The crowd at the water's-edge closed around Genêt, while the group of four or five men on horseback who followed him came to a halt on the roadway just below where were seated Schmidt and his companions. The riders looked around them, laughing. Then one spoke to a young secretary, and the man thus addressed, turning, took off his hat and bowed low to the Quaker maid.
"Mon Dieu!" cried De Courval, springing up as the attachés moved on. "C'est Carteaux! It is he!"
Schmidt heard him; the girl to the left of Schmidt less plainly. "What is it?" she cried to De Courval. His face as she saw it was of a sudden white, the eyes wide open, staring, the jaw set, the hands half-open, the figure as of a wild creature about to leap on its prey. "Take care!" said Schmidt. "Take care! Keep quiet!" He laid a strong hand on De Courval's shoulder. "Come away! People are looking at you."
"Yes, yes." He straightened, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
"Art thou ill?" asked Margaret.
"No, no. I am glad—glad as never before. Let us go. It will keep. It will keep." She looked at him with wonder. They climbed the bank and went up the hill across the Woodlands, Andrew Hamilton's estate, and homeward by the middle ferry at High Street, no one speaking.
The girl, troubled and apprehensive, walked on, getting now and then from the bonnet's seclusion a quick side glance at a face a little flushed and wearing a look of unwonted satisfaction. Schmidt was as silent as his companions. Comedy again, he thought, and as ever behind it the shadow tragedy. "If I were that man, I should be afraid—a secretary of this accursed envoy. I must know more. Ah, here is the other man behind the every-day De Courval."
De Courval went in and up-stairs to his room and at the five-o'clock supper showed no sign of the storm which had swept over him. After the meal he followed his mother, and as usual read aloud to her a chapter of the French Bible. Then at dusk he pulled out on the river, and, finding refreshment in a cold plunge, rowed to shore, returning in full control of the power to consider with Schmidt, as now he knew he must do, a situation not so simple as it seemed when he set eyes on his enemy.
"I have been waiting for you, René. I guess enough to know this for a very grave matter. You will want to tell me."
"I have often wanted to talk to you, but, as you may or may not know, it was also too painful to discuss until the need came; but now it has come."