From Señor Guffanta Stuart had heard more than once during his absence, which had now extended to three weeks, but the letters he received contained nothing but accounts of his failure to come upon the suspected man. In Paris, the Señor wrote, he had been absolutely unable to find any person of the name of Smerdon, though he had tried everything in his power to do so. He had pored daily over _Galignani_ and other papers that contained the lists of strangers who arrived in the French capital, he had personally inspected the visitors' books in every hotel likely to be patronised by English people of good social position; but all to no effect. Then, determined, if his man was there, not to miss him, he had applied to the particular _bureau_ of police at the Préfecture, where are kept, according to French law, the lists furnished weekly by every hotel-keeper and lodging-house keeper of their guests and tenants, both old and new; and these, being shown him, he had carefully searched, and still he had failed. He was induced to think, he wrote Stuart, that Smerdon, either alone or with his family (if he really had them with him) must have changed his route, or his destination, at the last moment. Or, perhaps they had travelled by Brussels and the Rhine to Switzerland, or passed through Paris from one station to the other without stopping, or they might have gone by the way of Rheims and Delle from Calais to Basle. Could Mr. Stuart, he asked, obtain any further information from Lord Penlyn as to the whereabouts of the man whose face he wished to see, for if he could not, he did not know where to look for him. In answer to this, Stuart wrote back that no letter had come from Smerdon since the day he left Occleve House, the day on which the Señor had seen the murderer in the cab, but that he had little doubt that the former was now in Switzerland. "Why," he wrote, "since you are determined to make yourself sure about Smerdon's identity with the man you saw kill our friend, do you not go on into Switzerland? There you could have but little difficulty in finding him, for printed lists of the visitors to almost every resort, small or large, are published daily or weekly. Any bookseller would procure you the _Fremdenblatts_ and _Listes des Étrangers_, and if you could only find his name at one spot, you would be sure to catch him up at last. When a traveller leaves an hotel in Switzerland, the train, or boat, or diligence is a sure indication of what district he is changing to, and any intelligent porter or servant will in all probability be able to remember any person you can describe fairly accurately."