The diagram of this portion of the hotel will give
you an idea of these connecting rooms.
[Illustration]
There are three of them, as you will see, all reception-rooms. Mr. Ransom
had passed through them all in looking for his wife. In No. 1 he found
several ladies sitting and standing, all strangers. He encountered no one
in No. 2, and in No. 3 just one person, a lady in street costume
evidently waiting for some one. To this lady he had addressed himself,
asking if she had seen any one pass that way the moment before. Her reply
was a decided "No"; that she had been waiting in that same room for
several minutes and had seen no one. This staggered him. It was as if his
wife had dissolved into thin air. True, she might have eluded him by
slipping out into the hall by means of door two at the moment he entered
door one; and alert to this possibility, he hastened back into the hall
to look for her. But she was nowhere visible, nor had she been observed
leaving the building by the man stationed at entrance A. But there was
another exit, that of B. Had she gone out that way? Mr. Ransom had taken
pains to inquire and had been assured by the man in charge that no
lady had left by that door during the last ten minutes. This he had
insisted on, and when Mr. Loomis and the detective came in their turn
to question him on this point he insisted on it again.
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