But when my stepmother died I felt sure I
should never, never get anything from Mr. Potter."
"But that old friend you spoke of, who wanted to upset the will?
Couldn't he have done anything?" Stephen asked.
"If he had lived, everything might have been different; but he was a
very old man, and he died of pneumonia soon after Saidee married Cassim
ben Halim. There was no one else to help. So from the time I was
fourteen, I knew that somehow I must make money. Without money I could
never hope to get to Algiers and find Saidee. Even though she had
disappeared from there, it seemed to me that Algiers would be the place
to begin my search. Don't you think so?"
"Yes, Algiers is the place to begin," Stephen echoed. "There ought to be
a way of tracking her. _Some one_ must know what became of a more or
less important man such as your brother-in-law seems to have been. It's
incredible that he should have been able to vanish without leaving any
trace."
"He must have left a trace, and though nobody else, so far, has found
it, I shall find it," said the girl. "I did what I could before. I asked
everybody to help; and when I got to New York last year, I used to go to
Cook's office, to inquire for people travelling to Algiers. Then, if I
met any, I would at once speak of my sister, and give them my address,
to let me know if they should discover anything. They always seemed
interested, and said they would really do their best, but they must have
failed, or else they forgot.
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