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.

There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison
Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had
been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her
father had not been the same since.