now evolved being that Mrs. Pargeter, having hired a motor cab to
drive her to Marly-le-Roi, had met with an accident or sinister
misadventure on the way thither.

VIII.

At last the long day wore itself out, and Vanderlyn, in the late
afternoon, found himself once more in his own rooms, alone. He only owed
his escape to-night to the fact that two of Mrs. Pargeter's relations
had arrived from England--one of her many brothers, and a woman cousin
who was fond of her. They, of course, were spending the evening with
Pargeter, and so the American had a respite--till to-morrow.

Having eaten his solitary dinner with a zest of which he felt ashamed,
he was now in his study leaning back in an easy-chair, with a pile of
unread papers at his side.

As he sat there, in the quiet, almost shabby room, which was so
curiously different from the splendours of the Pargeter villa, there
came over him a sense of profound and not unpleasing lassitude.

He looked back to the last forty-eight hours as to a long nightmare,
broken by the few solitary walks he had forced himself to take. But for
these brief periods of self-communing, he felt that his body, as well as
his mind, would and must have given way. Peggy's husband had leant
helplessly on him, and from the first moment he had been--so indifferent
onlookers would have told you--the sympathetic, helpful witness of the
various phases Tom Pargeter had lived through during those long two
days.

For something like a week Vanderlyn had been living so apart from the
world about him that he had known nothing, cared nothing, about what had
gone on in that world. That very day an allusion had been made in his
presence to some public event of importance of which he was evidently
quite ignorant, and the look of profound astonishment which had crossed
an Embassy colleague's face, warned him that he could not go on as he
had been doing without provoking considerable, and far from pleasant,
comment.

Putting out his hand, he took up the _New York Herald_--not the Paris
edition, in which there was almost certain to be allusions to that which
he wished for the moment to forget--but the old home paper which had
arrived by that day's mail, and which had been carefully opened and
ironed out by the faithful Poulain.

The newspaper was a little over a week old; it bore the date, April 28.
What had he been doing on the twenty-eighth of April? and then with a
rush it all came back to him--ev