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 t