Good-night,
gentlemen. I wish you the best of success."
"Do you think he could have kept up the acquaintance secretly?" I
asked Craig as we walked up the avenue after this baffling interview.
"Could he have cast her off when he found that in spite of her
parents' protests she was still in his power?"
"It's impossible to say what a man of Dudley Lawton's type could do,"
mused Kennedy, "for the simple reason that he himself doesn't know
until he has to do it. Until we have more facts, anything is both
possible and probable."
There was nothing more that could be done that night, though after
our walk we sat up for an hour or two discussing probabilities. It
did not take me long to reach the end of my imagination and give up
the case, but Kennedy continued to revolve the matter in his mind,
looking at it from every angle and calling upon all the vast store
of information that he had treasured up in that marvellous brain of
his, ready to be called on almost as if his mind were card-indexed.
Murders, suicides, robberies, and burglaries are, after all, pretty
easily explained," he remarked, after a long period of silence on
my part, "but the sudden disappearance of people out of the crowded
city into nowhere is something that is much harder to explain.
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