The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

"But that's just what she wouldn't do! What she couldn't do! Why, she couldn't in her right mind walk off and leave her daughter!"

"Well," said Ray imperturbably, "that's just what fills newspapers—people doing what they couldn't and wouldn't."

So Wardwell saw that Jim Ray was ready to give up. And he knew that when Ray gave up a matter it meant that the resources of newspaper tracing had been exhausted. To himself, he was willing to admit that Ray must be right. Rose Wilding, it seemed, must have gone out of the city in a quiet, commonplace way. But, walking the streets at Augusta's side, watching that tense, listening look upon her face, seeing her evidently straining for a sight or a voice that she could not quite get, he was again ready to believe with Augusta that Rose Wilding was near, that Augusta would find her.

There were days now when Augusta walked, as it seemed, aimlessly. There were no more definite places to be visited. She walked, Wardwell, with a dull pain of helplessness, dogged and uncomplaining at her side, through lower Fifth Avenue and University Place at the noon time when the thousands of women and girls spilled out from loft buildings and swarmed the sidewalks. Evening found her watching the cross streets from Broome to Fourteenth Street, searching excitedly the myriad faces of the crowds that move eastward to that world wonder of human hives, the great East Side.

One half of working Manhattan rides jammed, complaining, but submissive, to its wide flung homes. The other half walks, hurrying, stooping away from the setting sun, into that unexplored, uncounted medley of crowded tenements which lies beyond Second Avenue. It was the faces of these hurrying, jostling thousands that Augusta scanned desperately in the falling darkness of the cold November evenings. Until it was long past dark and the streams of people had begun to fail, they walked and watched.

But Wardwell, watching the girl, the weary, sharply cut look in her face, the pinched, thinning lines of her slender body as she walked home beside him, decided that this must stop. There could be but one end of it for the high strung, over-sensitized mind of the girl.

There was no one to whom he could appeal as having authority. So far as he had learned in the year which he had lived in Mrs. Wilding's house, she had no relatives. But some one must soon take a way of stopping Augusta from this hopeless, unending search.

"We both know it's doing no good, Augusta. And you're breaking yourself down," he reasoned with her one morning, when three weeks of looking had given not the slightest clue to the whereabouts of her mother. "She will come back somehow, I am sure. And she mustn't come to find you a wreck. She'll be needing your care. Don't you think I'm right, little girl?"

"Of course, you're right, Mr. Jimmie. You're always right, now. And you've been so good to me. But I can't stop. I can't stop! She's getting farther and farther from me all the time, I must follow until I find her."

"But, child dear, you've done all that's within human power. Now we can only wait and hope." Jimmie was now the sobered gentleman, the tried and patient servitor always at her side. Neither of them knew how close to each other in sympathy and understanding they had come in these weeks. They had, in truth, been living in a world almost all by themselves with their search. The girl was ready to listen, to believe, to trust; but she could not promise obedience. "I'll stay in today, if I can," she promised. "But, if I hear her calling—"