“To convict Judson Clark of the murder of Howard Lucas is to convict a probably or at least possibly innocent man.  To convict Richard Livingstone of that crime is to convict a different man, innocent of the crime, innocent of its memory, innocent of any single impulse to lift his hand against a law of God or the state.”

XXXII

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.

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.