“And, Dr. Fenneben, I must speak of a matter I have never touched upon with you before. It was agreed between Dr. Wream and myself that I should become his nephew by marriage. I want to go to Miss Elinor and ask her to release me. You will pardon my frankness, for I cannot honorably continue in this relationship since I have restored the property to Victor Burleigh.”
“He thinks she will not care for him now,” Fenneben said to himself. Aloud he said:
“Have you ever spoken directly to Elinor on this matter?”
“N-no. It was an understanding between her and her uncle and between him and me,” Burgess replied.
“Well, I don't pretend to know girls very well, being a confirmed bachelor”—the Dean's eyes were smiling—“but my advice at this distance is not to ask Norrie to release you from what she herself has never yet bound you. I'll vouch for her peace of mind; and your sense of honor is fully vindicated now. To be equally frank with you, Burgess, now that Norrie is entirely in my charge, I have put this sort of thing for her absolutely into the after-commencement years. The best wife is not always the girl who wears a diamond ring through three or four years of her college life. I want my niece to be a girl now, not a bride-in-waiting.”
As Burgess rose to go his eye caught sight of the pigeons above the bend in the river.
“By the way, Doctor, have you ever found out anything about the woman who used to live in that deserted place up north?”
“Nothing yet,” Fenneben replied. “But, remember, I have not spent a week—that is, a sane week—in Lagonda Ledge since the night you, and she, and Saxon, and the dog saved my life. I shall take up her case soon.”
“She is gone away and nobody knows where, Saxon tells me,” Burgess said. “For many reasons I wish we could find her, but she has dropped out of sight.”
Lloyd Fenneben wondered at the sorrowful expression on the younger man's face when he said this.