The official left the room a moment; then he returned with a colleague.

This man, the chief of the detective force, proceeded with considerable tact to examine and cross-examine both Pargeter and Vanderlyn concerning the way in which Mrs. Pargeter had spent the earlier part of the previous day--that is, the day on which she had disappeared.

The man's manner--that of scenting a secret, of suspecting that more lay behind the matter than was admitted by the husband and friend of the woman they were seeking--produced a disagreeable impression on Vanderlyn. For the first time he felt himself faced by a vague, but none the less real, danger, and the feeling braced him.

"Then Monsieur did not see this lady yesterday at all?"

"No," said Vanderlyn, shortly; "the last time I saw Mrs. Pargeter in her house was the day before yesterday, when I called on her about five o'clock."

"Monsieur is not related to the lady," asked the detective quietly.

"No," said Vanderlyn again. "But I am an old friend of both Mr. and Mrs.

Pargeter, and that is why he asked me to accompany him here to-day."

"Then when and how did you yourself first learn of Madame Pargeter's disappearance?" asked the other suddenly.

Vanderlyn hesitated; for a moment his tired brain refused to act--when was he supposed to have heard of Peggy's disappearance? He looked helplessly at Pargeter, then said suddenly, "I met my friend at L'Union last night."

"Then you already knew of Madame's disappearance last night?" said the official eagerly.

"No! no!" exclaimed Pargeter crossly. "Of course we didn't know then! We didn't know till just now--that is, till this morning, when Mr.

Vanderlyn went out to Madame de Lera's villa to fetch my wife. It was Madame de Lera who told us that she had never arrived at Marly-le-Roi.

She disappeared yesterday afternoon, but we did not know it till this morning."

"May I ask you, gentlemen, to wait for a moment while I make certain enquiries?" observed the detective politely. "You have not yet been shown our daily report concerning the stations of Paris--is it not possible that Madame Pargeter may have met with some accident at the Gare St. Lazare, if, as I understand, she was going to her friend by train, and not by automobile?"

Pargeter seemed struck by the notion. He turned to Vanderlyn. "I can't make out," he said in a puzzled tone, "why Peggy thought of going to Marly-le-Roi by train when she might so easily have gone in her new motor."

"Peggy gave her man a week's holiday," said Vanderlyn shortly. "You know, Tom, that he wanted to go to his own home, somewhere in Normandy."

"Yes, yes. Of course! But still she might have gone out in the big car--I wasn't using it yesterday."

The detective came back at the end of what seemed to both Vanderlyn and Pargeter a very long quarter of an hour.

"No incident of any sort took place last night at the Gare St. Lazare,"

he said briefly. "We shall now inst.i.tute a thorough enquiry among our agents; every police-station in Paris shall be notified of the fact that Madame Pargeter is missing; and I shall almost certainly be able to send you some kind of news of her by four o'clock this afternoon. In any case you can trust us to do our best. Will Monsieur be returning to the Avenue du Bois"--he addressed Vanderlyn, "or is Monsieur going to his own flat in the Rue de Rivoli?"

Vanderlyn looked up quickly. His private address was not printed on the card he had shown; still it was reasonable enough that this man should have looked up his own as well as Pargeter's address and should have wished to verify their statements as far as was possible.

"Of course, Grid, you will come home with me!" exclaimed Pargeter fretfully.

"Then, Messieurs, I will send any news I get straight to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne."

As they walked through the long corridors, it became clear that whatever anxiety Pargeter had suffered had dropped off him, for the moment, like a cloak. "I shouldn't be surprised if I can get off to-night after all,"

he said cheerfully, "you heard what he said? This afternoon we shall certainly have news of her."

Then, as they emerged into the hall, and he caught sight of his motor-car and of its occupant, "For G.o.d's sake, Grid," he said frowning, "let's get rid of that old woman! There she sits, staring like a bird of prey; it's enough to give one the hump! Ask her if she would like us to drive her to her Paris house. If she wants to go back to the country, I'll send her in Peggy's Limousine--oh! I forgot, that's not available, is it? Never mind, she can go on in this car. Say we'll send her news as soon as we hear any!"

But Vanderlyn soon ascertained that Madame de Lera had no wish to go back to Marly-le-Roi. She accepted his brief account of what had occurred at the Prefecture of Police without comment, and, refusing Pargeter's offer to drive her to her house in the Faubourg St. Germain, asked only to be set down at the nearest telegraph-station.

Dreary hours followed--hours later remembered with special horror and shrinking by Laurence Vanderlyn. They were spent by the two ill-a.s.sorted friends in Tom Pargeter's own room on the ground-floor of the villa.

It was a long, well-lighted room, lined with the huge, splendidly decorative posters, signed Cheret and Mucha, which were then just being collected by those who admired that type of flamboyant art. In this apartment Peggy, as Vanderlyn was well aware, never put her feet, for it was there that her husband received his trainer and his sporting friends. Here also was his own private telephone.

Lunch was brought to them on a tray, and at two o'clock the butler came with the information that several police officials were in the house interrogating the servants. Far from annoying Pargeter, the fact seemed to afford him some gratification, for it proved that he was after all quite as important a personage as he believed himself to be. He gave orders that the men were to be liberally supplied with drink.

An hour later came a high official from the Prefecture. He was taken upstairs and shown into the drawing-room, and it was there that Pargeter joined him, leaving Vanderlyn for the first time alone.

The American lay back in the rocking-chair in which he had been sitting forward listening to the other's unconnected talk. What a relief, what an immense sense of sobbing relief--came over his weary senses, aye, even his weary limbs! He put away the thought, the anguished query, as to how long this awful ordeal was likely to endure. For the moment it was everything to be alone. He closed his smarting eyes.

Suddenly the telephone bell rang, violently. Vanderlyn got up slowly; stumblingly he walked across the room and took up the receiver. A woman's voice asked in French:

"Has Mr. Pargeter left Paris?"

"No," said Vanderlyn shortly. "Mr. Pargeter is still in Paris."

"Is it a friend of Mr. Pargeter who is speaking?"

There was a long pause,--then, "Yes," said Vanderlyn.

"Will you, Monsieur, kindly inform your friend," said the voice, shaking with a ripple of light laughter, "that Mademoiselle de la Tour de Nesle has something very urgent to say to him?"

"Mr. Pargeter is engaged, but I will give him any message."

"May I ask you, Monsieur, to have the gracious amiability to inform Mr.

Pargeter that Mademoiselle de la Tour de Nesle will be expecting him at five o'clock this afternoon. She understood he was leaving Paris yesterday, but someone told her that he had been seen driving in his auto on the grand boulevards this morning."

A few moments later Pargeter burst into the room.

"They declare that Peggy must have left Paris!" he exclaimed. "I thought as much," he went on, angrily. "I felt certain that she was only hiding!

Of course I didn't like to say so--at first," and, as Vanderlyn remained silent, he came and flung himself in a chair close to the other man.

"You see, Grid,"--his voice unconsciously lowered,--"she played me that trick once before--years ago! It was a regular bit of bad luck, the sort of thing that only seems to happen to me; other men escape. A woman came to our house,--we were living in London then,--an old friend of mine with whom I'd stupidly mixed up again; she brought a child with her, a squalling brat two or three months older than Jasper--Of course the child had nothing to do with me, but she said he had, and Peggy believed her!" he looked for sympathy to the silent man opposite to whom he was now sitting.

"Did you ever hear of this before?" he asked suspiciously, "did Peggy ever tell you about it?"

"No," said Vanderlyn. "This is the first time I have heard anything of it. How long did she stay away?" he forced himself to add, loathing himself the while: "Did she disappear like this--I mean, as she has done this time?"

"Well, not exactly," said Pargeter reluctantly, "for one thing she took Jasper and his nurse with her, but not her maid. They went off to her aunt,--the aunt who brought her up, you know,--but for two days I hadn't a notion where she was! Then one of her brothers came to see me. It was all made as d.a.m.ned unpleasant for me as possible, but they were of course determined that she should come back to me, and so she did--after about a week. But she was never nice to me again," he added, moodily, "not that she ever was really nice to me before we married. It was the aunt who hunted me----"

"Is there any special reason why Peggy should have thought of going away like that--now?" asked Vanderlyn in a strained voice.

"No," exclaimed Pargeter, "of course there isn't! I've always been nice to her, as you know well, Grid,--much nicer, I mean, than most men would have been to a wife who was so--so--" he sought intently for a word, "so superior and--and unsympathetic. But lately I have been specially nice to her, for my sister, Sophy, you know, had written me a long screed,--I didn't bother to read it right through, making out that Peggy's heart was weak, and that I ought to be very careful about her. The very day I got the letter I went out and bought her that grey Limousine Lady Prynne was so keen I should take off her hands! Peggy always had everything she wanted," he repeated; "I didn't have a penny with her, but I've never grudged her anything. In fact I should be pleased if she spent more on her clothes than she seems to care to do, for I like to see a woman well trigged out."

"Tom, I have a message for you," said Vanderlyn slowly, "a lady telephoned just now to say she's expecting you at five o'clock."

"Eh! what?" said Pargeter, his fair face flushing, "a lady? What lady?