which kept no more trace of the three strangers than if they had been the merest ghosts I seemed to hear the ghostly murmur, “Americain, Catholique et gentilhomne.  Amer. . . " Unseen by human eye I ran up the flight of steps swiftly and on the first floor stepped into my sitting-room of which the door was open . . . “et gentilhomme.”  I tugged at the bell pull and somewhere down below a bell rang as unexpected for Therese as a call from a ghost.

I had no notion whether Therese could hear me.  I seemed to remember that she slept in any bed that happened to be vacant.  For all I knew she might have been asleep in mine.  As I had no matches on me I waited for a while in the dark.  The house was perfectly still.  Suddenly without the slightest preliminary sound light fell into the room and Therese stood in the open door with a candlestick in her hand.

She had on her peasant brown skirt.  The rest of her was concealed in a black shawl which covered her head, her shoulders, arms, and elbows completely, down to her waist.  The hand holding the candle protruded from that envelope which the other invisible hand clasped together under her very chin.  And her face looked like a face in a painting.  She said at once: 

“You startled me, my young Monsieur.”

She addressed me most frequently in that way as though she liked the very word “young.”  Her manner was certainly peasant-like with a sort of plaint in the voice, while the face was that of a serving Sister in some small and rustic convent.

“I meant to do it,” I said.  “I am a very bad person.”

“The young are always full of fun,” she said as if she were gloating over the idea.  “It is very pleasant.”

“But you are very brave,” I chaffed her, “for you didn’t expect a ring, and after all it might have been the devil who pulled the bell.”

“It might have been.  But a poor girl like me is not afraid of the devil.  I have a pure heart.  I have been to confession last evening.  No.  But it might have been an assassin that pulled the bell ready to kill a poor harmless woman.  This is a very lonely street.  What could prevent you to kill me now and then walk out again free as air?”

While she was talking like this she had lighted the gas and with the last words she glided through the bedroom door leaving me thunderstruck at the unexpected character of her thoughts.

I couldn’t know that there had been during my absence a case of atrocious murder which had affected the imagination of the whole town; and though Therese did not read the papers (which she imagined to be full of impieties and immoralities invented by godless men) yet if she spoke at all with her kind, which she must have done at least in shops, she could not have helped hearing of it.  It seems that for some days people could talk of nothing else.  She returned gliding from the bedroom hermetically sealed in her black shawl just as she had gone in, with the protruding hand holding the lighted candle and relieved my perplexity as to her morbid turn of mind by telling me something of the murder story in a strange tone of indifference even while referring to its most horrible features.  “That’s what carnal sin (peche de chair) leads to,” she commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin lips.  “And then the devil furnishes the occasion.”