"Very well. It has an extraordinary reputation. I am sorry to say it, Duncombe, but it is a very bad place for your friend to have disappeared from."
"Why?"
"In the first place it is the resort of a good many of the most dangerous people in Europe—people who play the game through to the end. It is a perfect hot-bed of political intrigue, and it is under police protection."
"Police protection! A place like that!" Duncombe exclaimed.
"Not as you and I understand it, perhaps," Spencer explained. "There is no Scotland Yard extending a protecting arm over the place, and that sort of thing. But the place is haunted by spies, and there are intrigues carried on there in which the secret service police often take a hand. In return it is generally very hard to get to the bottom of any disappearance or even robbery there through the usual channels. To the casual visitor, and of course it attracts thousands from its reputation, it presents no more dangers perhaps than the ordinary night café of its sort. But I could think of a dozen men in Paris to-day, who, if they entered it, I honestly believe would never be seen again."
Spencer was exaggerating, Duncombe murmured to himself. He was a newspaper correspondent, and he saw these things with the halo of melodrama around them. And yet—four nights ago. His face was white and haggard.
"The boy," he said, "could have been no more than an ordinary visitor. He had no great sum of money with him, he had no secrets, he did not even speak the language. Surely he would have been too small fry for the intriguers of such a place!"
"One would think so," Spencer answered musingly. "You are sure that he was only what you say?"
"He was barely twenty-one," Duncombe answered, "and he had never been out of England before."
"What about the girl?"