CHAPTER XXXIII: The English Spy.
And now at last the shades of evening were drawing in thick and fast.
Within the walls of Fort Gayole the last rays of the setting sun had long ago ceased to shed their dying radiance, and through the thick stone embrasures and the dusty panes of glass, the grey light of dusk soon failed to penetrate.
In the large ground-floor room with its window opened upon the wide promenade of the southern ramparts, a silence reigned which was oppressive.

The air was heavy with the fumes of the two tallow candles on the table, which smoked persistently.
Against the walls a row of figures in dark blue uniforms with scarlet facings, drab breeches and heavy riding boots, silent and immovable, with fixed bayonets like so many automatons lining the room all round; at some little distance from the central table and out of the immediate circle of light, a small group composed of five soldiers in the same blue and scarlet uniforms.

One of these was Sergeant Hebert.

In the centre of this group two persons were sitting: a woman and an old man.
The Abbe Foucquet had been brought down from his prison cell a few minutes ago, and told to watch what would go on around him, after which he would be allowed to go to his old church of St.Joseph and ring the Angelus once more before he and his family left Boulogne forever.
The Angelus would be the signal for the opening of all the prison gates in the town.

Everyone to-night could come and go as they pleased, and having rung the Angelus, the abbe would be at liberty to join Francois and Felicite and their old mother, his sister, outside the purlieus of the town.
The Abbe Foucquet did not quite understand all this, which was very rapidly and roughly explained to him.