have gone down it a little way; but if he had he must have turned off and sought concealment somewhere for she had seen no sign of any one when she came home.  To the left stretched the heath-land, brown and bare, to the belt of wildly tossing pines; it was hard to imagine her father choosing that way.  To the right lay the sandhills, a place of unsteady outline, earth and sky alike pale and blurred as the north-west wind fled seawards, lifting and whirling the fine particles till the air seemed full of them; it was impossible to think of any one choosing that way.

“We will go down the road to begin with,” Julia said, and started.

All through the early part of the afternoon they searched; sometimes stopped for a moment by a gust of wind; Julia caught and whirled, Johnny brought to a panting standstill.  But on again directly, struggling down the road, looking in ditches and behind scant bushes, leaving the track first on the right hand then on the left, searching in likely and unlikely places.  But always with the same result, there was no sign of the missing man.  At last, when they had reached a greater distance than it was possible to imagine the Captain could have gone, they turned towards the house across the heath.  It was difficult to think of the Captain going that way, seeing he would have been walking in the teeth of the wind, but it almost seemed he must have done it.

The short day was already beginning to close in when they reached the belt of pines.  It had grown much colder; one could almost believe there would be frost in the air by and by.  The wind was lulling a little; it still roared with strange rushings and half-demented tearings at the tree-tops, almost like some great spirit prisoned there, but it had spent its first strength.  The rain clouds were going, too; already in places the sky was swept clear so that a pale light gleamed behind the trees.

Julia stood in the vibrant shelter of the pines, pushing back her hair; she was bareheaded; a hat had been an impossible superfluity when she started out.

“Johnny,” she said, “we have come too far; father could not have got to the trees in such weather as it was when he started; we must go back.  I expect he is somewhere nearer home; we have not half searched the possible radius yet.”

Johnny said “Yes.”  He was dog-tired, so tired that his anxiety was now little more than dull despair animated by an unquestioning determination to continue the search.

He would have done so somehow, and with his flagging energies been more hindrance than help, had not Julia prevented him; as they neared the house, now almost merged in the dusk, she said—­

“I am going to fetch a lantern; the moon will be up soon, but until then I shall want a light.  I am just coming in to get it, then I shall go out again; but you must stop at home; father may come back, and if he found us both out after dark he would think something was wrong and start to look for us; then we should be worse off than ever.”