Amid the tumult of the storm, they heard a wailing sound, like a sob, in which a name was pronounced with difficulty: 

“Frantz!  Frantz!”

It was terrible and pitiful.

When Christ on the Cross sent up to heaven His despairing cry:  ’Eli, eli, lama sabachthani’, they who heard him must have felt the same species of superstitious terror that suddenly seized upon Mademoiselle Planus.

“I am afraid!” she whispered; “suppose you go and look—­”

“No, no, we will let him alone.  He is thinking of his brother.  Poor fellow!  It’s the very thought of all others that will do him the most good.”

And the old cashier went to sleep again.

The next morning he woke as usual when the drums beat the reveille in the fortifications; for the little family, surrounded by barracks, regulated its life by the military calls.  The sister had already risen and was feeding the poultry.  When she saw Sigismond she came to him in agitation.

“It is very strange,” she said, “I hear nothing stirring in Monsieur Risler’s room.  But the window is wide open.”

Sigismond, greatly surprised, went and knocked at his friend’s door.

“Risler!  Risler!”

He called in great anxiety: 

“Risler, are you there?  Are you asleep?”

There was no reply.  He opened the door.

The room was cold.  It was evident that the damp air had been blowing in all night through the open window.  At the first glance at the bed, Sigismond thought:  “He hasn’t been in bed”—­for the clothes were undisturbed and the condition of the room, even in the most trivial details, revealed an agitated vigil:  the still smoking lamp, which he had neglected to extinguish, the carafe, drained to the last drop by the fever of sleeplessness; but the thing that filled the cashier with dismay was to find the bureau drawer wide open in which he had carefully bestowed the letter and package entrusted to him by his friend.

The letter was no longer there.  The package lay on the table, open, revealing a photograph of Sidonie at fifteen.  With her high-necked frock, her rebellious hair parted over the forehead, and the embarrassed pose of an awkward girl, the little Chebe of the old days, Mademoiselle Le Mire’s apprentice, bore little resemblance to the Sidonie of to-day.  And that was the reason why Risler had kept that photograph, as a souvenir, not of his wife, but of the “little one.”

Sigismond was in great dismay.

“This is my fault,” he said to himself.  “I ought to have taken away the keys.  But who would have supposed that he was still thinking of her?  He had sworn so many times that that woman no longer existed for him.”

At that moment Mademoiselle Planus entered the room with consternation written on her face.

“Monsieur Risler has gone!” she exclaimed.

“Gone?  Why, wasn’t the garden-gate locked?”