One clew only was vouchsafed her puzzling mind:  Searle had actually gone to Glen at last, had been there at the hour of Van’s arrival, and had written Glen’s letter to herself.  Some encounter between the men had doubtless transpired, she thought, and Van had been poisoned against her.  What else could it mean, his coldness, his abrupt departure, after all that had been, and his stubborn silence since?

The letter from Glen had been wholly unsatisfactory.  Bostwick had written it, he said, at Glen’s dictation.  It echoed the phrases that Searle himself had employed so persistently, many of them grossly mendacious, as Beth was sufficiently aware.  Her effort had been futile, after all.  She was not at all certain as to Glen’s condition; she was wholly in the dark in all directions.

On the day succeeding the reservation rush she received the news at Mrs. Dick’s, not only that Van had lost his claim, and that McCoppet and Searle were its latest owners, but also that Van had run amuck that night after leaving herself.

Some vague, half-terrifying intuition that Searle was engaged in a lawless, retaliatory enterprise crept athwart her mind and rendered her intensely uneasy.  Her own considerable sum of money might even be involved in—­she could not fathom what.  Something that lay behind it all must doubtless explain Van’s extraordinary change.  It was maddening; she felt there must be something she could do—­there must be something!  She was not content to wait in utter helplessness for anything more to happen—­anything more that served to wreck human happiness, if not very life itself!

She felt, moreover, she had a right to know what it was affecting Van.  He had come unbidden into her life.  He had swept her away with his riotous love.  He had taught her new, almost frightening joys of existence.  He had drawn upon her very soul—­kissing into being a nature demanding love for love.  He had taken her all for himself, despite her real resistance.  She could not cease to love so quickly as he.  She had rights, acquired in surrender—­at least the right to know what evil thing had wrought its way upon him.

But fret as she might, and burn as she might, with impatience, love-created anger and resentment of some infamy, doubtless practiced on them both, there was nothing in the world she could do.

She wrote again to Glen and had the letter posted in the mail.  She asked for information.  Was he better?  Could he come to Goldite soon?  Had he met Mr. Van?  Had he understood that confession in her letter?  Had he really purchased a mine, with Searle, or had he, by some strange mischance, concerned himself with the others in taking the “Laughing Water” claim?

She explained that she was wholly in the dark, that worry was her only companion.  She begged him to come, if traveling were possible, and told of her effort to see him.

That Bostwick had opened and read her letter to Glen, suppressing that final page, together with sundry questions and references to himself, she could never have dreamed.  It is ignorance always that baffles, as we grope our way in the world.  And Beth had not yet entirely lost all trust in Bostwick himself.