This notion drove him abruptly to action. He sent to the inn near La Haie d’Etigues for his bicycle, and rode across the country to the outskirts of Lillebonne, in which Bridget Rousselin’s mother was living. There he learned that a fortnight before--which was about the time that Josine had taken the train from Paris--the Widow Rousselin had shut her house and gone, so they said, to join her daughter in Paris. The evening before a lady had come to see her. It was ten o’clock at night before Ralph got back to the barge which was moored to the southwest of the first curve beyond Rouen. A little while before reaching it he passed Josine’s carriage, which the little horses, utterly exhausted, could scarcely drag along. When it came to the bank of the river Leonard jumped down from the box, opened the door, bent down, stood up with the inert body of the fainting Josine in his arms, and carried her to the barge. Ralph lent a hand, and the two of them carried her down to her cabin. The woman of the barge came to tend her. “Look after her,” said Leonard roughly. “She has only fainted. But you’re all to stay on board, and don’t you forget it!” He went back to the carriage and drove off. Josine was delirious most of the night, but Ralph could make no sense of her incoherent utterances. Next morning she had nearly recovered. Next evening Ralph went to the nearest village to buy a newspaper. He read among the local news: Yesterday afternoon, the police of Caudebec, on receiving information that a wood-cutter had heard the screams of a woman appealing for help from an old lime-kiln on the outskirts of Maulevrier Forest, sent a sergeant and a constable to enquire into the matter. As these two representatives of the law approached the clearing in which the lime-kiln stands, they perceived over the fence two men who were dragging a woman towards a closed carriage beside which another woman was standing. Compelled to make the circuit of the fence, the police only reached the scene of action after the departure of the carriage. They at once started in pursuit of it, a pursuit which should have ended in the success of the police. But the horses drawing the carriage were so swift and the driver’s knowledge of the lanes and byways so extensive, that he succeeded in throwing them off his track in the network of roads to the north between Caudebec and Motteville. Moreover the night was coming on; and they have not yet succeeded in ascertaining in which direction this nice little gang escaped. “And they will not succeed,” said Ralph to himself. “Nobody but me can reconstitute the facts since nobody but me knows the points of departure and arrival.” He formulated the following conclusions: “One fact is certain: Mother Rousselin was in that old lime-kiln in charge of a confederate.