CHAPTER XVI
THE TWO MESSAGES
(Copy of cablegram received by O'Rourke upon his arrival in Ireland.)
Madame has need of you. Come. Imperative.
A. Chambret.
It was a cold night and a wet one in Paris when O'Rourke arrived at the Gare du Nord; it was, in point of exactness, nearly two o'clock, on a moist and chilly December morning.
The Irishman, haggard and worn with the hardship of continuous traveling, by night and day, from County Galway to Paris posthaste, darted out of the railway terminal as impatiently as if he had just been fresh from a long night's sleep in his bed, with Danny tagging disconsolately in his master's wake, and, since he dared not swear at O'Rourke, melodiously cursing the luggage which had fallen to his care.
The two of them piled into a fiacre and were whirled rapidly across Paris to Chambret's residence in the Rue Royale; which turned out to be nothing more nor less than that happily married gentleman's one-time bachelor apartments.
Despite the lateness of the hour, O'Rourke's determined and thunderous assaults upon the door finally were rewarded by a vision of a red night-capped concierge, from whom the information was finally extracted, with much difficulty, that Monsieur Chambret was from home—that he had left two
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