for his
sake he knew, because he had told her he could endure things no longer.
She had taken him at his word and vanished utterly. For all her
gentleness and docility Ruth had tremendous fortitude. She had taken this
hard, rash step alone in the dark for love's sake, just as she was ready
that unforgettable night to take that rasher step with him to marriage or
something less than marriage had he permitted it. She would have
preferred to marry him, not to bother with abstractions of right and
wrong, to take happiness as it offered but since he would not have it so
she had lost herself.

Despair, remorse, anxiety, loneliness held him-in thrall while he roamed
the streets of the old city, almost hopeless now of finding her but still
doggedly persistent in his search. Another man under such a strain of
mind and body would have gone on a stupendous thought drowning carouse.
Larry Holiday had no such refuge in his misery. He took it straight
without recourse to anaesthetic of any sort. And on the fourth day when
he had been about to give up in defeat and go home to the Hill to wait
for word of Ruth a crack of light dawned.

Chancing to be strolling absent mindedly across the Gardens he ran into a
college classmate of his, one Gary Eldridge, who shook his hand with
crushing grip and announced that it was a funny thing Larry's bobbing up
like that because he had been hearing the latter's name pretty
consecutively all the previous afternoon on the lips of the daintiest
little blonde beauty it had been his luck to behold in many a moon, a
regular Greuze girl in fact, eyes and all.

Naturally there was no escape for Eldridge after that. Larry Holiday
grabbed him firmly and demanded to know if he had seen Ruth Annersley and
if he had and knew where she was to tell him everything quick. It was
important.

Considering Larry Holiday's haggard face and tense voice Eldridge
admitted the importance and spun his yarn. No, he did not know where Ruth
Annersley was nor if the Greuze girl was Ruth Annersley at all. He did
know the person he meant was in the possession of the famous Farringdon
pearls, a fact immensely interesting to Fitch and Larrabee, the jewelers
in whose employ he was.

"Your Ruth Annersley or Farringdon or whoever she is brought the pearls
in to our place yesterday to have them appraised. You can bet we sat up
and took notice. We didn't know they had left Australia but here they
were right under our noses absolute