"That remains to be seen," remarked Duvall, slowly. "Where did you meet this fellow, Valentin?"
"At the café in the Rue St. Honoré."
"You had met him there frequently before?"
"Yes."
"After you left the café, what did you do?"
"We walked to the Champs Élysées and sat on a bench, talking. Suddenly I felt very ill. Mr. Valentin called a cab and sent me home."
"Give me the address of this café, please."
The woman did so. As Duvall was entering it in his notebook, a servant announced that the automobile was at the door.
In fifteen minutes the party, consisting of Mr. Stapleton, Duvall, and Mary Lanahan, were leaving the car at the spot in the Bois de Boulogne which had been the scene of the kidnapping. François was ordered to drive his machine to the exact spot, as nearly as he could tell, that it had occupied on the previous occasion. Mary Lanahan led the others to the place on the grass where she had sat.
It was evident at once that the distances she had named in telling her story were less, if anything, than the actual facts. It was quite impossible to see how, in any way, the child could have been taken from the spot she indicated, to the woods, without consuming a considerable period of time—five minutes, at least. To believe that the nurse could have turned away her head for a moment, and then looked around to find the boy gone seemed the sheerest fabric of the imagination; yet the woman, in repeating her story, stuck to it with a grim pertinacity which, it seemed, could come only from the knowledge that she was telling the truth.