But Richard Hartley drove at once back to the rue d’Assas.  He was not very much disappointed in having learned nothing from Stewart, though he was thoroughly angry at that gentleman’s hint about Ste. Marie and the unknown lady.  He had gone to the rue du Faubourg because, as he had said, he wished to leave no stone unturned, and, after all, he had thought it quite possible that Stewart could give him some information which would be of value.  Hartley firmly believed the elder man to be a rascal, but of course he knew nothing definite save the two facts which he had accidentally learned from Helen Benham, and it had occurred to him that Captain Stewart might have sent Ste. Marie off upon another wild-goose chase such as the expedition to Dinard had been.  He would have been sure that the elder man had had something to do with Ste. Marie’s disappearance if the latter had not been seen since Stewart’s party, but instead of that Ste. Marie had come home, slept, gone out the next morning, returned again, received a visitor, and gone out to lunch.  It was all very puzzling and mysterious.

His mind went back to the brief interview with Stewart and dwelt upon it.  Little things which had at the time made no impression upon him began to recur and to take on significance.  He remembered the elder man’s odd and strained manner at the beginning, his sudden and causeless change to ease and to something that was almost like a triumphant excitement, and then his absurd story about Ste. Marie’s flirtation with a lady.  Hartley thought of these things; he thought also of the fact that Ste. Marie had disappeared immediately after hearing grave accusations against Stewart.  Could he have lost his head, rushed across the city at once to confront the middle-aged villain, and then—­disappeared from human ken?  It would have been very like him to do something rashly impulsive upon reading that note.

Hartley broke into a sudden laugh of sheer amusement when he realized to what a wild and improbable flight his fancy was soaring.  He could not quite rid himself of a feeling that Stewart was, in some mysterious fashion, responsible for his friend’s vanishing, but he was unlike Ste. Marie:  he did not trust his feelings, either good or bad, unless they were backed by excellent evidence, and he had to admit that there was not a single scrap of evidence in this instance against Miss Benham’s uncle.

The girl’s name recalled him to another duty.  He must tell her about Ste. Marie.  He was by this time half-way up the Boulevard St. Germain, but he gave a new order, and the fiacre turned back to the rue de l’Universite.  The footman at the door said that Mademoiselle was not in the drawing-room, as it was only four o’clock, but that he thought she was in the house.  So Hartley sent up his name and went in to wait.

Miss Benham came down looking a little pale and anxious.