“Pardon me, my dear old friend,” smiled Basil, accepting the comfortable seat indicated to him by the General. “I do not always come to see you because I want something.”
“Let’s admit that you do not always come for interested reasons, but your nose is wriggling as if upon some scent or other, and so I conclude that this is one of your ‘on’ days.”
“You are dangerously perspicacious!” Basil remarked. “Yes, I did venture to disturb you to-night for some such reason.”
“I thought so,” laughed the ex-official, who had been dreaded above all his predecessors in office. “And now what is it you wish to find out?”
Basil lighted a cigarette, paused to expel two or three thin threads of smoke, and then spoke:
“I would like to know who is the English officer in mufti who has visited Petersburg on several occasions during—the last year or two, let us say—to meet a woman of the half-world—as a matter of fact, a Lesghise; first lançée by—”
“A dashing officer of the Gardes-à-Cheval?” interrupted the General.
“Precisely!”
General Lédòff glanced at his interlocutor from beneath his shaggy eyebrows, then fell to puffing once more at his enormous pipe with extraordinary industry.
“You,” he said, dryly, “have no longer the least business to occupy yourself with ladies of the merrier sort, my son, and unless you give me a pretty good reason for so doing I will certainly and most virtuously refuse to assist you in so unpardonable an enterprise. What do you want of that species of fallen Princess?”