QUEST FOR LOST LOVER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21244, 27 January 1931, Page 16

QUEST FOR LOST LOVER.

DISFIGURED MAN DISAPPEARS. LOYALTY OF A SWEETHEART. Because he was self-conscious of terrible lace wounds received during the last few weeks of the war, an ex-captain in a Territorial infantry regiment cancelled his engagement with a pretty- Belfast girl and disappeared. Now, after 12 years, during which she has remained single, the soldier’s former fiancee is setting out for America in the hope of tracing his whereabouts. This dramatic echo of a war-time romance was revealed lately by the man’s widowed mother, Mrs Kenneth Clare. After her son disappeared she had a stroke, which left one side completely paralysed. But for Miss Ridgeway, the girl to whom he was engaged, she would probably have had to give up her home. “ She is a wonderful girl, and when my son John went away she came to live with me,’’ Mrs Clare said. “It is she who has really kept the home going for over 11 years. “It has always been Miss Ridgeway’s hope to go out and look for John, but lack of money prevented her doing so. Now she has been left a little money, which has made her practically independent, and she intends to go to America at once to see if John can be traced.” Advertisements have been inserted in American newspapers with a view to tracing the missing man, but to no purpose. Both Miss Ridgeway and his mother, however, are firm in their belief that he is alive in some remote part.