Justly or unjustly, a good many practical detectives came after a time to the opinion that the case demanded a masculinizing of the familiar adage into _cherchez l’homme_. More seasoned officers inclined to the idea that there must have been some man, possibly one whose identity had been successfully concealed by the distraught girl. Again, as is common in such cases, there was the very general feeling that Miss Arnold’s family knew a good deal more than had been revealed either to the police or the public, and there was something about the long delay in reporting the case and the subsequent guarded attitude of the girl’s relatives that seemed to confirm this perhaps idle suspicion. The trouble with a great many of the theories evolved in the first months following the disappearance of Dorothy Arnold, was that they fitted only a part of the facts and probabilities. After all, here was an intricate and baffling situation, involving a person who, because of position, antecedents, and social situation, might be expected to act in a conventional manner. Accordingly, any explanation that fitted the physical facts and was still characterized by extraordinary details might reasonably be discarded. It was several years before the girl’s father finally declared his belief in her death, and it is a fact that a sum of not less than a hundred thousand dollars was expended, first and last, in running down all sorts of rumors and clews. The search extended to England, Italy, France, Switzerland, Canada--even to the Far East and Australia. But all trails led to vacancy, and all speculations were at length empty. No dimmest trace of the girl was ever found, and no genuinely satisfactory explanation of the strange story has ever been put forward. It is true there have been, at times in the intervening dozen or more years, rumors of a solution. Persons more or less closely connected with the official investigation have on several occasions been reported as voicing the opinion that the Arnold family was in possession of the facts, but denials have followed every such declaration. On April 8, 1921, for instance, Captain John H. Ayers, in charge of the Missing Persons Bureau of the New York Police Department, told an audience at the High School of Commerce that the fate of Miss Arnold had at that time been known to the police for many months, and that the case was regarded as closed. This pronouncement received the widest publicity in the New York and other American newspapers, but Captain Ayers’ statement was immediately and vigorously controverted by John S. Keith, the personal attorney of the girl’s father, who declared that the police official had told a “damned lie,” and that the mystery was as deep as ever it had been. The police chiefs later issued interviews full of dubiety and qualifications, the general tenor being that Captain Ayers had spoken without sufficient knowledge of the facts.