For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures. It knew nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything. Doctor David was ill at the seashore, and Dick was not with him. Harrison Miller, who was never known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than the railway station in one direction and the Sayre house in the other, had made a trip East and was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who might or might not know something, had joined the country club and sent for his golf bag.
And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and a determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.
The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame of mainly feminine anger.
But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.
Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.
“You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed.”
“I can't act, Nina. I do go about.”
And Nina had a softened moment.
“Don't think about him,” she said. “He isn't sick, or he would have had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his papers and let us know.”
“Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go out there!”