“You go away,” she repeated.

Rouletabille still held his place before her.  She turned from him; she did not wish to hear anything further.

“Mademoiselle,” said he, “you are watched closer than ever.  Who will take Michael Nikolaievitch’s place?”

“Madman, be silent!  Hush!”

“I am here.”

He said this with such simple bravery that tears sprang to her eyes.

“Dear man!  Poor man!  Dear brave man!” She did not know what to say.  Her emotion checked all utterance.  But it was necessary for her to enable him to understand that there was nothing he could do to help her in her sad straits.

“No.  If they knew what you have just said, what you have proposed now, you would be dead to-morrow.  Don’t let them suspect.  And above all, don’t try to see me anywhere.  Go back to papa at once.  We have been here too long.  What if they learn of it? — and they learn everything!  They are everywhere, and have ears everywhere.”

“Mademoiselle, just one word more, a single word.  Do you doubt now that Michael tried to poison your father?”

“Ah, I wish to believe it.  I wish to.  I wish to believe it for your sake, my poor boy.”

Rouletabille desired something besides “I wish to believe it for your sake, my poor boy.”  He was far from being satisfied.  She saw him turn pale.  She tried to reassure him while her trembling hands raised the lid of the wine-chest.

“What makes me think you are right is that I have decided myself that only one and the same person, as you said, climbed to the window of the little balcony.  Yes, no one can doubt that, and you have reasoned well.”

But he persisted still.

“And yet, in spite of that, you are not entirely sure, since you say, ‘I wish to believe it, my poor boy.’”

“Monsieur Rouletabille, someone might have tried to poison my father, and not have come by way of the window.”

“No, that is impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible to them.”

And she turned her head away again.

“Why, why,” she said, with her voice entirely changed and quite indifferent, as if she wished to be merely ’the daughter of the house’ in conversation with the young man, “the vodka is not in the wine chest, after all.  What has Ermolai done with it, then?”

She ran over to the buffet and found the flask.

“Oh, here it is.  Papa shan’t be without it, after all.”

Rouletabille was already into the garden again.

“If that is the only doubt she has,” he said to himself, “I can reassure her.  No one could come, excepting by the window.  And only one came that way.”

The young girl had rejoined him, bringing the flask.  They crossed the garden together to the general, who was whiling away the time as he waited for his vodka explaining to Matrena Petrovna the nature of “the constitution.”  He had spilt a box of matches on the table and arranged them carefully.