Rita and Coral were amusing themselves happily, winding up a tangle of bright-coloured silks. But Roddy was gone! Neither was Mrs. van Cannan there.
Christine sat down rather suddenly, but her voice gave no sign of the alarm she felt.
"He went out," answered Rita, perching herself upon Christine. "Mamma is going to give us each a new dolly if we get this silk untangled for her."
"Just after you went. But you mustn't be cross with him; Mamma gave him permission."
"Mamma is gone, too, to see poor Mrs. Saxby," prattled Coral.
"Well, hurry up and earn your new dollies," she counselled, smiling; "I'll be back very soon to help you."
In the dining-room, she looked for the discarded roses and found them gathered in a dying heap on a small side-table. In the nursery, she found two of Roddy's roses in the jug. The third was missing!
Of one thing she felt as certain as she could feel of anything in the shifting quicksands of that house, and that was that Roddy had not gone to the dam, for he had promised her earnestly, the night before, that never again would he go there without her. Could he, then, have gone to the cemetery? Even that seemed unlikely, for he loved her to go with him on his excursions thither. Where else, then? The rose-leaf she had passed on the road stuck obstinately in her memory, and now she suddenly remembered that the place she had seen it was near the barn from whence she had once found Roddy emerging. Perhaps he had gone there to amuse himself in his own mysterious fashion. He might even have been there when she passed. Oh, why had she not looked in? But the omission was easily rectified. In two minutes she was out of doors again, walking rapidly the way she had come.
Roddy was not in the barn, however, and it seemed at a glance as harmless a place as she had thought it before. An end of it was full of forage, and one side piled high with old farm-implements and empty cases. Rather to the fore of the pile stood one large packing case, sacking and straw sticking from under its loose lid. Christine had just decided there was nothing here to warrant her scrutiny when, lying in front of this case, she saw something that drew her gaze like a magnet. It was another yellow rose-leaf.