Still keeping his simple air and plainly showing that he could not refrain from giving way to his desire to enjoy the fullest admiration of his companion’s skill, Ralph said: “You couldn’t, I suppose, explain to me how?”
“Why not? After all you will only get the information two hours before the examining magistrate.”
Marescal was started, and in his weariness and confusion, contrary as it was to his usual habit, he could not stop babbling.
Bending towards Ralph, he said: “Do you know who that English girl is?”
“You knew her then?” said Ralph.
“I should think I did know her! We were even on excellent terms. For six months I have been her [[70]]shadow. I watched her always, seeking for proofs against her I could not collect.”
“Proofs? Against her?” cried Ralph in astounded accents.
“Yes, indeed: Against her—against Miss Bakersfield, on the one hand the daughter of Lord Bakersfield, an English peer and multi-millionaire, but on the other an international crook, hotel thief, and chief of a gang—entirely to amuse herself, a veritable dilettante of crime. And she had penetrated my disguise as I had penetrated hers; and when I spoke to her I found her quite sure of herself and ready to jeer at me. A thief? Yes. And I’ve warned my chiefs of it. But how to catch her? Then, ever since yesterday, I held her in my grip. I had been warned by a person in our service at her hotel that she had received from Nice yesterday, the plan of a villa to be burgled—Villa B. it was named in the letter which accompanied the plan—and that she had put the plan and the letter along with a packet of compromising papers, in a little red leather wallet, and was taking the train to the South. Hence my leaving Paris. ‘Down there,’ I thought, ‘either I shall catch her in the very act, or I shall get hold of those papers.’ I had not even to wait till I got to the South. The train-robbers handed her over to me.”
“And the wallet?” asked Ralph.
“She carried it under her clothes, fastened to a [[71]]belt; and now it’s here,” said Marescal patting the breast-pocket of his overcoat. “I’ve just had time to cast a glance over it, from which I gathered that there was no explaining away some of the papers, such as the plan of Villa B, to which she has added with a blue pencil in her own handwriting the date of the twenty-eighth of April. The twenty-eighth of April is the day after to-morrow—Wednesday.”