The maid (who admired the stranger) did not take it upon herself to deny his statement, but went away, and returned with the principal, Professor Adolphus Bittinger. Professor Bittinger was not acquainted with Mademoiselle Pitre. Their instructress in the French language was named Blanchard, and was already there. Heathcote then asked if there were any other young ladies' seminaries in Valley City, and was told (loftily) that there were not. No schools where French was taught? There might be, the professor thought, one or two small establishments for day scholars. The visitor wrote down the new addresses, and drove away to visit four day schools in succession, sending a ripple of curiosity down the benches, and exciting a flutter in the breasts of four French teachers, who came in person to answer the inquiries of monsieur. One of them, a veteran in the profession, who had spent her life in asking about the loaf made by the distant one-eyed relative of the baker, answered decidedly that there was no such person in Valley City. "Monsieur" was beginning to think so himself; but having now the fancy to exhaust all the possibilities, he visited the infant schools, and a private class, and at two o'clock returned to the hotel, having seen altogether about five hundred young Americans in frocks, from five years old to seventeen. According to the statement of the little shop-keeper at Lancaster, mademoiselle had been teaching in Valley City for a number of years: there remained, then, the chance that she was in a private family as governess. Heathcote lingered in Valley City three days longer on this governess chance. He ate three more dinners in the comfortless dining-room, slept three more nights in the gaudy bedroom, and was at the railway station five times each day, to wit, at the hours when the trains arrived from the east. If they had waited at Stringhampton until he had had time to return to New York, they would be coming on now. But no one came. The fourth day opened with dull gray rain; the smoke of the manufactories hung over the valley like a pall. In the dining-room there was a sour odor of fresh paint, and from the window he could see only a line of hacks, the horses standing in the rain with drooping heads, while the drivers, in a row against an opposite wall, looked, in their long oil-skin coats, as though they were drawn up there in their black shrouds to be shot. In a fit of utter disgust he rang for his bill, ordered a carriage, and drove to the station: he would take the morning train for New York.