“Let’s call Lieutenant Ames,” said Nolan suddenly. “I rather imagine this will hit him.”
“Oh, poor Jimmy,” cried Eveley. “He told me he wanted to marry her.”
Far into the night, they puzzled and pondered, not knowing which way to turn, but all in their love of Marie resolved that she must be found and saved again from the chaos. The next day, against the advice of all the others, Eveley sent word to Amos Hiltze and seemed to feel some comfort in his evident surprise and perturbation.
“I can not understand it,” he said. “She was so happy, and loved you so much. I will look for her. She may have taken fright at something—but what could it possibly have been?”
“Tell her I do not care what has happened, nor what she fears. She must come to me and I will help her.”
In spite of the insistence of Nolan, Angelo and Jimmy Ames, Eveley would have given the matter into the hands of the police, trusting to her own promises and her own standing to save Marie from whatever they held against her. But at her first suggestion of this to Amos Hiltze, he took a most positive stand against it.
“If you do that, you have lost her forever. It is the police she fears. She would never forgive you for putting her into their hands, even if you could afterward extricate her. You must not dream of such a thing.”
So Eveley gave it up and tried to reconcile herself to patient waiting, and to prayers of faith, determined to believe that the persistent search going on in all sections of the town would be effective, and believing still more fervently that God must return to her again the sister she had learned to love.
This time, because Eveley was suffering no one connected the disappearance of Marie with Eveley’s theory of duty. And to herself Eveley made no claims, not even for her favorite Exception.
For if Marie had loved her, would she not have left at least one word of sympathy, and affection, in farewell? Indeed, if she had loved her, would she not have preferred the investigation of the Secret Service to separation? For Eveley would have braved every court in the country for her little foreign sister.