"My dear neighbor," he said, "I would come over to your views and retract the advice I have given the marquis, except for one thought which has occurred to me, and which I beg you to weigh seriously; it is this: that it is unnecessary for the marquis to accuse himself of killing a man who may not be dead at all." Messieurs Robin and Bois-Doré made a gesture of surprise, and Guillaume continued: "I have two strong reasons for thinking and saying this: the first is that a man was carried away from La Caille-Bottée's garden, who, although run through by a lusty sword-thrust, may not have breathed his last; the second is that our marquis, whose courage is not of the sort that anyone can doubt, recognized his enemy's face at Brilbault." Monsieur Robin reflected in silence; Bois-Doré collected his memories of the preceding night, and tried to disentangle them from the bewilderment that had then taken possession of him; then he said: "If Monsieur d'Alvimar is dead, he did not die on the field of battle at La Rochaille, nor at the gardener's cottage, but at Brilbault, no later than last evening. He died in I know not what strange and brutal company, but attended by a priest who may have been Monsieur Poulain, and by a servant who must have been old Sancho. There was nothing in the confused shadows which I saw to contradict these suppositions, and the one thing that I saw most clearly and distinctly was a crucifix as sharply outlined as the cross on an escutcheon, and under the right branch of that crucifix the emaciated, fleshless face of Monsieur d'Alvimar. The features seemed somewhat agitated at first, while a voice repeated the prayers for the dying; faint groans, which I had heard throughout the revel, I continued to hear during the prayer. Then the groans ceased, the face became like stone; you would have said that the lines were petrified on the wall which showed me their reflection. The head was no longer bent forward but thrown back, and then----" "Then what?" said Guillaume. "Then," said the marquis, ingenuously, "I became weak and idiotic, and I fled to avoid seeing anything more." "Well," said Monsieur Robin, "however it may be, and whatever may be there, we will go to examine that hovel and ransack it from roof to cellar, if need be, to see what it conceals, and what sort of people it shelters." Guillaume advised waiting until nightfall, and taking all manner of precautions, in order to make sure of discovering the object of these mysterious meetings. Faraudet had given Monsieur Robin precise information as to the hour at which the tumult began, and the moment that it became certain that those strange noises were not a pure product of the imagination of terrified peasants, it was impossible not to see, in their regularity and their persistent recurrence, a deliberately adopted plan to spread terror abroad and turn it to advantage in one direction or another.