"He hasn't anything definite to report but he assures me that it is only a question of hours," he replied, cheerfully. "He has telegraphed to the frontiers and all the seaports, and unless Jacqueline has left France we have her just as surely as if she were in the next room now!"
"Left France! She can't have done that!" exclaimed Floriot.
"It's hardly possible in that length of time," agreed the other, "and for that reason I think that our friend the chief will have news for us by to-morrow night—sure!"
But there was no news "to-morrow night" nor the next night. The nights grew to weeks and the weeks to months and the months to years, and there was never a trace of the missing woman from the moment she left the Passy station.
Noel, true to the vow he had sworn the day after she left, spent his life in the search for her. He had ample funds, and Floriot was well provided for in the goods of the world. All the capitals of Europe and the larger cities he searched, aided by the police. He made friends with the demi-monde and the "submerged" of many races. The painted women of St. Petersburg and the belles of, the Tenderloin knew him equally well. But it! was all in vain. Jacqueline had disappeared.
Floriot could not abandon his work, for the sake of his boy, but he took from it all the time that he could spare. He labored now without soul and without ambition. The one thing in his life that seemed worth while was to find his wife.
He and Noel wrote to each other constantly when the latter was away—advising, suggesting, planning. All the time that he could take from the courts he employed in roaming about Europe while Noel was on the other side of the world. And like the sign of the cross to the ancient Jew, a hundred times a year he thought that in the glimpse of a profile or the sound of a woman's voice behind him, he had reached the end of his quest. And each disappointment was more bitter than the last.
Even in his home there was no escape. For as Raymond grew up it became more evident every year that his dark, passionate eyes, smooth forehead and dark curly hair were his mother's. The firmly cut jaw and mouth and straight, high-bred nose came from his father.
He was growing into a splendid young man, as clean mentally as he was physically. He was the one joy of his father's life and he tried to make up in his love what the boy missed in not having the mother that had been driven away.
He had an inherited taste for the law and at school he was a source of constant pride to his father. He was prouder when the young man—just turned twenty-four—was admitted to practice in the courts of France.