The notion that the girl might have been abducted and held for ransom was discarded at the end of a few weeks, when no word had come from possible kidnappers. The thought of a disagreement was dismissed, with the most emphatic denials coming from all the near and distant members of Miss Arnold’s family. The idea of an elopement also had to be discarded after a time, and so also the theory of an aphasic or amnesic attack. After the police finally insisted on the publication of the facts and the summoning of public aid, and after the various early hypotheses had one and all failed to stand the test of scrutiny and time, various more and more fantastic or improbable conjectures came into currency. One was that the girl might have been carried off to some distant American town or foreign port. Another was that some secret enemy, whose name and grievance her parents were loath to reveal, had made away with the young woman, or was holding her to satisfy his spite. The public excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted parents with every mail. Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable elements of the population came into vigorous play. Dorothy Arnold was reported from all parts of the country, and both the members of her family and numberless detectives were kept on the jump, running down the most absurd reports on the meager possibility that there might be a grain of truth in one of them. Soon there appeared the pathological liars and self-accusers, with whose peculiarities neither the police nor the public were then sufficiently acquainted. In more than a hundred cities--judging from a tabulation of the newspaper reports of that day--women of the most diverse ages and types came forward with the suggestion that they concealed within themselves the person of the missing heiress. Girls of fourteen made the claim and women of fifty. Such absurdities soon had the police in a state of weary skepticism, but the Arnold family and the newspaper-reading public were still upset by every fresh report. [Illustration: ~~ DOROTHY ARNOLD ~~] Naturally enough, the fact that a prominent young woman, enjoying the full protection of wealth and social distinction, could apparently be snatched away from the most populous quarter of a world city, struck terror to the hearts of many. If a Dorothy Arnold could be ravished from the familiar sidewalks of her home city, what fate waited for the obscure stranger? Was it not possible that some new and strange kind of criminal, equipped with diabolic cunning and actuated by impenetrable motives, was launched upon a campaign of woman stealing? Who was safe?