“But please don’t put that in the papers,” she went on. “It’s of no interest to anybody but us, and we don’t want the engagement announced yet. I told you so you would understand how much right I have to be interested. I am perfectly sure this dreadful creature, Hugh Gordon, is at the bottom of the whole business, that these charges in the papers this morning are nothing but revenge for his failure to blackmail Mr. Brand, and it is just as certain as can be that he has got Mr. Brand imprisoned somewhere, maybe drugged, and the thing for you to do now is to find this Gordon and make him tell where Felix is. Oh, please do!” she ended, with a sudden drop in her manner, her voice choking.
Seasoned news gatherers though they were they could not repress all sign of the gratification they felt at her words. They loosed a battery of questions upon the two young women, but soon discovered upon what a slender basis Miss Annister had based her theory.
They could tell her nothing whatever about the mysterious Hugh Gordon. But they promised to follow her clue and to hunt him down if he could be found. They went away well pleased, for even if this suggestion should not lead to anything of consequence they had enough already to warrant “scare heads” over tomorrow’s story and to furnish a narrative of even more “human interest” than the one set forth that morning.
Mildred Annister opened the paper the next morning with the greatest eagerness and expectation. But she sank back in horrified dismay as she saw the headlines. “I told them they mustn’t say anything about me or our engagement,” she said to her father, “and now just look at that!”
“Well, well,” he replied, as he glanced over the article, “they’ve been fairly decent, at any rate, in the way they’ve written it up, though it’s not pleasant for you to be thrown into the limelight like this. As for their making known your engagement, it can’t be helped now, so there’s no use worrying about it. But you mustn’t want to be married too soon, daughter.”
Mildred welcomed this final grudging half-acquiescence and felt that it was well worth the price. “Now it will be easy to persuade him to let us be married soon, when Felix comes back,” she thought.
But the morning’s news had not an atom more of information concerning the architect’s whereabouts than she had known the day before. Hugh Gordon also had disappeared. Before the publication of the investigating committee’s report several newspaper men had seen him and talked with him about it, but the next day they could not find him anywhere, nor any one who had the least idea whither he had gone. One member of the committee knew Brand very well and, in pursuit of Miss Annister’s idea that Gordon and the missing architect might be relatives, the reporters had questioned him about Gordon’s disappearance.
There was some resemblance, he said, although he had not thought about it at the time. Gordon was a larger man, he thought, and a younger, and his manner was very different. Brand was always affable, very polite, and inclined to be somewhat ceremonious; but Gordon was brusque, rather aggressive, and seemed to be much in earnest. His evident sincerity and honesty had impressed the committee very much. But, on the whole, he concluded, there was some resemblance between the two men in feature and coloring; enough, perhaps, to indicate that they might be relatives.
Mildred was keenly disappointed to find so little of consequence or of promise in the news of the morning, but the committeeman’s description of Brand’s accuser confirmed her in her conviction.