“And you met in my drawing room?”
“Yes,” and Alex laughed at the remembrance of it. “I knew it wasn’t right, and I made a speech against it——”
“And stood up on one of my satin-covered chairs, and left the print of your feet on it!” was the gendarme’s next remark, at which Alex laughed again, but answered, promptly: “I had to stand on something to look over their heads, and I took off my shoes.”
“But left the outline of your feet, the same. That is the way I tracked the affair,” M. Seguin said, and this time more sternly than he had before spoken.
“I am sorry about the chair,” Alex said; “and, as soon as I can save enough, I’ll pay for it.”
A wave of the hand was Michel’s reply.
“Anything more, sir?” Alex asked.
“Not this time,” was the answer; and then Michel turned to me, and said: “You knew Ivan as Sophie, and liked him. Everybody likes him, and that is where he is dangerous. I believe this old woman—Alex is her name? Yes, Alex—knows where he is. Tell her to urge him, from you, to get out of the country and go to America. That may sound strangely from me, a gendarme, but I have no wish to arrest him. Still, I must do it, later, if we find him.”
He spoke the last words very loud, so that Alex could hear them. A low grunt showed that she did.
“I must go, now, and quiet that landlady, who is nearly insane because I am here,” Seguin said to me, offering his hand, and saying good-by, with a promise to see me again, and, perhaps, give me good news of Nicol Patoff.