“What time was it?” I managed to ask.  And with the words my life itself was being forced out through my lips.  But Therese, not noticing anything strange about me, said it was something like half-past seven in the morning.  The “poor sinner” was all in black as if she were going to church (except for her expression, which was enough to shock any honest person), and after ordering her with frightful menaces not to let anybody know she was in the house she rushed upstairs and locked herself up in my bedroom, while “that French creature” (whom she seemed to love more than her own sister) went into my salon and hid herself behind the window curtain.

I had recovered sufficiently to ask in a quiet natural voice whether Dona Rita and Captain Blunt had seen each other.  Apparently they had not seen each other.  The polite captain had looked so stern while packing up his kit that Therese dared not speak to him at all.  And he was in a hurry, too.  He had to see his dear mother off to Paris before his own departure.  Very stern.  But he shook her hand with a very nice bow.

Therese elevated her right hand for me to see.  It was broad and short with blunt fingers, as usual.  The pressure of Captain Blunt’s handshake had not altered its unlovely shape.

“What was the good of telling him that our Rita was here?” went on Therese.  “I would have been ashamed of her coming here and behaving as if the house belonged to her!  I had already said some prayers at his intention at the half-past six mass, the brave gentleman.  That maid of my sister Rita was upstairs watching him drive away with her evil eyes, but I made a sign of the cross after the fiacre, and then I went upstairs and banged at your door, my dear kind young Monsieur, and shouted to Rita that she had no right to lock herself in any of my locataires’ rooms.  At last she opened it—­and what do you think?  All her hair was loose over her shoulders.  I suppose it all came down when she flung her hat on your bed.  I noticed when she arrived that her hair wasn’t done properly.  She used your brushes to do it up again in front of your glass.”

“Wait a moment,” I said, and jumped up, upsetting my wine to run upstairs as fast as I could.  I lighted the gas, all the three jets in the middle of the room, the jet by the bedside and two others flanking the dressing-table.  I had been struck by the wild hope of finding a trace of Rita’s passage, a sign or something.  I pulled out all the drawers violently, thinking that perhaps she had hidden there a scrap of paper, a note.  It was perfectly mad.  Of course there was no chance of that.  Therese would have seen to it.  I picked up one after another all the various objects on the dressing-table.  On laying my hands on the brushes I had a profound emotion, and with misty eyes I examined them meticulously with the new hope of finding one of Rita’s tawny hairs entangled amongst the bristles by a miraculous chance.