"Perhaps after all it is nothing but a joke; you've been a soldier and soldiers understand each other.

Tell me, what have you really done with the senator?
If you have killed him--why, that's the end of it! But if you have only locked him up, release him, for you see for yourself your game is balked.

Do this and I am certain the director of the jury and the senator himself will drop the matter." "We know absolutely nothing about it," said the marquis.
"If you take that tone the matter is likely to go far," replied the lieutenant.
"Dear cousin," said the Marquis de Simeuse, "we are forced to go to prison; but do not be uneasy; we shall return in a few hours, for there is some misunderstanding in all this which can be explained." "I hope so, for your sakes, gentlemen," said the magistrate, signing to the gendarmes to remove the four gentlemen, Michu, and Gothard.

"Don't take them to Troyes; keep them in your guardhouse at Arcis," he said to the lieutenant; "they must be present to-morrow, at daybreak, when we compare the shoes of their horses with the hoof-prints in the park." Lechesneau and Pigoult did not follow until they had closely questioned Catherine, Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, and Laurence.

The Durieus, Catherine, and Marthe declared they had only seen their masters at breakfast-time; Monsieur d'Hauteserre said he had seen them at three o'clock.
When, at midnight, Laurence found herself alone with Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, the abbe and his sister, and without the four young men who for the last eighteen months had been the life of the chateau and the love and joy of her own life, she fell into a gloomy silence which no one present dared to break.