CAMILLA spent the morning in the store-room, staring through the window at the tree tops and glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving with her father. Henry Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's plans for the new railroad bridge and station, the three parks and moon-shaped boulevard.

“His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!”

In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. He foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues.

“Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!”

He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings.

Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans seemed to occupy her father's mind of late.

“A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled.

So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her.

She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the afternoon papers.

When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not look at the paper till she reached the store-room.

Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A half hour slipped by.

“That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!”

Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important advice—it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of.

They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the hall. Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the front door. Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting.

“Camilla is going out again!”

Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla could have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation were thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not injustice to Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her father's newspaper, a thing so important to his happiness before tea? Miss Eunice put aside her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy.

She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed the second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in front of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice gasped, took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla have been so rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front page proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents of a Night.”

“Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.”

“Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.”

“Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port Argent.”

“John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.”

“Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a Hearse are his Limit.”

None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. No headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any bearing on Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that Richard had not already told the family, about a railroad bridge and station, park improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss Eunice's impression, Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming.

She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of Miss Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool chest, and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in the library, forlorn of his afternoon paper.

When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before six. He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head bent down drowsily, where he sat in his chair.

Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper.

“I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. I found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't understand, Richard!”

Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment.

“Well—you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to Mr. Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it might be just as well. He might be surprised.”

He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the corner by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar.

He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of which stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. The voices came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the Assembly Hall. He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to the street door, out of hearing of the words.

“It's the other man's innings,” he thought ruefully. But, he thought too, that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood when Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets, stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things.