She snapped open her little square window and stuck out into the moonlit court a dishevelled gray head.

“Il n’est pas la.” she said again, beaming upon Richard Hartley, whom she liked, and, when he protested that he had a definite and important appointment with her lodger, went on to explain that Ste. Marie had gone out, doubtless to lunch, before one o’clock and had never returned.

“He may have left word for me up-stairs,” Hartley said; “I’ll go up and wait, if I may.”  So the woman got him her extra key, and he went up, let himself into the flat, and made lights there.

Naturally he found no word, but his own note of that morning lay spread out upon a table where Ste. Marie had left it, and so he knew that his friend was in possession of the two facts he had learned about Stewart.  He made himself comfortable with a book and some cigarettes, and settled down to wait.

Ste. Marie out at La Lierre, with a bullet-hole in his leg, was deep in a drugged sleep just then, but Hartley waited for him, looking up now and then from his book with a scowl of impatience, until the little clock on the mantel said that it was one o’clock.  Then he went home in a very bad temper, after writing another note and leaving it on the table, to say that he would return early in the morning.

But in the morning he began to be alarmed.  He questioned the concierge very closely as to Ste. Marie’s movements on the day previous, but she could tell him little, save to mention the brief visit of a man with an accent of Toulouse or Marseilles, and there seemed to be no one else to whom he could go.  He spent the entire morning in the flat, and returned there after a hasty lunch.  But at mid-afternoon he took a fiacre at the corner of the Gardens and drove to the rue du Faubourg St. Honore.

Captain Stewart was at home.  He was in a dressing-gown, and still looked fagged and unwell.  He certainly betrayed some surprise at sight of his visitor, but he made Hartley welcome at once and insisted upon having cigars and things to drink brought out for him.  On the whole he presented an astonishingly normal exterior, for within him he must have been cold with fear, and in his ears a question must have rung and shouted and rung again unceasingly—­“What does this fellow know?  What does he know?”

Hartley’s very presence there had a perilous look.

The younger man shook his head at the servant who asked him what he wished to drink.

“Thanks, you’re very good,” he said to Captain Stewart, and that gentleman eyed him silently.  “I can’t stay but a moment.  I just dropped in to ask if you’d any idea what can have become of Ste. Marie.”

“Ste. Marie?” said Captain Stewart.  “What do you mean—­’become of him’?” He moistened his lips to speak, but he said the words without a tremor.

“Well, what I meant was,” said Hartley, “that you’d seen him last.  He was here Thursday evening.  Did he say anything to you about going anywhere in particular the next day—­yesterday?  He left his rooms about noon and hasn’t turned up since.”