But Mme. d’Escorval did not recognize Mlle. Lacheneur in the masculine habiliments in which she was clothed.

She only saw that it was not her husband whom they had brought with them; and a convulsive shudder shook her from head to foot.

“Your father, Maurice!” she exclaimed, in a stifled voice; “and your father!”

The effect was terrible.  Until that moment, Maurice and the cure had comforted themselves with the hope that M. d’Escorval would reach home before them.

Maurice tottered, and almost dropped his precious burden.  The abbe perceived it, and at a sign from him, two servants gently lifted Marie-Anne, and bore her to the house.

Then the cure approached Mme. d’Escorval.

“Monsieur will soon be here, Madame,” said he, at hazard; “he fled first——­”

“Baron d’Escorval could not have fled,” she interrupted.  “A general does not desert when face to face with the enemy.  If a panic seizes his soldiers, he rushes to the front, and either leads them back to combat, or takes his own life.”

“Mother!” faltered Maurice; “mother!”

“Oh! do not try to deceive me.  My husband was the organizer of this conspiracy—­his confederates beaten and dispersed must have proved themselves cowards.  God have mercy upon me; my husband is dead!”

In spite of the abbe’s quickness of perception, he could not understand such assertions on the part of the baroness; he thought that sorrow and terror must have destroyed her reason.

“Ah!  Madame,” he exclaimed, “the baron had nothing to do with this movement; far from it——­”

He paused; all this was passing in the court-yard, in the glare of the torches which had been lighted up by the servants.  Anyone in the public road could hear and see all.  He realized the imprudence of which they were guilty.

“Come, Madame,” said he, leading the baroness toward the house; “and you, also, Maurice, come!”

It was with the silent and passive submission of great misery that Mme. d’Escorval obeyed the cure.

Her body alone moved in mechanical obedience; her mind and heart were flying through space to the man who was her all, and whose mind and heart were even then, doubtless, calling to her from the dread abyss into which he had fallen.

But when she had passed the threshold of the drawing-room, she trembled and dropped the priest’s arm, rudely recalled to the present reality.

She recognized Marie-Anne in the lifeless form extended upon the sofa.

“Mademoiselle Lacheneur!” she faltered, “here in this costume—­dead!”

One might indeed believe the poor girl dead, to see her lying there rigid, cold, and as white as if the last drop of blood had been drained from her veins.  Her beautiful face had the immobility of marble; her half-opened, colorless lips disclosed teeth convulsively clinched, and a large dark-blue circle surrounded her closed eyelids.