"What is it?" cried Edna. "You've got news! What is it?"
"No. Not any news of _his_ whereabouts."
"What of, then? It's in that paper."
She seized the yellow journal, and threw her glance from headline to
headline. She found the story, and read it through, aloud, at a rate of
utterance that would have staggered the swiftest shorthand writer.
"Well! What do you think of _that_?" she said, and stopped to take
breath.
"Do you think it is true?" asked Florence.
"There is some reason to believe it is!" replied Larcher, awkwardly.
Florence rose, in great excitement. "Then this affair _must_ be cleared
up!" she cried. "For don't you see? He may have been robbed--waylaid for
the money--made away with! God knows what else can have happened! The
newspaper hints that he ran away with the money. I'll never believe that.
It must be cleared up--I tell you it _must_!"
Edna tried to soothe the agitated girl, and looked sorrowfully at
Larcher, who could only deplore in silence his inability to solve the
mystery.
CHAPTER IX.
MR. BUD'S DARK HALLWAY
A month passed, and it was not cleared up. Larcher became hopeless of
ever having sight or word of Murray Davenport again. For himself, he
missed the man; for the man, assuming a tragic fate behind the mystery,
he had pity; but his sorrow was keenest for Miss Kenby. No description,
nothing but experience, can inform the reader what was her torment of
mind: to be so impatient of suspense as to cry out as she had done, and
yet perforce to wait hour after hour, day after day, week after week,
in the same unrelieved anxiety,--this prolonged torture is not to be told
in words.
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