"Shall I finish it for you?" Sir Robert continued, with his famous little menacing gesture of the right hand. "Unless he had intended to give his friends the slip at Boulogne, and stay the night in Paris with you. Is that what you were going to say?"
"Yes, it was, for a moment," the girl answered, "until it struck me how absurd it was."
"It strikes you as absurd, does it?"
"Yes, it does rather," she replied.
"I suppose it would strike you as equally absurd that Mr. Collingwood had already engaged rooms at the Hôtel des Tuileries for himself and a lady, two days before you left London? Or do you think the rooms were engaged for some other lady?"
"I don't believe they were engaged at all before we arrived," came the answer quickly.
Sir Robert nodded his big head. "We shall hear, no doubt, from Mr. Collingwood. Am I to take it, then, that you had no knowledge of the fact that your luggage was not registered, and that you had no knowledge of the fact that Mr. Collingwood had already taken rooms for himself and a lady before you left London?"
"I had no knowledge whatever—none at all," Peggy replied with great emphasis.
"And I think you told my learned friend in examination-in-chief that you had no knowledge of the fact that both your bedroom and Mr. Collingwood's opened out of the same sitting-room?"
"That is so, Sir Robert."