Not only the public and the newspapers, but Detective Chief McClusky were long occupied with this enigma. Barrow himself gave various specious explanations and finally refused to say more. Hints and bruits of all kinds were current. Many said that Arthur Clarke could furnish the answer if he would, an accusation which the harried father indignantly rejected. In the end the guilty trio went to prison, the Clarkes removed to Boston, the public interest flagged, and the mystery remained unsolved. VII DOROTHY ARNOLD On the afternoon of Monday, December 12, 1910, a young woman of the upper social world vanished from the pavement of Fifth Avenue. Not only did she disappear from the center of one of the busiest streets on earth, at the sunniest hour of a brilliant winter afternoon, with thousands within sight and reach, with men and women who knew her at every side, and with officers of the law thickly strewn about her path; but she went without discernible motives, without preparation, and, so far as the public has ever been permitted to read, without leaving the dimmest clew to her possible destination. These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery of the missing. It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan, regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some token of their premeditation. Similarly, it is a truism that, barring purposeful self-occultation, the departure of an adult human being from so crowded a thoroughfare can be set down only to abduction or to mnemonic aberration. Remembering that a crime must have its motivation, and that cases of amnesia almost always are marked by previous symptoms and by fairly early recovery, the recondite and baffling aspects of this affair become manifest; for there was never the least hint of a ransom demand, and the girl who vanished was conspicuous for rugged physical and mental health. Thus, to sum up the affair, a disappearance which had from the beginning no standing in rationality, being logically both impenetrable and irreconcilable, remains, at the end of nearly a score of years, as obstinate and perplexing as ever--publicly a gall to human curiosity, an impossible problem for reason and analytical power.