MAURICE SINCLAIR ESCAPES WITH HIS VICTIM.
In the darkness of the night,
When the sun has lost command,
Wrong walks side by side with right--
Sin and truth go hand in hand.
Mrs. Sinclair rose late the next morning. A sleepless night had been
followed by hours of heavy slumber which extended far into the forenoon.
She awoke as she had retired, burdened with a trouble for which she
could find no tangible form.
Here was her only son, resembling his father in face and manner,--a
young man exemplary to all appearances, the knowledge of whose safe
return, after long years of sorrowful separation, had overflowed her
heart with gratitude and mother love, but whose actual presence thrilled
her, not with unspeakable affection, but with an indefinable sensation
of perplexity and apprehension. She blamed herself for the restraint
which so evidently existed between Maurice and herself, and in this self
accusing mood she rose and prepared earnestly to explore the seemingly
inaccessible paths to her son's estranged affections.
Breakfast, was the first suggestion of her sensible mind. She smiled,
even in her perplexity, at this prompting of the flesh, but obeying the
practical impulse, she rang for the butler and assured herself that
everything in this particular department was in its customary, excellent
condition.
She was indeed perplexed and the limit of her logical nature was reached
when she undertook the Herculean task of lifting the cloud which hung so
heavily over her son's individuality. She saw no inherited trait,
neither could she account for the developing of those peculiarities
which so early in life branded her only son with the marks of evil
associations and morbid desires. True, his faults at fifteen years were
but the outcome of boyish adventures and experiments, but a nature like
his, impulsive and so prone to investigation, had caused her, even in
his childhood days, to look forward to serious, inevitable results
unless added years brought more than the average amount of judgment to
balance the opposing inclinations.
Living, as he evidently had, in ignorant and brutal Mongolian
habitations, the seeds of vice, she reasoned, could easily have been
fostered, yet why she should so persistently associate vice with every
thought of this almost faultless young man, was a mystery she could not
solve with all her reasoning.
She feared him intuitively, and with this thought of fear there came,
strangely enough, a thought of Stella, and obeying an impulse which she
could not resist, she went to the young girl's room to awake her for the
breakfast hour. She knocked repeatedly at Stella's door, but there was
no response. She called her name excitedly, then trembling with
torturing apprehension, pushed open the door and entered the apartment.
Stella was not there. The bed was undisturbed, so also was each and
every article about the room. Almost unconsciously she bent and picked
up a small vial from the floor, and thrusting it into her pocket, rushed
wildly into the hall and straight on to the rooms designed for her
son's occupancy, and turning the latch without ceremony, stepped
breathlessly in, only to find _that_ also vacant and everything in
perfect order. Running frantically about the house, for a few moments
the bewildered woman forgot all self control and in agonizing tones
enlisted every member of her household in a search for the missing ones.
All in vain: Stella and Maurice had disappeared in the blackness of the
night, and the impenetrable fog had swallowed up their footsteps and
obliterated every trace by which the direction of their flight could be
determined.