“Aline!  You here!” she exclaimed.  And then in the urgency sweeping aside all minor considerations, “Were you also too late?” she asked.

“No, madame.  I saw him.  I implored him.  But he would not listen.”

“Oh, this is horrible!” Mme. de Plougastel shuddered as she spoke.  “I heard of it only half an hour ago, and I came at once, to prevent it at all costs.”

The two women looked blankly, despairingly, at each other.  In the sunshine-flooded street one or two shabby idlers were pausing to eye the handsome equipage with its magnificent bay horses, and the two great ladies on the doorstep of the fencing-academy.  From across the way came the raucous voice of an itinerant bellows-mender raised in the cry of his trade: 

“A raccommoder les vieux soufflets!”

Madame swung to the housekeeper.

“How long is it since monsieur left?”

“Ten minutes, maybe; hardly more.”  Conceiving these great ladies to be friends of her invincible master’s latest victim, the good woman preserved a decently stolid exterior.

Madame wrung her hands.  “Ten minutes!  Oh!” It was almost a moan.  “Which way did he go?”

“The assignation is for nine o’clock in the Bois de Boulogne,” Aline informed her.  “Could we follow?  Could we prevail if we did?”

“Ah, my God!  The question is should we come in time?  At nine o’clock!  And it wants but little more than a quarter of an hour.  Mon Dieu!  Mon Dieu!” Madame clasped and unclasped her hands in anguish.  “Do you know, at least, where in the Bois they are to meet?”

“No — only that it is in the Bois.”

“In the Bois!” Madame was flung into a frenzy.  “The Bois is nearly half as large as Paris.”  But she swept breathlessly on, “Come, Aline:  get in, get in!”

Then to her coachman.  “To the Bois de Boulogne by way of the Cours la Reine,” she commanded, “as fast as you can drive.  There are ten pistoles for you if we are in time.  Whip up, man!”

She thrust Aline into the carriage, and sprang after her with the energy of a girl.  The heavy vehicle — too heavy by far for this race with time — was moving before she had taken her seat.  Rocking and lurching it went, earning the maledictions of more than one pedestrian whom it narrowly avoided crushing against a wall or trampling underfoot.

Madame sat back with closed eyes and trembling lips.  Her face showed very white and drawn.  Aline watched her in silence.  Almost it seemed to her that Mme. de Plougastel was suffering as deeply as herself, enduring an anguish of apprehension as great as her own.

Later Aline was to wonder at this.  But at the moment all the thought of which her half-numbed mind was capable was bestowed upon their desperate errand.

The carriage rolled across the Place Louis XV and out on to the Cours la Reine at last.  Along that beautiful, tree-bordered avenue between the Champs Elysees and the Seine, almost empty at this hour of the day, they made better speed, leaving now a cloud of dust behind them.