Other to appear.

A hand touched her carefully. She turned.

Rouletabille was there, his face all scarred by red scratches, without
collar or neck-tie, having hastily resumed his clothes. He appeared
furious as he surprised her in his disarray. She let him lead her as
though she were a child. He drew her to his room and closed the door.

"Madame," he commenced, "it is impossible to work with you. Why in the
world have you wept not two feet from your step-daughter's door? You and
your Koupriane, you commence to make me regret the Faubourg Poissoniere,
you know. Your step-daughter has certainly heard you. It is lucky that
she attaches no importance at all to your nocturnal phantasmagorias, and
that she has been used to them a long time. She has more sense than you,
Mademoiselle Natacha has. She sleeps, or at least she pretends to sleep,
which leaves everybody in peace. What reply will you give her if it
happens that she asks you the reason to-day for your marching and
counter-marching up and down the sitting-room and complains that you
kept her from sleeping?"

Matrena only shook her old, old head.

"No, no, she has not heard me. I was there like a shadow, like a shadow
of myself. She will never hear me. No one hears a shadow."

Rouletabille felt returning pity for her and spoke more gently.

"In any case, it is necessary, you must understand, that she should
attach no more importance to what you have done to-night than to the
things she knows of your doing other nights. It is not the first time,
is it, that you have wandered in the sitting-room? You understand me?
And to-morrow, madame, embrace her as you always have."

"No, not that," she moaned. "Never that. I could not."

"Why not?"

Matrena did not reply. She wept. He took her in his arms like a child
consoling its mother.

"Don't cry. Don't cry. All is not lost. Someone did leave the villa this
morning."

"Oh, little domovoi! How is that? How is that? How did you find that
out?"

"Since we didn't find anything inside, it was certainly necessary to
find something outside."

"And you have found it?"

"Certainly."

"The Virgin protect you!"

"SHE is with us. She will not desert us. I will even say that I believe
she has a special guardianship over the Isles. She watches over them
from evening to morning."

"What are you saying?"

"Certainly. You don't know what we call in France 'the watchers of the
Virgin'?"

"Oh, yes, they are the webs tha