When they were in the veranda, he added: 

“She is to see also, at once, these gentlemen, who will be able to tell her there is no more danger.”

And all three passed while Koupriane and Rodetabille vaguely saluted the two conspirators in the drawing-room.  It was a decisive moment.  Recognizing Koupriane, the two Nihilists might well believe themselves discovered, as the reporter had said, and precipitate the catastrophe.  However, Ermolai, Koupriane and Rouletabille climbed the stairs to the bedroom like automatons, not daring to look behind them, and expecting the end each instant.  But neither stirred.  Ermolai went down again, by Rouletabille’s order, normally, naturally, tranquilly.  They went into Matrena Petrovna’s chamber.  Everybody was there.  It was a gathering of ghosts.

Here was what had happened above.  That the “doctors” still remained below, that they had not been received instantly, in brief, that the catastrophe had been delayed up to now was due to Matrena Petrovna, whose watchful love, like a watch-dog, was always ready to scent danger.  These two “doctors” whose names she did not know, who arrived so late, and the precipitate departure of the little doctor of Vassili-Ostrow aroused her watchfulness.  Before allowing them to come upstairs to the general she resolved to have a look at them herself downstairs.  She arose from her bed for that; and now her presentiment was justified.  When she saw Ermolai, sober and mysterious, enter with Koupriane’s message, she knew instinctively, before he spoke, that there were bombs in the house.  When Ermolai did speak it was a blow for everybody.  At first she, Matrena Perovna, had been a frightened, foolish figure in the big flowered dressing-gown belonging to Feodor that she had wrapped about her in her haste.  When Ermolai left, the general, who knew she only trembled for him, tried to reassure her, and, in the midst of the frightened silence of all of them, said a few words recalling the failure of all the previous attempts.  But she shook her head and trembled, shaking with fear for him, in agony at the thought that she could do nothing there above those living bombs but wait for them to burst.  As to the friends, already their limbs were ruined, absolutely ruined, in very truth.  For a moment they were quite incapable of moving.  The jolly Councilor of Empire, Ivan Petrovitch, had no longer a lively tale to tell, and the abominable prospect of “this horrible mix-up” right at hand rendered him much less gay than in his best hours at Cubat’s place.  And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff was whiter than the snow that covers old Lithuania’s fields when the winter’s chase is on.  Athanase Georgevitch himself was not brilliant, and his sanguine face had quite changed, as though he had difficulty in digesting his last masterpiece with knife and fork.  But, in justice to them, that was the first instantaneous effect.  No one could learn like that, all of a sudden, that