When Madame d’Hauteserre, pale and terrified, opened the door and entered the room, almost carried by Mademoiselle Goujet, whose red eyes had evidently been weeping, all faces turned to her at once.  The two agents hoped as much as the household feared to see Laurence enter.  This spontaneous movement of both masters and servants seemed produced by the sort of mechanism which makes a number of wooden figures perform the same gesture or wink the same eye.

Madame d’Hauteserre advanced by three rapid strides towards Corentin and said, in a broken voice but violently:  “For pity’s sake, monsieur, tell me what my sons are accused of.  Do you really think they have been here?”

The abbe, who seemed to be saying to himself when he saw the old lady, “She will certainly commit some folly,” lowered his eyes.

“My duty and the mission I am engaged in forbid me to tell you,” answered Corentin, with a gracious but rather mocking air.

This refusal, which the detestable politeness of the vulgar fop seemed to make all the more emphatic, petrified the poor mother, who fell into a chair beside the Abbe Goujet, clasped her hands and began to pray.

“Where did you arrest that blubber?” asked Corentin, addressing the corporal and pointing to Laurence’s little henchman.

“On the road that leads to the farm along the park walls; the little scamp had nearly reached the Closeaux woods,” replied the corporal.

“And that girl?”

“She? oh, it was Oliver who caught her.”

“Where was she going?”

“Towards Gondreville.”

“They were going in opposite directions?” said Corentin.

“Yes,” replied the gendarme.

“Is that boy the groom, and the girl the maid of the citizeness Cinq-Cygne?” said Corentin to the mayor.

“Yes,” replied Goulard.

After Corentin had exchanged a few words with Peyrade in a whisper, the latter left the room, taking the corporal of gendarmes with him.

Just then the corporal of Arcis made his appearance.  He went up to Corentin and spoke to him in a low voice:  “I know these premises well,” he said; “I have searched everywhere; unless those young fellows are buried, they are not here.  We have sounded all the floors and walls with the butt end of our muskets.”

Peyrade, who presently returned, signed to Corentin to come out, and then took him to the breach in the moat and showed him the sunken way.

“We have guessed the trick,” said Peyrade.

“And I’ll tell you how it was done,” added Corentin.  “That little scamp and the girl decoyed those idiots of gendarmes and thus made time for the game to escape.”

“We can’t know the truth till daylight,” said Peyrade.  “The road is damp; I have ordered two gendarmes to barricade it top and bottom.  We’ll examine it after daylight, and find out by the footsteps who went that way.”

“I see a hoof-mark,” said Corentin; “let us go to the stables.”