!_ Goliah!"

And he darted forward and would have caught him by the throat, but
the peasant, foreseeing in his action a repetition of his yesterday's
experience, jumped quickly within the house and locked the door behind
him. For a moment confusion reigned about the premises; soldiers came
rushing up to see what was going on, while the quartermaster-sergeant
shouted at the top of his voice:

"Open the door, open the door, you confounded idiot! It is a spy, I tell
you, a Prussian spy!"

Maurice doubted no longer; there was no room for mistake now; the
Alsatian was certainly the man whom he had seen arrested at the camp
of Mulhausen and released because there was not evidence enough to hold
him, and that man was Goliah, old Fouchard's quondam assistant on his
farm at Remilly. When finally the peasant opened his door the house was
searched from top to bottom, but to no purpose; the bird had flown,
the gawky Alsatian, the tow-headed, simple-faced lout whom General
Bourgain-Desfeuilles had questioned the day before at dinner without
learning anything and before whom, in the innocence of his heart, he had
disclosed things that would have better been kept secret. It was evident
enough that the scamp had made his escape by a back window which was
found open, but the hunt that was immediately started throughout the
village and its environs had no results; the fellow, big as he was, had
vanished as utterly as a smoke-wreath dissolves upon the air.

Maurice thought it best to take Honore away, lest in his distracted
state he might reveal to the spectators unpleasant family secrets which
they had no concern to know.

"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_" he cried again, "it would have done me such good
to strangle him!--The letter that I was speaking of revived all my old
hatred for him."

And the two of them sat down upon the ground against a stack of rye a
little way from the house, and he handed the letter to his cousin.

It was the old story: the course of Honore Fouchard's and Silvine
Morange's love had not run smooth. She, a pretty, meek-eyed,
brown-haired girl, had in early childhood lost her mother, an operative
in one of the factories of Raucourt, and Doctor Dalichamp, her
godfather, a worthy man who was greatly addicted to adopting the
wretched little beings whom he ushered into the world, had conceived
the idea of placing her in Father Fouchard's family as small maid of
all work. True it was that the old boor was a terrible skin