less gesture, afraid to speak lest he
should be tempted to share with her his agony and complicated suspense.

"If she were a Catholic," added Madame de Lera pitifully, "I should be
inclined to think--to hope--that she had gone to a convent; but--but for
her there was no such place of refuge from temptation----" her voice as
she uttered the last word became almost inaudible; more firmly she
added, "Is it not possible that she may have gone to England, to her
child?"

"No," said Vanderlyn, dully, "she has not done that."

He took her to her door, and then, as he had promised Tom Pargeter to
do, went to the Avenue du Bois, there to spend with Margaret Pargeter's
husband another term of weary waiting and suspense.

* * * * *

That second day, of which the closing hours were destined to bring to
Laurence Vanderlyn the most dramatic and dangerous moments connected
with the whole tragic episode of Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance, wore
itself slowly, uneventfully away.

Tom Pargeter, alternating between real anxiety, and an angry suspicion
that his wife was in very truth only hiding from him, poured into the
ears of this man, whom he now regarded rather as his friend than his
wife's, every theory which might conceivably account for Peggy's
disappearance. He took note of every suggestion made to him by the
members of the now intensely excited and anxious household, for Margaret
Pargeter's gentle personality and thoughtful kindness had endeared her
to her servants.

When Plimmer, her staid maid, evolved the idea that Mrs. Pargeter, on
her way to the station, might have stopped to see some friend, and,
finding that friend ill, have remained to nurse her,--the suggestion so
seized hold of Pargeter's imagination that he insisted on spending the
afternoon in making a tour of his own and his wife's acquaintances. To
Vanderlyn's anger and pain, the only result of this action on his part
was that Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance became known to a large circle,
and that more than one of the evening papers contained a garbled
reference to the matter.

Meanwhile, or so Pargeter complained, the officials of the Prefecture of
Police remained curiously inactive. They were quite certain, so they
told the anxious husband, of ultimately solving the mystery, but it was
doubtful if any news could be procured before the next day, for they
were now directing their researches to the environs of Paris--a new
theory