But next morning, when the chief commissary did present himself before the Minister's agent with the Mézidon report, he for one felt that he would far sooner have sacrificed a night's rest than endure the icy reprimand and the coolly worded threats wherewith the insufferable little man had greeted his news.
"By your culpable negligence," the Minister's agent had said in his quiet monotone which made every official conscious of some unavowed peccadillo shiver, "you have given the murderer an added chance of escape."
"The murderer!" protested M. Carteret, with a feeble attempt at swagger. "What in the world makes you think that Darnier has been murdered? Why, the leech——"
"Because an ignorant country apothecary finds no sign of violence upon a dead body," retorted the Man in Grey coldly, "unanswerable logic must not be deemed at fault."
"But what motive could anyone have for murdering poor Darnier?" argued the commissary with a shrug of his wide shoulders.
"You forget that he was the bearer of an important report from me to the Minister," replied the Man in Grey.
The commissary gave a long, low whistle. He certainly had forgotten that all-important fact for the moment.
"And you think," he said, "that the woman in the black cloak was an emissary of those cursed Chouans, and that she murdered Darnier in order to steal that report——"
"Together with the autograph letter of Monsieur le Marquis de Trévargan which implicates him and his family in the plot against the Emperor," broke in the secret agent. "I should have thought it was self-evident."
He wasted no further argument on the commissary, who, bewildered and helpless, solemnly scratched his head, as if to extricate therefrom a solution of the weird mystery.