"Then what are we to do, Philip?" Lady Clive asks, piteously.
"We must oppose cunning to cunning," he answers, thoughtfully. "I shall return to London to-night and employ a skillful detective to shadow Leslie Noble's every footstep. You may be sure that the wretch has shut Lady Vera up in some obscure place in the hope of coercing her to yield to his wishes. Oh, Heaven, what anguish may not my darling be suffering now while I am powerless to rescue her!"
He walks distractedly up and down the floor, while tears of not unmanly grief gather in his troubled blue eyes.
"But, Philip, you forget that it was a woman who gave little Hal the note for Lady Vera," exclaims Sir Harry, unwilling to give up his theory of Mrs. Cleveland's handiwork in the abduction.
"Leslie Noble may have employed a woman as his tool in the affair, or he may have masqueraded in female attire himself, but I am sure that he is the guilty party," Colonel Lockhart answers, unshaken in his conviction, "But to satisfy your doubts, Sir Harry, we will have a watch set upon Mrs. Cleveland also. Nothing shall be left undone that can possibly tend to the rescue of Lady Vera from the power of her enemies."
He goes back to London that night.
Sir Harry Clive and his family follow him the next day. Two of the most skillful detectives in London are quietly set on the track of the supposed guilty parties. All London rings with the story of the daring abduction of the beautiful Countess of Fairvale.
At first public opinion was strong against the Clevelands and Mr. Noble, but when it is discovered that all three are living quietly but openly in London, a doubt falls on the first suspicions. An inexplicable mystery centers around that strange disappearance.
The sensation grows all the greater because, simultaneously with her disappearance, Raleigh Gilmore had entered suit against her for the title and estates of Fairvale, alleging that the true heiress had died in her early girlhood, and that the late earl had foisted an impostor on the public as his daughter.
But pending the return of the missing countess, the lawsuit lay in abeyance. Nothing could be done in her absence, and conjecture became rife over the strange circumstances of her abduction. Various opinions were advanced.