Why should she have strayed from home?  That was the question.  What possible reason could there have been, strong enough to impel a young and delicately-nurtured girl to run all the risks and dangers of a flight alone and unprotected?  Her friends evidently believed that she had not been run away with; there was not the ordinary element of an elopement in this case.

But Miss Ollivier had assured me she had no friends.  What did she mean by the word?  Here were persons evidently anxious to discover her place of concealment.  Were they friends? or could they by any chance be enemies?  This is not an age when enmity is very rampant.  For my own part, I had not an enemy in the world.  Why should this pretty, habitually-obedient, self-controlled girl have any?  Most probably it was one of those instances of bitter misunderstanding which sometimes arise in families, and which had driven her to the desperate step of seeking peace and quietness by flight.

Then what ought I to do with this advertisement, thrust, as it would seem, purposely under my notice?  If I had not wrapped up the parcel myself at Barbet’s, I should have missed seeing it; or if Barbet had picked up any other piece of paper, it would not have come under my eye.  A curious concatenation of very trivial circumstances had ended in putting into my hands a clew by which I could unravel all the mystery about my Sark patient.  What was I to do with the clew?

I might communicate at once with Messrs. Scott and Brown, giving them the information they had advertised for six months before, and receive a reply, stating that it was no longer valuable to them, or containing an acknowledgment of my claim to the fifty pounds reward.  I might sell my knowledge of Miss Ollivier for fifty pounds.  In doing so I might render her a great service, by restoring her to her proper sphere in society.  But the recollection of Tardif’s description of her as looking terrified and hunted recurred vividly to me.  The advertisement put her age as twenty-one.  I should not have judged her so old myself, especially since her hair had been cut short.  But if she was twenty-one, she was old enough to form plans and purposes for herself, and to choose, as far as she could, her own mode of living.  I was not prepared to deliver her up, until I knew something more of both sides of the question.

Settled—­that if I could see Messrs. Scot and Brown, and learn something about Miss Ollivier’s friends, I might be then able to decide whether I would betray her to them but I would not write.  Also, that I must see her again first, and once more urge her to have confidence in me.  If she would trust me with her secret, I would be as true to her as a friend as I meant to be true to Julia.

Having come to these conclusions, I cut the advertisement carefully out of the crumpled paper, and placed it in my pocket-book with portraits of my mother and Julia, Here were mementos of the three women I cared most for in the world:  my mother first, Julia second, and my mysterious patient third.