“Whom do you want?” she cried.

“Caecelia K——.”

“I am Miss Zoe.”

“Oh!  I know you,” the Inspector said with a smile; “be kind enough to take off your dark locks, and you will be Caecelia K——.  I arrest you in the name of the law.”

“Good heavens!” she stammered, “Lajos has betrayed me.”

“You are mistaken, Madame,” the Inspector replied; “he has merely done his duty.”

“What?  Lajos . . . my lover?”

“No, Lajos, the detective.”

Caecelia got out of bed, and the next moment she sank fainting onto the floor.

AN EXOTIC PRINCE

In the forthcoming reminiscences, a lady will frequently be mentioned who played a great part in the annals of the police from 1848 to 1866, and we will call her Wanda von Chabert.  Born in Galicia of German parents, and carefully brought up in every way, she married a rich and handsome officer of noble birth, from love, when she was sixteen.  The young couple, however, lived beyond their means, and when her husband died suddenly, two years after they were married, she was left anything but well off.

As Wanda had grown accustomed to luxury and amusement, the quiet life in her parents’ house did not suit her any longer, and even while she was still in mourning for her husband, she allowed a Hungarian magnate to make love to her, and she went off with him at a venture, and continued the same extravagant life which she had led when her husband was alive, at her own authority.  At the end of two years, however, her lover left her in a town in North Italy, almost without means, and she was thinking of going on the stage, when chance provided her with another resource, which enabled her to reassure her position in society.  She became a secret police agent, and soon was one of their most valuable members.  In addition to the proverbial charms and wit of a Polish woman, she also possessed high linguistic attainments, and she spoke Polish, Russian, French, German, English and Italian, almost equally fluently and correctly; then she had also that encyclopaedic polish, which impresses most people much more than the most profound learning of a specialist.  She was very attractive in appearance, and she knew how to set off her good looks by all the arts of dress and coquetry.

In addition to this, she was a woman of the world in the widest sense of the term; pleasure-loving, faithless, unstable, and therefore never in any danger of really losing her heart, and consequently her head.  She used to change the place of her abode, according to what she had to do.  Sometimes she lived in Paris among the Polish emigrants, in order to find out what they were doing, and maintained intimate relations with the Tuileries and the Palais Royal at the same time; then she went to London for a short time, or hurried off to Italy, to watch the Hungarian exiles, only to reappear suddenly in Switzerland, or at one of the fashionable German watering-places.