"Why, father, that's a first rate idea! Hadn't you better go right now and get it?"
"Yes, perhaps I had; and meanwhile you can tell the poor little woman that her friend will be here on Friday."
"Yes, I will. And father? May I tell Daisy that now you agree with me about
Mrs. Dampier—that you no longer believe the Poulains' story?"
"No," said Senator Burton a little sternly. "You are to say nothing of the sort, Gerald. I have only known this girl three days—I have known the Poulains nine years. Of course it's a great relief to me to learn that Mrs. Dampier's account of herself is true—so far as you've been able to ascertain such a fact in a few minutes' conversation with an unknown man over the telephone—but that does not affect my good opinion of the Poulains."
And on this the father and son parted, for the first time in their joint lives, seriously at odds the one with the other.
"Give you an introduction to our Prefect of Police? Why, certainly!"
The white-haired President of the French Senate looked curiously at the American gentleman who had sought him out at the early hour of eleven o'clock.
"You will find Monsieur Beaucourt a charming man," he went on. "I hear nothing but good of the way he does his very difficult work. He is a type to whom you are used in America, my dear Senator, but whom we perhaps too often lack in France among those who govern us. Monsieur Beaucourt is a strong man—a man who takes his own line and sticks to it. I was told only the other day that crime had greatly diminished in our city since he became Prefect. He is thoroughly trusted by his subordinates, and you can imagine what that means when one remembers that our beautiful Paris is the resort of all the international rogues of Europe. And if they tease us by their presence at ordinary times, you can imagine what it is like during an Exhibition Year!"
CHAPTER IX
In all French public offices there is a strange mingling of the sordid and of the magnificent.