"Then you already knew of Madame's disappearance last night?" said the official eagerly.
"No! no!" exclaimed Pargeter crossly. "Of course we didn't know then! We didn't know till just now—that is, till this morning, when Mr. Vanderlyn went out to Madame de Léra's villa to fetch my wife. It was Madame de Léra who told us that she had never arrived at Marly-le-Roi. She disappeared yesterday afternoon, but we did not know it till this morning."
"May I ask you, gentlemen, to wait for a moment while I make certain enquiries?" observed the detective politely. "You have not yet been shown our daily report concerning the stations of Paris—is it not possible that Madame Pargeter may have met with some accident at the Gare St. Lazare, if, as I understand, she was going to her friend by train, and not by automobile?"
Pargeter seemed struck by the notion. He turned to Vanderlyn. "I can't make out," he said in a puzzled tone, "why Peggy thought of going to Marly-le-Roi by train when she might so easily have gone in her new motor."
"Peggy gave her man a week's holiday," said Vanderlyn shortly. "You know, Tom, that he wanted to go to his own home, somewhere in Normandy."
"Yes, yes. Of course! But still she might have gone out in the big car—I wasn't using it yesterday."
The detective came back at the end of what seemed to both Vanderlyn and Pargeter a very long quarter of an hour.
"No incident of any sort took place last night at the Gare St. Lazare," he said briefly. "We shall now institute a thorough enquiry among our agents; every police-station in Paris shall be notified of the fact that Madame Pargeter is missing; and I shall almost certainly be able to send you some kind of news of her by four o'clock this afternoon. In any case you can trust us to do our best. Will Monsieur be returning to the Avenue du Bois"—he addressed Vanderlyn, "or is Monsieur going to his own flat in the Rue de Rivoli?"
Vanderlyn looked up quickly. His private address was not printed on the card he had shown; still it was reasonable enough that this man should have looked up his own as well as Pargeter's address and should have wished to verify their statements as far as was possible.
"Of course, Grid, you will come home with me!" exclaimed Pargeter fretfully.