"It is as if," went on the lawyer desperately, "she had gone out of some cabin in a frozen wilderness—without provisions, without even matches or an axe, and God knows what she found there!"
The two Kentuckians stood gazing into each other's eyes across the table that lay between them. Upon the temples of each glistened beads of terror sweat. With the suddenness of revelation, Boone Wellver saw the falsity of all his bitter and fallacious judgments, and the love that he had denied swept over him with the onrush of an avalanche. Then he heard Morgan again:
"Between us—somehow we managed to do this for her. From babyhood she was under a coercion that neither of us appreciated. I don't know what parted you—but I know that I love her enough to be happy if I could see her married to you—and safe. I've hunted her and I haven't found her. Perhaps she has hidden purposely from me. Perhaps she wouldn't hide from you—"
Boone raised a hand, and it fell limply at his side. He dropped abruptly into a chair and cradled his face on his bent forearms. But after a short while he rose, lividly colourless of check, and said:
"I'll ride back with you. I'm going to New York to find her."
But when he had been a month in New York he knew as little as when he had come.
One morning he read a brief item hidden away on an inside page of his newspaper. A young woman had taken gas in a boarding house in the Forties. She had been there only a few days and, save by the name she had given, was unknown. A few dollars in change had been found in her bedroom, but no letters or identifying data. She was tall, well dressed, and had been beautiful. Her body lay, awaiting claim, in an undertaker's shop of given address. In default of identification, it would be turned over for burial among the pauper dead.
Boone Wellver dropped the paper and went stumblingly across his room for his hat. At his door he paused to steady the palsy that had seized him. In his mind he was seeing a little girl at a Christmas dance, in a hall where the tempered glow of mahogany and silver awoke to the tiny fires of candle-light.