United States or Czechia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"But I can't see the lady very well, with all those veils on," Mme. Doulenques protested. Lady Beltham did not wait for the request which the President would inevitably have made, but haughtily put back her veil. "Do you recognise me now?" she said coldly. The scorn in her tone upset Mme. Doulenques.
"The deuce!" he exclaimed softly; "who can be coming to ring Gurn up when everybody in Paris knows he has been arrested?" and he felt mechanically in his pocket to make sure that his revolver was there. Then he smiled. "What a fool I am! Of course it is only Mme. Doulenques, wondering why I am staying here so long." He strode to the door, flung it wide open, and then recoiled in astonishment.
"M. Gurn is a kind of commercial traveller and is often away, sometimes for a month or six weeks together," and the gossiping woman was beginning a long and incoherent story when the stranger interrupted her, pointing to a silver-framed photograph of a young woman he had noticed on the mantelpiece. "Is that Mme. Gurn?" "M. Gurn is a bachelor," Mme. Doulenques replied.
Doulenques had conceived a most respectful admiration for the Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department. "That man," she constantly declared to Madame Aurore, "it isn't eyes he has in his head, it's telescopes, magnifying glasses! He sees everything in a minute even when it isn't there!"
Doulenques cast a mechanical glance through the window that looked on to the street, and then surveyed the stranger from top to toe; he seemed to be much too well dressed to be a mere porter. "But you haven't got any handcart or truck," she exclaimed. "You're not thinking of carrying the trunks on your shoulder, are you? Why, there are at least three or four of them and heavy!"
The porters had left hurriedly for the rue d'Hauteville and a quarter of an hour went by. The detective had requested the concierge to ask the Madame Aurore to whom she had previously appealed so loudly for help, to take her place temporarily in the lodge. Juve kept Mme. Doulenques upstairs with him partly to get information from her, and partly to prevent her from gossiping downstairs.
The existence of some relations between yourself and the prisoner, which delicacy would prompt him to conceal, and honour would compel you to deny, would alter the whole aspect of this case." He turned to the usher. "Recall Mme. Doulenques, please." Mme.
He carefully shut the lid of the trunk, thus hiding the unhappy corpse from the curious eyes of the gendarme and the still terrified Mme. Doulenques. Then he leisurely buttoned his overcoat and spoke to the gendarme. "Stay here until I send a man to relieve you; I am going to your superintendent now." At the door he called the concierge. "Will you kindly go down before me, madame?
Please go on with your work exactly as though I were not in the house, Mme. Doulenques." It was his usual phrase, and a constant disappointment to the concierge, who would have asked nothing better than to go upstairs with the detective and watch him at his wonderful work. Juve went up the five floors to the flat formerly occupied by Gurn, reflecting somewhat moodily.
Doulenques, crimson with excitement, and nervously twisting in her hands a huge pair of white gloves which she had bought for this occasion, looked curiously at Lady Beltham. "Upon my word I can't be sure that this is the lady," she said after quite a long pause. "But you were so certain of your facts just now," the President smiled encouragingly.
Word Of The Day