‘It’ll take more than an hour and a half, monsieur,’ replied the man. ‘It is a long way and this cart is very heavy.’
‘Very well, just do the best you can.’
The man touched his cap and moved off with his load.
‘Are we in any hurry?’ asked Burnley.
‘No, we have to kill time until he gets there. Why do you ask?’
‘Nothing, except that if we have time enough, let’s go down directly to the river and take a boat. I always enjoy the Seine boats.’
‘As a matter of fact so do I,’ replied Lefarge. ‘You get the air and the motion is pleasanter and more silent than a bus. They are not so slow either when you consider the stops.’
They took a bus which brought them southwards through the Louvre, and, alighting at the Pont des Arts, caught a steamer going to Suresnes. The morning was fresh and exquisitely clear. The sun, immediately behind them at first, crept slowly round to the left as they followed the curve of the river. Burnley sat admiring perhaps for the fiftieth time the graceful architecture of the bridges, justly celebrated as the finest of any city in the world. He gazed with fresh interest and pleasure also on the buildings they were carried past, from the huge pile of the Louvre on the right bank to the great terrace of the Quai d’Orsay on the left, and from the Trocadero and the palaces of the Champs Élysées back to the thin tapering shaft of the Eiffel Tower. How well he remembered a visit that he and Lefarge had paid to the restaurant on the lower stage of this latter when they lunched at the next table to Madame Marcelle, the young and attractive looking woman who had murdered her English husband by repeated doses of a slow and irritant poison. He had just turned to remind his companion of the circumstance when the latter’s voice broke in on his thoughts.
‘I went back to the Sûreté after we parted last night. I thought it better to make sure of the cart this morning, and I also looked up our records about this firm of monumental sculptors. It seems that it is not a very large concern, and all the power is vested in the hands of M. Paul Thévenet, the managing director. It is an old establishment and apparently eminently respectable, and has a perfectly clean record so far as we are concerned.’
‘Well, that’s so much to the good.’