"Why, it never occurred to me to do that!" cried Sylvia. "What a good idea!"
"Wait," he said. "I will go and do it for you."
But five minutes later he came back, shaking his head. "I am sorry to say the people at the Hôtel de l'Horloge know nothing of Madame Wolsky. They have had no news of her since you and she both left the place. I wonder if the Wachners know more of her disappearance than they have told you?"
"What do you mean?" asked Sylvia, very much surprised.
"They're such odd people," he said, in a dissatisfied voice. "And you know they were always with your friend. When you were not there, they hardly ever left her for a moment."
"But I thought I had told you how distressed they are about it? How they waited for her last evening and how she never came? Oh no, the Wachners know nothing," declared Sylvia confidently.
CHAPTER XVI
There is something very bewildering and distressing in the sudden disappearance or even the absence of a human being to whose affectionate and constant presence one has become accustomed. And as the hours went by, and no letter or message arrived from Anna Wolsky, Sylvia became seriously troubled, and spent much of her time walking to and from the Pension Malfait.
Surely Anna could not have left Paris, still less France, without her luggage? All sorts of dreadful possibilities crowded on Sylvia's mind; Anna Wolsky might have met with an accident: she might now be lying unidentified in a Paris hospital....