"Mr. Jessop, I must tell you," I said in a serious and measured voice. "The truth is I don't know!"
"What?" he took up, startled. "Are you telling me that you don't know where my cousin is at this moment?"
"I wish I did know," I said fervently. And as we stood, a little aside from the glass doors in the vestibule, I went on, in soft, rapid tones, to tell him the story of Miss Million's disappearance from my horizon since half-past eleven last night.
I looked up, despairingly, into his startled, concerned face.
"What has happened to her?" I said urgently. "What do you think? Where do you think she is?"
Before he could say a word a messenger came up to me with a telegram.
I felt that this would be news at last. It must be. I seized the wire; I tore it open.
One of the commissionaires glanced curiously over his shoulder at me.
I dropped my voice as I said feverishly: "Yes, it is! It's from HER!"
And I held the telegram out, blindly, towards the young American.
The telegram which my mistress had sent ran simply and superbly thus:
"Why ever don't you bring my clothes? "MISS MILLION."
The wire had been handed in at half-past seven o'clock that evening at Lewes. It left me silent for a moment with bewilderment and dismay. After waiting so long for a message! To receive one that told me nothing!
"What is the meaning of this here?" said Miss Million's cousin, repeating, in the accent that makes all our English words sound something new and strange. "'Why ever don't you bring my clothes?' Well! I guess that sounds as if nothing very terrible had happened to her. Her clothes! A woman's first thought, of course. Where does she want you to 'bring' them to, Miss Smith?"
"How on earth should I know?" I cried, in desperation. "When I still don't know where she is, or what she is doing!"
"But this place, Lewes. Surely that's some guide to you?"
"Not the slightest," I said. "We don't know anybody at Lewes! At least, I don't know that she knew anybody there! I don't know who on earth can have taken her there!" This with another nervous thought of young Lord Fourcastles. "I shall have to go at once--no, it's too late to-night. To-morrow I shall go. But----
"She may not be there at all. She may have been motoring through when she sent this absurd wire!"