“I have been thinking over the idea of consulting the Baron,” O’Hara ventured, after a pause. “Suppose he won’t believe you?”
“Oh, but he will,” the other insisted; “I’ll make it quite clear to him that I am an American and that I’m a victim and not an aspirant for kingly honours, except in so far as goes to set matters right and bring the guilty to justice.”
“It’s a risk that you take there, lad,” the Irishman argued; “the more I think of it the bigger it looks. He’s just as likely to fancy it’s only a game of yours to throw him off the scent and secure your own ends. I don’t believe Lindenwald exaggerated his shrewdness. I’ve heard of him myself.”
Grey rose, leaned over the table and took a cigarette from a tray.
“Come,” he said, as he struck a match, “we’re liable to find him about this time.”
During the past twenty-four hours he had experienced a gradual reawakening of faculties that had previously lain dull or dormant. His five months of lost memory had had an after-effect in what he could only describe as a mental thickness. His thoughts had run slowly and sluggishly; he had lacked keenness of perception and the ability to draw deductions; he had been all the while conscious of a timidity, an indecision, a hesitation, a tendency to rely upon others, against which he strove with but little effect. His actions were dictated by outside suggestion rather than by his own judgment. And with this, too, was a contrasting dignity of demeanour unnatural to him, and all the more annoying in that it was, he knew, superficial and at discord with his temperament.
The clearing of his brain, the reassertion of his naturally alert mentality, the recovery of his self-reliance, were now becoming evident; but that unwonted, and to him unwelcome, exaggeration of dignity in his carriage and demeanour gave no sign of deserting him.
O’Hara observed the change and delighted in it. The soldier in him could find only admiration for the manner in which Grey had risen mentally in one day from a subaltern to a commanding officer; and the dignified, distinguished air which had seemed, he once thought, a little incongruous appeared now as most fitting and admirable.
Together they went in search of the Budavian Baron. Into one café after another they wandered, but always without success. They encountered acquaintances by the dozen--men and women whom Grey and O’Hara had met since their arrival in Paris, and whom Grey had no recollection of ever having seen before--but the little, wiry, sallow-faced Italian-looking nobleman was nowhere in evidence.