AN ODD SENSATION
IT is, of course, impossible for a small boy to disappear from the face
of the earth without a good deal of uneasiness being felt regarding his
disappearance.
By midday the uneasiness had approached to something like alarm. The
gardens, the paddocks, the park, had been searched unavailingly;
inquiry had been made of every villager. No clue was forthcoming; no
possible reason for the disappearance.
A conscience-stricken Louisa kept a discreet silence on the
matter. There was, to her mind, no occasion to incriminate herself
unnecessarily. The cause could afford no solution of the effect; or, at
any rate she told herself it could not, which, after all, came to the
same thing as far as her silence was concerned.
A distraught Rosamund finally made swift way to the White Cottage,
there to seek aid from John.
Father Maloney went off to the Green Man to find David. He saw the
scouting propensities he conceived men of his type to possess, standing
them in good stead at the moment. Having enlisted his services, and
likewise those of Elizabeth, as already seen, he set off once again for
the Castle.
The day was as hot as the previous days had been. The earth lay panting
and breathless. There was something almost ominous about the brazen
blueness of the sky, the extraordinary stillness that hung over the
earth.
Father Maloney, breasting the hill, wondered vaguely whether the
world would ever again breathe in comfort. Personally he considered
asphyxiation a not remote possibility.
And then, all at once, he became aware of a subtle change in the
atmosphere. It wasn’t that the sky was less blue, or the air less
heavy, or the sun less brilliant. And, having said what it was not,
I find myself at a loss to say what it was. It lay more in a curious
foreboding, a certain indefinable prescience of change.
“I believe,” said Father Maloney, addressing himself to the sky, “that
we are going to have a storm.”