“Miss Rainforth,” said Ida, “I fear you have been laboring under a strange delusion. You evidently do not know that, almost from the moment of his arrival in New York, Mr. Ellison was a suitor for the hand of Miss Sanborn.”
“It is not so,” said Miss Rainforth. “He was entangled by her family, pursued and hunted by Elsie Sanborn herself.”
“In your last letter to Mr. Carter,” said Ida, “you hinted that a woman was at the bottom of the disappearance of Mr. Ellison.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Miss Rainforth, “and it is the Ladew woman. She was at the reception and she was in the house when he went away.”
“And you were, too,” said Ida.
“I was, and it was from the Ladew woman that I found out that he had run away. If she wasn’t at the bottom of it, how did she know of it when nobody else did?”
Ida now made up her mind that she had gotten at the bottom of Miss Rainforth’s connection with the matter.
She was certain that Miss Rainforth was in love with Ellison and had herself hoped to be Mrs. Ellison; that, possibly, there had been tender passages between herself and Ellison which had been interrupted by Ellison’s intrigue with Mrs. Ladew, and, escaping from that, he had not returned to Miss Rainforth, but had devoted himself to Miss Sanborn; and that, in her jealousy and disappointment, Miss Rainforth had first tried to break up the marriage and, secondly, punish Mrs. Ladew by directing Nick Carter’s suspicions to her.
Ida’s substantial gain had been knowledge of Ellison’s relations to a gang of sharpers in Philadelphia, of whom Lannigan undoubtedly was one. And she believed that nothing more of value was to be obtained from the young woman.
“You have been wise,” said Ida, “in being plain with me. We shall be able to protect your name and reputation. And that we will do.”