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Updated: May 24, 2025
Vanderlyn made a sudden nervous movement, but he checked the words which rose to his lips, for the Prefect was again speaking, and this time with a certain excitement of manner. "I am convinced that Mrs. Pargeter never intended to go to Madame de Léra, and that the proposed visit was a blind! The facts speak for themselves.
To poor Tom Pargeter, "doing something" always meant parting with money, and Laurence Vanderlyn was, if not rich, then quite well off. Vanderlyn's hand suddenly shook. He dropped the piece of paper he had been holding. "Perhaps you'll let me have Jasper sometimes in the holidays," he said, huskily. "Lord, yes! Of course I will! There's nothing would please poor Peggy more!
For the first time, also, he forced himself to face the knowledge that any hour might bring as unexpected a development as had been the prolonged presence of Pargeter in Paris. He realised that he must, if possible, be prepared, forearmed, with the knowledge of what had occurred after he had left the darkened railway carriage at Dorgival.
Pargeter was not used even to innocent adventure; she lived the guarded, sheltered existence which belongs of right to those women whose material good fortune all their less fortunate sisters envy. The dangers of the Paris streets rose up before Vanderlyn's excited imagination, hideous, formidable.... Then, quite suddenly, Margaret Pargeter herself stood before him, smiling a little tremulously.
Was it not possible, nay, even likely, that Margaret Pargeter, like many another woman before her, had found her courage fail her at the last moment that Heaven, stooping to her feeble virtue, had come to save her in spite of herself? Vanderlyn's steps unconsciously quickened. They bore him on and on, to the extreme end of the platform.
And now Laurence Vanderlyn and Margaret Pargeter were speeding through the night, completely and physically alone as they had never been during the years of their long acquaintanceship; and, as he sat there, with the woman he had loved so long and so faithfully wholly in his power, there came over Vanderlyn a sense of fierce triumph and conquest. The train had not started to time.
"We must think of a way by which we can prevent an interview between Mr. Pargeter and La d'Elphis! Unless," she concluded slowly, "there is no serious reason why he should not know the truth now?" Vanderlyn also got up. A look of profound astonishment came over his face. "The truth?" he repeated.
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.
"'Cherchez la femme," he observed, affecting an atrocious English accent; and then he repeated, as if he were himself the inventor, the patentee, of the admirable aphorism, "'Cherchez la femme! That's what you have got to do in the case of Florac, and of a good many other Frenchmen of his kind, I fancy!" "I'm going home now, Pargeter," said Vanderlyn with sudden, harsh decision.
"There, you can see it for yourself " Pargeter held out, with fingers twitching with excitement, a sheet of note-paper. "La d'Elphis wrote it all down! I didn't see her she's ill. But this is not the first time I've had to work her in that way, and it does just as well. Her sister managed everything, she took her in one of Peggy's gloves which I'd brought with me." Vanderlyn shuddered.
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