To Ruby and Florrie the mine of speculation and scandal thus opened up was a veritable God-send. Every caller as he came in was posted up in all the latest particulars. One of the first to be so informed was Alec Booth, and it met him like a knock-down blow. He was, however, soon on his mental feet again, and sifting, by examination, the list of crude rumours with which the two barmaids inundated him, he learned successively, first, that it was a lad (a well-known habitué of the side walk) who had called Bertha out. Next, having found the lad, he heard from him that on the evening before a bushy-whiskered man had driven up in a cab, and giving him a shilling, had told him to go in the Golden Bar and tell a Miss Summerhayes that she was wanted. The lady had come to the door as requested, and after some words with the bushy-whiskered man, which the lad did not overhear, they both got in the cab and drove rapidly away.
This was all the information Alec could gather. Neither a description of the cab or cabman, nor the number of the same was to be had. A hansom in a main Sydney thoroughfare is too common a sight to attract even passing attention. Doubtless if Alec had been endowed with half the imagination of a French detective he would have found his clue ample for the prosecution of an immediate chase. But imagination was distinctly not his forte. He could weave no theory, spin no web of conjecture; only in a vague and ill-defined way he told himself that Bertha’s disappearance was not natural, and probably not voluntary. She was certainly not the sort of girl to elope at a minute’s notice, and even Alec, slight student as he was of feminine human nature, felt that she was above all not the girl to thus abandon her wardrobe.
Mixed with these feelings, that Bertha had met with foul play, were a host of jealous doubts. Of her own accord she had stepped into this cab. Why had she done so? Passion boiled up in the man, and he raged impotently. At last his mind received an inspiration.
“Why not go to Soft Sam?”
He acted on the thought at once, and in a few minutes found himself in the Domain at the old gentleman’s accustomed seat.
As Alec approached a group of children he heard the familiar voice calling out amongst them—
“Now, knuckle down properly; don’t fudge.”
It was Sam teaching his pupils the mysteries of marbles, and Alec had to wait some few minutes while a chubby youngster of six was inducted into the mysteries of holding his blood-alley in the most scientific and approved method.
“Well, my lad,” said Soft Sam at last, “what’s the trouble?”
Then Alec told him all he knew of Bertha’s disappearance; how eager he was to seek her out, and how helpless he felt himself to do so.