They returned to the great courtyard, but not to Zaniloff's room as the promise had been. Here by the gates there stood a passable private carriage, and into this Alban perceived that he was to be hustled. The bestarred transcriber of the upper story, he who waged the battle of the flies, now stood by the carriage door and appeared to be ill at ease. Evidently his study of strange tongues still troubled him.
"Pardon, mein Herr--how in English--khorosho?" he asked very deferentially.
"It means 'that's all right,' sir." Alban answered immediately.
"It means that,--ah, nitchevo--je ne m'en souviens jamais."
He held the door open and Alban entered the carriage without a word. Apparently they still waited for someone and five minutes passed and found their attitudes unchanged. Then Zaniloff himself appeared full of bustle and business but in a temper modified toward concession.
"I am taking you back to your hotel, mein Herr," he said to Alban, "it is the Governor's order. You will leave Warsaw to-night. Those are our instructions."
He sank back in the cushions and the great gates were shut behind them with a sonorous clang. Out in the streets the outbreak of the earlier hours had been a veritable battle but was now a truce. The whole city seemed to be swarming with troops. Well might Zaniloff think of other things.
"Is the Count better, sir?" Alban ventured presently.
"He will live," was the dry response, "at least the doctors say so."
"And you have discovered the truth about the affair?"
"The man who attacked him was shot on the Rymarska half an hour ago."
"Then that is why you are taking me back to my hotel?"
"There is positively no other reason," said the Chief.
The statement was frank to the point of brutality, but it carried also such a message of hope that Alban hardly dared to repeat the words of it even to himself; there was no longer any possibility of a capital charge against the child he had just left in the wretched stable. Let the other facts be as they might, these people could not detain Lois Boriskoff upon the Count's affair or add it to the dossier in which her father's offences were narrated. Of this Zaniloff's tone convinced him. "He would never have admitted it at all if Lois were compromised," the argument ran, and was worthy of the wise head which arrived at it.
"I am glad that you have found the man," he explained presently, "it clears up so much and must be very satisfactory. Would you have any objection to telling me what you are going to do with the girl I have just left?"