The most alert detectives of Washington and New York were completely baffled, though neither time nor money was spared in the quest.
Mrs. Winans had taken to her bed, a weak, nervous, weeping woman, and the physician declared that she would never rise from it again unless her daughter were soon restored. Her husband looked like a man whose mind might go wrong at any moment. Ethel, who had been sullenly indifferent at first, and secretly exultant at her sister's strait, began to get over her first anger, and missing the sunshine from the house prayed God to pardon her mad jealousy and restore her little sister to their yearning hearts.
"And let Lord Chester love her if he will, for if he can turn so easily from one to another he is not worth the winning," she thought with bitter pride.
She did not see him much in those days, but she knew that he was often with her father, and that he was eager to join in and forward every plan for finding Precious.
"I am forgotten already; but let him go, he is nothing to me," she said to herself with jealous pride, trying to cheat her own aching heart.
Suddenly her brother, Earle, who had been abroad, came home, and his grief and horror at the fate of Little Blue Eyes, as he had loved to call his younger sister, were most intense.
Ethel could not resist one bitter fling.
"Now that your idol is gone, perhaps you will be able to remember sometimes that you have another sister," she cried bitterly.
Earle, who was dark and handsome and impetuous, like his father, turned on her a glance of displeasure.