den reminiscence of the
bride of the "Mistletoe Bough." There was no Peggy inside the chest,
however; only a few blankets, and a very strong smell of camphor; so
Mellicent crept back to her footstool, and cried with redoubled energy.
In the kitchen the fat old cook sat with a hand planted on either knee,
and thrilled the other servants with an account of how "a cousin of me
own brother-in-law, him that married our Annie, had a child as went
a-missing, as fine a girl as you could wish to see from June to January.
Beautiful kerly 'air, for all the world like Miss Mellicent's, and such
nice ways with her! Everybody loved that child, gentle and simple.
`Beller,' 'er name was, after her mother. She went out unbeknownst,
just as it might be Miss Peggy, and they searched and better
searched,"--cook's hands waved up and down, and the heads of the
listeners wagged in sympathy--"and never a trace could they find. 'Er
father--he's a stone-mason by trade, and getting good money--he knocked
off work, and his friends they knocked off too, and they searched the
country far and wide. Day and night I tell you they searched, a week on
end, and poor Isabeller nearly off her head with grief. I've heard my
sister say as she never tasted bite nor sup the whole time, and was
wasted to a shadow. Eh, poor soul, it's hard to rare up a child, and
have it go out smiling and bonnie, and never see nothink of it again but
its bones--for she had fallen into a lime pit, had Beller, and it was
nothing but her skeleton as they brought 'ome. There was building going
on around there, and she was playing near the pit--childlike--just as it
might be Miss Peggy..." Soon and on. The horrors accumulated with
every moment. The housemaid had heard tell of a beautiful little girl,
the heiress to a big estate, who had been carried off by strolling
gipsies, and never been seen again by her sorrowing relatives; while the
waitress hinted darkly that the time might come when it would be a
comfort to know force had been employed, for sharper than a serpent's
tooth was an ungrateful child, and she always _had_ said that there was
something uncanny about that little Miss Saville!

The clock was striking nine o'clock when the first of the messengers
came back to report his failure; he was closely followed by a second;
and last of all came Max, bringing word that nothing had been seen or
heard of Peggy at the Larches; that neither Lord Darcy nor Rosalind had
the