Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/24

6 which trembled violently, "you must not excite yourself this way."

"You do not know!" the girl cried excitedly. "I see it in your face. Dr. Reiland, father did not come home last night! He sent no word."

Reiland's face went blank. No one knew better than he how great was the break in Dr. Lawrie's habits that this fact implied, for the man was his dearest friend. Dr. Lawrie had been treasurer of the university twenty years, and in that time only three events—his marriage, the birth of his daughter, and his wife's death—had been allowed to interfere with the stern and rigorous routine into which he had welded his lonely life. So Reiland paled, and drew the trembling girl toward him.

"When did you see him last, Miss Lawrie?" Trant asked gently.

"Dr. Reiland, last night he went to his university office to work," she replied, as though the older man had spoken. "Sunday night. It was very unusual. All day he had acted so strangely. He looked so tired, and he has not come back. I am on my way there now to see—if—I can find him."

"We will go with you," Trant said quickly, as the girl helplessly broke off. "Harrison, if he is there so early, can tell us what has called your father away. There is not one chance in a thousand, Miss Lawrie, that anything has happened to him."

"Trant is right, my dear." Reiland had recovered himself, and looked up at University Hall in front of them with its fifty windows on the east glimmering like great eyes in the early morning sun. Only, on