“Only to give her her chance, my son. Do not forget that. He could tell us what this means. I don’t care anything about his religion. Your Uncle Catty thinks he was a ghost even that day at Fort Fisher. I don’t. He is the Catholic Bishop of Alden. You’ll go to him to-morrow. He’ll tell you what it means.”
Bishop Joseph Winthrop of Alden was very much worried. For the third time he picked up and read a telegram from the Mother Superior of the Sacred Heart Convent at Athens, telling him that Ruth Lansing had left the convent that morning. But the third perusal of the message did not give him any more light on the matter than the two previous readings had done.
Why should the girl have gone away? What could have happened? Only the other day he had received a letter from her telling of her studies and her progress and of every new thing that was interesting her.
The Bishop thought of the lonely hill home where he had found her “Daddy Tom” dying, and where he had buried him on the hillside. Probably the girl would go back and try to live there. And he thought of the boy who had told 56 him of his love and that he wanted to keep Ruth there in the hills.
As he laid down the telegraph form, his secretary came to the door to tell him that the boy, Jeffrey Whiting, was in the waiting room asking to see him and refusing even to indicate the nature of his business to any one but the Bishop himself.
The Bishop was startled. He had understood that the young man was in Albany at school. Now he thought that he would get a very clear light upon Ruth Lansing’s disappearance.
“I came to you, sir,” said Jeffrey when the Bishop had given him a chair, “because you could tell us what to do.”
“You mean you and your––neighbour, Ruth Lansing?”
“Why, no, sir. What about her?” said Jeffrey quickly.