"Ay, true! True! What are you going to Troyes for? Yet I should have thought, if you recover the child, it is enough. Why—say—bitter words?"
"Boussac, you—but, there, you are not a father; you cannot understand all I have suffered in these four years past. Why! man, the galleys, my exile, the death that yawned for me this morning, were easier than the loss of my little one. And, with her dying brother's own confession ringing in my ears still, as it will ring when I stand before her to-morrow, as I hope, you ask me what need I have to reproach her—to utter bitter words?"
The mousquetaire shrugged his shoulders; then he muttered something about the recovery of the child being everything, and that reproaches brought little satisfaction with them; and after that he again asked St. Georges when he meant to set out for Troyes?
"To-night, I tell you—to-night. Yet"—and he paused bewildered—"I—I have no money. Not enough to get me a horse, at least. They have given me back all they took from me after my condemnation, but there were only a few guineas left."
"Where is the horse you rode to Paris on when De Mortemart brought you?"
"Ah!" exclaimed St. Georges, "a good horse—though, alas! at a moment when my life was in danger and a horse alone could save me, I—I stole it. Oh, if I can but get that again!"
"Why not? It is doubtless in the stables behind the cours criminel, where the guard stable theirs."
It was there; so that difficulty was soon solved, no objection being offered by the authorities to giving up the property of a prisoner who was so distinguished as to be acquitted by the king's order an hour before his execution; and then, when St. Georges had recovered it, he announced his intention of at once setting forth. He was impatient to be gone now he was so near; he calculated that by midday on the morrow he would have forced from Aurélie de Roquemaure a confession of what she had done with Dorine. She was at Troyes he knew; Boussac, who professed himself well acquainted with her movements, having told him that such was the case.
"She is much at court now," he said; "I often see her. And she must be back at Troyes by now—I mean—that—she has been absent from there of late. But—but she would be back by now—she—told me—she was——"
"What?" asked St. Georges, looking at him and wondering why he seemed so incoherent about the woman's movements; wondering also how he came to know so much about them, especially her recent ones—"what did she tell you when last you saw her?"