ine anger.

But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.

Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and
angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.

"You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed."

"I can't act, Nina. I do go about."

And Nina had a softened moment.

"Don't think about him," she said. "He isn't sick, or he would have
had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his
papers and let us know."

"Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go
out there!"

That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. She
would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but she
had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had
refused her when he knew her purpose.

"We're following him up, little sister," he said. "Harrison Miller has
gone out, and there's enough talk as it is."

She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraid
of what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could
not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and were
not heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. It
seemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie and
even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.

There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison
Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had
been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her
father had not been the same since.

He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at
her, however. He was very gentle with her.

And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when
Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there
would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding
and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a
little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and
closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house,
safe and cared for.

That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house
of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone
outside, cold and frightened.

She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.
The small gaieties of