"There is nothing for it," said one man, "but to resume our former roles as members of the Chéron family, and to do it as naturally as before."
"They suspect us now," said another, "or they would not be here again so soon."
"Even so; but if we play our parts well they can only take us back to the commissariat and question us; they must release us in the end; they have no proof."
In the meanwhile someone had relighted the lamp. There appeared to be a good deal of scurrying and scrambling inside the room; the Man in Grey tiptoed up to the doorway to see what was going on. Evidently, disguises which had hastily been put aside had been resumed; the group stood before him now just as Lefèvre had originally described them: the old man, the woman, the two young girls; the latter were striding about the room and holding their skirts up clumsily with both hands, as men are wont to do when they don women's clothes; the old man, on whom grey locks and well-stencilled wrinkles were the only signs of age, was hastily putting these to rights before a mirror on the wall.
But it was the woman's doings which compelled the attention of the Man in Grey. She was standing on a chair with her back to him, intent on manipulating something up the huge open chimney.
"It will be quite safe there," she said.
She appeared to be closing some heavy iron door which fell in its place with a snap. Then she turned to her companions and slowly descended from the chair. "When the present storm has blown over," she said, "we'll come and fetch it. Chéron will never guess; at any rate, we are sure the police cannot discover this most excellent hiding-place."
She was a short, square-built woman, with a dark, almost swarthy skin, keen jet-black eyes which appeared peculiarly hard and glittering owing to the absence of lashes, a firm, thin-lipped mouth, square chin, and low forehead crowned by a shock of thick, black hair cut short like a boy's. The secret agent kept his eyes fixed upon her while she spoke to her friends. He noted the head so full of character, and the strength and determination expressed in every line of the face; he marvelled why the features—especially those glittering jet-black eyes—appeared familiar, as something he had known and heard of before. And, suddenly, it all came to him in a flash; he remembered the informer's description of the leader named "the Spaniard": a dark, swarthy skin, jet-black hair, keen dark eyes with no lashes to soften their glitter, the beard, the man's attire, the foreign accent. Soh! these marauding Chouans slipped in and out of their disguises and changed even their sex outwardly as easily as men change their coats; whilst the very identity of their leader was more often unknown to them than known.
As the secret agent's practised glance took in during these few seconds the whole personality of the woman before him, he knew that his surmises—based on intuition and on reasoning—were correct. It was the Spaniard who stood before him now, but the Spaniard was a woman. And as he gazed on her, half in pity because of her sex, and half in admiration for her intrepidity, she turned, and their glances met. She looked at him across the narrow room, and each knew that the other had guessed.
The woman never flinched; she held the agent's glance and did not utter either word or cry whilst with a slow, deliberate movement, she drew a pistol from beneath her kerchief. But he, as quick and resourceful, had instantly stepped back into the hall. He seized the door, and, with a loud bang, closed it to between himself and the Chouans. Then, with lightning rapidity, he pushed the heavy bolt home.