id
Bigot, stamping his foot upon the floor.

"It is understood, then, Bigot, not a word, a hint, a look is to be
given to Angelique regarding your suspicions of her complicity in this
murder?"

"Yes, it is understood. The secret is like the devil's tontine,--he
catches the last possessor of it."

"I expect to be the last, then, if I keep in your company, Bigot,"
remarked Cadet.

Cadet having settled this point to his mind, reclined back in his easy
chair and smoked on in silence, while the Intendant kept walking the
floor anxiously, because he saw farther than his companion the shadows
of coming events.

Sometimes he stopped impatiently at the window, beating a tattoo with
his nails on the polished casement as he gazed out upon the beautiful
parterres of autumnal flowers, beginning to shed their petals around the
gardens of the Palace. He looked at them without seeing them. All that
caught his eye was a bare rose-bush, from which he remembered he had
plucked some white roses which he had sent to Caroline to adorn her
oratory; and he thought of her face, more pale and delicate than any
rose of Provence that ever bloomed. His thoughts ran violently in two
parallel streams side by side, neither of them disappearing for a moment
amid the crowd of other affairs that pressed upon his attention,--the
murder of Caroline and the perquisition that was to be made for her in
all quarters of the Colony. His own safety was too deeply involved in
any discovery that might be made respecting her to allow him to drop the
subject out of his thought for a moment.

By imposing absolute silence upon himself in the presence of Angelique,
touching the death of Caroline, he might impose a like silence upon her
whom he could not acquit of the suspicion of having prompted the murder.
But the certainty that there was a confederate in the deed--a woman,
too, judging by the fragment of writing picked up by Cadet--tormented
him with endless conjectures.

Still, he felt, for the present, secure from any discovery on that side;
but how to escape from the sharp inquisition of two men like La Corne
St. Luc and Pierre Philibert? And who knew how far the secret of
Beaumanoir was a secret any longer? It was known to two women, at any
rate; and no woman, in Bigot's estimation of the sex, would long keep a
secret which concerned another and not herself.

"Our greatest danger, Cadet, lies there!" continued the Intendant,
stopping in his walk and tur