“Poor fellow!” the lawyer sighed, as he folded the letter after reading it; “it is a hard case. It is a most trying case, and no one can tell how it will end,” he mused, “else, with her resolution and natural keenness, it seems as if she must have found some way of giving us a hint of her whereabouts if she is detained anywhere against her will.”
But he could only telegraph to Earle: “No clew has yet been discovered.”
And the weary lover resumed his sad quest by himself.
But poor, frail humanity cannot endure everything; there is a point beyond which tired nature refuses to go, and at last, worn almost to a shadow, Earle felt that he must do something to recruit his strength, or he would give out entirely. A fever seemed to be burning in his veins, drying his blood and parching his skin; his appetite failed him, his strength was leaving him, and he grew so nervous and irritable that the slightest noise startled him painfully, the least opposition or disappointment tried him almost beyond endurance.
“I am going to be sick,” he said one day, when he was nearly prostrated, and looking at his thin, trembling hands. “This anxiety and ceaseless search are fast wearing me out. I must rest, or I shall die, and who then will find my Editha?”
Longing for the sight of some familiar face, and hoping that Mr. Felton might by this time be able to give him a “drop of comfort,” he returned with all speed to the city whence he had started.
Arriving in the evening, some unaccountable repugnance to repairing to the hotel where he usually stopped, and where he had before spent so many restless, miserable nights, seized him, and calling a coach, he gave the name of a smaller, but no less respectable house, located in a quiet street, and was driven thither.
He sought the clerk and asked for a room.
As it happened, the hotel that week was overflowing with transient visitors, and at first the clerk told him that there was not a room to be had in the house.
“You must manage some way to accommodate me, for I am too weary and ill to move another step,” Earle said; and indeed his looks did not belie his words.