“I don’t know yet. At any rate, I must first of all run to the newspaper office, and get that woman’s address.”
But Mlle. Lucienne stopped him.
“No,” she uttered: “it isn’t there that you must go. You must come with me to see my friend the commissary.”
Maxence received this suggestion with a gesture of surprise, almost of terror.
“Why, how can you think of such a thing?” he exclaimed. “My father is fleeing from justice; and you want me to take for my confidant a commissary of police,—the very man whose duty it is to arrest him, if he can find him!”
But he interrupted himself for a moment, staring and gaping, as if the truth had suddenly flashed upon his mind in dazzling evidence.
“For my father has not gone abroad,” he went on. “It is in Paris that he is hiding: I am sure of it. You have seen him?”
Mlle. Lucienne really thought that Maxence was losing his mind.
“I have seen your father—I?” she said.
“Yes, last evening. How could I have forgotten it? While you were waiting for me down stairs, between eleven and half-past eleven a middle-aged man, thin, wearing a long overcoat, came and asked for me.”