“I can do it in a second,” he assured his master. “I just go up to him, without making him aware of my presence. I seize him by his cravat; I give him two turns, like that—and good-night. He won’t track anybody again.”
Daniel had to use all his authority to keep him back, and found it still harder to convince him of the necessity to let the scamp not know that he had been discovered.
“Besides,” he added, “it is not proved yet that we are really watched; it may be merely a curious coincidence.”
“That may be so,” growled Lefloch.
But they could no longer doubt, when, just before dinner, as they looked out of the window, they saw the same man pass the hotel. At night they saw him again at the depot; and he took the same express train of 9.45 for Paris, in which they went. They recognized him in the refreshment-room at Lyons. And the first person they saw as they got out at Paris was the same man.
But Daniel did not mind the spy. He had long since forgotten him. He thought of nothing but the one fact that he was in the same town now with Henrietta. Too impatient to wait for his trunks, he left Lefloch in charge, and jumped into a cab, promising the driver two dollars if he would go as fast as he could to the Hotel du Louvre. For such pay, the lean horses of any cab become equal to English thoroughbreds; and in three-quarters of an hour Daniel was installed in his room at the hotel, and waited with anxiety the return of the waiter. Now that he was really here, a thousand doubts assailed him: “Had he understood Papa Ravinet correctly? Had the good old man given him the right directions? Might they not, excited as they both were, have easily made a mistake?”
“In less than a quarter of an hour after your arrival,” Papa Ravinet had said to Daniel, “you shall have news.”
Less than a quarter of an hour! It seemed to Daniel as if he had been an eternity in this room. Thinking that Henrietta might possibly occupy a room on the same floor with him, on the same side of the house, that he might even be separated from her only by a partition-wall, he felt like cursing Papa Ravinet, when there came a knock at the door.
“Come in!” he cried.
A waiter appeared, and handed him a visiting-card, on which was written, “Mrs. Bertolle, third story. No. 5.”