The nurse rushed down to the office. A search was instituted at once.
Every one in the office and halls was questioned. Only one elevator-man
remembered a person, dressed in black, going out of the nurses' side
door. He had thought it one of the probation nurses.
They searched the streets for several blocks around. It had been only a
few minutes, and the girl was weak. She could not have gone far! But no
Bonnie was found!
The evening mail came in and a letter with a Western postmark arrived
for Miss R.B. Brentwood. The nurse looked at it sadly. A letter for the
poor child! What hope and friendliness might it not contain! If it had
only come a couple of hours sooner!
Later that evening, when it was finally settled that the patient had
really escaped, the nurse went to the telephone.
Courtland was in Tennelly's room. They had been discussing woman
suffrage, some question that had come up in the political-science class
that day. Tennelly held that most women were too unbalanced to vote; you
never could tell what a woman would do next. She was swayed entirely by
her emotions, mainly two--love and hate; sometimes pride and
selfishness. _Always_ selfishness. Women were all selfish!
Courtland thought of the calm, true eyes of Mother Marshall and the
telegram that had come the day before. He held that all women were not
selfish. He said he knew _one_ woman who was not. All women were not
flighty and unbalanced nor swayed by their emotions. He knew two girls
whom he thought were not swayed by their emotions. Just then he was
called to the telephone.
The nurse's voice broke upon his absorption with a disturbing element:
"Mr. Courtland, this is the nurse from Good Samaritan Hospital. I
thought you ought to know that Miss Brentwood has disappeared! We have
searched everywhere, but can get no clue to her whereabouts. She wasn't
fit to go. She had fainted again--was unconscious a long time. She had a
very disturbing call from a young woman this afternoon, who mentioned
your name and got up to the room somehow without the usual formalities.
Of course I didn't know but she had the doctor's permission, and she
came right in. She brought a lot of dirty evening gowns and tried to
give them to my patient, and called her a working-girl; spoke of her
little dead brother as 'the kid,' and was very insulting. I thought
perhaps you would be able to give us a clue as to where the patient was.
She really was too weak to be out alone; and in this bitter cold! Her
jacket was very thin. She's just in the condition to get pneumonia. I'm
all broken up because I thought she was sound asleep. She left a little
note for me, with a pin she wanted me to keep, and five dollars to pay
for her room. You see she got the notion from what that girl said that
she was on charity in that room and she wouldn't stay. I thought you'd
want me to let you know!"
There was almost a sob in the nurse's voice as she ended. Courtland's
heart sank.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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