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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.
"And what are you going to do now?" asked Vanderlyn in a low, dry tone. "Arrange for a special to Orange, I suppose? What time will you start, Tom? Would you like me to come with you?" Pargeter reddened; his green eye blinked as if he felt suddenly blinded by the bright sun. "I'm not thinking of going myself," he said, rather ashamedly. "Where would be the good of it?
Vanderlyn was trying to choose a form of words with which he could bid the other farewell; he longed with a miserable longing to be alone, but that first day's ordeal was not yet over. "I can't face dinner here," said Pargeter suddenly, "let's go and dine at that new place, the Coq d'Or." Vanderlyn lacked the energy to say him nay, and they went out, leaving word where they were to be found.
I ask you if you know more of this mysterious matter than you are apparently prepared to divulge? In a word I beg you to tell me where Mrs. Pargeter is hiding at the present moment? I have no wish to disturb her retreat, but I beg you most earnestly to entrust me with the secret."
It was very unlikely, however, that Tom Pargeter would return to Paris before he was expected to do so. For many years past he had spent the first fortnight of each May at Newmarket; and, as is the curious custom of his kind, he seldom varied the order of his rather monotonous pleasures.
The mystery solved, the question of how Margaret Pargeter came to be travelling in the demi-rapide would be comparatively unimportant at any rate not a point which such a man as Tom Pargeter would give himself much trouble to clear up.
Pargeter were, it is true, those of close friendship, but I must ask you to accept my assurance, Monsieur le Préfet, that they were not what the writer of this passage evidently believed them to have been." "I will make a note of the correction," said the Prefect, gravely, "and I must offer you my very sincere excuses for having troubled you to-night."
Tom Pargeter was no gambler, your immensely wealthy man rarely is, but it gave him pleasure to watch the primitive emotions which gambling generally brings to the human surface, and so he spent at what he called "The Wash" a good many of his idle hours. "Let's turn in here for a minute," he said, eagerly, "Florac was holding the bank two hours ago; let's go and see if he's still at it."
He and Margaret Pargeter, the Englishwoman whom he had loved with an absorbing, unsatisfied passion, and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless devotion, for seven years, were about to do that which each had sworn, together and separately, should never come to pass, that is, they were about to snatch from Fate a few days of such free happiness and communion as during their long years of intimacy they had never enjoyed.
Pargeter, desired to break the sad news through her, instead of in a more commonplace fashion. Vanderlyn knew enough of that curious underworld of Paris which preys on wealthy foreigners, to feel sure that this would not be the first time that Madame d'Elphis had been persuaded, in her own interest, to add the agreeable ingredient of certainty to one of her predictions.
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