“Did you follow Mr. Ransom when he walked through those rooms?”

“No, sir; I stayed in the hall.”

“Did the lady hobble when she slid thus mysteriously out of sight?”

“A little.  Not so much as when she came in.  But she wasn’t at her ease, sir.  Her shoes were certainly too small.”

“I think I will take a peep at those rooms now,” Gerridge remarked to the manager.

Mr. Loomis bowed, and together they crossed the office to the reception-room door.  The diagram of this portion of the hotel will give you an idea of these connecting rooms.

[Illustration]

There are three of them, as you will see, all reception-rooms.  Mr. Ransom had passed through them all in looking for his wife.  In No. 1 he found several ladies sitting and standing, all strangers.  He encountered no one in No. 2, and in No. 3 just one person, a lady in street costume evidently waiting for some one.  To this lady he had addressed himself, asking if she had seen any one pass that way the moment before.  Her reply was a decided “No”; that she had been waiting in that same room for several minutes and had seen no one.  This staggered him.  It was as if his wife had dissolved into thin air.  True, she might have eluded him by slipping out into the hall by means of door two at the moment he entered door one; and alert to this possibility, he hastened back into the hall to look for her.  But she was nowhere visible, nor had she been observed leaving the building by the man stationed at entrance A. But there was another exit, that of B. Had she gone out that way?  Mr. Ransom had taken pains to inquire and had been assured by the man in charge that no lady had left by that door during the last ten minutes.  This he had insisted on, and when Mr. Loomis and the detective came in their turn to question him on this point he insisted on it again.  The mystery seemed complete,—­at least to the manager.  But the detective was not quite satisfied.  He asked the man if at any time that day, before or after Mrs. Ransom’s disappearance, he had swung the door open for a lady who walked lame.  The answer was decisive.  “Yes; one who walked as if her shoes were tight.”

“When?”

“Oh a little while after the gentleman asked his questions.”

“Was she dressed in brown?”

That he didn’t know.  He didn’t look at ladies’ dresses unless they were something special.

“But she walked lame and she came from Room 3?”

Yes.  He remembered that much.

Gerridge, with a nod to the manager, stepped into the open compartment of the whirling door.  “I’m off,” said he.  “Expect to hear from me in two hours.”

At twenty minutes to ten Mr. Ransom was called up on the telephone.

“One question, Mr. Ransom.”

“Hello, who are you?”

“Gerridge.”

“All right, go ahead.”

“Did you see the face of the woman you spoke to in Room No. 3?”