How he went on in it Calne could not get to learn, though it was moderately inquisitive upon the point.  His father and mother heard from him occasionally; and once the clerk took a sudden and rather mysterious journey to London, where he stayed for a whole week.  Rumour said—­I wonder where such rumours first have their rise—­that Willy Gum had fallen into some trouble, and the clerk had had to buy him out of it at the cost of a mint of money.  The clerk, however, did not confirm this; and one thing was indisputable:  Willy retained his place in the banking-house.  Some people looked on this fact as a complete refutation of the rumour.

Then came a lull.  Nothing was heard of Willy; that is, nothing beyond the reports of Mrs. Gum to her gossips when letters arrived:  he was well, and getting on well.  It was only the lull that precedes a storm; and a storm indeed burst on quiet Calne.  Willy Gum had robbed the bank and disappeared.

In the first dreadful moment, perhaps the only one who did not disbelieve it was Clerk Gum.  Other people said there must be some mistake:  it could not be.  Kind old Lord Hartledon came down in his carriage to the clerk’s house—­he was too ill to walk—­and sat with the clerk and the weeping mother, and said he was sure it could not be so bad as was reported.  The next morning saw handbills—­great, staring, large-typed handbills—­offering a reward for the discovery of William Gum, posted all over Calne.

Once more Clerk Gum went to London.  What he did there no one knew.  One thing only was certain—­he did not find Willy or any trace of him.  The defalcation was very nearly eight hundred pounds; and even if Mr. Gum could have refunded that large sum, he might not do so, said Calne, for of course the bank would not compound a felony.  He came back looking ten years older; his tall, thin form more shadowy, his nose longer and sharper.  Not a soul ventured to say a syllable to him, even of condolence.  He told Lord Hartledon and his Rector that no tidings whatever could be gleaned of his unhappy son; the boy had disappeared, and might be dead for all they knew to the contrary.

So the handbills wore themselves out on the walls, serving no purpose, until Lord Hartledon ordered them to be removed; and Mrs. Gum lived in tears, and audibly wished herself dead.  She had not seen her boy since he quitted Calne, considerably more than two years before, and he was now nearly nineteen.  A few days’ holiday had been accorded him by the banking-house each Christmas; but the first Christmas Willy wrote word that he had accepted an invitation to go home with a brother-clerk; the second Christmas he said he could not obtain leave of absence—­which Mrs. Gum afterwards found was untrue; so that Willy Gum had not been at Calne since he left it.  And whenever his mother thought of him—­and that was every hour of the day and night—­it was always as the fair, young, light-haired boy, who seemed to her little more than a child.