but wait for Koupriane; then Ermolai was to
come down and say to the men, "In just a moment, if you please."

Ermolai crept back as far as the lodge, and then came quite normally up
the path, letting the gravel crunch under his countrified footsteps.
He was an intelligent man, and grasped with extraordinary coolness the
importance of the plan of campaign. Easily and naturally he mounted the
veranda steps, paused at the threshold of the drawing-room, made the
remark he had been told to make, and went upstairs. Koupriane and
Rouletabille now watched the bedroom windows. The flitting shadows there
suddenly became motionless. All moving about ceased; no more steps were
heard, nothing. And that sudden silence made the two "doctors" raise
their faces toward the ceiling. Then they exchanged an aroused glance.
This change in the manner of things above was dangerous. Koupriane
muttered, "The idiots!" It was such a blow for those upstairs to learn
they walked over a mine ready to explode that it evidently had paralyzed
their limbs. Happily Ermolai came down almost immediately and said to
the "doctors" in his very best domestic manner:

"Just a second, messieurs, if you please."

He did it still with utter naturalness. And he returned to the ledge
before he rejoined Koupriane and Rouletabille by way of the lawn.
Rouletabille, entirely cool, quite master of himself, as calm now as
Koupriane was nervous, said to the Prefect of Police:

"We must act now, and quickly. They are commencing to be suspicious.
Have you a plan?"

"Here is all I can see," said Koupriane. "Have the general come down by
the narrow servants' stairway, and slip out of the house from the window
of Natacha's sitting-room, with the aid of a twisted sheet. Matrena
Petrovna will come to speak to them during this time; that will keep
them patient until the general is out of danger. As soon as Matrena has
withdrawn into the garden, I will call my men, who will shoot them from
a distance."

"And the house itself? And the general's friends?"

"Let them try to get away, too, by the servants' stairway and jump from
the window after the general. We must try something. Say that I have
them at the muzzle of my revolver."

"Your plan won't work," said Rouletabille, "unless the door of Natacha's
sitting-room that opens on the drawing-room is closed."

"It is. I can see from here."

"And unless the door of the little passage-way before that staircase
that opens into