Page:The Teeth of the Tiger - Leblanc - 1914.djvu/408

 easiness, a longing to be up and doing, to throw himself into the fray; and his eyes kept on involuntarily returning to the face of the clock. The minute hand seemed endowed with extraordinary speed.

At last some one entered, ushering in a second person. Don Luis recognized Valenglay and the Prefect of Police.

"That's it," he thought. "I've got him."

He saw this by the sort of vague sympathy perceptible on the old Premier's lean and bony face. There was not a sign of arrogance, nothing to raise a barrier between the Minister and the suspicious individual whom he was receiving: just a manifest, playful curiosity and sympathy. It was a sympathy which Valenglay had never concealed, and of which he even boasted when, after Arsène Lupin's sham death, he spoke of the adventurer and the strange relations between them.

"You have not changed," he said, after looking at him for some time. "Complexion a little darker, a trifle grayer over the temples, that's all."

And putting on a blunt tone, he asked:

"And what is it you want?"

"An answer first of all, Monsieur le Président du Conseil. Has Deputy Chief Weber, who took me to the lockup last night, traced the motor cab in which Florence Levasseur was carried off?"

"Yes, the motor stopped at Versailles. The persons inside it hired another cab which is to take them to Nantes. What else do you ask for, besides that answer?"

"My liberty, Monsieur le Président."

"At once, of course?" said Valenglay, beginning to laugh.

"In thirty or thirty-five minutes at most."