Magnotte was chary of lamps and candles, and prolonged to its utmost
limits the pensive interval between day and night. He walked softly up
and down the room, unheeded by the ladies clustered in a group by one of
the windows. Restless and unhappy, he could neither go nor stay. She was
not coming down to the salon this evening. He had clung to the faint hope
that she might appear; but the faint hope died away in his breast as the
night deepened. What purpose could be served by his remaining in that
dismal room? He was no nearer her than he would have been in the
remotest wilds of Central America. He would go out--not to the odious
dancing-garden, but to the cool dark streets, where the night wind might
blow this fever from his brain.

He left the room suddenly, and hurried downstairs. At the bottom of the
staircase he almost stumbled against a woman, who turned and looked at
him in the light of a little oil-lamp that hung over the door of the
portress's lodge.

It was the Englishwoman, deadly pale, and with a wild look in her face
that Gustave had never seen there before. She gave him no sign of
recognition, but passed out of the courtyard, and walked rapidly away.
That unusual look in her face, the strangeness of the fact that she
should be leaving the house at this hour, inspired him with a vague
terror, and he followed her, not stealthily, without a thought that he
was doing any wrong by such an act--rather, indeed, with the conviction
that he had a right so to follow her.

She walked very quickly--at a more rapid pace than Gustave would have
supposed possible for so fragile a creature. She chose the lonelier
streets, and Gustave had no difficulty in following her; she never looked
back, but went straight on her course, without pause or slackening of her