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“There he is. Shoot, Dixmer, shoot! Kill him! Kill him!”

Maurice let out a roar: he was trapped in the garden. At a glance he estimated that the surrounding walls were ten feet high.

All this happened in a flash as his assassins flew after him. Maurice was about thirty feet ahead of them. He looked around with the eyes of a doomed man who asks only to be able to slip through a crack in the ground.

He spotted the pavilion, the shutters, the light behind the shutters. It took only one bound, a leap of ten feet, for him to grab one of the shutters, rip it off, smash his way through the window, and fall into the illuminated room where a woman sat reading by the fire.

The woman shot to her feet in fright and screamed for help.

“Out of the way, Geneviève, out of the way,” cried the voice of Dixmer. “Out of the way so I can kill the man!”

Maurice saw the barrel of the rifle level at him about ten feet away. But as soon as the woman laid eyes on him, she let out a terrible cry, and instead of getting out of the way as her husband had ordered she threw herself between Maurice and the barrel of the gun. That gesture focused Maurice’s attention squarely on the generous creature whose first impulse was to protect him.

It was his turn to let out a cry, for it was none other than the mysterious woman he’d been trying so hard to find.

“You! … You!…” he cried.

“Quiet!” she said; turning to the assassins who had gathered at the window, with different weapons in their hands, she cried, “Oh, no you don’t! You will not kill this man!”

“He’s a spy!” cried Dixmer, whose soft placid face had taken on an expression of implacable determination. “He’s a spy and he has to die.”

“Him? A spy?” said Geneviève. “A spy, him? Come here, Dixmer, I have something to say to you that will prove you are peculiarly mistaken.”

Dixmer approached the window and Geneviève went over to him, bent down, and whispered a few words in his ear. The master tanner shot his head up.

“Him?” he said.

“The very one,” Geneviève replied.

“Are you sure?”

This time the young woman did not reply but turned to Maurice and held out her hand, smiling. Dixmer’s features settled into a bizarre mix of kindly indulgence and disdain. He brought the butt of the rifle down hard against the ground.

“Well, then, that’s a different matter,” he said.

Then he signaled to his cohorts to follow him and they moved off into the dark.

“Hide the ring,” Geneviève murmured meanwhile. “Everyone here knows it.”

Maurice swiftly slipped the ring from his finger and into his vest pocket. An instant later, the door of the pavilion opened and Dixmer, unarmed, came toward him.

“Forgive me, citizen,” he said, “for not acknowledging earlier the debt I owe you! My wife remembered the service you did for her the night of the tenth of March, but she’d forgotten your name. So we had no idea who we were dealing with. If we had, believe me, we would never for a moment have doubted your honor or suspected your intentions. And so forgive me, once again!”

Maurice was stupefied. He remained on his feet only by some miracle as he felt his head spin and sensed he was about to fall. He leaned against the mantelpiece for support.

“But what did you want to kill me for, anyway?” he said.

“I’ll let you in on the secret, citizen,” said Dixmer. “I trust your loyalty. I am, as you already know, the master tanner and manager of this tannery. Most of the acids I use in the preparation of my skins are prohibited goods. Now, the smugglers I employ got wind of a delegation made to the general council of the Commune. When I saw you taking down information, I panicked. My smugglers panicked even more than I did when they saw your red cap and how businesslike you looked, and I won’t pretend we didn’t vote to kill you.”

“I’m well aware of that, thank you,” Maurice said. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. I heard the debate, I saw your gun.”

“I’ve already asked your forgiveness,” Dixmer