“Her name?  Do you know her name?  I’m a detective from New York—­one of the regular police force.  I’m in search of a woman not unlike the one I saw here, though not, I am bound to state, a factory worker except on compulsion.”

“You are!  A police detective, eh, and at your age!  It must be a healthy employment.  But about this woman!  I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you anything except that she came on the same train you did and wanted a boat right away to take her across the river.  You see, we’ve no ferry here, and I told her so, and the only way she could get across was to wait for Phil Jenkins, who was going over at five.  She said she would wait, and sat down here, refusing dinner, or even to enter the house.  Perhaps she wasn’t hungry, and perhaps she didn’t wish to register, eh?”

“Had her speech an accent?  Did you take her for a foreign woman?”

“Yes, I did and I didn’t.  She spoke very well.  She’s not young, you know?”

“I’m not looking for a young woman.”

“Well, she’s gone and you can’t reach her to-night.  There they are now, see! about a quarter of the way across.  That small boat just slipping across the wake of the big one.”

Mr. Gryce looked and saw that she was in the way of escape for to-night.

“When can I get over?” he asked.

“Not till Phil crosses again to-morrow noon.”

“Meanwhile, she may go anywhere.  I shall certainly lose her.”

“Hardly.  She’s bound for the factory; you can just see the roof of it above the trees a little to the right.  She asked me all sorts of questions about the work over there, and whether there were decent places to live in within walking distance of the factory.”

“Then she isn’t lame?  My woman is a trifle lame.”

“So may this woman be, for all I know.  I didn’t see her on her feet, but she carried no crutch—­only a bag and an umbrella.”

“A brown bag, neat like herself in appearance?”

“No.  It was light in color and old.  She herself was neat enough.”

Mr. Gryce’s brows came together.  He was in a quandary.  He felt convinced, with a positiveness which surprised him, that in watching the withdrawal of this small boat farther and farther toward the opposite shore, he was watching the escape of Antoinette Duclos from his immediate interference.

Yet, circumstantial as were the proofs which had led him to this conclusion, he felt that he would gladly welcome some further corroboration of those proofs before risking the time and opportunity he might lose in following the person of two skirts to her destination on the other side of the Hudson.  There were more reasons than one why he could not afford to lose one unnecessary minute.  An extra twinge or two of rheumatism warned him that he was approaching the point of disablement.