Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/218

 and sketches, during the last ten days, asking himself whether or no the face was the face of a murderer. Now he recognized it instantly, leaping to the startling conclusion that this meeting, at a remote village in France, had been arranged between Sir Ian and Teresina Ricardo.

Here was something better than he had dreamed of expecting, and he was delighted. The fact that this man and this woman journeyed so far from their world to meet each other, seemed to prove that Miss Ricardo had perjured herself in swearing that Ian Hereward had not loved her, long ago, in India. They had been separated for years, these two; and as they had apparently met in private only once (on the afternoon of the murder) since the old days in India, there must have been something between them, or they would not be keeping this tryst now.

"At last the wife is out of the way, and they aren't losing much time in profiting by it!" Michel said to himself.

This put a rather different complexion on his business. He had been sent after Nora Verney in the hope of running down Ian Barr. But since Ian Hereward came to St. Pierre de Chartreuse, Michel's theory of the murder was shaken. What if, after all, the elder Ian knew more about it than the younger, and Barr were but a scapegoat?

Of course, it would soon be known at headquarters