etter, forbidding him to make any
attempt to see her. But what he had seen at Perros, what he had heard
behind the dressing-room door, his conversation with Christine at the
edge of the moor made him suspect some machination which, devilish
though it might be, was none the less human. The girl's highly strung
imagination, her affectionate and credulous mind, the primitive
education which had surrounded her childhood with a circle of legends,
the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of
sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this
art was made manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in
the churchyard at Perros; all this seemed to him to constitute a moral
ground only too favorable for the malevolent designs of some mysterious
and unscrupulous person. Of whom was Christine Daae the victim? This
was the very reasonable question which Raoul put to himself as he
hurried off to Mamma Valerius.

He trembled as he rang at a little flat in the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. The door was opened by the maid whom he had
seen coming out of Christine's dressing-room one evening. He asked if
he could speak to Mme. Valerius. He was told that she was ill in bed
and was not receiving visitors.

"Take in my card, please," he said.

The maid soon returned and showed him into a small and scantily
furnished drawing-room, in which portraits of Professor Valerius and
old Daae hung on opposite walls.

"Madame begs Monsieur le Vicomte to excuse her," said the servant.
"She can only see him in her bedroom, because she can no longer stand
on her poor legs."

Five minutes later, Raoul was ushered into an ill-lit room where he at
once recognized the good, kind face of Christine's benefactress in the
semi-darkness of an alcove. Mamma Valerius' hair was now quite white,
but her eyes had grown no older; never, on the contrary, had their
expression been so bright, so pure, so child-like.

"M. de Chagny!" she cried gaily, putting out both her hands to her
visitor. "Ah, it's Heaven that sends you here! ... We can talk of HER."

This last sentence sounded very gloomily in the young man's ears. He
at once asked:

"Madame ... where is Christine?"

And the old lady replied calmly:

"She is with her good genius!"

"What good genius?" exclaimed poor Raoul.

"Why, the Angel of Music!"

The viscount dropped into a chair. Really? Christine was with the
Angel of Music? An