What did it portend?
Had harm come upon Ethie?
And a shadow broke the placid surface of the sweet old face as Aunt Barbara put these questions, first to herself, and then to Mrs.Van Buren, who rapidly explained that Ethelyn had left her husband, and gone, no one knew whither.
"I hoped she might be here, and came up to see," Mrs.Van Buren concluded; while Aunt Barbara steadied herself against the great bookcase in the corner, and wondered if she was going out of her senses, or had she heard aright, and was it her sister Van Buren sitting there before her, and saying such dreadful things.
She could not tell if it were real until Tabby sprang with a purring, caressing sound, upon her shoulder, and rubbed her soft sides against her cap.

That made it real, and brought the color back to her wrinkled face, but brought, also, a look of horror into her blue eyes, which sought Mrs.Van Buren's with an eager, and yet terribly anxious glance.
Mrs.Dr.Van Buren understood the look.

Its semblance had been on her own face for an instant when she first heard the news, and now she hastened to dispossess her sister's mind of any such suspicion.
"No, Barbara; Frank did not go with her, or even see her when in Camden.
He is not quite so bad as that, I hope." The mother nature was in the ascendant, and for a moment resented the suspicion against her son, even though that suspicion had been in her own mind when Frank returned from Camden with the news of Ethie's flight.

That he had had something to do with it was her first fear, until convinced to the contrary; and now she blamed Aunt Barbara for harboring the same thought.

As soon as possible she told all she had heard from Frank, and then went on with her invectives against the Markhams generally, and Richard in particular, and her endless surmises as to where Ethelyn had gone, and what was the final cause of her going.
For a time Aunt Barbara turned a deaf ear to what she was saying, thinking only of Ethie, gone; Ethie, driven to such strait, that she must either run away or die; Ethie, the little brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, willful, imperious girl, whom she loved so much for the very willful imperiousness which always went hand in hand with such pretty fits of penitence, and sorrow, and remorse for the misdeed, that not to love her was impossible.