For Womans Love | Page 8

he shut up the house and went to his room. No
one discovered that Mr. Rothsay was missing until this morning. When
the inaugural committee came two hours ago, the servants told them all
that I have just told you."
"Who was the last visitor? He might throw some light upon this dark,
evil subject. Who was he?" abruptly demanded Aaron Rockharrt.
"I do not know. No one seems to know. Jasper says he never saw him
before, nor ever heard his name."
"Couldn't he see it on his card?"
"Jasper cannot read, you must remember."
"Where is that card? Let me see it!"
"It cannot be found."
"Conspiracy! Treason! Murder!" interrupted Aaron Rockharrt. "The
governor-elect has been decoyed away from the house by that last
caller, and has been murdered! And the people in the house may not be
as innocent or ignorant as they pretend to be. I will go out and take
counsel with the committee," he said, and he turned and strode out of
the drawing room.
When he reached the hall, however, he found that the officials had gone
to pursue their search for the missing man elsewhere. The men of his

own party were nowhere to be seen. The porter, Jasper, was the only
occupant of the hall, and Aaron Rockharrt opened the hall door and
walked out. The military and civil escort were still on parade before the
house, waiting for the governor-elect.
Mr. Rockharrt's carriage was standing before the door. He entered it
and ordered the coachman to drive to police headquarters.
The hour for the inauguration of the new governor was approaching.
The procession to the State house should have been in motion by this
time. The people on the sidewalks, at the doors and windows, on the
balconies, and on the roofs, all along the line of march, were beginning
to be weary of waiting.
The officials who had the ceremonies of the occasion in hand waited
until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then, as the governor-elect was
nowhere to be found, as the necessity was imminent, the inaugural
procession was ordered to begin its march.
"Where is he? Where is Rothsay?" demanded the spectators one of the
other.
No one knew. No one had seen him. No one could, therefore, answer.
When the procession reached the State house, the lieutenant-governor,
Kennelm Kennedy, was sworn in, and the military companies and the
civic societies and the spectators all dispersed.
But where was the governor? That was the question of the hour. Why
had he not been inaugurated? was asked by everybody of everybody
else. The secret of his total and unexplained disappearance had not,
indeed, been closely kept. His intimate friends, his household servants
and the public officials knew it, but the general public did not.
The next morning the news came out, and the papers had sensational
head-lines and long accounts of the sudden and mysterious
disappearance of the governor-elect on the eve of his inauguration and
of a bridegroom on the evening of his wedding day.

Also there were rewards offered for any intelligence of Regulas
Rothsay, living or dead, and for the identification of the unknown
visitor who was supposed to have been the last to have seen him on the
night of his disappearance.
Days passed, and nothing came in answer to the advertisements. The
public at length reached in theory this conclusion: that the
governor-elect had been decoyed from the house by his latest visitor,
and had been secretly murdered in some remote quarter.
The Rockharrts did not return to Rockhold, but remained in town
through all the heat of that hot summer, because Aaron Rockharrt
thought he could best pursue his investigations on the scene of the
mystery. But he sent his sons to North End to look after the works.
Corona would see no one save the members of her own family. She
kept her room, and grieved without ceasing. On the ninth day after the
disappearance of her lover-husband she made an effort and came down
into the drawing room, to please the gentle old grandmother.
She sat there with the old lady, reading to her, until Mrs. Rockharrt was
called out by her tyrant to get something, it might be a book or a paper,
a cigar or a pipe, that he himself or a servant might have got just as
well, except that Aaron Rockharrt liked to have the ladies of his family
wait upon him.
What happened during the hour of the old lady's absence from the
drawing room no one knew, but when she returned she found her
granddaughter in a swoon on the carpet. In great alarm she called the
servants to her assistance. The unconscious girl was laid upon a sofa,
and all means were taken to