“I think we must be careful not to let Mr. Madison suspect anything about the burglar,” said Miss Peirce.  “It would be bad for him.”

Laura began:  “But we ought to notify the police——­”

“Police!” Hedrick woke so abruptly, and uttered the word with such passionate and vehement protest, that everybody started.  “I suppose you want to kill your father, Laura Madison!”

“How?”

“Do you suppose he wouldn’t know something had happened with a squad of big, heavy policemen tromping all over the house?  The first thing they’d do would be to search the whole place——­”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Madison quickly.  “It wouldn’t do at all.”

“I should think not!  I’m glad,” continued Hedrick, truthfully, “that idea’s out of your head!  I believe Laura imagined the whole thing anyway.”

“Have you looked at her mattress,” inquired Cora, “darling little boy?”

He gave her a concentrated look, and rose to leave.  “Nothin’ on earth but imagina——­” He stopped with a grunt as he forgetfully put his weight on his left leg.  He rubbed his knee, swallowed painfully, and, leaving the word unfinished, limped haughtily from the room.

He left the house, gloomily swinging his books from a spare length of strap, and walking with care to ease his strains and bruises as much as possible.  He was very low in his mind, that boy.  His fortunes had reached the ebb-tide, but he had no hope of a rise.  He had no hope of anything.  It was not even a consolation that, through his talent for surprise in waylayings, it had lately been thought necessary, by the Villard family, to have Egerton accompanied to and from school by a man-servant.  Nor was Hedrick more deeply depressed by the certainty that both public and domestic scandal must soon arise from the inevitable revelation of his discontinuing his attendance at school without mentioning this important change of career at home.  He had been truant a full fortnight, under brighter circumstances a matter for a lawless pride—­now he had neither fear nor vainglory.  There was no room in him for anything but dejection.

He walked two blocks in the direction of his school; turned a corner; walked half a block; turned north in the alley which ran parallel to Corliss Street, and a few moments later had cautiously climbed into an old, disused refuse box which stood against the rear wall of the empty stable at his own home.  He pried up some loose boards at the bottom of the box, and entered a tunnel which had often and often served in happier days—­when he had friends—­for the escape of Union officers from Libby Prison and Andersonville.  Emerging, wholly soiled, into a box-stall, he crossed the musty carriage house and ascended some rickety steps to a long vacant coachman’s-room, next to the hayloft.  He closed the door, bolted it, and sank moodily upon a broken, old horsehair sofa.