CHAPTER XV.
When Barrant learnt from the trembling lips of Mrs.Pendleton that she had not seen her niece since that morning, his first step was to get Sisily's full description, and call up Dawfield on the hotel telephone with instructions to have all the railway stations between Penzance and London warned to look out for her.

That was a necessary precaution, but it did not need Dawfield's hesitating information about time tables to convince him that it was almost futile.

The later of the two trains by which Sisily might have fled from Cornwall had reached London and discharged its passengers somewhere about the time that Mr.Peter Portgartha, in the depth of the rumbling wagonette, was paying his tribute to shrinking female modesty as exhibited on Mousehole rocks.
After doing this Barrant returned to the empty lounge, where Mrs.
Pendleton sat in partial darkness with tearful face.

All the other guests had retired, and a lurking porter yawned longingly in the passage, waiting for an opportunity to put out the last of the lights and get to bed.
In the first shock of Barrant's violent apparition and angry questions, Mrs.Pendleton had tried, in a bewildered way, to insist that her niece had not left her room on the previous night.

But now, in her troubled consideration of the new strange turn of events surrounding her brother's death, she saw that she might have been deceived on this point.