"Have you seen that woman go by here to-day?"
"Yes, sir; I see that woman go by here not twenty minutes ago. That's the beauty, Mrs. Carey, that is. There was another woman with her, and a man."
Her maid, probably. But who could the man be? Carey found the next train for New York did not leave till evening. He waited in the station for it, and arrived in that city at midnight. It was too late to get any trace of his wife that night.
Early in the morning he began the search, but it was all of no avail. His wife had apparently stopped at none of the hotels. A certain lady looking like her had been seen at a small hotel on the Fifth Avenue, but she had been with a gentleman, and their names were registered as Mr. and Mrs. Copley Hutchinson, of Boston.
Carey wondered whether she could have left the city. Several European steamers had sailed or were to sail that day, and he spent an hour or two at the docks searching them. All the papers, all the shops, were full of his wife and her movements; he alone knew nothing of them.
As he walked back, up Broadway, he looked at the bulletin boards. He had a habit of doing this now. In front of the Herald office they were changing the bulletin, and he waited a moment to see. The first line on the new broadside he read aloud:
"Mrs. Oswald Carey sails for Brazil."
Carey went in and bought a copy of the newspaper. In it he found the sailing-list of the City of Rio, and there the first name was "Mrs. Oswald Carey and maid," and then, just below, "Jarley Jawkins."
Carey stood on the sidewalk several minutes, like a statue. Then, slowly crumpling up the newspaper in his hand, he threw it in the gutter. That night he was a passenger in the emigrant train for the North-west.