he had taken his potion. Matrena remained
in the darkness of the drawing-room, her dark-lantern in her hand.
All her nights passed thus, gliding from door to door, from chamber to
chamber, watching over the watch of the police, not daring to stop her
stealthy promenade even to throw herself on the mattress that she had
placed across the doorway of her husband's chamber. Did she ever sleep?
She herself could hardly say. Who else could, then? A tag of sleep here
and there, over the arm of a chair, or leaning against the wall, waked
always by some noise that she heard or dreamed, some warning, perhaps,
that she alone had heard. And to-night, to-night there is Rouletabille's
alert guard to help her, and she feels a little less the aching terror
of watchfulness, until there surges back into her mind the recollection
that the police are no longer there. Was he right, this young man?
Certainly she could not deny that some way she feels more confidence now
that the police are gone. She does not have to spend her time watching
their shadows in the shadows, searching the darkness, the arm-chairs,
the sofas, to rouse them, to appeal in low tones to all they held
binding, by their own name and the name of their father, to promise them
a bonus that would amount to something if they watched well, to count
them in order to know where they all were, and, suddenly, to throw full
in their face the ray of light from her little dark-lantern in order to
be sure, absolutely sure, that she was face to face with them, one of
the police, and not with some other, some other with an infernal machine
under his arm. Yes, she surely had less work now that she had no longer
to watch the police. And she had less fear!

She thanked the young reporter for that. Where was he? Did he remain in
the pose of a porcelain statue all this time out there on the lawn? She
peered through the lattice of the veranda shutters and looked anxiously
out into the darkened garden. Where could he be? Was that he, down
yonder, that crouching black heap with an unlighted pipe in his mouth?
No, no. That, she knew well, was the dwarf she genuinely loved, her
little domovoi-doukh, the familiar spirit of the house, who watched with
her over the general's life and thanks to whom serious injury had not
yet befallen Feodor Feodorovitch--one could not regard a mangled leg
that seriously. Ordinarily in her own country (she was from the Orel
district) one did not care to see the domovo