Constance de Plélan had walked on very rapidly, only looking back now and again to see whether the police agent had followed her. The road was now quite lonely; not even a belated passer-by was in sight. After a few minutes, the girl halted where a side-track, inches deep in mud, struck at right angles and, cutting across an intervening meadow, plunged into a dense part of the wood at some distance from the road. For a few seconds Constance appeared to hesitate; she pressed her trembling hands against her heart, which was beating so furiously that she felt sick and faint. Next moment, however, she started to run down the side-track as fast as the muddy ooze would allow her. A few minutes later she had reached the margin of the wood and, no longer hesitating, boldly entered the thicket.
The road along which the police agent was striding with his habitual quick and firm step wound in and out of thick masses of coppice; the footpath which Constance de Plélan followed so unerringly led by a direct short cut straight to the thicket where Blue-Heart lay in wait.
The shades of evening were falling fast; the wintry sunset had long since ceased to glimmer among the trees. Blue-Heart was cowering in his hiding-place, grasping his musket and marvelling why Mademoiselle had not yet led her quarry into the trap which had been so carefully prepared. The hated police agent had not yet come. But Blue-Heart was patient and content to bide his time. He knew that the hatred he felt for the Man in Grey had its counterpart in the heart of Constance de Plélan. The secret agent had only been in the province four months, and already the Chouans had felt the weight of his relentless courage, his astuteness and his power. M. le Comte d'Artois, brother and messenger of the uncrowned King, had been sent back to England with ignominy through the instrumentality of this one man, and when Mademoiselle de Plélan had asked for a volunteer to lay this powerful enemy low, Blue-Heart had offered himself, heart and soul, ready to strike and take every risk. If only the quarry would come, Blue-Heart's musket was not likely to err.
Suddenly the Chouan drew in his breath. His whole attitude grew at once more rigid and more tense. Cowering in the thicket, he shouldered his musket. The road stretched out before him, through a veil of coppice, for a length of some thirty feet or so, and at a distance of less than twenty paces from the spot where he crouched, on the alert, holding his breath now that his keen ear had detected the sound of approaching footsteps.
Soon these footsteps drew nearer and Blue-Heart muttered an imprecation: "Malediction!" came between his clenched teeth. "Mademoiselle said that the devil would come alone!"
But his rough, nervy hands grasped the musket with undiminished vigour. If that hated police agent came escorted with a whole posse of his own men, Blue-Heart was not going to be done out of his vengeance.
Then suddenly the footsteps stopped and the melancholy call of a screech-owl pierced the silence of the night.
"White-Beak!" muttered the crouching Chouan as he lowered his musket. "What is he doing here at this hour?"
He, too, raised his fingers to his mouth, and the cry of a screech-owl rang shrilly through the wood. Next moment three or four men pushed their way cautiously through the thicket.
"Well, is it done?" queried the foremost amongst them, as soon as he had become conscious of Blue-Heart's presence close by.