The Breaking Point - Page 169/275

For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures. It knew

nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything. Doctor David was ill at

the seashore, and Dick was not with him. Harrison Miller, who was never

known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than the railway

station in one direction and the Sayre house in the other, had made a

trip East and was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who might or

might not know something, had joined the country club and sent for his

golf bag.

And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and a

determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.

The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge,

and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would

have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for

it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came

from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame

of mainly feminine anger.

But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.

Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and

angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.

"You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed."

"I can't act, Nina. I do go about."

And Nina had a softened moment.

"Don't think about him," she said. "He isn't sick, or he would have

had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his

papers and let us know."

"Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go

out there!"

That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. She

would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but she

had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had

refused her when he knew her purpose.

"We're following him up, little sister," he said. "Harrison Miller has

gone out, and there's enough talk as it is."

She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraid

of what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could

not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and were

not heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. It

seemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie and

even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.