th a long deliberate
stare.

VII.

The fact that he was being watched had a curious effect on Laurence
Vanderlyn. It roused in him the fighting instinct which he had had to
keep in leash the whole of that terrible first day of repression, save
during the moments when he had been confronted with the head of the
detective department at the Prefecture of Police.

As at last he walked on, now choosing deliberately quiet and solitary
streets, the footsteps of his unknown companion echoed loudly behind
him, and he allowed himself, for the first time since the night before,
the cruel luxury of recollection. 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. News travels slowly in provincial France, yet,
even so, the fact that the dead body of a woman had been found in a
first-class carriage of the Paris demi-rapide must soon have become
known, and made its way into the local press.

Out of the past there came to Vanderlyn the memory of an old-fashioned
reading-room frequented by him long years before when he was studying in
Paris.

The place had been pointed out to him by one of the professors at the
Sorbonne as being by far the best lending library on the left side of
the Seine; and there, in addition to the ordinary reading-room, was an
inner room, where, by paying a special fee, one could see all the
leading provincial papers.

In some such sheet,--for in France every little town has its own
newspaper,--would almost certainly appear the first intimation of so
sinister and mysterious a discovery as the finding of a woman's dead
body in the Paris train.

Vanderlyn wondered if the library--the Bibliotheque Cardinal was its
name--still existed. If yes, there was every chance that he might find
there what was vital to him to know, both in order to rid himself of the
obsessing vision which he saw whenever he shut his tired eyes, and also
that he might be prepared for any information suddenly forwarded to
Pargeter from the Prefecture of Police.

The next morning Vanderlyn was scarcely surprised to see the man who had
shadowed him the night before lying in wait for him before the house.

The American measured the other's weary