The Secret of the Night

Publisher Marketing: "BARINIA, the young stranger has arrived." "Where is he?" "Oh, he is waiting at the lodge." "I told you to show him to Natacha's sitting-room. Didn't you understand me, Ermolai?" "Pardon, Barinia, but the young stranger, when I asked to search him, as you directed, flatly refused to let me." "Did you explain to him that everybody is searched before being allowed to enter, that it is the order, and that even my mother herself has submitted to it?" "I told him all that, Barinia; and I told him about madame your mother." "What did he say to that?" "That he was not madame your mother. He acted angry." "Well, let him come in without being searched." "The Chief of Police won't like it." "Do as I say." Ermolai bowed and returned to the garden. The "barinia" left the veranda, where she had come for this conversation with the old servant of General Trebassof, her husband, and returned to the dining-room in the datcha des Iles, where the gay Councilor Ivan Petrovitch was regaling his amused associates with his latest exploit at Cubat's resort. They were a noisy company, and certainly the quietest among them was not the general, who nursed on a sofa the leg which still held him captive after the recent attack, that to his old coachman and his two piebald horses had proved fatal. Contributor Bio:  LeRoux, Gaston Gaston Leroux was a French journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, and is most famous for his acclaimed novel, The Phantom of the Opera. A student of law, Leroux turned to journalism after spending his inheritance on a lavish lifestyle. Over a decade of work as a court reporter and theatre critic for the L'?cho de Paris served as inspiration for his series of successful detective novels featuring Joseph Rouletabille, an amateur sleuth, and Leroux's contributions to the French detective genre are considered as significant as those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Leroux died in 1927.