“A good girl, my dear, a good girl,” the Vicar mildly interposed.
“Oh, yes, quite,” Mrs. Vicar admitted.
“Exceptionally well able to take care of herself I should imagine,” was my own comment, whereat Mrs. Vicar nodded emphatically.
It was two days after that conversation that I met Detective Pepster in the village.
“Ah, Mr. Holt,” he said, “I was coming to see you. I have found out where Mr. Thoyne is.”
“Why,” I returned, “there was no particular mystery about that, was there? He’d made none so far as I know. What is the point?”
“Well—he disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Do you call it that? He left the furnished house he’d been occupying and went off to his yacht, the Sunrise, but that isn’t disappearing.”
“No—well, perhaps in a way it isn’t. But I’m going to interview Mr. Ronald Thoyne for all that and with a warrant in my pocket—”
“It hardly seems likely that Thoyne—”