ently 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.

But fast to danger-point as was the speed, to the women in that carriage
it was too slow. As they reached the barrier at the end of the Cours,
nine o'clock was striking in the city behind them, and every stroke of
it seemed to sound a note of doom.

Yet here at the barrier the regulations compelled a momentary halt.
Aline enquired of the sergeant-in-charge how long it was since a
cabriolet such as she described had gone that way. She was answered that
some twenty minutes ago a vehicle had passed the barrier containing the
d