There May Be Danger by Ianthe Jerrold Page B

just a li’l less forlorn!”
    The word struck a tiny knell in Kate’s heart. Rosaleen was a shrewd, sensible girl. Was she herself truly as hopelessly lacking in realism as, lying awake in the small hours, she had feared? No. Sidney Brentwood, or his body, was somewhere under the autumn sun. And the question of whether Kate had to look for him, had been settled all in a flash in the Edgware Road the day before yesterday.
    Rosaleen and Nurse Maud, who emerged from the kitchen damp-handed, turning down her neat cuffs, both accompanied Kate up to the field-gate.
    â€œIf I can ever help you in your search, command me, honey! Anyway, we’ll be seeing you again—and again, I hope!”
    Rosaleen and Maud leant against the gate as Kate went off across the field-path, The high wind which was still tearing joyfully across the sky, carrying a chill with it now that evening was approaching, blew their voices after Kate so strongly that she half-thought for a second that Rosaleen was calling her back. But it was to Maud that Rosaleen was speaking.
    â€œWhat did you want to go pulling Humphries’ leg like that for?”
    â€œWell, I was irritated, Rosa! I don’t like the way the man looks at you!” replied the nurse.
    Rosaleen’s fresh laughter followed Kate up the slope.
    â€œAnybody hearing you might think you were jealous on old Major Everyman’s account! Or at least, anybody looking at you might!”
    Kate could not help turning her head to look at Maud in the distance and see what it was that so manifested jealousy in her looks. But she looked just as usual, her white coif fluttering in the wind, and as Kate looked back she raised her hand and waved in a friendly manner. Had Nurse Maud, then, a secret tenderness for Major Everyman? If so, it certainly showed itself oddly!
    But a secret tenderness was apt to show itself oddly, and who should know it better than Kate, who, with the utmost manifestation of lightheartedness, had let Colin Kemp go to South America without her? Kate forgot Maud, and Rosaleen, and Major Everyman, and thought about Colin all the way home.
    The track at Pentrewer looked very dark and secret when she passed it, with the high darkling hills between it and the sun. Two rough ponies were grazing a little way up the track, and beyond a hedge Kate caught sight as she passed of the gipsy caravan, and a blue drift of woodsmoke. The gipsies were evidently spending the night near their relations at Pentrewer.

Chapter Nine
    Kate, having ascertained that the school break was at half-past-eleven, decided the next morning to go and see Sidney Brentwood’s schoolmaster, and, while she was about it, some of Sidney’s contemporaries and friends.
    â€œMrs. Howells, I suppose it’s no use asking if you’ve got any sweets in the shop?”
    â€œWell, I think you are lucky, there was a few pounds of toffee come in this morning, and if it’s for the schoolchildren you can have half-a-pound if you wish!” Mrs. Howells added, when she had weighed out the half-pound: “Now the boys and girls will be all swarming over my shop in the dinner-hour like ants when they smells honey, but never mind—I would rather it was them than Miss Gilliam and some others I knows as is always in here after sweets.”
    She tipped the little waxed-paper and bright tinfoil-wrapped cubes into a paper bag, and handing it to Kate, added pensively: “It was toffees like these that Sidney had in his pocket when he went off that night.”
    This was news to Kate.
    â€œYes, indeed,” sighed Mrs. Howells. “It was finding one of the papers up the road made us think he had turned towards the hills when he left here that night, not towards the village.”
    â€œWhereabouts was this paper found, then, Mrs. Howells?”
    â€œOh, in the road about fifty yards up. The police didn’t think a great deal of it, because of course there was plenty others