When at last he found himself in his own flat, and at last alone, Vanderlyn stood for a few moments in his empty sitting-room. Terrible as had been the companioned hours of the day, he now feared to be alone. It was too early to go to bed—and he looked back with horror to the wakeful hours which had been his the night before. So standing there he told himself that an hour's walk—he had not walked at all that day—would quiet his nerves, prepare him for the next day's ordeal.
As he made his way down the broad shallow stairs, his mind seemed to regain its elasticity. He realised that it must be his business to keep fit. A greater ordeal than anything which had yet befallen him lay there—in front of him. Soon, perhaps to-morrow, the Prefecture of Police would connect the finding of a woman's dead body in the train which had left Paris for Orange the night before, with Mrs. Pargeter's disappearance.
It would be then that he would need all his strength and self-control. He remembered with a thrill of anger the curious measuring glance the head of the Paris detective force had cast on him that morning. He wondered uneasily how far he had betrayed himself.
Passing through the porte cochère, he noticed that the concierge was talking to a neat, stout little Frenchman with whose appearance he felt himself familiar. Vanderlyn looked straight at the man; yes, this was undoubtedly one of the two watchers who had been standing outside the door of the Coq d'Or.
Then he was being followed, tracked? The Paris police evidently already connected him in some way with the disappearance of Mrs. Pargeter?
Instead of crossing the road to the deserted pavement which bounds the gardens of the Tuileries, the American turned to the left, and became merged in the slowly moving stream of men and women under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. As he walked along he became conscious, and that without once turning round, that his pursuer was close behind; when he walked slowly, the other, as far as possible, did the same, and when he hurried on, he could hear the tap-tap dogging his footsteps through the crowd.
At last, finding himself opposite the Hotel Continental, Vanderlyn stopped and deliberately read over the bill of fare attached to the door of the restaurant. As he did so, the light of a large réverbère beat down on his face; from the human current sweeping slowly on behind him a man quietly detached himself, and, standing for a moment by the side of the American diplomatist, looked up into his face with a long deliberate stare.
VII.
The fact that he was being watched had a curious effect on Laurence Vanderlyn. It roused in him the fighting instinct which he had had to keep in leash the whole of that terrible first day of repression, save during the moments when he had been confronted with the head of the detective department at the Prefecture of Police.