her credulous himself. The leader
of a party ought not to be the plaything of others."

"Do you know him?" asked the _emigre_, quietly.

"No," she replied, with a disdainful glance, "but I thought I did."

"Oh, mademoiselle, he's a _malin_, yes a _malin_," said Captain Merle,
shaking his head and giving with an expressive gesture the peculiar
meaning to the word which it had in those days but has since lost.
"Those old families do sometimes send out vigorous shoots. He has just
returned from a country where, they say, the _ci-devants_ didn't find
life too easy, and men ripen like medlars in the straw. If that fellow
is really clever he can lead us a pretty dance. He has already formed
companies of light infantry who oppose our troops and neutralize the
efforts of the government. If we burn a royalist village he burns two of
ours. He can hold an immense tract of country and force us to spread out
our men at the very moment when we want them on one spot. Oh, he knows
what he is about."

"He is cutting his country's throat," said Gerard in a loud voice,
interrupting the captain.

"Then," said the _emigre_, "if his death would deliver the nation, why
don't you catch him and shoot him?"

As he spoke he tried to look into the depths of Mademoiselle de
Verneuil's soul, and one of those voiceless scenes the dramatic
vividness and fleeting sagacity of which cannot be reproduced in
language passed between them in a flash. Danger is always interesting.
The worst criminal threatened with death excites pity. Though
Mademoiselle de Verneuil was now certain that the lover who had cast her
off was this very leader of the Chouans, she was not ready to verify her
suspicions by giving him up; she had quite another curiosity to satisfy.
She preferred to doubt or to believe as her passion led her, and she
now began deliberately to play with peril. Her eyes, full of scornful
meaning, bade the young chief notice the soldiers of the escort; by thus
presenting to his mind triumphantly an image of his danger she made him
feel that his life depended on a word from her, and her lips seemed
to quiver on the verge of pronouncing it. Like an American Indian, she
watched every muscle of the face of her enemy, tied, as it were, to the
stake, while she brandished her tomahawk gracefully, enjoying a revenge
that was still innocent, and torturing like a mistress who still loves.

"If I had a son like yours, madame," she said to Madame du Gua, who