“And you, too, look as if you weren’t satisfied.  Now do just ask Zoe if I’m at all mixed up in it.  Zoe, do speak:  explain to Monsieur—­”

The lady’s maid, having brought a towel and a basin of water out of the dressing room, had for some moments past been rubbing the carpet in order to remove the bloodstains before they dried.

“Oh, monsieur,” she declared, “Madame is utterly miserable!”

Muffat was still stupefied; the tragedy had frozen him, and his imagination was full of the mother weeping for her sons.  He knew her greatness of heart and pictured her in her widow’s weeds, withering solitarily away at Les Fondettes.  But Nana grew ever more despondent, for now the memory of Zizi lying stretched on the floor, with a red hole in his shirt, almost drove her senseless.

“He used to be such a darling, so sweet and caressing.  Oh, you know, my pet—­I’m sorry if it vexes you—­I loved that baby!  I can’t help saying so; the words must out.  Besides, now it ought not to hurt you at all.  He’s gone.  You’ve got what you wanted; you’re quite certain never to surprise us again.”

And this last reflection tortured her with such regret that he ended by turning comforter.  Well, well, he said, she ought to be brave; she was quite right; it wasn’t her fault!  But she checked her lamentations of her own accord in order to say: 

“Listen, you must run round and bring me news of him.  At once!  I wish it!”

He took his hat and went to get news of Georges.  When he returned after some three quarters of an hour he saw Nana leaning anxiously out of a window, and he shouted up to her from the pavement that the lad was not dead and that they even hoped to bring him through.  At this she immediately exchanged grief for excess of joy and began to sing and dance and vote existence delightful.  Zoe, meanwhile, was still dissatisfied with her washing.  She kept looking at the stain, and every time she passed it she repeated: 

“You know it’s not gone yet, madame.”

As a matter of fact, the pale red stain kept reappearing on one of the white roses in the carpet pattern.  It was as though, on the very threshold of the room, a splash of blood were barring the doorway.

“Bah!” said the joyous Nana.  “That’ll be rubbed out under people’s feet.”

After the following day Count Muffat had likewise forgotten the incident.  For a moment or two, when in the cab which drove him to the Rue Richelieu, he had busily sworn never to return to that woman’s house.  Heaven was warning him; the misfortunes of Philippe and Georges were, he opined, prophetic of his proper ruin.  But neither the sight of Mme Hugon in tears nor that of the boy burning with fever had been strong enough to make him keep his vow, and the short-lived horror of the situation had only left behind it a sense of secret delight at the thought that he was now well quit of a rival, the charm of whose youth had always exasperated him.  His