"So much the better I our share will be all the bigger!" "Idiots, to think that you alone can capture----" XLIX The voices died away, but Mario had recognized them. They were the voices of La Flèche and old Sancho. His courage suddenly returned, although there was nothing encouraging in that discovery. It had been impossible to keep Mario long in ignorance of the affair of La Rochaille, and he fully realized that his father's murderer, D'Alvimar's fidus Achates, was thenceforth the deadliest foe of the name of Bois-Doré; but La Flèche's complicity in this bold stroke led the child to hope that Sancho's auxiliaries were the band of gypsies who had been his companions in misery. He reflected, justly enough, that those vagrants had in all probability joined forces with other more desperate rascals; but even so, an attack of that sort seemed to him much less to be dreaded than a regular raid organized by the provincial authorities, such as they had had reason to fear; and for a moment he had an idea of trying to win over La Flèche, if he could obtain an interview with him alone. But his distrust returned when he remembered the brutal and threatening air with which the gypsy had talked with him on that same spot months before. Thereupon he began to reflect on the words he had just heard. He felt that he needed all his faculties in order to understand them and take advantage of them at need. Doubtless the assailants expected reinforcements, whose arrival was delayed too long to suit Sancho. "They will not arrive before him!"--The _him_ could be no other than the marquis, whose return they dreaded.--"So much the better, our share will be all the bigger!" indicated that La Flèche was impelled by the hope of pillage. "Idiots, to think that you alone can capture"--the château presumably--was a confession of the inability of the assailants to maintain a siege of the manor with any chance of success. In short, Mario, who had seen the besmeared, masked, ghastly, grotesque faces,--disguises assumed by the gypsies in all probability to terrify the peasants of the village and the farm,--and who, despite his courage, had been himself terrified by them, was immensely relieved when he found that he had to do with villains of flesh and blood, rather than with supernatural creatures and mysterious dangers. Being unable to do anything for the moment except remain in hiding, he waited until the voices and footsteps had died away, before leaving the gate himself to seek shelter from the cold night air in one of the little structures in the garden. He thought, with good reason, that the labyrinth, with all the windings of which he was so familiar, would enable him to elude any possible pursuit for some time, and he entered it, bending his steps without hesitation toward the little cottage which was metaphorically called the _Palace of Astrée_. He was no sooner inside than he fancied that he heard footsteps on the gravel of the circular path.