He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said:  “That was a lie!  The man lied!”

“Name of a dog, why?” demanded Ste. Marie; but the Englishman shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he said.  “But I believe it was a lie.  The man came to you—­sought you out to tell his story, didn’t he?  And all the others have given a different date?  Well, there you are!  For some reason, this man or some one behind him—­O’Hara himself, probably—­wants you to believe that O’Hara is in America.  I dare say he’s in Paris all the while.”

“I hope you’re right,” said the other.  “And I mean to make sure, too.  It certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that.  I wonder, by-the-way, how he knew I’d been making inquiries about O’Hara.  I’ve questioned only two or three people, and then in the most casual way.  Yes, it’s odd.”

It was about a week after this—­a fruitless week, full of the alternate brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment—­that he met Captain Stewart, to whom he had been, more than once, on the point of appealing.  He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the rue Royale.  Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop, devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amusement, observed, to ladies’ hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he looked in an ill humor, and older and more yellow than usual.  But his face altered suddenly when he saw the younger man, and he stopped and shook Ste. Marie’s hand with every evidence of pleasure.

“Well met!  Well met!” he exclaimed.  “If you are not in a hurry, come and sit down somewhere and tell me about yourself.”

They picked their way across the street to the terrace of the Taverne Royale, which was almost deserted at that hour, and sat down at one of the little tables, well back from the pavement, in a corner.

“Is it fair,” queried Captain Stewart—­“is it fair, as a rival investigator, to ask you what success you have had?”

Ste. Marie laughed rather ruefully, and confessed that he had as yet no success at all.

“I’ve just come,” said he, “from pricking one bubble that promised well, and Hartley is up in Montmartre destroying another, I fancy.  Oh, well, we didn’t expect it to be child’s play.”

Captain Stewart raised his little glass of dry vermouth in an old-fashioned salute and drank it.

“You,” said he—­“you were—­ah, full of some idea of connecting this man, this Irishman O’Hara, with poor Arthur’s disappearance.  You’ve found that not so promising as you went on, I take it.”

“Well, I’ve been unable to trace O’Hara,” said Ste. Marie.  “He seems to have disappeared as completely as your nephew.  I suppose you have no clews to spare?  I confess I’m out of them at the moment.”