Three days—three breathless anxious days passed. Ah! shall I ever forget the awful tension of those terrible hours!
Sir Herbert had returned, and, with his wife, was naturally distracted. He was making inquiries in every quarter of friends and acquaintances, and of anyone who might have been likely to see his missing daughter. In this, both Teddy and I actively assisted him.
On the third evening I returned to my rooms to wash, intending to go along to the Automobile Club to dine with the flying-boys who assembled there every night, when Theed told me that the police had, an hour before, rung me up from Scotland Yard, and requested me to go down there at once.
This I did without delay and, having been shown into that big, bare waiting-room, the same dark-haired inspector came to see me.
“Well, Mr Munro,” he exclaimed, “we’ve met with no very great result, though the description of the missing young lady has been circulated right through the country. But the affair is certainly a mystery.”
“Then you don’t suspect that she has purposely disappeared—eh?” I asked quickly.
“Well—after all—I don’t know,” was his hesitating reply. “Something belonging to her has been found which rather leads to that supposition.”
“What has been found?” I gasped eagerly.
“This,” he answered, and he placed upon the table a gold chatelaine which I at once recognised as belonging to Roseye—for. I had given it to her. It formed a jingling bunch. There was a chain-purse, a combined match-box and cigarette-case, a powder-box with its little mirror in the cover, and a card-case all strung upon thin gold chains which, in turn, were attached to a ring—so that it could be carried upon the finger.
“Wherever was that found?” I asked, turning pale at sight of it.