'clock when Joseph entered and told his master that
the worthless poaching workman who had been dismissed wanted to see
him,--something about a bill which he said the general still owed him.
"He is very drunk," added Joseph.

"Very good, I'll go and speak to him."

The general went out upon the lawn to some distance from the house.

"Monsieur le comte," said the detective, "nothing will ever be got out
of these people. All that I have been able to gather is that if you
continue to stay in this place and try to make the peasants renounce the
pilfering habits which Mademoiselle Laguerre allowed them to acquire,
they will shoot you as well as your bailiff. There is no use in my
staying here; for they distrust me even more than they do the keepers."

The count paid his spy, who left the place the next day, and his
departure justified the suspicions entertained about him by the
accomplices in the death of Michaud.

When the general returned to the salon there were such signs of emotion
upon his face that his wife asked him, anxiously, what news he had just
heard.

"Dear wife," he said, "I don't want to frighten you, and yet it is right
you should know that Michaud's death was intended as a warning for us to
leave this part of the country."

"If I were in your place," said Monsieur de Troisville, "I would not
leave it. I myself have had just such difficulties in Normandy, only
under another form; I persisted in my course, and now everything goes
well."

"Monsieur le marquis," said the sub-prefect, "Normandy and Burgundy are
two very different regions. The grape heats the blood far more than the
apple. We know much less of law and legal proceedings; we live among the
woods; the large industries are unknown among us; we are still savages.
If I might give my advice to Monsieur le comte it would be to sell this
estate and put the money in the Funds; he would double his income and
have no anxieties. If he likes living in the country he could buy a
chateau near Paris with a park as beautiful as that of Les Aigues,
surrounded by walls, where no one can annoy him, and where he can let
all his farms and receive the money in good bank-bills, and have no law
suits from one year's end to another. He could come and go in three or
four hours, and Monsieur Blondet and Monsieur le marquis would not be so
often away from you, Madame la comtesse."

"I, retreat before the peasantry when I did not recoil before the
Danube!" cried the