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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Madame de Léra's villa is at Marly-le-Roi, isn't it?" "Yes, haven't you ever been there?" Vanderlyn looked at Pargeter. "No," he said very deliberately, "I scarcely know Madame de Léra." "How odd," said Pargeter indifferently. "Peggy's always with her, and you and Peggy are such pals." "One doesn't always care for one's friends' friends," said Vanderlyn dryly.
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.
I'm told she's not here. Is she ill?" "Peggy never arrived at Marly-le-Roi," said Vanderlyn. To himself his very voice seemed changed, his words charged with terrible significance; but to Pargeter, the answer given to his question sounded disagreeably indifferent and matter-of-fact. "Never arrived?" he echoed. "Where is she then? You don't mean to say she's lost?"
Each had schooled the other to accept all that she would admit was possible. True, Vanderlyn saw Margaret Pargeter almost every day, but more often than not in the presence of acquaintances. She never came to his rooms, and she had never seemed tempted to do any of the imprudent things which many a woman, secure of her own virtue, will sometimes do as if to prove the temper of her honour's blade.
The English doctor, the man on whom he had poured such careless scorn, had been right, terribly right. At last he uncovered his eyes, and forced himself to gaze upon what lay before him Margaret Pargeter had died in her sleep. She was lying exactly as Vanderlyn had left her, still folded closely in the rug he had placed so tenderly about her.
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?"
"I don't believe she kept any letters," he repeated, then glanced uncertainly at the lady's-maid who stood primly by. "Mrs. Pargeter kept some letters in that writing-desk over there, sir, at least I think she did." Close to the small tent-bed stood an old-fashioned rosewood davenport, a relic of Margaret Pargeter's childhood and girlhood, brought from her distant English home.
Pargeter was fingering absently a yellowing packet of Vanderlyn's letters: "Fancy keeping your old letters! What a queer thing to do!" Vanderlyn said nothing. The maid stared at him stealthily. At last Pargeter put the packet down, and deliberately opened yet another envelope which lay loose.
Vanderlyn had walked the considerable distance from the Avenue du Bois to the quiet street near the Luxembourg where Adèle de Léra lived, and all the way he had felt as if pursued by a mocking demon. How much longer, so he asked himself, was his awful ordeal to endure? The moments spent by him and Pargeter in Peggy's room had racked heart and memory.
"As you know, I stayed, when in England, with Sophy Pargeter " Again she looked up at him, as if hesitating what she should say. "Sophy Pargeter?" he repeated the name mechanically, but with a sudden wincing. Vanderlyn had always disliked, with a rather absurd, unreasoning dislike, Peggy's plain-featured, rough-tongued sister-in-law.
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