He went over to Boulogne, saw the English chaplain, and several of the hotel-keepers. He explored the cemetery, and examined the record of the dead. He visited the police, and he made friends with the elderly editor of an old-established newspaper; but from all his questioning of various people the result was blank. Nobody remembered a Mrs. Darcy, an Englishwoman of distinguished appearance but fallen fortunes, a woman long past youth and yet not old. If she had lived for any time in Boulogne she had left no trace of her existence; if she had died and been buried there she had left no record among the graves. Boulogne could tell him nothing. He came back to the great wilderness of London, the rallying point for all wanderers. It was there perhaps that the end of Evelyn Strangway was to be sought. He had, as it seemed to him, only one clue, the name of her governess. The governess was only seven or eight years older than the pupil, and she might have survived her pupil, and might have been in communication with her till the end. Jasper Blake had told him that there was a strong attachment between Sarah Newton and the wayward girl she taught. To hunt for a governess among the thousands of portionless gentlewomen who try to live by teaching might seem more hopeless than the proverbial search for the lost needle, but Theodore did not despair. If Miss Newton had remained a spinster and had continued to exercise her vocation as a teacher she might be traced through one of those agencies which transact business between governess and employer; but, on the other hand, if, as was more likely, she had long ago abandoned the profession of teacher, and had made some obscure marriage, she would have sunk into the vast ocean of middle-class life, in whose depths it would be almost impossible to discover her. The first thing to be done was to make a visitation of the agencies, and this task Theodore began two days after his return from Boulogne.