“After all,” he said to himself, “we shall soon find out.  Monsieur Puck must be less difficult to unearth than Michel Menko.”

He rang for his valet, and was about to go out, when Yanski Varhely was announced.

The old Hungarian looked troubled, and his brows were contracted in a frown.  He could not repress a movement of anger when he perceived, upon the Prince’s table, the marked number of L’Actualite.

Varhely, when he had an afternoon to get rid of, usually went to the Palais-Royal.  He had lived for twenty years not far from there, in a little apartment near Saint-Roch.  Drinking in the fresh air, under the striped awning of the Cafe de la Rotunde, he read the journals, one after the other, or watched the sparrows fly about and peck up the grains in the sand.  Children ran here and there, playing at ball; and, above the noise of the promenaders, arose the music of the brass band.

It was chiefly the political news he sought for in the French or foreign journals.  He ran through them all with his nose in the sheets, which he held straight out by the wooden file, like a flag.  With a rapid glance, he fell straight upon the Hungarian names which interested him—­Deak sometimes, sometimes Andrassy; and from a German paper he passed to an English, Spanish, or Italian one, making, as he said, a tour of Europe, acquainted as he was with almost all European languages.

An hour before he appeared at the Prince’s house, he was seated in the shade of the trees, scanning ‘L’Actualite’, when he suddenly uttered an oath of anger (an Hungarian ‘teremtete!’) as he came across the two paragraphs alluding to Prince Andras.

Varhely read the lines over twice, to convince himself that he was not mistaken, and that it was Prince Zilah who was designated with the skilfully veiled innuendo of an expert journalist.  There was no chance for doubt; the indistinct nationality of the great lord spoken of thinly veiled the Magyar characteristics of Andras, and the paragraph which preceded the “Little Parisian Romance” was very skilfully arranged to let the public guess the name of the hero of the adventure, while giving to the anecdote related the piquancy of the anonymous, that velvet mask of scandal-mongers.

Then Varhely had only one idea.

“Andras must not know of this article.  He scarcely ever reads the journals; but some one may have sent this paper to him.”

And the old misanthrope hurried to the Prince’s hotel, thinking this:  that there always exist people ready to forward paragraphs of this kind.

When he perceived ‘L’Actualite’ upon the Prince’s table, he saw that his surmise was only too correct, and he was furious with himself for arriving too late.

“Where are you going?” he asked Andras, who was putting on his gloves.

The Prince took up the marked paper, folded it slowly, and replied: 

“I am going out.”