“Such a fine estate!”

“It will sell to-day for over two millions.”

“The chateau alone must have cost that,” remarked Monsieur de Troisville.

“One of the best properties in a circumference of sixty miles,” said the sub-prefect; “but you can find a better near Paris.”

“How much income does one get from two millions?” asked the countess.

“Now-a-days, about eighty thousand francs,” replied Blondet.

“Les Aigues does not bring in, all told, more than thirty thousand,” said the countess; “and lately you have been at such immense expenses, —­you have surrounded the woods this year with ditches.”

“You could get,” added Blondet, “a royal chateau for four hundred thousand francs near Paris.  In these days people buy the follies of others.”

“I thought you cared for Les Aigues!” said the count to his wife.

“Don’t you feel that I care a thousand times more for your life?” she replied.  “Besides, ever since the death of my poor Olympe and Michaud’s murder the country is odious to me; all the faces I meet seem to wear a treacherous or threatening expression.”

The next evening the sub-prefect, having ended his visit at the chateau, was welcomed in the salon of Monsieur Gaubertin at Ville-aux-Fayes in these words:—­

“Well, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, so you have returned from Les Aigues?”

“Yes,” answered the sub-prefect with a little air of triumph and a look of tender regard at Mademoiselle Elise, “and I am very much afraid to say we may lose the general; he talks of selling his property—­”

“Monsieur Gaubertin, I speak for my pavilion.  I can on longer endure the noise, the dust of Ville-aux-Fayes; like a poor imprisoned bird I gasp for the air of the fields, the woodland breezes,” said Madame Isaure, in a lackadaisical voice, with her eyes half-closed and her head bending to her left shoulder as she played carelessly with the long curls of her blond hair.

“Pray be prudent, madame!” said her husband in a low voice; “your indiscretions will not help me to buy the pavilion.”  Then, turning to the sub-prefect, he added, “Haven’t they yet discovered the men who were concerned in the murder of the bailiff?”

“It seems not,” replied the sub-prefect.

“That will injure the sale of Les Aigues,” said Gaubertin to the company generally, “I know very well that I would not buy the place.  The peasantry over there are such a bad set of people; even in the days of Mademoiselle Laguerre I had trouble with them, and God knows she let them do as they liked.”

At the end of the month of May the general still gave no sign that he intended to sell Les Aigues; in fact, he was undecided.  One night, about ten o’clock, he was returning from the forest through one of the six avenues that led to the pavilion of the Rendezvous.  He dismissed the keeper who accompanied him, as he was then so near the chateau.  At a turn of the road a man armed with a gun came from behind a bush.