.'

David went indoors again, and Loveday and Bob continued their morning
survey by ascending into the mysterious quivering recesses of the mill,
and holding a discussion over a second pair of burr-stones, which had to
be re-dressed before they could be used again. This and similar things
occupied nearly twenty minutes, and, looking from the window, the elder
of the two was reminded of the time of day by seeing Mrs. Garland's table-
cloth fluttering from her back door over the heads of a flock of pigeons
that had alighted for the crumbs.

'I suppose David can't find us,' he said, with a sense of hunger that was
not altogether strange to Bob. He put out his head and shouted.

'The lady is not down yet,' said his man in reply.

'No hurry, no hurry,' said the miller, with cheerful emptiness. 'Bob, to
pass the time we'll look into the garden.'

'She'll get up sooner than this, you know, when she's signed articles and
got a berth here,' Bob observed apologetically.

'Yes, yes,' said Loveday; and they descended into the garden.

Here they turned over sundry flat stones and killed the slugs sheltered
beneath them from the coming heat of the day, talking of slugs in all
their branches--of the brown and the black, of the tough and the tender,
of the reason why there were so many in the garden that year, of the
coming time when the grass-walks harbouring them were to be taken up and
gravel laid, and of the relatively exterminatory merits of a pair of
scissors and the heel of the shoe. At last the miller said, 'Well,
really, Bob, I'm hungry; we must begin without her.'

They were about to go in, when David appeared with haste in his motions,
his eyes wider vertically than crosswise, and his cheeks nearly all gone.

'Maister, I've been to call her; and as 'a didn't speak I rapped, and as
'a didn't answer I kicked, and not being latched the door opened,
and--she's gone!'

Bob went off like a swallow towards the house, and the miller followed
like the rather heavy man that he was. That Miss Matilda was not in her
room, or a scrap of anything belonging to her, was soon apparent. They
searched every place in which she could possibly hide or squeeze herself,
every place in which she could not, but found nothing at all.

Captain Bob was quite wild with astonishment and grief. When he was
quite sure that she was nowhere in his father's house, he ran into Mrs.
Garland's, and telling them the story so hastily that they har