Nick remained silent, watching her, and presently she turned and faced him again.
“I think my heart is breaking, sir,” she said. “I do not know what to do.”
“There is only one thing for you to do if you would serve your mistress whom you love, and that is to tell me everything you know which will throw light upon this strange disappearance. Has it occurred to you, Sarah, that the woman in the coupé, who put her handkerchief to her mouth when she bade you good-by, was not your mistress at all, but was in reality Isabel Benton, dressed in her clothes? Has it occurred to you that the woman in the other seat of the coupé was not Isabel, but was, in reality, the woman who had been hemming linen in the house and who was sent away—but who did not go—the preceding night?”
“Where, then, was my mistress?”
“Where, indeed?”
“But if she was not in the coupé, where could she have been? She was not in the house.”
“No. She was not in the house, because she had been carried out of the house,” said Nick.
“Carried out of the house! Oh, God! You don’t mean——”
“I don’t know what I mean, Sarah, save that she had been spirited away in the night, after you had put her to bed—after she had been drugged, or possibly murdered.”
“Murdered! My Mercedes? No, no, no! I will not believe it. No, no, no, no.”