"May I come in, citizen?" asked La Vireville mildly, facing the barrel with all the appearance of innocent intent. "I wish to speak with you on important business."
The occupant of Number Nine looked at him straight and searchingly with his strange light eyes. Then, still keeping his visitor covered, he moved aside for him to enter, and closed the door behind him, locking it.
La Vireville's immediate dread, on entering, was of finding Anne-Hilarion there, or at least awake in the inner room,—whose door he saw ajar in front of him,—to recognise him, as he surely would, with a cry, and spoil everything. "Shall I close this door?" he suggested, and, turning his back on the pistol, he shut the door which faced him. "We do not want to wake the boy, and it is about him that I have come to speak to you."
"You choose a very strange time for the errand, citizen," observed M. Duchâtel, but he lowered the pistol.
"Yet you were expecting me, were you not?" queried La Vireville, glancing at the bed and the book lying open on it. "She told you, of course, that she might send me? On the whole it seemed best, though to be sure he—you know whom I mean—will suffer by it." Anne's gaoler was, he trusted, gravelled by this pronouncement, which was devoid of meaning even to himself; but it was impossible to tell. The man with the goat's eyes merely said curtly:
"I saw you downstairs with that fool of a versifier. Why did you not speak to me then?"
"Juste ciel!" exclaimed the émigré, putting down his candle. "What imprudence! You know her recommendation!"
"I don't know your business—or your credentials!" snapped the other.
"I will show you both," quoth La Vireville sweetly; and, opening his coat, he pulled out the thin leather case in which he had put the passports. From this he carefully drew forth Anne-Hilarion's, and spread enough of it before his adversary's vision to show him the boy's name.
"Why, what have you there?" exclaimed M. Duchâtel, shaken out of his self-possession. And he added something under his breath about a trick and an old vixen, while, eager for a fuller sight or complete possession of the document, he hastily laid down the pistol on the mantelpiece.