us into consideration? In a word, suppose I left you free?"
Perenna could not help smiling. Notwithstanding the affair of the walking-stick and though appearances were all against him, at the moment when everything seemed to be going wrong, things were taking the course which he had prophesied from the start, and which he had mentioned to Mazeroux during the inquiry on the Boulevard Suchet. They wanted him.
"Free?" he asked. "No more supervision? Nobody shadowing my movements?"
"Nobody."
"And what if the press campaign around my name continues, if the papers succeed, by means of certain pieces of tittle-tattle, of certain coincidences, in creating a public outcry, if they call for measures against me?"
"Those measures shall not be taken."
"Then I have nothing to fear?"
"Nothing."
"Will M. Weber abandon his prejudices against me?"
"At any rate, he will act as though he did, won't you, Weber?"
The deputy chief uttered a few grunts which might be taken as an expression of assent; and Don Luis at once exclaimed:
"In that case, Monsieur le Préfet, I am sure of gaining the victory and of gaining it in accordance with the wishes and requirements of the authorities."
And so, by a sudden change in the situation, after a series of exceptional circumstances, the police themselves, bowing before Don Luis Perenna's superior qualities of mind, acknowledging all that he had already done and
