“Hope!”
“My meaning is this, I can give you no hope that M. Lefarge is alive.”
“Alive! Ah, no! He is dead, my dear father is dead, some instinct has long told me that; all I hope for is revenge.”
“I may give you that,” said Freyberger quite simply.
They were standing opposite to one another. Mademoiselle Lefarge sank down on a fauteuil near by and motioned the detective to take a chair.
“I must tell you first,” said he, taking a seat close to her, “that a terrible crime has been committed in England, a crime almost exactly similar to that which was committed in the Rue de Turbigo eight years ago.”
“Ah!”
“We are investigating that crime, we believe the active agent in it to be the active agent in the crime of the Rue de Turbigo. If we can prove this incontrovertibly by the capture of the active agent for whom we are seeking, your father’s name will be quite cleared of any imputation.”
Cécile Lefarge sighed deeply. She sat with her hands clasped across one knee and her eyes fixed upon the man before her.
She divined, in this plain, clean-shaved, fresh-coloured and youngish-looking man, whose face might have been that of a café waiter, whose manner was yet so calm and authoritative and assured, and whose eye was so full of steadfastness and energy, she divined in this person the man for whom she had been seeking for years—her avenger.