But Senator Burton had been struck by Madame Poulain's notion. Men, and if all the Senator had heard was true, especially Englishmen, do behave very strangely sometimes to their women-folk. It was an Englishman who conceived the character of Petruchio. He remembered Mrs. Dampier's flushed face, the shy, embarrassed manner with which she had come forward to meet him that morning. She had seemed rather unnecessarily distressed at not being able to make the hotel people understand her: she had evidently been much disappointed that her husband had not left a message for her.
"My son thinks it possible that Mr. Dampier may have met with an accident on his way to the studio."
A long questioning look flashed from Madame Poulain to her husband, but
Poulain was a cautious soul, and he gave his wife no lead.
"Well," she said at last, "of course that could be ascertained," and the Senator with satisfaction told himself that she was at last taking a proper part in what had become his trouble, "but I cannot help thinking, Monsieur le Sénateur, that we might give this naughty husband a little longer—at any rate till to-morrow—to come back to the fold."
And the Senator, perplexed and disturbed, told himself that after all this might be good advice.
But when he again went upstairs and joined the young people, he found that this was not at all a plan to which any one of the three was likely to consent. In fact as he came into the sitting-room where Nancy Dampier was now restlessly walking up and down, he noticed that his son's hat and his son's stick were already in his son's hands.
"I think I ought to go off, father, to the local Commissaire of Police. There's one in every Paris district," said Gerald Burton abruptly. "Mrs. Dampier is convinced that her husband did go out this morning, even if the Poulains did not see him doing so; and she and I think it possible, in fact, we are afraid, that he may have met with an accident on his way to the studio."
As he saw by his father's face that this theory did not commend itself to the Senator, the young man went on quickly:—"At any rate my doing this can do no harm. I might just inform the Commissaire that a gentleman has been missing since this morning from the Hôtel Saint Ange, and that the only theory we can form which can account for his absence is that he may have met with an accident. Mrs. Dampier has kindly provided me with a description of her husband, and she has told me what she thinks he might have been wearing."
Nancy stopped her restless pacing. "If only the Poulains would allow me to see where Jack slept last night!" she cried, bursting into tears. "But oh, everything is made so much more difficult by their extraordinary assertion that he never came here at all! You see he had quite a large portmanteau with him, and I can't possibly tell which of his suits he put on this morning."
And the Senator looking down into her flushed, tearful face, wondered whether she were indeed telling the truth—and most painfully he doubted, doubted very much.