Controlling his emotions as well as he could, he began:
“Your letter filled me with alarm. What can have happened to my daughter?”
“Our daughter,” she said, gently correcting him, with a sad smile, adding: “It was very bold in me to send for you, Leon, but I thought that in this matter we might act together.”
“Leon”—she called him Leon as of old—and it made the blood rush to his face, and his whole frame tremble with agitation, the old love rising in him like a flood.
He answered gravely:
“This is very kind in you.”
And for a moment they were very silent, the novelty of the position bearing painfully on both their hearts—“so near and yet so far.”
Little by little they gained self-possession and talked seriously on the subject so near to their hearts—the mysterious disappearance of their daughter from the hour when she had been turned away from her mother’s house by Cora.
She told him all she knew, and he could not conceal his alarm.
“It is the strangest thing in the world that she did not return to Mrs. Doyle, the only friend she had in New York!” he exclaimed.