"Are they out?" asked Starr.
"Yes. But they promised to be back at a quarter to ten, without fail, or I shouldn"t have let them go. Tibe"s had no breakfast, and he _must_ have his teeth brushed before we start. Oh dear, I"m afraid something"s happened."
"For goodness" sake, don"t be excited. You get such an American accent when you"re excited," whispered the Mariner, fiercely. "Be brave.
Remember you"re a Scotswoman."
"If I lose Tibe, I shall be a madwoman," she retorted.
"You won"t lose him. Alb and I care at least as much for the girls as you do for your dog, and we"re not worrying----"
"That"s different. The girls don"t belong to you," almost wept the tiny creature. "You haven"t fed them, and brushed them, and washed their feet every day of their lives since they were a few months old, as I have with Tibe, and if you"re not _very_ nice to me, you never will."
"We never dared hope for quite as much as that," said Starr, "but we _are_ being nice to you. What do you want us to do? They"re half an hour behind time. Shall we give an order for the Town Crier? I dare say there"s one in use still, as this is Holland."
"If you"re sarcastic, Ronald, I"ll _leave_ you the moment I have my darling Tibe again," replied the Chaperon, and the threat reduced Ronald to crushed silence.
"What took them out so early in the morning?" I asked.
"Oh, Tibe escaped from my room for a minute, and was eating a boot which he found at somebody"s door--a horrid, elastic-sided boot: I"m sure it couldn"t have been good for him--and the two girls brought him back.
They were going out for one last glimpse of that quaint, hidden square you call "the village," which they longed to see again, and they asked if they should take Tibe, so I said yes, as he"s fond of driving.
"Oh, they were driving?" said I.
"Yes. They could easily have been in long ago. There _must_ have been an accident. Miss Rivers is always so depressingly prompt. Such a strange girl! She considers it quite a sin to break a promise, even to a man, and she seems actually to _like_ telling the truth."
We soothed the Chaperon"s fears as well as we could; but when half-past ten came, and there were still no signs of the missing ones, we both began to be troubled.
"If they don"t appear in ten minutes, I"ll drive slowly in the direction by which they should return," I said; but the words had hardly left my lips when the girls walked into the hall, with Tibe. Both charming faces were flushed, and it was evident that something exciting had happened.
But whatever it was, n.o.body was the worse for it. Tibe flew to his mistress, knocking down a child, and almost upsetting an old gentleman by darting unexpectedly between his legs, while the girls rushed into explanations.
"We"re so sorry to have kept you waiting, but we"ve had _such_ an adventure!" cried Nell. "We were driving back from the "village," when Tibe gave a leap and jumped out of the cab before we could hold him."
"We were _terrified_," broke in Phyllis.
"And he disappeared in the most horribly mysterious way," finished Nell.
"We thought some one in the crowd must have stolen him, so we stopped the cab----"
"And began tearing about looking for him, asking every human being in every known language _except_ Dutch, if they"d seen a dog, or a _chien_, or a _hund_----"
"But n.o.body understood, so we went into a lot of shops, and he wasn"t in any of them----"
"And we were in _despair_. We shouldn"t have _dared_ come back without him----"
"I should think not!" cut in the Chaperon.
"And we were on the way to the nearest police-station, with a dear old gentleman who could speak English, and a whole procession of extraneous creatures who couldn"t, when we saw Tibe, calmly driving in a carriage with----"
"A strange man, and----"
"He never so much as looked at us, but we were _sure_ we couldn"t be mistaken, at least Nell was; so we deserted our old gentleman, and began running after Tibe"s carriage, shrieking for it to stop."
"Naturally, every one thought we were mad; but we didn"t care, and at last the man in the carriage realized we were after him. If he _hadn"t_ stopped, we should have known that he"d deliberately stolen Tibe; but he did stop, and we said, both together, it was our dog."
"The man took off his hat, and answered in English, such a nice man, and quite good-looking, with a big mustache, and quick-tempered blue eyes.
He said that the first thing he knew, Tibe had jumped into his cab, and he had no idea where he came from, as he"d been reading in a guide-book; but the strangest thing was, he felt certain Tibe had belonged to _him_ when a puppy; only his dog wasn"t named Tibe, but John Bull--Bully for short, and he sold him to an American, because it turned out his wife didn"t like bulldogs in the house, she thought them too ugly."
"What a _cat_!" interpolated the Chaperon.
"Could it be possible that Tibe ever _was_ his?" asked Nell. "He sold his dog just a year ago, when he was six months old----"
"I bought Tibe ten months ago, poor lamb, for a song, because he was ill--he"d been seasick on a long voyage, so I nursed him up, and _see_ what he is now," said Tibe"s mistress. "It may be he"d belonged to this man, for it"s always the strangest things that are true. Tibe has a wonderful memory for faces; but I"m sure if I"d been with him, he wouldn"t have run away from me for twenty old masters."
"The _second_ queerest thing in the adventure is, that this "old master" must be some relation of yours, Lady MacNairne," said Nell. "He gave us his card. See, here it is." She handed it to the Chaperon, who gazed at it through her blue spectacles for a moment without speaking; then pa.s.sed it to Starr. "Merely--a relation by marriage," said she.
"Quite a distant relation. I never saw this gentleman myself; but I believe you"ve met him, haven"t you, dear Ronny?"
There is plenty of room on the Mariner"s face for expression. He grew red, and his eyebrows were eloquent as he looked at the card.
"Oh--er--yes, I"ve seen him, I think," he mumbled, "when I was in Scotland last. Odd he happens to be here."
"He only arrived this morning, on important business," Nell explained.
"If it weren"t for that, he would have asked to bring us back to our hotel, but it was something that had to be attended to without a moment"s delay, so he was obliged to leave us at once. He was on the way to the Hotel de l"Europe, where he hoped to find the people he"d come to seek."
No need for me to see that card. I knew well who was the hero of the girls" adventure, and would have guessed without the aid of Starr"s expression. He saw that I guessed, and turned to me with a look of appeal.
"Well, at all events, Tibe is safe," I said, "and we ought to start, if we"re to get through our program to-day. Ladies, is your luggage ready?
I"ll see that Tibe has a nice bone instead of breakfast. He can eat it in the car, going to the boat; and as it"s dusty, you had better put on your motor-veils when you leave the hotel. Starr and I are going to wear goggles."
"Alb," said Starr, as the ladies moved away, "you may have a bad heart, but you have a good head. Disguise and flight are our only hope. If Sir Alec should recognize me----"
("If he should recognize me," I echoed inwardly.)
"The game would be up."
"Speed, veils, and goggles may do the trick," said I.
"But afterwards? By Jove, what we"re let in for!"
"We must set our wits to work. Change "Lorelei"s" name and disappear into s.p.a.ce."
Five minutes later we were off, unrecognizable by our best friends, and Tibe well hidden, deeply interested in his bone at the bottom of the _tonneau_. But hardly were we away when Miss Rivers cried out----
"Oh, look, Nell; there"s Sir Alec MacNairne. Oughtn"t we to stop a minute, so that Lady MacNairne----"
"I"m afraid we haven"t time," I said hastily, and put on speed, as much as I dared in traffic. We whizzed by a cab, and might have pa.s.sed the gloomy-faced man who sat in it with his traveling-bag (hastily packed, I"ll warrant) had not the two girls bowed.
Their faces were not to be recognized behind the small, triangular tale windows of the silk and lace motor-veils they bought in Haarlem; but their bow attracted Sir Alec MacNairne"s attention, and those "quick-tempered blue eyes" of his looked the whole party over as he lifted his hat from his crisply curling auburn hair. He probably divined that the two veiled figures must be the girls of his late adventure; and as he was now acquainted with them and with Tibe, there would be one less chance of our boat slipping away from under his nose, in case he got upon our track.
I realized that Sir Alec could not have been in Scotland when the fatal paragraph appeared, which reached our eyes only yesterday. If he had been, he could not have arrived in Amsterdam to-day. My idea now is that he must have come abroad in search of his wife, have seen the Paris _Herald_ at some Continental resort, and have rushed off post-haste to Holland, expecting to find her.