Mr. Sabin followed him into a large and delightfully furnished library. Then he looked keenly at the servant.
“You know me,” he remarked.
“Monsieur Le Duc Souspennier,” the man answered with a bow. “I am an Englishman, but I was in the service of the Marquis de la Merle in Paris for ten years.”
“Your face,” Mr. Sabin said, “was familiar to me. You look like a man to be trusted. Will you be so good as to remember that the Duc is unfortunately dead, and I am Mr. Sabin.”
“Most certainly, sir,” the man answered. “Is there anything which I can bring you?”
“Nothing, thank you,” Mr. Sabin answered.
The man withdrew with a low bow, and Mr. Sabin stood for a few minutes turning over magazines and journals which covered a large round table, and represented the ephemeral literature of nearly every country in Europe.
“Mrs. Peterson,” he remarked to himself, “must be a woman of Catholic tastes. Here is the Le Petit Journal inside the pages of the English Contemporary Review.”
He was turning the magazines over with interest, when he chanced to glance through the great south window a few feet away from him. Something he saw barely a hundred yards from the little iron fence which bordered the lawns, attracted his attention. He rubbed his eyes and looked at it again. He was puzzled, and was on the point of ringing the bell when the man who had admitted him entered, bearing a tray with liqueurs and cigarettes. Mr. Sabin beckoned him over to the window.