I am just in receipt of your telegram and have answered it as requested. Alice’s long silence has for some time been a source of worry and alarm – the more so as no reason was given for it. This very day I had intended writing you to seek an explanation of her protracted silence and now ‘tis of her disappearance I must seek the cause.
It is wholly inexplicable to me; then her silence & now her going away. It is this ignorance as to the cause of her going that ties my hands and prevents my looking for her. Had she been ill, or is it owing to some trouble? The doubt and the hazarding of a hundred things is torture to me.
Where would she be likely to go? Holyoke? Some friends in Kingston? If not there, then home or Providence? I have sent to Providence and anxiously await word. I haven’t a doubt that you have written me explaining all and that I shall shortly know all. In abiding such knowledge, I await and pray the mercy of God.