"No—but wait. I had no other letter and no other communication of any sort. I searched the papers for any news of him, thinking he might put something for me in the personal columns, but there was not a sign. Days passed that way, my business was closed and I had time to think, and the more I thought the more strange and inexplicable it seemed. Why, in the letter, had he made no reference to the broken engagement, so vital to both of us, that night in the church. Why had he said nothing about my mother whose state of mind he would have guessed?
"From the first I had suspicions that something was wrong. I could not believe he would have done what they said he had. Even after I read in the papers of his carefully planned get-away I was not convinced. After that scene in the Whitney office, when I saw you were all watching me, eager to trip me into any admission, my suspicions grew stronger. There was more than showed on the surface. I sensed it, an instinct warned me.
"As days passed and I heard nothing more from him, the conviction grew that something had happened to him. If it was accident I was certain it would have been known; if, as many thought, he'd lost his memory and strayed away, I was equally certain he'd have been seen and recognized. What else could it be? Can you picture me, shut up with my poor distracted mother, ravaged by fear and anxiety? Those waiting days—how terrible they were—with that sense of dread always growing, growing. Finally it came to a climax. If my father was dead as I thought, there was only one explanation—foul play. On Friday, when you came to see me, I was at the breaking point, afraid to speak, desperate for help and unable to ask for it.
"Now I come to the day when I learned everything, when all these broken forebodings of disaster fell together like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope and took a definite shape. It was Sunday, can it be only two days ago? My mother had moved to the cottage and I was alone in the apartment packing up to follow her. About the middle of the afternoon while I was hard at work the telephone rang. I answered it and was told by the operator Long Distance was calling me, Quebec. At that my heart gave a great jump of joy and relief—my father was alive and sending for me again. It was like the wireless answer of help to a foundering vessel.
"You know how often the Long Distance connection varies—one day you can recognize a voice a thousand miles off that on the next you can't make out at a hundred? The voice that had spoken to me from Toronto was no more than a vibration of the wire, thin and toneless. The one that spoke from Quebec was distinct and colored with a personality.
"The first words were that it was J. W. B. and at these words, as if the receiver had shot an electric current into me, I started and grew tense, for it did not sound like the voice of J. W. B. It went on, explaining why he had not communicated with me, and how he now again wanted me to come to him. I, listening, became more and more sure that the person speaking was not my father, but that, whoever he was, his voice stirred a faint memory, was dimly suggestive of a voice I did know.
"I was confused and agitated, standing there with the receiver at my ear, while those sentences ran over the wire, every syllable clear and distinct. Then, suddenly, I thought of a way I could find out. My father was the only man in the world who knew of our secret, of the plan for our reunion. A simple question would test the knowledge of the person talking to me. When he had finished I said:
"'I've been longing to hear from you, not only for myself but for my mother—she's been in despair.'
"There was a slight pause before the voice answered:
"'Why should Mrs. Whitehall be so disturbed?'