“You can rest here,” said Hercule, and he pointed to the benches in the coffee-room, “and if there is any soup left in the stockpot, you are welcome to it.”

Hercule, you see, is a good patriot, and he had been a soldier in his day....  No! no... do not interrupt me, any of you... you would only be saying that I ought to have known... but listen to the end.

“The soup we’ll gladly eat,” said the corporal very pleasantly.  “As for shelter... well!  I am afraid that this nice warm coffee-room will not exactly serve our purpose.  We want a place where we can lie hidden, and at the same time keep a watch on the road.  I noticed an outhouse as we came.  By your leave we will sleep in there.”

“As you please,” said my man curtly.

He frowned as he said this, and it suddenly seemed as if some vague suspicion had crept into Hercule’s mind.

The corporal, however, appeared unaware of this, for he went on quite cheerfully: 

“Ah! that is excellent!  Entre nous, citizen, my men and I have a desperate customer to deal with.  I’ll not mention his name, for I see you have guessed it already.  A small red flower, what?...  Well, we know that he must be making straight for the port of Calais, for he has been traced through St. Omer and Ardres.  But he cannot possibly enter Calais city to-night, for we are on the watch for him.  He must seek shelter somewhere for himself and any other aristocrat he may have with him, and, bar this house, there is no other place between Ardres and Calais where he can get it.  The night is bitterly cold, with a snow blizzard raging round.  I and my men have been detailed to watch this road, other patrols are guarding those that lead toward Boulogne and to Gravelines; but I have an idea, citizen, that our fox is making for Calais, and that to me will fall the honour of handing that tiresome scarlet flower to the Public Prosecutor en route for Madame la Guillotine.”

Now I could not really tell you, citizens, what suspicions had by this time entered Hercule’s head or mine; certainly what suspicions we did have were still very vague.

I prepared the soup for the men and they ate it heartily, after which my husband led the way to the outhouse where we sometimes stabled a traveller’s horse when the need arose.

It is nice and dry, and always filled with warm, fresh straw.  The entrance into it immediately faces the road; the corporal declared that nothing would suit him and his men better.

They retired to rest apparently, but we noticed that two men remained on the watch just inside the entrance, whilst the two others curled up in the straw.

Hercule put out the lights in the coffee-room, and then he and I went upstairs—­not to bed, mind you—­but to have a quiet talk together over the events of the past half-hour.

The result of our talk was that ten minutes later my man quietly stole downstairs and out of the house.  He did not, however, go out by the front door, but through a back way which, leading through a cabbage-patch and then across a field, cuts into the main road some two hundred metres higher up.