ine had brought in she slipped hastily
from the room with a sign to her faithful maid. Francine then took the
marquis to the dressing-room adjoining the bed-chamber. The young man
seeing a large number of sheets knotted firmly together, perceived the
means by which the girl expected him to escape the vigilance of the
soldiers.

"I can't get through there," he said, examining the bull's-eye window.

At that instant it was darkened by a thickset figure, and a hoarse
voice, known to Francine, said in a whisper, "Make haste, general, those
rascally Blues are stirring."

"Oh! one more kiss," said a trembling voice beside him.

The marquis, whose feet were already on the liberating ladder, though
he was not wholly through the window, felt his neck clasped with a
despairing pressure. Seeing that his wife had put on his clothes, he
tried to detain her; but she tore herself roughly from his arms and
he was forced to descend. In his hand he held a fragment of some stuff
which the moonlight showed him was a piece of the waistcoat he had worn
the night before.

"Halt! fire!"

These words uttered by Hulot in the midst of a silence that was
almost horrible broke the spell which seemed to hold the men and their
surroundings. A volley of balls coming from the valley and reaching to
the foot of the tower succeeded the discharges of the Blues posted on
the Promenade. Not a cry came from the Chouans. Between each discharge
the silence was frightful.

But Corentin had heard a fall from the ladder on the precipice side of
the tower, and he suspected some ruse.

"None of those animals are growling," he said to Hulot; "our lovers
are capable of fooling us on this side, and escaping themselves on the
other."

The spy, to clear up the mystery, sent for torches; Hulot, understanding
the force of Corentin's supposition, and hearing the noise of a serious
struggle in the direction of the Porte Saint-Leonard, rushed to the
guard-house exclaiming: "That's true, they won't separate."

"His head is well-riddled, commandant," said Beau-Pied, who was the
first to meet him, "but he killed Gudin, and wounded two men. Ha!
the savage; he got through three ranks of our best men and would have
reached the fields if it hadn't been for the sentry at the gate who
spitted him on his bayonet."

The commandant rushed into the guard-room and saw on a camp bedstead a
bloody body which had just been laid there. He went up to the supposed
marquis, raised