"
"You like sous, and you want to kill the Gars who killed your father
--well, I'll take care of you. Ah! Marie," he muttered, after a pause,
"you yourself shall betray him, as you engaged to do! She is too
violent to suspect me--passion never reflects. She does not know the
marquis's writing. Yes, I can set a trap into which her nature will
drive her headlong. But I must first see Hulot."
Mademoiselle de Verneuil and Francine were deliberating on the means
of saving the marquis from the more than doubtful generosity of
Corentin and Hulot's bayonets.
"I could go and warn him," said the Breton girl.
"But we don't know where he is," replied Marie; "even I, with the
instincts of love, could never find him."
After making and rejecting a number of plans Mademoiselle de Verneuil
exclaimed, "When I see him his danger will inspire me."
She thought, like other ardent souls, to act on the spur of the
moment, trusting to her star, or to that instinct of adroitness which
rarely, if ever, fails a woman. Perhaps her heart was never so wrung.
At times she seemed stupefied, her eyes were fixed, and then, at the
least noise, she shook like a half-uprooted tree which the woodsman
drags with a rope to hasten its fall. Suddenly, a loud report from a
dozen guns echoed from a distance. Marie turned pale and grasped
Francine's hand.
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