But already had the young woman returned to her feeling of mistrust.
“How in the world do you expect me to know?” she replied. “Go and ask Amanda. I have no accounts to give you. Besides, I have to go and finish packing my trunks. So good-by, and enjoy yourself.”
And she went out so quick, that she caught Amanda, the chambermaid, kneeling behind the door.
“So that woman was listening,” thought M. de Tregars, anxious and dissatisfied.
But it was in vain that he begged Mme. Zelie to return, and to hear a single word more. She disappeared; and he had to resign himself to leave the house without learning any thing more for the present.
He had remained there very long; and he was wondering, as he walked out, whether Maxence had not got tired waiting for him in the little Café where he had sent him.
But Maxence had remained faithfully at his post. And when Marius de Tregars came to sit by him, whilst exclaiming, “Here you are at last!” he called his attention at the same time with a gesture, and a wink from the corner of his eye, to two men sitting at the adjoining table before a bowl of punch.
Certain, now, that M. de Tregars would remain on the lookout, Maxence was knocking on the table with his fist, to call the waiter, who was busy playing billiards with a customer.
And when he came at last, justly annoyed at being disturbed,
“Give us two mugs of beer,” Maxence ordered, “and bring us a pack of cards.”