“What orders?” snapped Ralph.
“Mine.”
Ralph crossed his arms.
“That’s all very well, but by what right do you give them? It’s all very well for you to lay down the law with an insolence that these other people stand. But I am not in the humor to submit to it myself.” [[39]]
The lady-killer held out his visiting card and chanted in pompous accents:
“Rudolph Marescal, Commissary of the International Investigation Department, attached to the Ministry of the Interior.”
He had the air of saying: “In the face of such qualifications there is nothing to do but to give way.”
He added: “If I have taken charge of the matter it is by agreement with the station master and because my special qualifications authorize me to do so.”
Ralph taken aback, controlled himself. The name of Marescal suddenly awoke in his memory the confused remembrance of certain affairs in which it seemed to him that the Commissary had shown cleverness and remarkable clearsightedness. In any case it would be absurd to oppose him.
“It’s my fault,” he thought. “Instead of acting at once in the matter of the English girl and fulfilling my last promise to her, I wasted time in getting excited about the masked girl. But all the same I’ll catch you before I’ve done with you, my pomaded friend.”