"Well?" she said. "Well, Mr. Burton?"
He shook his head despondently. "We found nothing, absolutely nothing which
could connect your husband with any one of the rooms which we searched,
Mrs. Dampier. If, after leaving you, he did spend the night in the Hôtel
Saint Ange, the Poulains have obliterated every trace of his presence."
She gave a low cry of pain, of bitter disappointment, and suddenly sinking down into a chair, buried her head in her hands—"I can't bear it," she wailed. "I only want to know the truth, whatever the truth may be! Anything would be better than what I am going through now."
Gerald Burton came and stood by the bowed figure. He became curiously pale with that clear, not unhealthy, pallor which is induced by exceptional intensity of feeling.
"Mrs. Dampier?" he said, in a very low voice.
She lifted her head and looked at him fixedly.
"Everything that a man can do I will do to find your husband. If I fail to find him living I will find him dead."
CHAPTER XII
But it is far easier to form such a resolution and to make such a promise as that which Gerald Burton had made to Nancy Dampier than it is to carry it out.
The officials of the Prefecture of Police grew well accustomed to the sight of the tall, good-looking young American coming and going in their midst, and they all showed a sympathetic interest in his quest. But though the police officials were lavish in kindly words, and in permits and passes which he found an open sesame to the various places where it was just conceivable that John Dampier, after having met with some kind of accident, might have been carried, they were apparently quite unable to elucidate the growing mystery of the English artist's disappearance.