THE WRECK
63
"After all he hasn't run away ! You had better go and ask him yourself."
Jogendra swallowed a cup of tea and dashed off. "Hold on, Jogen," called Annada Babu after him; "what are you in such a hurry about? You've had nothing to eat," but Jogendra was out of earshot. He rushed into the next house and stamped upstairs call- ing "Ramesh! Ramesh!" but there was no sign of Ramesh, though he looked for him in the bedroom, the sitting-room, on the roof, and on the ground floor. After hunting high and low he found the bearer and asked him where his master was. "He went out early," was the reply.
"When will he be back?"
The bearer informed him that Ramesh had taken a supply of clothes with him and had said that he might not be back for four or five days; but where he had gone the man did not know.
Jogendra wore a preoccupied air as he resumed his seat at the breakfast-table.
"Well, what luck?" asked Annada Babu.
"What can one expect?" replied his son testily. "Here's a man who is about to marry your daughter and you take no interest in his actions and his move- ments ; and that though he lives next door!"
"Why, he was there only last night!" said Annada Babu.
"You didn't know that he was going anywhere," exclaimed Jogendra, "and his bearer doesn't know where he has gone. There's something very fishy about it. I don't like the look of things at all, dad. Why do you take it so coolly?"
In the face of this tirade Annada Babu was obliged to grapple with the situation.
"What's the meaning of it all, then?" he asked, as- suming the expression of gravity that the occasion seemed to demand.
Digitized by Google
