"But I never had any intention of going with you. To-day you're going to be nursemaid."
He was not greatly surprised. Since early morning he had had an odd feeling that everything that happened was not quite natural. The incidents followed one another in such perfect sequence and with a logic and exactness foreign to actuality. One might have said that they were scenes in a too-well-made play, of which it would have been easy, with a little experience of the playwright's art, to analyze the construction and the tricks. Certainly, without knowing Dorothy's game, he guessed the dénouement she proposed to bring about—the capture of d'Estreicher. But by means of what stratagem?
"Don't question me," she said. "We are watched. So no heroics, no remonstrances. Listen."
She was amusing herself by spinning the disk on the table and quite calmly she outlined her plan and her maneuvers.
"It's like this. A day or two ago I wrote, in your name, to the Public Prosecutor, advising him that our friend d'Estreicher, for whom the police are hunting, guilty of attempts to murder Baron Davernoie and Madame Juliet Assire, would be at Hillocks Manor to-day. I asked him to send two detectives who would find you at Masson Inn at four o'clock. It's now a quarter to four. Your three servants will be there too. So off you go."
"What am I to do?"
"Come back quickly with the two detectives and your three servants, not by the main road, but by the paths Saint-Quentin and the three boys will point out to you. At the end of them you will find ladders ready. You will set them up against the wall. D'Estreicher and his confederate will be there. You will cover them with your guns while the detectives arrest them."
"Are you sure that d'Estreicher will come out of the hillocks—if it's the fact that the hillocks are his hiding-place?"
"Quite sure. Here is the medal. He knows that it is in my hands. How can he help seizing the opportunity of taking it now that we are on the eve of the great event."
She expressed herself with a disconcerting calmness. For all that she was exposing herself alone to all the menace of a combat which promised to be formidable, she had not the faintest air of being in danger. Indeed, such was her indifference to the risk she was running that, when the old Baron went past them and into the Manor, followed by his faithful Goliath, she imparted to Raoul some results of her observations.