Those summer days from July until September had been full of suspense and sorrow to the Rodneys. Each day had been full of disappointment and harrowing suspense. Each day had only added to the impenetrable mystery that hung around the fate of the lost daughter. The New York detective, baffled for once in his life, had given up the case and returned to New York. In all his expeditions, in all his search, he had failed to find the house with the marble steps, the house that held the mysterious blue-and-white room where the beautiful wounded girl was hidden away. Mr. Lane was moody and irritable over his failure. He had conscientiously tried to succeed in finding Aline, and he could not understand why he had failed. After the fashion of many other unsuccessful people he sought some one else to lay the blame upon, and Dr. Anthony’s broad shoulders were selected for that purpose. Mr. Lane sarcastically denied the existence of the blue room, the masked villain, and the wounded girl. He did not hesitate to declare that Dr. Anthony had dreamed the whole thing. Dr. Anthony was not shaken in his convictions by the great detective’s incredulity. But he was very good-natured. He admitted that he had told a startling tale. He gave any one who chose full liberty to disbelieve it. For himself he was puzzled, vexed, chagrined at his own self, for he had made some private excursions on his own account and he had failed as ignominiously as Mr. Lane in finding the mysterious house and the mysterious maiden. It chagrined him to think that he had been so cleverly blinded, but he never once subscribed to the detective’s theory that he had been fooled by an hallucination of the brain. “My imagination is not so brilliant as you would give me credit for,” he said, laughing. “A poet’s brain might produce such a vision of peerless beauty off-hand, but not that of a prosaic physician. It was not a dream, it was not an hallucination, it was a strange reality. I shall assert that always, the whole world to the contrary notwithstanding.” But although the great detective had grown incredulous over the story, the Rodneys had not. They placed the most implicit faith in the doctor. He remained their valued friend, and Chester saw more of him in those days than Maywood. All his spare time, which did not really amount to much, since he had a large and steadily increasing practice, was spent at the little cottage home that nestled under the towers of Delaney House--the great house of the town. Through those troublesome days and nights he and Effie were learning the first tenses of that old, old lesson ever new--to love.