M. Fauville ate a couple of biscuits and then cut a dessert-apple.  It was not ripe.  He took two others, felt them, and, not thinking them good, put them back as well.  Then he peeled a pear and ate it.

“You can leave the fruit dish,” he said to his man.  “I shall be glad of it, if I am hungry during the night....  Oh, I was forgetting!  These two gentlemen are staying.  Don’t mention it to anybody.  And, in the morning, don’t come until I ring.”

The man placed the fruit dish on the table before retiring.  Perenna, who was noticing everything, and who was afterward to remember every smallest detail of that evening, which his memory recorded with a sort of mechanical faithfulness, counted three pears and four apples in the dish.

Meanwhile, Fauville went up the winding staircase, and, going along the gallery, reached the room where his son lay in bed.

“He’s fast asleep,” he said to Perenna, who had joined him.

The bedroom was a small one.  The air was admitted by a special system of ventilation, for the dormer window was hermetically closed by a wooden shutter tightly nailed down.

“I took the precaution last year,” Hippolyte Fauville explained.  “I used to make my electrical experiments in this room and was afraid of being spied upon, so I closed the aperture opening on the roof.”

And he added in a low voice: 

“They have been prowling around me for a long time.”

The two men went downstairs again.

Fauville looked at his watch.

“A quarter past ten:  bedtime, I am exceedingly tired, and you will excuse me—­”

It was arranged that Perenna and Mazeroux should make themselves comfortable in a couple of easy chairs which they carried into the passage between the study and the entrance hall.  But, before bidding them good-night, Hippolyte Fauville, who, although greatly excited, had appeared until then to retain his self-control, was seized with a sudden attack of weakness.  He uttered a faint cry.  Don Luis turned round and saw the sweat pouring like gleaming water down his face and neck, while he shook with fever and anguish.

“What’s the matter?” asked Perenna.

“I’m frightened!  I’m frightened!” he said.

“This is madness!” cried Don Luis.  “Aren’t we here, the two of us?  We can easily spend the night with you, if you prefer, by your bedside.”

Fauville replied by shaking Perenna violently by the shoulder, and, with distorted features, stammering: 

“If there were ten of you—­if there were twenty of you with me, you need not think that it would spoil their schemes!  They can do anything they please, do you hear, anything!  They have already killed Inspector Verot—­they will kill me—­and they will kill my son.  Oh, the blackguards!  My God, take pity on me!  The awful terror of it!  The pain I suffer!”

He had fallen on his knees and was striking his breast and repeating: