Yet there was one consideration which might have daunted a spirit less
brave. To obtain aught from Tavannes it was needful to ask him, and to
ask him it was needful to see him; and to see him _before_ that to-morrow
which meant so much to her. It was necessary, in a word, to run some
risk; but without risk the card could not be played, and she did not
hesitate. It might turn out that she was wrong, that the man was not
only pitiless and without bowels of mercy, but lacked also the shred of
decency for which she gave him credit, and on which she counted. In that
case, if she sent for him--but she would not consider that case.

The position of the window, while it increased the women's safety,
debarred them from all knowledge of what was going forward, except that
which their ears afforded them. They had no means of judging whether
Tavannes remained in the house or had sallied forth to play his part in
the work of murder. Madame Carlat, indeed, had no desire to know
anything. In that room above stairs, with the door double-locked, lay a
hope of safety in the present, and of ultimate deliverance; there she had
a respite from terror, as long as she kept the world outside. To her,
therefore, the notion of sending for Tavannes, or communicating with him,
came as a thunderbolt. Was her mistress mad? Did she wish to court her
fate? To reach Tavannes they must apply to his riders, for Carlat and
the men-servants were confined above. Those riders were grim, brutal
men, who might resort to rudeness on their own account. And Madame,
clinging in a paroxysm of terror to her mistress, suggested all manner of
horrors, one on top of the other, until she increased her own terror
tenfold. And yet, to do her justice, nothing that even her frenzied
imagination suggested exceeded the things which the streets of Paris,
fruitful mother of horrors, were witnessing at that very hour. As we now
know.