Then, "I can only hear them," she replied
softly. "This is one of their rooms--everything ready, you see."
She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, its hooked front half open,
faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
"Surely they've only just gone," I whispered. In the failing light a door
creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet--
quick feet through a room beyond.
"I heard that," she cried triumphantly. "Did you? Children, O children,
where are you?"
The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note,
but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We
hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps
there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as
well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There
were bolt-holes innumerable--recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten
windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned
fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the
gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
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