“Did you hunt, Aunt Barbara?  Did you really hunt for me?”

And something of Ethie’s old self leaped into her eyes and flushed into her cheeks as she asked the question.

“Yes, darling.  All the spring and all the summer long, and on into the fall, and then I gave it up.”

“Were you alone, auntie?  That is, did nobody help you hunt?” was Ethelyn’s next query; and Richard would have read much hope for him in the eagerness of the eyes, which waited for Aunt Barbara’s answer, and which dropped so shyly upon the carpet when Aunt Barbara said, “Alone, child?  No; he did all he could—­Richard did—­but we could get no clew.”

Ethelyn could not tell her story until she had been made easy on several important points, and smoothing the folds of Aunt Barbara’s dress, and still looking beseechingly into her face, she said, “and Richard hunted, too.  Was he sorry, auntie?  Did he care because I went away?”

“Care?  Of course he did.  It almost broke his heart, and wasted him to a skeleton.  You did wrong, Ethie, to go and stay so long.  Richard did not deserve it.”

It was the first word of censure Aunt Barbara had uttered, and Ethelyn felt it keenly, as was evinced by her quivering lip and trembling voice, as she said:  “Don’t auntie, don’t you scold me, please.  I can bear it better from anyone else.  I want you to stand by me.  I know I was hasty and did very wrong.  I’ve said so a thousand times; but I was so unhappy and wretched at first, and at the last he made me so angry with his unjust accusations.”

“Yes; he told me all, and showed me the letter you left.  I know the whole,” Aunt Barbara said, while Ethelyn continued: 

“Where is he now?  How long since you heard from him?”

“It is two years or more.  He wrote the last letter.  I’m a bad correspondent, you know, and as I had no good news to write, I did not think it worth while to bother him.  I don’t know where he is since he quit being governor.”

There was a sudden lifting of Ethie’s head, a quick arching of her eyebrows, which told that the governor part was news to her.  Then she asked, quietly, “Has he been governor?”

“Yes, Governor of Iowa; and James’ wife lived with him.  She was Melinda Jones.”

“Yes, yes,” and Ethie’s foot beat the carpet thoughtfully, while her eyes were cast-down, and the great tears gathered slowly in the long-fringed lids, then they fell in perfect showers, and laying her head in Aunt Barbara’s lap she sobbed piteously.

Perhaps she was thinking of all she had thrown away, and weeping that another had taken the post she would have been so proud to fill.  Aunt Barbara did not know, and she kept smoothing the bowed head until it was lifted up again, and the tears were dried in Ethie’s eyes, where there was not the same hopeful expression there had been at first when she heard of Richard’s hunting for her.  Some doubt or fear had crossed her mind, and her hands were folded together in a hopeless kind of way as, at Aunt Barbara’s urgent request, she began the story of her wanderings.