“Here are some prisoners,” he said; “that little scamp was escaping on horseback.”

“Fool!” said Corentin, in his ear, “why didn’t you let him alone?  You could have found out something by following him.”

Gothard had chosen to burst into tears and behave like an idiot.  Catherine took an attitude of artless innocence which made the old agent reflective.  The pupil of Lenoir, after considering the two prisoners carefully, and noting the vacant air of the old gentleman whom he took to be sly, the intelligent eye of the abbe who was still fingering the cards, and the utter stupefaction of the servants and Durieu, approached Corentin and whispered in his ear, “We are not dealing with ninnies.”

Corentin answered with a look at the card-table; then he added, “They were playing at boston!  Mademoiselle’s bed was just being made for the night; she escaped in a hurry; it is a regular surprise; we shall catch them.”

CHAPTER VII

A FOREST NOOK

A breach has always a cause and a purpose.  Here is the explanation of how the one which led from the tower called that of Mademoiselle and the stables came to be made.  After his installation as Laurence’s guardian at Cinq-Cygne old d’Hauteserre converted a long ravine, through which the water of the forest flowed into the moat, into a roadway between two tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the chateau, by merely planting out in it about a hundred walnut trees which he found ready in the nursery.  In eleven years these trees had grown and branched so as to nearly cover the road, hidden already by steep banks, which ran into a little wood of thirty acres recently purchased.  When the chateau had its full complement of inhabitants they all preferred to take this covered way through the breach to the main road which skirted the park walls and led to the farm, rather than go round by the entrance.  By dint of thus using it the breach in the sides of the moat had gradually been widened on both sides, with all the less scruple because in this nineteenth century of ours moats are no longer of the slightest use, and Laurence’s guardian had often talked of putting this one to some other purpose.  The constant crumbling away of the earth and stones and gravel had ended by filling up the ditch, so that only after heavy rains was the causeway thus constructed covered.  But the bank was still so steep that it was difficult to make a horse descend it, and even more difficult to get him up upon the main road.  Horses, however, seem in times of peril to share their masters’ thought.

While the young countess was hesitating to follow Marthe, and asking explanations, Michu, from his vantage-ground watched the closing in of the gendarmes and understood their plan.  He grew desperate as time went by and the countess did not come to him.  A squad of gendarmes were marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as sentinels, each man being near enough to communicate with those on either side of them, by voice and eye.  Michu, lying flat on his stomach, his ear to earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength of the sounds the time that remained to him.