“I don’t mean that. I mean, where is he? I want to see him very much.”
“You want to see him? He has vanished, and left no track. Is it nothing I can help you in?”
“No,” said she, looking very miserable. “I hoped you could have told me where to find him. Good-bye, and thank you.”
She departed, leaving the doctor sorely disturbed and bewildered. He stood watching her slight figure till it disappeared in the Vicarage garden, and then shrugging his shoulders, said, “Something wrong, somewhere. Evidently not a case for me to be trusted with. It’s about time Armstrong came home.”
Whereupon he walked over to the post office and dispatched the telegram which, as the reader knows, procured Tom Oliphant the unspeakable pleasure of a game of football on the following afternoon.
“Well,” said the tutor to his friend in the doctor’s parlour that evening, “what’s all this about?”
“That’s what I’m not likely to know myself,” said the doctor; and he narrated the circumstances of Miss Oliphant’s mysterious call.
“Humph!” said the tutor. “She wants to see him in his capacity of Robert Ratman, evidently, and not of Roger Ingleton, major.”
“So it seemed to me.”
“And you say she had just come from visiting her father at Maxfield?”