After that another man stepped in from the doorway and volunteered the information that he had seen the second car standing about half a kilomètre away. He had seen the soldier running, and had seen the car drive off. He thought there was another soldier in that car.
By that time a couple of gendarmes were on the scene. They were conducting their own investigations of the case in a casual, perfunctory manner. At first they took no notice of Elza or of Rosemary, talked over their heads in a proper democratic manner; then one of them asked curtly of Elza:
"Did you see the car drive up?"
Elza said: "No!"
"Do you know anything about it?"
Again she replied: "No!"
Whereupon the man queried roughly: "Then what are you doing here?"
Elza's face flushed a little, but she replied quite courteously: "We all hoped at the castle to hear that the miller's two sons had arrived safely at Hódmezö, and I thought that this was the car that drove them in the night."
The man gave a sneer and a shrug of the shoulders.
"You seem mightily concerned," he said, with a harsh laugh, "about the miller's sons, to be out of your bed at this hour of the morning."