“The papers?” he questioned, and then his eyes blazed with anger when she took from her pocket a marked copy of the society journal which had tried to make scandal out of her misery.
“Whose hand is in this?” he muttered. “By Heaven, if I only knew! Toss the thing into the fire!” he added, aloud. “It is not worthy of a moment’s thought, Elaine. Child, be of good cheer. I am leaving no stone unturned. There is foul play somewhere. You promised me that you would send to him. Why did you delay?”
“I did not,” was the piteous rejoinder. “Has not Margaret told you? He scoffed at my love; he tore my letter to fragments and threw it away. Afterward he wrote cruel things to me. But he will come back again, if he lives. I know that he will, and I shall wait, if need be, forever.”
She looked at him in a way that he never forgot.
“I have misjudged you, Lady Elaine,” he said. “I did not think you were capable of such love as this.”
He looked at her pityingly, then his brow became dark.
“Why did Margaret Nugent not tell me of the letter?” he thought. “This puts the matter in a new light. This inclines me to believe that the earl’s theory is the correct one, and yet how could that boy be guilty of such meanness? He must have been mad.”
He promised Lady Elaine some news at an early date, but nothing came of his investigations.
A small fortune was spent upon detectives and advertisements in papers all over the world, but not an atom of information was to be obtained anywhere. A hundred messages were flashed across the Atlantic, and many harmless, innocent men were made objects of suspicion, but it all ended in—nothing.
The sum total was this: Sir Harold Annesley had been seen to enter a train at Crayford Station, and there he disappeared completely.