"I don't think it--"

We fell into silence. Presently he went on:

"It was a bit of luck, our falling in with that examining magistrate and
his Registrar, eh? What did I tell you about that revolver?" His head
was bent down, he had his hands in his pockets, and he was whistling.
After a while I heard him murmur:

"Poor woman!"

"Is it Mademoiselle Stangerson you are pitying?"

"Yes; she's a noble woman and worthy of being pitied!--a woman of a
great, a very great character--I imagine--I imagine."

"You know her then?"

"Not at all. I have never seen her."

"Why, then, do you say that she is a woman of great character?"

"Because she bravely faced the murderer; because she courageously
defended herself--and, above all, because of the bullet in the ceiling."

I looked at Rouletabille and inwardly wondered whether he was not
mocking me, or whether he had not suddenly gone out of his senses. But I
saw that he had never been less inclined to laugh, and the brightness of
his keenly intelligent eyes assured me that he retained all his reason.
Then, too, I was used to his broken way of talking, which only left me
puzzled as to his meaning, till, with a very few clear, rapidly uttered
words, he would make the drift of his ideas clear to me, and I saw
that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void of
meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how it
was I had not understood him sooner.

CHAPTER IV. "In the Bosom of Wild Nature"

The Chateau du Glandier is one of the oldest chateaux in the Ile de
France, where so many building remains of the feudal period are still
standing. Built originally in the heart of the forest, in the reign of
Philip le Bel, it now could be seen a few hundred yards from the road
leading from the village of Sainte-Genevieve to Monthery. A mass of
inharmonious structures, it is dominated by a donjon. When the visitor
has mounted the crumbling steps of this ancient donjon, he reaches a
little plateau where, in the seventeenth century, Georges Philibert de
Sequigny, Lord of the Glandier, Maisons-Neuves and other places, built
the existing town in an abominably rococo style of architecture.

It was in this place, seemingly belonging entirely to the past, that
Professor Stangerson and his daughter installed themselves to lay the
foundations for the science of the future. Its solitude, in the depths
of woods, was what, more than all, had pleased them