Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/213

 and he had to acknowledge himself defeated for the moment. Barr had doubtless taken another name, and Miss Verney had asked a friend to address her envelope, or had used a typewriter.

Michel examined the contents of the letter-box, in company with a postman instructed by the French police, while Miss Ricardo and her travelling companion dined. He "shadowed" the two ladies in Paris for the short time they spent there, and journeyed with them to Chamounix, where he put up in a cheap room at their hotel. They did nothing that repaid his watchfulness, but when they had been at the mountain village for several days, he learned that they proposed a driving tour. They were not engaging a carriage and horse at Chamounix, but had sent elsewhere, which struck Michel as odd, though he did not quite see how it bore upon the business which had brought him to France.

He could not find out for some time whence the vehicle would come, but at last heard from some employé of the hotel that it was to arrive from St. Pierre de Chartreuse, whither it would return with the ladies. This was disappointing to Michel, because it ceased to appear strange. It was natural enough to engage a conveyance of the hotel at which they intended to stop, where the landlord might make a better price for incoming guests than would one about to lose his clients.