Vyse shrugged his shoulders. “Yes; but the interesting question is—why on earth didn’t your answer come back, too?”
“My answer?”
“The official one—the one I wrote in your name. If she’s unknown, what’s become of that?”
Betton stared at him with eyes wrinkled by amusement. “Perhaps she hadn’t disappeared then.”
Vyse disregarded the conjecture. “Look here—I believe all these letters are a hoax,” he broke out.
Betton stared at him with a face that turned slowly red and angry. “What are you talking about? All what letters?”
“These I’ve spread out here: I’ve been comparing them. And I believe they’re all written by one man.”
Burton’s redness turned to a purple that made his ruddy moustache seem pale. “What the devil are you driving at?” he asked.
“Well, just look at it,” Vyse persisted, still bent above the letters. “I’ve been studying them carefully—those that have come within the last two or three weeks—and there’s a queer likeness in the writing of some of them. The g’s are all like corkscrews. And the same phrases keep recurring—the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the same expressions as the President of the Girls’ College at Euphorbia, Maine.”
Betton laughed. “Aren’t the critics always groaning over the shrinkage of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use the same expressions.”