The clerk very emphatically said that he would not send up anybody’s card. Tab went straight to the supreme authority. Fortunately he knew the hotel manager very well, but on this occasion Crispi was not inclined to oblige him.
“Miss Ardfern is a very good customer of ours, Holland,” he said, “and we don’t want to offend her. I will tell you, in the strictest confidence, that Miss Ardfern is not in the hotel.”
“Where is she?”
“She went away this morning in her car to her country cottage. She always spends Sunday and Sunday night in the country and I know that she does not want to see any reporters, because she came back this morning especially to tell me that the staff were to answer no enquiries relative to herself.”
“Where is this country cottage—come on, Crispi,” wheedled Tab, “or the next time you have a robbery in this hotel I’ll make a front page item of it.”
“That is blackmail,” murmured Crispi, protestingly. “I am afraid I cannot tell you, Holland. Maybe if you got a Hertford directory—”
In the office library he found the directory and turned its pages. Against the name of “Ardfern Ursula” was “Stone Cottage, near Blisville Village.”
This distance from town was some forty-five miles and the route carried him past an unfinished building which one day was to play its part in the ending of many mysteries. Tab covered the ground on a fast motor-cycle in just over an hour. He leant his machine against a very trim hedge, opened the high garden gate, and walked into the beautiful little garden that surrounded Stone Cottage, which was not ill-named, though the stone which composed its walls was completely hidden by purple flowering creeper.
In the shade of a tree he saw a white figure stretched at her ease, a figure which sat bolt upright in her deep garden chair at the click of the gate-lock.
“This is too bad of you, Mr. Tab,” said Ursula Ardfern, reproachfully. “I particularly asked Crispi not to tell anybody where I was.”