“If I can render you any assistance I will do so with pleasure,” I said, addressing her, adding, “I noticed a moment ago that you appeared to be in distress.”
“You are extremely kind,” she answered, raising her eyes to mine for an instant. Her glance was steady and searching, and I saw that she was undecided whether to trust me. “You were quite correct in thinking I am in distress, and if you really could help me I should be so much obliged.”
“Then what troubles you?” I inquired, well satisfied with her answer, and anxious that she should make me her confidant.
“I have been separated from my friends, and am a stranger to London,” she replied. “You will laugh,” she added, “but I am really lost, for I don’t know my way back to my friends’ house.”
“You know the address, I suppose?” I laughed, for to me the idea of one being thus lost in London was amusing.
“Yes: Ellerdale Street.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, “except that it’s a long way from here; somewhere on the other side of London. We came by train.”
“Ellerdale Street,” I repeated reflectively. “I’ve never heard of it.” There are, of course, thousands of streets in the suburbs of which nobody ever hears, save when somebody commits a crime of more than ordinary violence, and papers give the unknown thoroughfare undue prominence.
“But the strange thing is that my friends, two ladies, should have disappeared so quickly,” she went on, pausing on the pavement before the theatre as we went out and gazing blankly about her. “They must surely have missed me, and if so, one would think they would remain till everybody had gone, and then search for me.”