“It can’t make little difference if he see me,” said the professor, swallowing with difficulty and displaying, as he turned to me, a look of such profound anxiety that I was as sorry for him now as I had been irritated a few minutes earlier by his galliard air-castles. “I do not know this man, nor does he know me, but I have fear”—his beard moved as though his chin were trembling—“I have fear that I know his employers. Still, it may be better if you go. Bring somebody here that we can ask.”
“Shall I find Amedee?”
“No, no, no! That babbler? Find Madame Brossard.”
I stepped out to the gallery, to discover Madame Brossard emerging from a door on the opposite side of the courtyard; Amedee, Glouglou, and a couple of carters deploying before her with some light trunks and bags, which they were carrying into the passage she had just quitted. I summoned her quietly; she came briskly up the steps and into the room, and I closed the door.
“Madame Brossard,” said the professor, “you have a new client to-day.”
“That monsieur who arrived this morning,” I suggested.
“He was an American,” said the hostess, knitting her dark brows—“but I do not think that he was exactly a monsieur.”
“Bravo!” I murmured. “That sketches a likeness. It is this ‘Percy’ without a doubt.”
“That is it,” she returned. “Monsieur Poissy is the name he gave.”
“Is he at the inn now?”