l's been the usual round, I suppose, and he's either too
much ashamed of himself or too besotted to turn up. I wish she wasn't
quite so devilish good-looking," he remarked to himself. "If she goes
about alone she'll get badly scared before she's finished."

Phyllis Poynton drove straight back to her hotel and went to her room. A
sympathetic chambermaid followed her in.

"Mademoiselle has news yet of her brother?" she inquired.

Mademoiselle shook her head. Indeed her face was sufficient answer.

"None at all, Marie."

The chambermaid closed the door.

"It would help Mademoiselle, perhaps, if she knew where the young
gentleman spent the evening before he disappeared?" she inquired
mysteriously.

"Of course! That is just what I want to find out."

Marie smiled.

"There is a young man here in the barber's shop, Mademoiselle," she
announced. "He remembers Monsieur Poynton quite well. He went in there
to be shaved, and he asked some questions. I think if Mademoiselle were
to see him!"

The girl jumped up at once.

"Do you know his name?" she asked.

"Monsieur Alphonse, they call him. He is on duty now."

Phyllis Poynton descended at once to the ground
floor of the hotel, and pushed open the glass door which led into the
coiffeur's shop. Monsieur Alphonse was waiting upon a customer, and she
was given a chair. In a few minutes he descended the spiral iron
staircase and desired to know Mademoiselle's pleasure.

"You speak English?" she asked.

"But certainly, Mademoiselle."

She gave a little sigh of relief.

"I wonder," she said, "if you remember waiting upon my brother last
Thursday week. He was tall and fair, and something like me. He had just
arrived in Paris."

Monsieur Alphonse smiled. He rarely forgot a face, and the young
Englishman's tip had been munificent.

"Perfectly, Mademoiselle," he answered. "They sent for me because
Monsieur spoke no French."

"My chambermaid, Marie, told me that you might perhaps know how he
proposed to spend the evening," she continued. "He was quite a stranger
in Paris, and he may have asked for some information."

Monsieur Alphonse smiled, and extended his hands.

"It is quite true," he answered. "He asked me where to go, and I say to
the Folies Bergeres. Then he said he had heard a good deal of the supper
cafes, and he asked me which was the most amusing. I tell him the Cafe
Montmartre. He wrote it down."

"Do you think that he meant to go there?" she asked.