And this lover was just the
missing link not to be found anywhere. Others said she had drowned
herself; but here, again, Why? Young girls do not give up their precious
freight of hope in love and present joy in youth for a trifling ailment
or a temporary annoyance. And nothing worse than either could have
befallen Leam, said the reasoners, putting their little twos and twos
together and totting up the items with the serene accuracy of spiritual
arithmeticians, dealing with human emotion as if it was a sum in long
division which any schoolboy could calculate.
Edgar Harrowby, however, who came forward manfully enough to say when
and where--if not how--he had last seen Miss Dundas, leant to the side
of the believers in suicide, and on his own responsibility ordered the
Broad to be dragged. Which looked ugly, said a few of the rasher spirits
in the village, cherishing suspicion of their betters as the birthright
which had never had a chance of being bartered for a mess of pottage;
while the more contemptuous, critical after the event, gave it as their
opinion that the major had a bee in his bonnet somewhere, for what
gentleman in his seven sane senses would have looked for such a mare's
nest as Miss Leam Dundas lying among the bulrushes of the Broad? Drowned
herself? No: it was no drowning of herself that had come to little miss,
be sure of that.
What, however, had come to her no one knew. The fact only was certain:
she had gone, and no one had met her coming or seen her going, and for
all trace left she might as well have melted into air like one of the
fairy women of romance.
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