was a painful silence in the doctor's library for a few minutes.

"`Patience combined with affectionate treatment,'" read the doctor
again. "Helen, I believe that man has beaten and ill-used poor Dexter
till he could bear it no longer, and has run away."

"I'm sure of it, papa," cried Helen excitedly. "Do you think he will
come back!"

"I don't know," said the doctor. "Yes, I do. No; he would be afraid.
I'd give something to know how to go to work to find him."

"If you please, sir, may I come in?" said a pleasant soft voice.

"Yes, yes, Millett, of course. What is it?"

"Dan'l has been to say, sir, that he caught sight of that boy, Bob
Dimsted, crawling in the garden last night when it was dark, and chased
him, but the boy climbed one of the trained pear-trees, got on the wall,
and escaped."

"Confound the young rascal!" cried the doctor.

"And I'm sorry to say, sir, that two blankets have been stolen off
Master Dexter's bed."

There was a week of watching, but Bob Dimsted was not caught, and the
doctor sternly said that he would not place the matter in the hands of
the police. But all the same the little pilferings went on, and Mrs
Millett came one morning, with tears in her eyes, to say that she
couldn't bear it any longer, for only last night a whole quartern loaf
had been taken through the larder bars, and, with it, one of the large
white jars of black-currant jam.

Mrs Millett was consoled with the promise that the culprit should soon
be caught, and two nights later Peter came in to announce to the doctor
that he had been so near catching Bob Dimsted that he had touched him as
he chased him down the garden, and that he would have caught him, only
that, without a moment's hesitation, the boy had jumped into the river
and swum across, and so escaped to the other side.

"Next time I mean to have him," said Peter confidently, and this he
repeated to Mrs Millett and Maria, being rewarded with a basin of the
tea which had just come down from the drawing-room.

It was just two days later that, as Helen sat with her work under the
old oak-tree in the garden--an old evergreen oak which gave a pleasant
shade--she became aware of a faint rustling sound.

She looked up, but could see nothing, though directly after there was a
peculiar noise in the tree, which resembled the chopping of wood.

Still she could see nothing, and she had just resumed her work, thinking
the while that Dexter would some day writ