centre of it!"

"You will please allow me to prefer my calling to yours," said the
soldier, curtly. "You can do as you like with your running-gear; I
recognize no authority but that of the minister of war. I have my
orders; I shall take the field with veterans who don't skulk, and face
an enemy you want to catch behind."

"Oh, you can fight if you want to," replied Corentin. "From what that
girl has dropped, close-mouthed as you think she is, I can tell you that
you'll have to skirmish about, and I myself will give you the pleasure
of an interview with the Gars before long."

"How so?" asked Hulot, moving back a step to get a better view of this
strange individual.

"Mademoiselle de Verneuil is in love with him," replied Corentin, in
a thick voice, "and perhaps he loves her. A marquis, a knight
of Saint-Louis, young, brilliant, perhaps rich,--what a list of
temptations! She would be foolish indeed not to look after her own
interests and try to marry him rather than betray him. The girl is
attempting to fool us. But I saw hesitation in her eyes. They probably
have a rendezvous; perhaps they've met already. Well, to-morrow I shall
have him by the forelock. Yesterday he was nothing more than the enemy
of the Republic, to-day he is mine; and I tell you this, every man who
has been so rash as to come between that girl and me has died upon the
scaffold."

So saying, Corentin dropped into a reverie which hindered him from
observing the disgust on the face of the honest soldier as he discovered
the depths of this intrigue, and the mechanism of the means employed by
Fouche. Hulot resolved on the spot to thwart Corentin in every way that
did not conflict essentially with the success of the government, and to
give the Gars a fair chance of dying honorably, sword in hand, before
he could fall a prey to the executioner, for whom this agent of the
detective police acknowledged himself the purveyor.

"If the First Consul would listen to me," thought Hulot, as he turned
his back on Corentin, "he would leave those foxes to fight aristocrats,
and send his solders on other business."

Corentin looked coldly after the old soldier, whose face had brightened
at the resolve, and his eyes gleamed with a sardonic expression, which
showed the mental superiority of this subaltern Machiavelli.

"Give an ell of blue cloth to those fellows, and hang a bit of iron at
their waists," he said to himself, "and they'll think there's but one
way