At a few minutes to eight a maid came out of the front door of the house and hurried across to a chemist’s shop lower down the street. Ralph hurried after her with a bank-note ready and accosted her. He learned that Aurelie, who had returned the night before with her step-father, had been struck down by fever and was delirious. In the middle of the afternoon Marescal was prowling about the house. CHAPTER VIII PLANS AND STRATAGEMS Events had taken a course uncommonly favorable to Marescal. Aurelie’s confinement to her room meant checkmate to the plan that Ralph had had in mind; it rendered it impossible to fly; it kept her awaiting denunciation in a terrible suspense. Marescal took immediate precautions not to lose these advantages; the nurse they had to put in charge of her, was one of his creatures and, as Ralph was able to ascertain, let him have word every day of the condition of the sick girl. In the event of a sudden improvement, he would have acted. “Yes,” said Ralph to himself. “But if he has not acted already, it must be that he has motives which prevent him still from laying information against her and prefer to await the end of her illness. He is making his preparations. Let us make our preparations too.” Though he was opposed to too logical hypotheses which the event always upsets, Ralph had drawn from the facts of the affair some, so to speak, involuntary, conclusions. The strange truth of which no one in the world had dreamt for an instant, but which was so simple, he saw in a confused fashion, rather owing to the weight of the facts than to any effort of his intelligence, and he understood that the moment had come to attack the problem with the utmost determination. “In an enterprise,” he often said to himself, “the first step is often the most difficult of all.” If certain actions were clear enough to him, the motives of them remained obscure. To him characters in the drama presented the appearance of people struggling in stress and storm. If he meant to win, it was no longer enough to go on defending Aurelie day after day, but he must ransack the past and discover what profound reasons had moved these people and influenced them in the course of that tragic night. “To sum up,” he said to himself, “besides me, there are four leading actors who circle round Aurelie and who, all four of them, persecute her: William, Jodot, Marescal and Bregeac. Of these four, some are drawn to her by love, others by the desire of tearing her secret from her. The combination of these two elements, love and greed, are the determining factors in the affair. Now William is, for the time being, out of action. Bregeac and Jodot do not worry me much, as long as Aurelie is ill. There remains Marescal. That is the enemy to be watched.”