“Yes.”
“No, you idiot, it’s not yes. How could it be a Zeppelin signal when, according to the conversation which I overheard, the signal had already been given twice before the war. Besides, is it really a signal?”
“No.”
“How do you mean, no? What else could it be, you silly ass? You’d do better to hold your tongue and listen to me, all the more as you don’t even know what it’s all about. . . . No more do I, for that matter, and I confess that I’m at an utter loss. Lord, it’s a complicated business, and I’m not much of a hand at solving these problems.”
Patrice Belval was even more perplexed when he came to the bottom of the Rue de la Tour. There were several roads in front of him, and he did not know which to take. Moreover, though he was in the middle of Passy, not a spark shone in the dark sky.
“It’s finished, I expect,” he said, “and we’ve had our trouble for nothing. It’s your fault, Ya-Bon. If you hadn’t made me lose precious moments in snatching you from the arms of your beloved we should have arrived in time. I admit Angèle’s charms, but, after all . . .”
He took his bearings, feeling more and more undecided. The expedition undertaken on chance and with insufficient information was certainly yielding no results; and he was thinking of abandoning it when a closed private car came out of the Rue Franklin, from the direction of the Trocadéro, and some one inside shouted through the speaking-tube:
“Bear to the left . . . and then straight on, till I stop you.”
Now it appeared to Captain Belval that this voice had the same foreign inflection as one of those which he had heard that morning at the restaurant.
“Can it be the beggar in the gray hat,” he muttered, “one of those who tried to carry off Little Mother Coralie?”