Miss Silver smiled.

“My dear Frank, you really do talk very great nonsense.”

He took another sandwich and said,

“I wonder how many of the missing people whose husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and cousins and aunts come clamouring to Scotland Yard are really lost?”

Miss Silver was filling her own cup. She said in a noncommittal tone,

“I suppose there are statistics.”

“I don’t mean that sort of thing. I mean, how many of them cut loose because they have got to the point where they feel they can’t go on any longer? The husband has had one girl friend too many, or got drunk just once too often. The wife has nagged until the man thinks he had better get out before he does her in. The boy or the girl just can’t stand being asked all the time, ‘Where did you go-what did you do-whom did you see?’ The routine of the shop, or the office, or the factory just gets them where they feel they are going to smash things up unless they clear out. Statistics only give you the facts-lost, stolen, or strayed-so many human cattle. They don’t give you the reasons behind the facts.”

Miss Silver gave a gentle meditative cough.

“Loss of memory is too often advanced as an explanation to be a very credible one. That there are such cases, I do not doubt, and they must, I fear, be the cause of a great deal of suffering- the sudden shock of disappearance, the continued strain, the anguish of longing so beautifully expressed by Lord Tennyson in two of his best known xlines-‘Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.’ But it is only too easy an explanation when a missing person has been traced and desires to avoid the social and domestic consequences of a voluntary disappearance.”