"What is that?" I cried, pointing to the farther end of the chamber, where a bed stood in the alcove.
"A closet," the woman answered, almost with a sob. "Yes, yes, Monsieur, they may not search. Quick, and I can lock it."
In such a case man acts on instinct. I heard the latch of the door tried, and then some one knocked peremptorily; and so long I hesitated. But a second knock followed on the first, and a voice I knew cried imperatively: "Open, open, Françoise!" and I moved towards the closet. The girl, distracted by the repeated summons and her terror, hung a moment between me and the door of the room; but in the end had to go to the latter, so that I drew the closet door upon myself.
Then in a moment it came upon me that if, hiding there, I was found, I should shame Denise; it darted through my brain that if, lurking there behind the closed doors among her woman's things, I was caught, I should harm her a hundred times more than if I stood out in the middle of the floor and faced the worst. And with my face on fire at the mere thought, I opened the door again, and stepped out; and was just in time. For as the door of the room flew open, and M. de St. Alais strode in and looked round, I was the first person he saw.
There were three or four men behind him; and among them the man whom I had cheated on the stairs. But M. St. Alais' eyes blazing with wrath caught mine, and held them; and the others were nothing to me.
CHAPTER XXII.
[NOBLESSE OBLIGE.]
Yet he was not the first to speak. One of the men behind him took a step forward, and cried, "That is the man! See, he still has the gun-barrel."
"Seize him, then," M. de St. Alais replied. "And take him from here! Monsieur," he continued, addressing me grimly, and with a grim eye, "whoever you are, when you undertook to be a spy you counted the cost, I suppose? Take him away, my men!"
Two of the fellows strode forward, and in a moment seized my arms; and in the surprise of M. de St. Alais' appearance and the astonishment his words caused me, I made no resistance. But in such emergencies the mind works quickly, and in a trice I recovered myself. "This is nonsense, M. de St. Alais!" I said. "You know well that I am no spy. You know why I am here. And for the matter of that----"