This was supplemented by a word from Scotland Yard, England, received a
few hours after the other, to the effect that Madame Duclos and Miss
Willetts arrived at the Ritz from Dover, on the morning of May 16th, and
left the next morning for Southampton. They spent the evening at the
theater with friends who called for them in a public automobile. These
people had not been found, but they had been advertised for and might yet
show up. Nothing more could be learned of either of them.

Now here was an astonishing discovery! That two women known and
recognized as mother and daughter in France should pass for unrelated
companions on leaving that country to enter ours. What were we Americans
to think of this, especially in the light of the tragic event which so
soon terminated this companionship.

That the French records, imperfect as they were, were to be relied upon
as stating the truth as to the exact nature of the connection between
these two, there could be no doubt. But granting this, what fresh
complexities were thus brought into an affair already teeming with
incongruities--nay, absolute contradictions.

Madame Duclos' conduct, as shown toward her young charge, had seemed
sufficiently strange and inconsistent when looked upon as that of
governess or guardian. But for a mother, and a French mother at that, to
allow a young and inexperienced girl to go alone to a strange museum on
the very day of their arrival, and then, with or without knowledge of
what had happened to her there, to efface herself by flight without
promise of return, was inconceivable to anyone acquainted with the most
ordinary of French conventions.

Some sinister secret, despite the seeming harmlessness of their lives,
must hide behind such unnatural conduct! Was it one connected with or
entirely dissociated from the tragedy which had terminated the poor
child's existence? This was the great question. This was what gave new
zest to the search for the dark-skinned Frenchwoman, with her drooping
eyelid and hesitating walk, and led Sweetwater to whisper into Gryce's
ear, as they stepped out that same day from Headquarters:

"No more nonsense now. We must find that woman or her dead body before
the next twenty-four hours have elapsed. With our fingers on that end of
the string----"

"We will get hold of some family secret, but not of the immediate one
which especially concerns us. Madame Duclos sent her daughter unattended
to the museum, but she