."

There was discomfort in the sight of Joan's railed cot standing empty
in the night nursery, but Joyce was tired and had scarcely begun to
be touched by it before she was asleep. She had a notion that during
the night Mother came in more than once, and she had a vague dream,
too, all about Joan and wood-ladies, of which she could not remember
much when she woke up. Joan was always dressed first in the morning,
being the younger of the pair, but now there was no Joan, and Nurse
was very gentle with Joyce and looked tired and as if she had been
crying.

Mother was not to be seen that morning; she had been up all night,
"till she broke down, poor thing," sai