Page:The Zeppelin Destroyer.djvu/98

 'Yet there is always the telephone,' Lady Lethmere said.

I argued that, in many country places, the telephone service was not available on Sundays and, though I felt intensely anxious, I endeavoured to regard the matter with cheerful optimism. I saw, however, that Lady Lethmere, a good, kindly and most charming woman, who had ever been genuinely friendly towards me, was greatly perturbed regarding her daughter's whereabouts.

And surely not without cause. Roseye had left that house at eleven o'clock on the previous morning—dressed as usual in a navy-blue gaberdine coat and skirt, with her skunk boa and muff, intending to change later on into her Burberry flying-suit which she kept at Hendon. From the moment when she had closed the front door behind her, she had vanished into space.

Such was the enigma with which I—her lover—was at that moment faced.

I ask you, my reader, to place yourself for a moment in my position, and to put to yourself the problem.

How would you have acted?

Would you have suspected, as I suspected, the sinister and deadly touch of the Invisible Hand?