Peter began by visiting the business schools in New York and finding out the names of the pupils registered there. Eleanor had clung firmly to her idea of becoming an editorial stenographer in some magazine office, no matter how hard he had worked to dissuade her. He felt almost certain she would follow out that purpose now. There was a fund in her name started some years before for the defraying of her college expenses. She would use that, he argued, to get herself started, even though she felt constrained to pay it back later on. He worked on this theory for some time, even making a trip to Boston in search for her in the stenography classes there, but nothing came of it. Among Eleanor's effects sent on from the school was a little red address book containing the names and addresses of many of her former schoolmates at Harmon. Peter wrote all the girls he remembered hearing her speak affectionately of, but not one of them was able to give him any news of her. He wrote to Colhassett to Albertina's aunt, who had served in the capacity of housekeeper to Eleanor's grandfather in his last days, and got in reply a pious letter from Albertina herself, who intimated that she had always suspected that Eleanor would come to some bad end, and that now she was highly soothed and gratified by the apparent fulfillment of her sinister prognostications. Later he tried private detectives, and, not content with their efforts, he followed them over the ground that they covered, searching through boarding houses, and public classes of all kinds; canvassing the editorial offices of the various magazines Eleanor had admired in the hope of discovering that she had applied for some small position there; following every clue that his imagination, and the acumen of the professionals in his service, could supply;--but his patient search was unrewarded. Eleanor had apparently vanished from the surface of the earth. The quest which had seemed to him so simple a matter when he first undertook it, now began to assume terrible and abortive proportions. It was unthinkable that one little slip of a girl untraveled and inexperienced should be able permanently to elude six determined and worldly adult New Yorkers, who were prepared to tax their resources to the utmost in the effort to find her,--but the fact remained that she was missing and continued to be missing, and the cruel month went by and brought them no news of her.