ch
as you are, if you had all the gold that I have refused--" she stopped
suddenly.

"Don't go near that wall, or--"

"But I hear a voice," she said; "it echoes through that wall,--a voice
that is more to me than all your riches."

Before the miser could stop her Marie had laid her hand on a small
colored engraving of Louis XV. on horseback; to her amazement it turned,
and she saw, in a room beneath her, the Marquis de Montauran, who was
loading a musket. The opening, hidden by a little panel on which the
picture was gummed, seemed to form some opening in the ceiling of the
adjoining chamber, which, no doubt, was the bedroom of the royalist
general. D'Orgemont closed the opening with much precaution, and looked
at the girl sternly.

"Don't say a word if you love your life. You haven't thrown your
grappling-iron on a worthless building. Do you know that the Marquis
de Montauran is worth more than one hundred thousand francs a year from
lands which have not yet been confiscated? And I read in the Primidi
de l'Ille-et-Vilaine a decree of the Consuls putting an end to
confiscation. Ha! ha! you'll think the Gars a prettier fellow than ever,
won't you? Your eyes are shining like two new louis d'or."

Mademoiselle de Verneuil's face was, indeed, keenly excited when she
heard that well-known voice so near her. Since she had been standing
there, erect, in the midst as it were of a silver mine, the spring
of her mind, held down by these strange events, recovered itself. She
seemed to have formed some sinister resolution and to perceive a means
of carrying it out.

"There is no return from such contempt," she was saying to herself; "and
if he cannot love me, I will kill him--no other woman shall have him."

"No, abbe, no!" cried the young chief, in a loud voice which was heard
through the panel, "it must be so."

"Monsieur le marquis," replied the Abbe Gudin, haughtily; "you will
scandalize all Brittany if you give that ball at Saint James. It is
preaching, not dancing, which will rouse our villagers. Take guns, not
fiddles."

"Abbe, you have sense enough to know that it is not in a general
assembly of our partisans that I can learn to know these people, or
judge of what I may be able to undertake with them. A supper is better
for examining faces than all the spying in the world, of which, by the
bye, I have a horror; they can be made to talk with glasses in their
hand."

Marie quivered, as she listened, and conceive