"There are three poor people there," she said, in a low voice, "two men and a woman, but not, thank God! our friend. I wonder if it is possible that we are mistaken--that there was no accident, Monsieur Vanderlyn? But then, if so, where is she--why has she not written to me?" He shook his head with a hopeless gesture, afraid to speak lest he should be tempted to share with her his agony and complicated suspense. "If she were a Catholic," added Madame de Lera pitifully, "I should be inclined to think--to hope--that she had gone to a convent; but--but for her there was no such place of refuge from temptation----" her voice as she uttered the last word became almost inaudible; more firmly she added, "Is it not possible that she may have gone to England, to her child?" "No," said Vanderlyn, dully, "she has not done that." He took her to her door, and then, as he had promised Tom Pargeter to do, went to the Avenue du Bois, there to spend with Margaret Pargeter's husband another term of weary waiting and suspense. * * * * * That second day, of which the closing hours were destined to bring to Laurence Vanderlyn the most dramatic and dangerous moments connected with the whole tragic episode of Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance, wore itself slowly, uneventfully away. Tom Pargeter, alternating between real anxiety, and an angry suspicion that his wife was in very truth only hiding from him, poured into the ears of this man, whom he now regarded rather as his friend than his wife's, every theory which might conceivably account for Peggy's disappearance. He took note of every suggestion made to him by the members of the now intensely excited and anxious household, for Margaret Pargeter's gentle personality and thoughtful kindness had endeared her to her servants. When Plimmer, her staid maid, evolved the idea that Mrs. Pargeter, on her way to the station, might have stopped to see some friend, and, finding that friend ill, have remained to nurse her,--the suggestion so seized hold of Pargeter's imagination that he insisted on spending the afternoon in making a tour of his own and his wife's acquaintances. To Vanderlyn's anger and pain, the only result of this action on his part was that Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance became known to a large circle, and that more than one of the evening papers contained a garbled reference to the matter. Meanwhile, or so Pargeter complained, the officials of the Prefecture of Police remained curiously inactive. They were quite certain, so they told the anxious husband, of ultimately solving the mystery, but it was doubtful if any news could be procured before the next day, for they were now directing their researches to the environs of Paris--a new theory now evolved being that Mrs. Pargeter, having hired a motor cab to drive her to Marly-le-Roi, had met with an accident or sinister misadventure on the way thither. VIII.