I suppose the driver of that car can be found ?--he'll have returned by this, I should think." "Oh, you can find him all right," answered the clerk.

"The car was got from a garage close by." Allerdyke jotted down the name of the garage in his pocket-book, and proceeded to make further inquiries about his cousin's movements on the previous night.

He interviewed various hotel servants--waiters, chambermaids, porters, all could tell him something, and the sum total of what they could tell amounted, for all practical purposes, to next to nothing.

James Allerdyke had come to the hotel just as several other people had come.

He had been served with a light supper in the coffee-room; he had been seen chatting with one or two people in the lounge and in the smoking-room; a chambermaid had seen him in his own room--according to all these people there was nothing in his appearance or his behaviour that was out of the common, and all agreed that he looked very well.
The manager, who accompanied Allerdyke in his round of these inquiries, glanced at him with a puzzled expression when they came to an end.
"Of course, sir, if you would like the police to be summoned," he suggested for the second time.