"I was saying, don't mix the matter up with my sister-in-law."
"Then it must be settled in the open country. But where? They'll be sure to come by different roads."
"Yes, but they will go away together. In order to get home, the mayor will have to take the road to Nantes as far as the Tiercet."
"Well, then, let's ambush by the road to Nantes among the reeds; it is a good hiding-place. For my part, I've made more than one good stroke just there."
"So be it. Where shall we meet? I shall leave here to-morrow, before daylight," said Joseph.
"Well, then, meet me at the Ragot crossways in the forest of Machecoul," said the master of warrens.
Joseph agreed to the place and promised to be there. The widow heard him offer Maître Jacques a night's lodging under his roof; but the old Chouan, who had his burrows in every forest of the canton, preferred those asylums to all the houses in the world, if not for comfort, at least for security.
He departed therefore, and all was silent in Joseph's part of the house.
Marianne returned to her stable and found Jean Oullier fast asleep; she did not wake him. The night was far advanced,--so advanced that she had only time to get back to Saint-Philbert before daylight. After arranging, as usual, everything that her patient might want during the morrow, she left the stable through the window.
As she walked thoughtfully along, the hatred she felt to her brother-in-law, because of her firm conviction that he had shared in the death of Pascal, and her deep desire for vengeance, which the loneliness and sufferings of her widowhood made daily more imperious, came over her. It seemed to her that heaven, by calling her providentially to the discovery of Joseph's secret intention of crime, put itself on her side; she believed she would be serving its designs (while satisfying her hatred) in preventing the accomplishment of this crime and the ruin and death of those she considered innocent. Her first idea had been to denounce Maître Jacques and Joseph either to the police or to those they intended to attack; but she now renounced that scheme and resolved to be herself, and all alone, the intermediary between fate and the victims of the intended crime.