At the end of half an hour she reached a house standing close to the junction of the chief street of the faubourg with the street leading out to the Barriere de Pantin.  The place is to this day one of the loneliest in Paris.  The north wind blowing from Belleville and the Buttes Chaumont whistled among the houses, or rather cottages, scattered through the sparsely inhabited little valley, where the inclosures are fenced with walls built of mud and refuse bones.  This dismal region seems the natural home of poverty and despair.  The man who was intent on following the poor creature who had had the courage to thread these dark and silent streets seemed struck with the spectacle they offered.  He stopped as if reflecting, and stood in a hesitating attitude, dimly visible by a street lantern whose flickering light scarcely pierced the fog.  Fear gave eyes to the old gentlewoman, who now fancied that she saw something sinister in the features of this unknown man.  All her terrors revived, and profiting by the curious hesitation that had seized him, she glided like a shadow to the doorway of the solitary dwelling, touched a spring, and disappeared with phantasmagoric rapidity.

The man, standing motionless, gazed at the house, which was, as it were, a type of the wretched buildings of the neighborhood.  The tottering hovel, built of porous stone in rough blocks, was coated with yellow plaster much cracked, and looked ready to fall before a gust of wind.  The roof, of brown tiles covered with moss, had sunk in several places, and gave the impression that the weight of snow might break it down at any moment.  Each story had three windows whose frames, rotted by dampness and shrunken by the heat of the sun, told that the outer cold penetrated to the chambers.  The lonely house seemed like an ancient tower that time had forgotten to destroy.  A faint light gleamed from the garret windows, which were irregularly cut in the roof; but the rest of the house was in complete obscurity.  The old woman went up the rough and clumsy stairs with difficulty, holding fast to a rope which took the place of baluster.  She knocked furtively at the door of a lodging under the roof, and sat hastily down on a chair which an old man offered her.

“Hide! hide yourself!” she cried.  “Though we go out so seldom, our errands are known, our steps are watched—­”

“What has happened?” asked another old woman sitting near the fire.

“The man who has hung about the house since yesterday followed me to-night.”

At these words the occupants of the hovel looked at each other with terror in their faces.  The old man was the least moved of the three, possibly because he was the one in greatest danger.  Under the pressure of misfortune or the yoke of persecution a man of courage begins, as it were, by preparing for the sacrifice of himself:  he looks upon his days as so many victories won from fate.  The eyes of the two women, fixed upon the old man, showed plainly that he alone was the object of their extreme anxiety.