“Mrs. Leland will clear up the whole mystery,” volunteered Medenham.
“But what mystery is there?” purred Mrs. Devar, blinking first at one, then at the other. She bent over the telegram again.
“James sent this message from the West Strand at 9.30 a.m. Perhaps he had just heard of Mr. Vanrenen’s departure,” she said.
Judging from Cynthia’s occasional references to her father’s character and associates, Medenham fancied it was much more likely that the American railway magnate had merely refused to meet Captain Devar. But therein he was mistaken.
At the very hour that the three were settling themselves in the Mercury before taking the road to Leominster, Mr. Vanrenen, driven by a perturbed but silent Simmonds, stopped the car on the outskirts of Whitchurch and asked an intelligent-looking boy if he had noticed the passing of an automobile numbered X L 4000.
“I s’pose you mean a motor-car, sir?” said the boy.
Vanrenen, a tall man, thin, close-lipped, with high cheekbones, and long nose, a man utterly unlike his daughter save for the wide-open, all-seeing eyes, smiled at the naïve correction; with that smile some enchanter’s wand mirrored Cynthia in her father’s face. Even Simmonds, who had seen no semblance of a smile in the features of the chilly, skeptical man by whom he was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour in the morning at Bristol, witnessed the alchemy, and marveled.
“Yes, sir, rather,” continued the boy, brimming over with enthusiasm. “The gentleman went along the Hereford Road, he did, yesterday mornin’. He kem back, too, wiv a shuffer, an’ he’s a-stayin’ at the Symon’s Yat Hotel.”
Peter Vanrenen frowned, and Cynthia vanished, to be replaced by the Wall Street speculator who had “made a pyramid in Milwaukees.” Whence, then, had Cynthia telephoned? Of course, his alert mind hit on a missed mail as the genesis of the run to Hereford early on Sunday, but he asked himself why he had not been told of a changed address. He could not guess that Cynthia would have mentioned the fact had she spoken to him, but in the flurry and surprise of hearing that he was not in the hotel she forgot to tell the attendant who took her message that she was at Symon’s Yat and not at Hereford.
“Are you sure about the car?” he said, rendered somewhat skeptical by the boy’s overfullness of knowledge.