"Yes," the girl said slowly. "Yes, I understand."
CHAPTER XII.
LOST.
A considerable hubbub outside the manoir—the crying of a woman, and the voices of various men all talking together—aroused St. Georges from his sleep as the wintry dawn broke through the fogs and mists of the night.
"Fichte," he heard the old servitor say, "you are a fool, my girl, to come here and thrust your head in the lion's jaws. Better make off another way; he will kill you, I warrant, when he hears how you have kept your promise."
"Let him," he heard next a woman's voice reply, a voice all broken and rendered indistinct by her tears and sobs, "let him. O mon Dieu!" she wailed, "have pity on me! I would have shielded the little thing with my life. I left it but a few, nay, not ten, minutes, and then—then it was gone. Oh, pity me, pity me, mon Dieu!"
With a bound St. Georges had flung himself from out of his bed, and was hastily putting on his clothes. For the words of the weeping woman in the roadway, as they rose to his ears—above all, the voice which he recognised—told him the worst. The child, his child, was missing; the woman below was the one to whom he had confided Dorine overnight.
Huddling on his garments, therefore, while still he heard arising the voices from a short distance below him (for the first floor of the manoir, on which his room was situated, was not more than twelve or fourteen feet from the ground) and the girl's sobs and weeping as she exclaimed, "Not more than ten minutes did I leave it alone, not more, while I regarded the troops coming in," he descended rapidly to the great hall below. He met no one on his way as he did so—doubtless, neither the marquise nor her daughter were yet risen—and finding the door in the tourelle with little difficulty, he emerged into the roadway.
Standing in it were those two whose voices he had already heard—the old servitor and the girl from the inn in Troyes—and by them was the youth, Gaston, his arm this morning being bound up in a sling, as though he had met with some hurt. He was gazing silently at the girl as she sobbed and wept before the old man, listening evidently with interest to all she said, and with a look of sympathy on his face for the evident distress of mind she was in.