But stay--Vanderlyn suddenly remembered Madame de Lera, that is the one human being who had been in Peggy's confidence. She was a real and terrible point of danger--or rather she might at any moment become so. It was with her, at the de Lera villa in the little village of Marly-le-Roi, that Mrs. Pargeter was, even now, supposed to be staying. This being so, he, Vanderlyn, must make it his business to see Madame de Lera at the first possible moment. Together they would have to concoct some kind of possible story--he shuddered with repugnance at the thought. Long before Peggy's confidences in the train, the American diplomatist had been well aware that Adele de Lera disapproved of his close friendship with Mrs. Pargeter; and she had never lent herself to any of those innocent complicities with which even good women are often so ready to help those of their friends who are most foolish--whom perhaps they know to be more tempted--than themselves. The one thing of paramount importance, so Vanderlyn suddenly reminded himself, was that no one--not even Madame de Lera--should ever know that he and Margaret Pargeter had left Paris that night, together. How could this fact be best concealed, and concealed for ever? To the unspoken question came swift answer. It flashed on the man lingering on the solitary river-side quay, that even now, to-night, it was not too late for him to establish the most effectual of alibis. By taking a fiacre and bribing the man to drive quickly he could be back in his rooms in the Rue de Rivoli, dressed, and at his club, before midnight. Fool that he was to have wasted even a quarter of an hour! Vanderlyn struck sharply across the dimly-lighted thoroughfare; he started walking down one of the narrow streets which connect the river quays with commercial Paris. A few moments later, having picked up a cab, he was driving rapidly westward, down the broad, still seething Boulevard du Temple, and, as he suddenly became aware with a sharp pang at his heart, past the entrance to the quiet mediaeval square, where, only four short days ago, he and Peggy walking side by side, had held the conversation which was to prove pregnant of so much short-lived joy, and of such long-lived pain. Like so many modern Americans, to whom every material manifestation of wealth has become distasteful, Laurence Vanderlyn had chosen to pitch his Paris tent on the top floor of one of those eighteenth-century houses which, if lacking such conveniences as electric light and lifts, can command in their place the stately charm and spaciousness of which the modern Parisian architect seems to have lost the secret. His _appartement_ consisted of a few large, airy, low-pitched rooms, of which the stone balconies overlooked the Tuileries gardens, while from a corner window of his sitting-room Vanderlyn could obtain what was in very truth a bird's-eye view of the vast Place de la Concorde.