“Depend upon it, m’sieur, both gentlemen are victims of some audacious plot. Your London is full of clever thieves.”
I smiled within myself. Little did Madame dream that she was at that moment talking with a member of the smartest and boldest gang of jewel-thieves who had ever emerged from “the foggy island.”
“Yes,” I said sympathetically, “there are a good many expert jewel-thieves in the metropolis, and it seems very probable that they knew, by some means, that Monsieur Dumont and his clerk were staying at the Charing Cross Hotel and——” I did not finish my sentence.
“And—what?” asked Madame.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“It must be left to the police, I think, to solve the mystery.”
“But they are powerless,” complained Madame. “Monsieur Lepine, in Paris, expressed his utter contempt for your English police methods. And, in the meantime, Monsieur the father of Mademoiselle has disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up.”
“What I fear is that my dear father is dead,” exclaimed the pretty Pierrette, with tears in her fine eyes. “One reads of such terrible things in the journals.”
“No, no,” I hastened to reassure her. “I do not think so. If one man alone lay between the thieves and jewels of that value—well, then we might perhaps apprehend such a catastrophe. But there were two—two able-bodied men, who were neither children nor fools. No,” I went on, “my own opinion is that there may be reasons—reasons of which you are entirely unaware—which have led your father to bury himself and his clerk for the present, to reappear later. Men often have secrets, mademoiselle—secrets that they do not tell others—not even their wives or daughters.”