There, she had it now! It was a letter, the mysterious letter Nan had read in their room at Lakeview! It was the letter Nan had refused to explain, although it had left her nervous and excited! Bess remembered the scene all quite clearly now. She knew now, as she knew then, that Nan’s explanation that it made her homesick wasn’t the truth. She knew that that letter had been the beginning of all their troubles!
Without thinking further, she blurted out what she knew about it. James Blake, Dr. Prescott, everyone in the room listened intently to everything that Bess had to say. For once, she made a clean breast of everything and told all that she knew of what had been happening.
“And where, lassie, is that letter?” James Blake made a distinct effort to forget his own sorrow at the turn of events. Action was needed now.
“I don’t know, unless it is in her bags,” Bess started upstairs at once. “I’ll go look.” At last she felt important, as though she was doing her part to help locate Nan.
But much as she wanted to, she couldn’t find the note in question. She looked over everything most thoroughly, admiring, even in her excitement, the extreme neatness of Nan’s bags. But she found nothing unusual at all. She went slowly back downstairs and reported.
“Did you ever see the letter at all?” Dr. Prescott questioned her, “the envelope, the stamps, or the postmark?”
Bess shook her head, wishing now that when she had first noticed Nan sitting troubled over it, she had insisted on knowing what it was all about. “If I hadn’t been so interested in that old memory book,” she thought regretfully, “I might have known more now.”
But regrets were of no use, now. All in the room felt regrets in one form or another, but that did not bring Nan back.
Old James Blake had sat silently by, during Dr. Prescott’s questioning, knowing that she thought as he did, that the letter Nan had received in Lakeview was some sort of warning as to what would happen to her, if she left the United States. He knew, too, that in asking about the postmark, she was trying to find out whether or not it had been mailed in Scotland.
“There is only one thing to do,” he spoke rather sadly, “and much as I hate to have it happen, I must tell you to do it. You must ring that bell over there, call for a servant, and either go yourself or have him go and report this whole thing to the authorities. It’s a case, I think, for Scotland Yard.”