“Ah! you are right, M. le Marquis, a hundred times right!” he declared. “This girl must evidently know Vincent Favoral’s secret, the key of the enigma that we are vainly trying to solve. What she would not tell to you, a stranger, she will tell to Lucienne, her friend.”
Maxence offered to go himself for Zelie Cadelle.
“No,” answered Marius. “If she should happen to know you, she would mistrust you, and would refuse to come.”
It was, therefore, M. Fortin who was despatched to the Rue du Cirque, and who went off muttering, though he had received five francs to take a carriage, and five francs for his trouble.
“And now,” said the commissary of police to Maxence, “we must both of us get out of the way. I, because the fact of my being a commissary would frighten Mme. Cadelle; you because, being Vincent Favoral’s son, your presence would certainly prove embarrassing to her.”
And so they went out; but M. de Tregars did not remain long alone with Mlle. Lucienne. M. Fortin had had the delicacy not to tarry on the way.
Eleven o’clock struck as Zelie Cadelle rushed like a whirlwind into her friend’s room.
Such had been his haste, that she had given no thought whatever to her dress. She had stuck upon her uncombed hair the first bonnet she had laid her hand upon, and thrown an old shawl over the wrapper in which she had received Marius in the afternoon.
“What, my poor Lucienne!” she exclaimed. “Are you so sick as all that?”
But she stopped short as she recognized M. de Tregars; and, in a suspicious tone,