"Yes, Ethel is charming, but so was my little Precious. She was charming and winsome, too, my youngest born, my darling, the idol of my heart!" groaned the senator, completely overcome by his trouble.
Lord Chester began to feel an eager curiosity over the missing girl. Was she, indeed, as lovely and winsome as her father declared? She must be if her charms exceeded Ethel's.
He held out a sympathetic hand to the stricken father.
"General, pray command my services in this sad affair to assist you in all possible ways," he exclaimed cordially.
"Thank you, Lord Chester, for we must begin to follow up the clews at once. But my heart bleeds for my wife. I fear this shock will almost kill her. My lord, if you will order my carriage, I will send her home with Ethel, telling her that perhaps Precious has somehow found her way home. Not a word of the truth yet. It must be broken to her later, and very gently. She must think that I am still searching here, while in fact I shall be on the track of the kidnaper. Oh, Heavens every moment is an agony, until I find my child again!"
And later on, when his wife and daughter were gone, and he was rolling in a cab to the office of a great detective, he confided to the young Englishman a brief page from his romantic earlier life.
"My only son, Earle, who is at present in Europe, was kidnaped by a lunatic when he was an infant, and it was over four years before we recovered him. He was in my care at the time, and I was blamed for his loss. My wife had brain fever, and almost died, and the pensive shade on her face now was left there by that early grief. Think what it would be to her now to lose Precious in the same terrible fashion. She is a noble Christian woman, but I fear that she would curse me and never forgive me if our darling daughter should be lost like that while in my care. Oh, why was I so careless? Why did I not remember that there are always human wolves watching—for prey?"
Mrs. Winans sobbed bitterly all the way home from the ball, but Ethel was too angry to offer one word of comfort.
Her father's praise of Precious rankled like a poisoned arrow in her heart.
"The most beautiful girl he ever saw! How dared he say it? I wonder if Lord Chester would say so, too, if he saw her? Would he like her blue eyes better than my dark ones? Would he think her golden curls prettier than my raven tresses? Woe be to her if he did, for now he is almost my declared lover, and if she won him from me I should be tempted to take a terrible revenge on both," she thought bitterly, forgetting that the deadliest revenge often recoils on the hand that deals the blow.