“She had something else on her mind,” Gertrude answered gravely, “but she had Peter on her mind, too.”
“She didn’t—she couldn’t have known about us—Peter and me. We—we haven’t told any one.”
“She guessed it, Beulah. She couldn’t bear it. Nobody’s to blame. It’s just one of God’s most satirical mix-ups.”
“I was to blame,” Beulah said slowly. “I don’t believe in shifting responsibility. I got her here in the first place and I’ve been instrumental in guiding her life ever since. Now, I’ve sacrificed her to my own happiness.”
“It isn’t so simple as that,” Gertrude said; “the things we start going soon pass out of our hands. 275 Somebody a good deal higher up has been directing Eleanor’s affairs for a long time,—and ours too, for that matter.”
“Don’t worry, Beulah,” Peter said, making his way to her side from the other corner of the room where he had been talking to Margaret. “You mustn’t let this worry you. We’ve all got to be—soldiers now,—but we’ll soon have her back again, I promise you.”
“And I promise you,” Beulah said chokingly, “that if you’ll get her back again, I—I will be a soldier.”
Peter began by visiting the business schools in New York and finding out the names of the pupils registered there. Eleanor had clung firmly to her idea of becoming an editorial stenographer in some magazine office, no matter how hard he had worked to dissuade her. He felt almost certain she would follow out that purpose now. There was a fund in her name started some years before for the defraying of her college expenses. She would use that, he argued, to get herself started, even though she felt constrained to pay it back later on. He worked on this theory for some time, even making 276 a trip to Boston in search for her in the stenography classes there, but nothing came of it.
Among Eleanor’s effects sent on from the school was a little red address book containing the names and addresses of many of her former schoolmates at Harmon. Peter wrote all the girls he remembered hearing her speak affectionately of, but not one of them was able to give him any news of her. He wrote to Colhassett to Albertina’s aunt, who had served in the capacity of housekeeper to Eleanor’s grandfather in his last days, and got in reply a pious letter from Albertina herself, who intimated that she had always suspected that Eleanor would come to some bad end, and that now she was highly soothed and gratified by the apparent fulfillment of her sinister prognostications.