“So the corn has come up,” said the son, throwing himself back on his heels with a lordly air.  The mother smiled dimly at the green spears from between the woolly swaths of her shawl.  She coughed, and pulled the white fleece closely over her mouth and nose.  Then only her eyes were visible, which looked young as they gazed at the green spears of corn.  The book-keeper nodded his elderly, distinctly commonplace, and unimportant head with the motion of a conqueror who marshals armies.

After all, it is something for a man to be able to call into life, even if under the force which includes him also, the new life of the spring.  It is a power like that of a child in leading-strings, but still power.  After the mother and son had gone away and he and his sister were still out in the cool, and the great evening star had come out and it was too dark to work any longer, for the first time he said something about the queer accounts in his books in Captain Carroll’s office.

“I suppose it is all right,” he said, leaning a second on his hoe and staring up at the star, “but sometimes my books and the accounts I keep look rather—­strange to me.”

“He pays you regularly, doesn’t he?” inquired the sister.  The question of pay could sting her from her numbness.  Once there had been a period, years ago, before Carroll’s advent, of no pay.

“Oh yes,” replied the brother.  “He pays me.  He has never been more than a week behind.  Captain Carroll seems like a very smart man.  I wonder where he lives.  I don’t believe anybody in the office knows.  He went away very early this afternoon.  I don’t know whether he lives in the City or in the country.  I thought maybe if he did live in the country he wanted to get home and go driving or something.”

It had been as the book-keeper surmised.  Carroll had gone early to his home in the country with the idea of a drive.  But when he reached home he found a state of affairs which precluded the drive.  It seemed that young Eddy Carroll was given to romancing in more respects than one, and had not told the truth to Anderson when he had been asked if his family would feel anxious at his non-return to dinner.  Eddy knew quite well that they would be anxious.  In spite of a certain temperamental aversion to worry, the boy’s mother and sisters were wont to become quite actively agitated if he failed to appear at expected times and seasons.  Eddy Carroll, in the course of a short life, had contrived to find the hard side of many little difficulties.  He had gotten into divers forms of mischief; he had met with many accidents.  He had been almost drowned; he had broken an arm; he had been hit in the forehead by a stone thrown by another boy.

When Arthur Carroll reached home that afternoon he found his wife in hysterical tears, his sister trying to comfort her, and the two daughters and the maid were scouring the town in search of the boy.  School was out, and he had still not come home.  Carroll heard the news before he reached home, from the coachman who met him at the station.