“Perfect!” he exclaimed. “Now quick, the address: Mme. la Baronne de Thaller, Rue de le Pepiniere.”
There are professions which extinguish, in those who exercise them, all curiosity. It is with the most complete indifference, and without asking a question, that the secretary had done what he had been requested.
“Now, my dear Felix,” resumed the commissary, “you will please get yourself up as near as possible like a restaurant-waiter, and take this letter to its address.”
“At this hour!”
“Yes. The Baroness de Thaller is out to a ball. You will tell the servants that you are bringing her an answer concerning an important matter. They know nothing about it; but they will allow you to wait for their mistress in the porter’s lodge. As soon as she comes in, you will hand her the letter, stating that two gentlemen who are taking supper in your restaurant are waiting for the answer. It may be that she will exclaim that you are a scoundrel, that she does not know what it means: in that case, we shall have been anticipated, and you must get away as fast as you can. But the chances are, that she will give you two thousand francs; and then you must so manage, that she will be seen plainly when she does it. Is it all understood?”
“Perfectly.”
“Go ahead, then, and do not lose a minute. I shall wait.”
Away from Mlle. Lucienne, Maxence had gradually been recalled to the strangeness of the situation; and it was with a mingled feeling of curiosity and surprise that he observed the commissary acting and bustling about.
The good man had found again all the activity of his youth, together with that fever of hope and that impatience of success, which usually disappear with age.
He was going over the whole of the case again,—his first meeting with Mlle. Lucienne, the various attempts upon her life; and he had just taken out of the file the letter of information which had been intrusted to him, in order to compare the writing with that of the letter taken from his adversary by M. de Tregars, when the latter came in all out of breath.