"It was Peter's engagement that was the last straw," Margaret said.

"The poor baby withered and shrank like a flower in the blast when I told her that."

"The d.a.m.ned hound--" Jimmie said feelingly and without apology. "Who's he engaged to anyway?"

"Eleanor says it's Beulah, and the more I think of it the more I think that she's probably right."

"That would be a nice mess, wouldn't it?" Gertrude suggested.

"Remember how frank we were with her about his probable lack of judgment, Margaret? I don't covet the sweet job of breaking it to either one of them."

Nevertheless she a.s.sisted Margaret to break it to them both late that same afternoon at Beulah's apartment.

"I'll find her," Peter said briefly. And in response to the halting explanation of her disappearance that Margaret and Gertrude had done their best to try to make plausible, despite its elliptical nature, he only said, "I don't see that it makes any difference why she's gone.

She's gone, that's the thing that's important. No matter how hard we try we can't really figure out her reason till we find her."

"Are you sure it's going to be so easy?" Gertrude asked. "I mean--finding her. She's a pretty determined little person when she makes up her mind. Eleanor's threats are to be taken seriously. She always makes good on them."

"I'll find her if she's anywhere in the world," Peter said. "I'll find her and bring her back."

Margaret put out her hand to him.

"I believe that you will," she said. "Find out the reason that she went away, too, Peter."

Beulah pulled Gertrude aside.

"It wasn't Peter, was it?" she asked piteously. "She had some one else on her mind, hadn't she?"

"She had something else on her mind," Gertrude answered gravely, "but she had Peter on her mind, too."

"She didn't--she couldn't have known about us--Peter and me. We--we haven't told any one."

"She guessed it, Beulah. She couldn't bear it. n.o.body's to blame. It's just one of G.o.d's most satirical mix-ups."

"I was to blame," Beulah said slowly. "I don't believe in shifting responsibility. I got her here in the first place and I've been instrumental in guiding her life ever since. Now, I've sacrificed her to my own happiness."

"It isn't so simple as that," Gertrude said; "the things we start going soon pa.s.s out of our hands. Somebody a good deal higher up has been directing Eleanor's affairs for a long time,--and ours too, for that matter."

"Don't worry, Beulah," Peter said, making his way to her side from the other corner of the room where he had been talking to Margaret. "You mustn't let this worry you. We've all got to be--soldiers now,--but we'll soon have her back again, I promise you."

"And I promise you," Beulah said chokingly, "that if you'll get her back again, I--I will be a soldier."

Peter began by visiting the business schools in New York and finding out the names of the pupils registered there. Eleanor had clung firmly to her idea of becoming an editorial stenographer in some magazine office, no matter how hard he had worked to dissuade her. He felt almost certain she would follow out that purpose now. There was a fund in her name started some years before for the defraying of her college expenses. She would use that, he argued, to get herself started, even though she felt constrained to pay it back later on. He worked on this theory for some time, even making a trip to Boston in search for her in the stenography cla.s.ses there, but nothing came of it.

Among Eleanor's effects sent on from the school was a little red address book containing the names and addresses of many of her former schoolmates at Harmon. Peter wrote all the girls he remembered hearing her speak affectionately of, but not one of them was able to give him any news of her. He wrote to Colha.s.sett to Albertina's aunt, who had served in the capacity of housekeeper to Eleanor's grandfather in his last days, and got in reply a pious letter from Albertina herself, who intimated that she had always suspected that Eleanor would come to some bad end, and that now she was highly soothed and gratified by the apparent fulfillment of her sinister prognostications.

Later he tried private detectives, and, not content with their efforts, he followed them over the ground that they covered, searching through boarding houses, and public cla.s.ses of all kinds; canva.s.sing the editorial offices of the various magazines Eleanor had admired in the hope of discovering that she had applied for some small position there; following every clue that his imagination, and the ac.u.men of the professionals in his service, could supply;--but his patient search was unrewarded. Eleanor had apparently vanished from the surface of the earth. The quest which had seemed to him so simple a matter when he first undertook it, now began to a.s.sume terrible and abortive proportions. It was unthinkable that one little slip of a girl untraveled and inexperienced should be able permanently to elude six determined and worldly adult New Yorkers, who were prepared to tax their resources to the utmost in the effort to find her,--but the fact remained that she was missing and continued to be missing, and the cruel month went by and brought them no news of her.

The six guardians took their trouble hard. Apart from the emotions that had been precipitated by her developing charms, they loved her dearly as the child they had taken to their hearts and bestowed all their young enthusiasm and energy and tenderness upon. She was the living clay, as Gertrude had said so many years before, that they had molded as nearly as possible to their hearts' desire. They loved her for herself, but one and all they loved her for what they had made of her--an exquisite, lovely young creature, at ease in a world that might so easily have crushed her utterly if they had not intervened for her.

They kept up the search unremittingly, following false leads and meeting with heartbreaking discouragements and disappointments. Only Margaret had any sense of peace about her.

"I'm sure she's all right," she said; "I feel it. It's hard having her gone, but I'm not afraid for her. She'll work it out better than we could help her to. It's a beautiful thing to be young and strong and free, and she'll get the beauty out of it."

"I think perhaps you're right, Margaret," David said. "You almost always are. It's the bread and b.u.t.ter end of the problem that worries me."

Margaret smiled at him quaintly.

"The Lord provides," she said. "He'll provide for our ewe lamb, I'm sure."

"You speak as if you had it on direct authority."

"I think perhaps I have," she said gravely.

Jimmie and Gertrude grew closer together as the weeks pa.s.sed, and the strain of their fruitless quest continued. One day Jimmie showed her the letter that Eleanor had written him.

"Sweet, isn't she?" he said, as Gertrude returned it to him, smiling through her tears.

"She's a darling," Gertrude said fervently. "Did she hurt you so much, Jimmie dear?"

"I wanted her," Jimmie answered slowly, "but I think it was because I thought she was mine,--that I could make her mine. When I found she was Peter's,--had been Peter's all the time, the thought somehow cured me. She was dead right, you know. I made it up out of the stuff that dreams are made of. G.o.d knows I love her, but--but that personal thing has gone out of it. She's my little lost child,--or my sister. A man wants his own to be his own, Gertrude."

"Yes, I know."

"My--my real trouble is that I'm at sea again. I thought that I cared,--that I was anch.o.r.ed for good. It's the drifting that plays the deuce with me. If the thought of that sweet child and the grief at her loss can't hold me, what can? What hope is there for me?"

"I don't know," Gertrude laughed.

"Don't laugh at me. You've always been on to me, Gertrude, too much so to have any respect for me, I guess. You've got your work," he waved his arm at the huge cast under the shadow of which they were sitting, "and all this. You can put all your human longings into it. I'm a poor rudderless creature without any hope or direction." He buried his face in his hands. "You don't know it," he said, with an effort to conceal the fact that his shoulders were shaking, "but you see before you a human soul in the actual process of dissolution."

Gertrude crossed her studio floor to kneel down beside him. She drew the boyish head, rumpled into an irresistible state of curliness, to her breast.

"Put it here where it belongs," she said softly.

"Do you mean it?" he whispered. "Sure thing? Hope to die? Cross your heart?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Praise the Lord."

"I snitched him," Gertrude confided to Margaret some days later,--her whole being radiant and transfigured with happiness. "You snitch David."

CHAPTER XXIII

THE YOUNG NURSE