"I am glad you have come back to us, Maurice. Bertha is so lonely."
The lips of Maurice parted, but some internal warning checked the bitter words before they formed themselves into sound. He bowed gravely, and, entering the house, remarked to Bertha,—
"You wrote that all the servants had been examined?"
"Yes, all; and they know nothing of Madeleine's flight."
"That is impossible. One of them at least must have some knowledge."
Maurice rang the bell. It was Bettina, who replied. Gustave, she said, was in the stable, and Baptiste in the garden. The answers of the femme de chambre to the young viscount were clear and unhesitating: no one could doubt, for a moment, that she was wholly ignorant of Madeleine's movement; and her tone and manner evinced, as forcibly as any language could have done, how deeply she mourned over her absence. Elise was next summoned, and her replies were but a repetition of Bettina's.
"I will not send for Gustave and Baptiste," he observed, dismissing the two female domestics,—"I will walk out and see them."
"And I will go with you," said Bertha.
The countess was too well pleased to see the cousins together to object.