three o'clock
The shock to her had been intense , and burying her face in her handkerchief she burst into tears , which more than ever agitated Lecour . In a few minutes d'Estaing and de Grancey drove up . They were astonished at the speed and audacity of the affair . At three o'clock a search party of friends and gendarmes from the Palace , at which the occurrence had aroused something of a flutter , came back to the place . The Guardsmen offered to scour the woods in a body . Lecour soberly recommended a different plan , which they adopted , and placing his six friends and several royal gamekeepers in Indian file he started at their head . They followed him without speaking and watched him closely as , with an intentness quite un-French , he bent down to see farther through the trees , examined the branches for newly-broken twigs , the displaced stones , the crushed mosses , disturbed grass , and soft places of the ground , and the little indications read and looked for by trappers and Indians .