"Nothing, your Prefect of Police only spoke a little too loud. He seemed to me to understand."
Vaudrey's hand rapidly seized Lissac's wrist.
"Hush! be silent!"
"Very well! Good!" said Lissac to himself. "Poor little Adrienne."
"I will tell you all about that later. Oh! nothing is more simple! It isn't what you think!"
"I am sure of that!" answered Lissac, with a smile.
In a mechanical way, and as if to evade his friend, Sulpice left the smoking-room for the salon, tritely observing:
"We must rejoin the ladies—the cigar kills conversation—"
He felt uncomfortable. It was the first time that Jouvenet had informed him that there are agents for learning the movements of ministers. The Prefect of Police, in a chance conversation at the Opéra with the editor-in-chief of a very Parisian journal, had suppressed a rumor which stated that a minister hailing from Grenoble set propriety at defiance in his visits to Rue Prony. It would have been as well to print Vaudrey's name.
Hitherto he had been able to enjoy his passion for Marianne without scandal and secretly. His mysterious intrigue was now known to the police, to everybody, to a reporter who had stumbled against him on leaving a supper-party at the house of a courtesan in the neighborhood.