Oscar remained dumb, confounded, stupefied, hearing nothing, though Madame Moreau questioned him and shook him violently by his arm, which she caught and squeezed.  She gained nothing, however, and was forced to leave him in the salon without an answer, for Rosalie appeared again, to ask for linen and silver, and to beg she would go herself and see that the multiplied orders of the count were executed.  All the household, together with the gardeners and the concierge and his wife, were going and coming in a confusion that may readily be imagined.  The master had fallen upon his own house like a bombshell.

From the top of the hill near La Cave, where he left the coach, the count had gone, by the path through the woods well-known to him, to the house of his gamekeeper.  The keeper was amazed when he saw his real master.

“Is Moreau here?” said the count.  “I see his horse.”

“No, monseigneur; he means to go to Moulineaux before dinner, and he has left his horse here while he went to the chateau to give a few orders.”

“If you value your place,” said the count, “you will take that horse and ride at once to Beaumont, where you will deliver to Monsieur Margueron the note that I shall now write.”

So saying the count entered the keeper’s lodge and wrote a line, folding it in a way impossible to open without detection, and gave it to the man as soon as he saw him in the saddle.

“Not a word to any one,” he said, “and as for you, madame,” he added to the gamekeeper’s wife, “if Moreau comes back for his horse, tell him merely that I have taken it.”

The count then crossed the park and entered the court-yard of the chateau through the iron gates.  However worn-out a man may be by the wear and tear of public life, by his own emotions, by his own mistakes and disappointments, the soul of any man able to love deeply at the count’s age is still young and sensitive to treachery.  Monsieur de Serizy had felt such pain at the thought that Moreau had deceived him, that even after hearing the conversation at Saint-Brice he thought him less an accomplice of Leger and the notary than their tool.  On the threshold of the inn, and while that conversation was still going on, he thought of pardoning his steward after giving him a good reproof.  Strange to say, the dishonesty of his confidential agent occupied his mind as a mere episode from the moment when Oscar revealed his infirmities.  Secrets so carefully guarded could only have been revealed by Moreau, who had, no doubt, laughed over the hidden troubles of his benefactor with either Madame de Serizy’s former maid or with the Aspasia of the Directory.

As he walked along the wood-path, this peer of France, this statesman, wept as young men weep; he wept his last tears.  All human feelings were so cruelly hurt by one stroke that the usually calm man staggered through his park like a wounded deer.

When Moreau arrived at the gamekeeper’s lodge and asked for his horse, the keeper’s wife replied:—­