She handed him the card with:
"It's the two gentlemen who were here before and wanted to see you, M. the President."
"Perissard! Perissard!" mused the President, studying the bit of pasteboard. "I don't know the name. However, Rose, show them in and take M. Noel up to his room."
The friends silently gripped hands as a mute promise that they would renew the conversation later and Noel went in with the housekeeper.
[CHAPTER XIX]
HOPE AT LAST
Messrs. Perissard and Merivel were not hopelessly shocked and grief-stricken over the death of Laroque. They were grateful to his memory, inasmuch as he had put them in the way of making 125,000 francs with more ease and less risk than they had expected to incur in collecting, at the outside, three-fifths of that amount in Bordeaux. They were doubly grateful when they reflected that his timely death had saved them ten per cent of that amount.
While he would have been useful in the matter of the public official of Bordeaux, they felt that they would eventually find as trustworthy an agent. On the whole, from the viewpoint of the partners in Confidential Missions, nothing in his life became him as the leaving it. The fact that he had been murdered by the wife of the President of the Court of Toulouse put that gentleman in position where he could not possibly refuse to pay for "discretion."
They went over all this as they sat in a café not far from the Floriot house in Bordeaux and waited for M. Floriot's return. It had taken them nearly three months to finally fix upon him as the husband of the homicide of the Three Crowns. They went to Toulouse to interview him and found that he had just gone to Bordeaux to attend the trial in which his son was to appear for the defense. They fairly hugged themselves with pious joy when they saw the shocking corruption of the whole proceedings.