“Have you been out to-night, Madame?” asked he, in a low voice.

“No.”

“Have all the servants gone to bed?”

“I suppose so; but why do you ask?”

“Since I have been upstairs, somebody has gone out into the garden, and come back again.”

Bertha looked at him with a troubled glance.

“Are you sure of what you say?”

“Certainly.  Snow is falling, and whoever went out brought some back on his shoes.  This has melted in the vestibule—­”

Mme. Sauvresy seized the lamp, and interrupting Hector, said: 

“Come.”

Tremorel was right.  Here and there on the vestibule pavement were little puddles.

“Perhaps this water has been here some time,” suggested Bertha.

“No.  It was not there an hour ago, I could swear.  Besides, see, here is a little snow that has not melted yet.”

“It must have been one of the servants.”

Hector went to the door and examined it.

“I do not think so,” said he.  “A servant would have shut the bolts; here they are, drawn back.  Yet I myself shut the door to-night, and distinctly recollect fastening the bolts.”

“It’s very strange!”

“And all the more so, look you, because the traces of the water do not go much beyond the drawing-room door.”

They remained silent, and exchanged anxious looks.  The same terrible thought occurred to them both.

“If it were he?”

But why should he have gone into the garden?  It could not have been to spy on them.

They did not think of the window.

“It couldn’t have been Clement,” said Bertha, at last.  “He was asleep when I went back, and he is in a calm and deep slumber now.”

Sauvresy, stretched upon his bed, heard what his enemies were saying.  He cursed his imprudence.

“Suppose,” thought he, “they should think of looking at my gown and slippers!”

Happily this simple idea did not occur to them; after reassuring each other as well as they were able, they separated; but each heart carried an anxious doubt.  Sauvresy on that night had a terrible crisis in his illness.  Delirium, succeeding this ray of reason, renewed its possession of his brain.  The next morning Dr. R—–­ pronounced him in more danger than ever; and sent a despatch to Paris, saying that he would be detained at Valfeuillu three or four days.  The distemper redoubled in violence; very contradictory symptoms appeared.  Each day brought some new phase of it, which confounded the foresight of the doctors.  Every time that Sauvresy had a moment of reason, the scene at the window recurred to him, and drove him to madness again.

On that terrible night when he had gone out into the snow, he had not been mistaken; Bertha was really begging something of Hector.  This was it: