Surprised them?  No.  For a long time M. d’Escorval had seen the prodigious edifice erected by the genius whom he had made his idol totter as if about to fall.

Certainly, he felt intense chagrin at this fall, but he was heart-broken at the sight of all the treason and cowardice which followed it.  He was indignant and horrified at the rising en masse of the avaricious, who hastened to gorge themselves with the spoil.

Under these circumstances, exile from Paris seemed an actual blessing.

“Besides,” as he remarked to the baroness, “we shall soon be forgotten here.”

But even while he said this he felt many misgivings.  Still, by his side, his noble wife presented a tranquil face, even while she trembled for the safety of her adored husband.

On this first Sunday in August, M. d’Escorval and his wife had been unusually sad.  A vague presentiment of approaching misfortune weighed heavily upon their hearts.

At the same hour that Lacheneur presented himself at the house of the Abbe Midon, they were seated upon the terrace in front of the house, gazing anxiously at the two roads leading from Escorval to the chateau, and to the village of Sairmeuse.

Warned, that same morning, by his friends in Montaignac of the arrival of the duke, the baron had sent his son to inform M. Lacheneur.

He had requested him to be absent as short a time as possible; but in spite of this fact, the hours were rolling by, and Maurice had not returned.

“What if something has happened to him!” both father and mother were thinking.

No; nothing had happened to him.  Only a word from Mlle. Lacheneur had sufficed to make him forget his usual deference to his father’s wishes.

“This evening,” she had said, “I shall certainly know your heart.”

What could this mean?  Could she doubt him?

Tortured by the most cruel anxieties, the poor youth could not resolve to go away without an explanation, and he hung around the chateau hoping that Marie-Anne would reappear.

She did reappear at last, but leaning upon the arm of her father.

Young d’Escorval followed them at a distance, and soon saw them enter the parsonage.  What were they going to do there?  He knew that the duke and his son were within.

The time that they remained there, and which he passed in the public square, seemed more than a century long.

They emerged at last, however, and he was about to join them when he was prevented by the appearance of Martial, whose promises he overheard.

Maurice knew nothing of life; he was as innocent as a child, but he could not mistake the intentions that dictated this step on the part of the Marquis de Sairmeuse.

At the thought that a libertine’s caprice should dare rest for an instant upon the pure and beautiful girl whom he loved with all the strength of his being—­whom he had sworn should be his wife—­all his blood mounted madly to his brain.