Poor Lance had been strolling carelessly up and down with a care-worn, wretched look upon his handsome face. Time went very slowly with him now. He turned about and, shaking hands with his friend, walked on by his side.
"Is there any news?" he asked, his mind reverting instantly to the painful event which occupied all his waking thoughts.
"None," answered the banker, sadly. "Some of the sharpest detectives in the city are trying to trace it, but as yet there is not the faintest clew."
He sighed and Lancelot echoed the sigh. Both walked silently on. At length the banker signaled a car and, entering it, they became at once the cynosure of all the eyes within it. Their recent terrible affliction was so well known that sympathy shone on them from every eye. But little was said to them even by the friends they encountered. The mute trouble of their faces seemed to repel the mere trivialities of conversation, and no one wished to speak of the mournful tragedy whose impress was written so legibly on the faces of both the sufferers.
"You are looking very ill," Mrs. Vance said, in a gentle tone of sympathy, when the banker had left the guest in the drawing-room while he went up to see Ada, whose illness had not as yet taken any favorable turn.
"I am quite well, thank you," he answered, absently, and with an unconscious, heart-wrung sigh. He was looking about him sadly, seeing in fancy the graceful, girlish form that had so often flitted through this grand room. She saw the turn his mind had taken, and instantly diverted it to the present.
"Has anything been heard from our poor Lily yet?" she asked, in low, mournful tones.
"Nothing, nothing. Oh! Mrs. Vance, this suspense is very hard to bear," said he, impetuously, won by the gentle sympathy in her face and voice to an outburst he had not intended. "It is almost killing me!"
"Poor Lance," said she, in a broken voice; "your features show the traces of your great suffering. It is hard for us all to bear, but harder still for you."
Her delicate hand fluttered down upon his own with a pressure of mute sympathy, while she buried her face in her handkerchief, sobbing softly.