In her joy at being delivered from her nightmare, she wrote the same day to Colas, her groom, who was also in the Conciergerie: "Do not worry: do you need money? I will send you twelve francs. The cursed horse! They have sent me some of its skin, which I send for recognition. Burn this." And to her chambermaid, Catherine Querey: "The horse is killed. My agent skinned and burnt it. If you are asked about the missing horse, say that it was sold. My miserable daughter gives me a great deal of pain." Thus ends the story of the yellow horse. It finished its mysterious odyssey in the stables of Savoye-Rollin, where Licquet often visited it, as if he could thus learn its secret. For a doubt remained, and Real's suggestion haunted him: "If the horse had only served for Mme. Acquet's flight, they would not advise the strange precaution of taking it twelve leagues away, killing, and skinning it on the spot." Even now a great deal of mystery hangs about it. The horse had not been used by Mme. Acquet, because we know that since the robbery of June 7th, she had not left the neighbourhood of Falaise. Lefebre had ridden it from Tournebut; but was that a fact to be so carefully concealed? Why did the Marquise in her confidential letters insist on this point? "Say that the lawyer returned to his house on foot," is a sentence that we find in each of her letters. Since no mystery was made of the journey, why was its means of accomplishment important? There was something unexplained, and Licquet was not satisfied. His tricks had brought no result. D'Ache was not found; Mme. Acquet had disappeared; her description had in vain been sent to all the brigades. Manginot, in despair of finding her, had renounced the search, and Savoye-Rollin himself was "determined to suspend all action." Such was the situation during the last days of September. It seemed most probable that the affair of Quesnay and the great plot of which it was an off-shoot, were going to join many others of the same kind, whose originators Fouche's police had despaired of finding, when an unexpected event reawakened Licquet's fervour and suggested to him a new machination. CHAPTER VII MADAME ACQUET