“‘No,’ answered Alberdina.
“‘None of the household?’”
Then he gave her orders to telegraph the Baron von Metz at an address in Dresden and sign it A. J. Mr. Campbell had failed to catch the telegram, although he distinctly heard the second telegram to a “Miss Phoebe Jones,” at an address in England. It said she was not to worry. He had been detained by illness. Twice he made the blundering maid repeat the telegram, and finally exhausted with the mental effort, dropped into unconsciousness.
Was it not strange and terrible to take up the thread of one’s life where it had been so ruthlessly snapped off some two decades ago?
Richard and Billie, seated on a rock out of hearing distance of the cabin, discussed the anomaly together.
“It’s like Rip Van Winkle,” Billie observed, “only worse because there have been so many inventions.”
“Yes, there are motor cars, for instance. They were only on trial then; and flying machines.”
“And hobble skirts,” added Billie with an inward laugh, remembering Nancy’s.
“It’s very interesting,” said Richard, “a good deal like missing the middle act of a drama.”
“Don’t you imagine that Phoebe’s father belonged to a noble family? Perhaps he was a younger son, and fell in love with a pretty English girl named Phoebe Jones. They eloped to America and hid themselves in the mountains, and the old Archduke or Prince or Baron who was the father perhaps gave it out that his son was insane. They always do that, you know.”