warned Mademoiselle de Verneuil of her rival's determination.
"She sends me her card," thought Marie, smiling. Instantly a "Qui
vive?" echoing from sentry to sentry, from the castle to the Porte
Saint-Leonard, proved to the Chouans the alertness of the Blues,
inasmuch as the least accessible of their ramparts was so well guarded.

"It is she--and he," muttered Marie to herself.

To seek the marquis, follow his steps and overtake him, was a thought
that flashed like lightning through her mind. "I have no weapon!" she
cried. She remembered that on leaving Paris she had flung into a
trunk an elegant dagger formerly belonging to a sultana, which she had
jestingly brought with her to the theatre of war, as some persons take
note-books in which to jot down their travelling ideas; she was less
attracted by the prospect of shedding blood than by the pleasure of
wearing a pretty weapon studded with precious stones, and playing with
a blade that was stainless. Three days earlier she had deeply regretted
having put this dagger in a trunk, when to escape her enemies at La
Vivetiere she had thought for a moment of killing herself. She now
returned to the house, found the weapon, put it in her belt, wrapped a
large shawl round her shoulders and a black lace scarf about her hair,
and covered her head with one of those broad-brimmed hats distinctive
of Chouans which belonged to a servant of the house. Then, with the
presence of mind which excited passions often give, she took the glove
which Marche-a-Terre had given her as a safeguard, and saying, in reply
to Francine's terrible looks, "I would seek him in hell," she returned
to the Promenade.

The Gars was still at the same place, but alone. By the direction of
his telescope he seemed to be examining with the careful attention of
a commander the various paths across the Nancon, the Queen's Staircase,
and the road leading through the Porte Saint-Sulpice and round the
church of that name, where it meets the high-road under range of the
guns at the castle. Mademoiselle de Verneuil took one of the little
paths made by goats and their keepers leading down from the Promenade,
reached the Staircase, then the bottom of the ravine, crossed the Nancon
and the suburb, and divining like a bird in the desert her right course
among the dangerous precipices of the Mont Saint-Sulpice, she followed
a slippery track defined upon the granite, and in spite of the prickly
gorse and reeds and loose stone