"'So the servants said. How could I know? All I know is, that he left
off coming to our hotel, and that at one time before then he had never
been two days absent.'

"'So much the better for him. He suffers now for having come between me
and my object--in trying to snatch her away out of my sight. Take you
warning, Pierre! I did not like your meddling to-night.' And so he went
off, leaving Madam Babette rocking herself backwards and forwards, in all
the depression of spirits consequent upon the reaction after the brandy,
and upon her knowledge of her nephew's threatened purpose combined.

"In telling you most of this, I have simply repeated Pierre's account,
which I wrote down at the time. But here what he had to say came to a
sudden break; for, the next morning, when Madame Babette rose, Virginie
was missing, and it was some time before either she, or Pierre, or Morin,
could get the slightest clue to the missing girl.

"And now I must take up the story as it was told to the Intendant
Flechier by the old gardener Jacques, with whom Clement had been lodging
on his first arrival in Paris. The old man could not, I dare say,
remember half as much of what had happened as Pierre did; the former had
the dulled memory of age, while Pierre had evidently thought over the
whole series of events as a story--as a play, if one may call it
so--during the solitary hours in his after-life, wherever they were
passed, whether in lonely camp watches, or in the foreign prison, where
he had to drag out many years. Clement had, as I said, returned to the
gardener's garret after he had been dismissed from the Hotel Duguesclin.
There were several reasons for his thus doubling back. One was, that he
put nearly the whole breadth of Paris between him and an enemy; though