So now with a posse of police at their gates they did not lose their heads. On the contrary, Madame la Marquise de Plélan's attitude became if anything more dignified and more calm. She arranged her silk dress in prim folds around her, readjusting the set of her lace coif, and took up a piece of knitting wherewith she busied her perfectly steady fingers. Constance, still carrying the metal box, turned to go out of the room.
"I will return," she said, "when I have disposed of this box."
"What have you kept in it?" asked Madame rather anxiously. "From what I hear, secret hiding-places stand but little chance when that grey-coated ferret is about."
Apparently, however, the young girl had not heard her mother's query, for even as the usual ominous "Open, in the name of the law!" rang out through the silence of the château, she had run out of the room and was speeding down the long corridor towards her own apartments.
II
The Man in Grey, quiet and perfectly deferential, stood before Mme. la Marquise de Plélan and in a few words explained the duty that lay before him.
"By order of His Majesty's Minister of Police," he added firmly.
Mme. la Marquise waived aside his explanations with a quick gesture of her slender, aristocratic hand.
"I know, Monsieur, I know," she said calmly. "French men and women now are little better than slaves. Their very homes, their privacy, have ceased to be sacred in the eyes of the State which should be their protector, rather than their tyrant."
A search in a private house in those days was no small matter. Ordered by the Minister of Police or his accredited representative, it consisted in a thorough and rigid examination of every nook and cranny, of every corner wherein compromising papers might be hidden. The high-born gentlemen and ladies, suspected of furthering the Cause of the exiled Bourbon princes by aiding and abetting the Chouans in their nefarious practices, were known to be past masters in the art of concealing every proof of their own guilt or that of their friends; the women especially, who reckoned on a certain amount of chivalry on the part of police officers, were the chief custodians of the papers and records belonging to those organised bands of marauding freebooters.