oman, who,
by her dress, belonged to the leisured class, entered the train. Her
hand baggage had disappeared, no doubt stolen at some intervening
station by someone who, having made the gruesome discovery, thought it
wise to make himself scarce. The police do not, however, consider that
they are in the presence of a crime. Dr. Fortoul, the well-known
physician of Orange, has satisfied himself that the lady died of heart
disease."

Vanderlyn went on staring down at the printed words. They seemed to make
more true, more inevitable, the fact of Margaret Pargeter's death, and
of his own awful loss.

But with the agony of this thought came infinite relief, for this, or so
he thought, meant that his own personal ordeal was at last drawing to a
close. The fact of so strange and unwonted an occurrence as the finding
of a woman's dead body in a train, would surely be at once connected by
the trained intellects of the Paris Police with the disappearance of
Mrs. Pargeter.

He let the paper fall to the ground and began to think intently. When
that came to pass, as it certainly must do within the next few hours, it
would become his grim business to persuade Tom Pargeter that the clue
was one worth following. 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.

Then with some uneasiness he remembered that before such an item of news
could have found its way into an English newspaper, the fact must have
been known to the French police for at least twelve hours. If that were
so, their acumen was not as great as that with which Vanderlyn credited
them.

But stay! The Prefect of Police was convinced that Mrs. Pargeter was
alive, and that he, Vanderlyn, knew her whereabouts; it was not for
Peggy dead, but for Peggy living, that they were still searching so
eagerly.

He opened the _Figaro_ and the _Petit Journal_, and ran a shaking finger
down the columns; there, in each paper, hidden away among unimportant
items, and told more briefly and in much balder language, he at last
found the story of the discovery which the _Daily Telegraph_ had served
up as a tit-bit to thrill the readers of its Paris news columns.

Vanderlyn made up his mind to spend the whole of the next day with
Pargeter; he must be at the villa, ready to put in his word of
advice,--e