“Thanks; it’s very good of you,” he answered, opening the gate. But he had no intention of giving her either his name or address, as he did not for a moment think that this disappearance of the Reeds was other than temporary.
At the corner he stopped and inquired for them at Coggles the grocer’s. Coggles himself answered his inquiries. He had even less information to give than Mrs. Robson. A week before the colonel had paid such small amounts as he yet owed, and had casually mentioned the fact that he had sold his house and was about to leave the city. This was all Coggles knew. He showed some desire to talk over the colonel’s pecuniary difficulties, but Gault cut him short and left the store.
Gault walked away, feeling dazed and hardly master of himself. It had been so absolutely unexpected that he did not yet send his mind back over their past intercourse to ask what she might have been thinking since he saw her last. As is the case of the man in love, he had seen the situation only from his own side. But he did not for a moment doubt that he would hear from her within the next few days.
He was still with his brother a good deal of the time, and the days that followed passed with the swiftness which characterizes hours filled with various anxieties. Four days after learning of her flight, two weeks from the evening that he had seen her last, the janitor at his office handed him a small but heavy package. It had been left early in the morning by a boy, the janitor said, who had merely asked if this was Mr. John Gault’s office, and had then hastened away.
An instinct told him it was from her, and he shut himself into his inner office before he opened it. It was a rough wooden box, and contained the money given by him to the colonel—five hundred and ten dollars in gold coin. Lying on the top was a slip of paper bearing the words: “Good-by. Viola.”
Still he could not but believe that she would soon reveal her whereabouts. The move was occupying her, and such an operation would seem a gigantic undertaking to her youthful inexperience. That she should treat him this way was thoughtless, cruel even, but she had been deeply wounded, and her hurt was evidently still sore. He could only wait patiently.
He did so for two weeks, his uncertainties growing into fears, his conviction of her intention to communicate with him gradually weakening. Uneasiness gave place to alarm. For the first time the haunting thought that she had gone from him purposely, fled forever from his love, entered his mind.
Finally, unable to endure the anxiety that now beset him, he commissioned a private detective agency to run to earth the boy who had brought the money. He supposed it had come directly from her, and that, through the boy, without drawing her into the affair, her hiding-place could be discovered.
The finding of the boy was not so simple a matter as might have been supposed. It required a week’s search to locate him. He was the only son of a poor widow living near South Park, who had done the Reeds’ washing. Before her departure Miss Reed had commissioned him to deliver the package at Mr. Gault’s office at a certain date, and at an hour when there would be no chance of his coming into personal contact with Mr. Gault himself.
Gault snatched at this meager information, and lost no time in seeking out the widow in her own home. She was a good-natured and loquacious Irish-American,—Mrs. Cassidy by name,—and was full of terror at the thought that detectives had been occupied in discovering her place of abode. Her fears, however, were soon allayed, and she became exceedingly discursive. But when it came to information of Viola, she could tell no more than the others.