“Certainly not; we know too much.  I tell you of it because I tell you everything; and if we are menaced, we have no help to expect, except from you.  Florentin is a good boy, but he is weak and foolish.  Mamma is like him in more than one respect, and as for me, although I am more resistant, I confess that, in the face of the law and the police, I should easily lose my head, like children who begin to scream when they are left in the dark.  Is not the law, when you know nothing of it, a night of trouble, full of horrors, and peopled with phantoms?”

“I do not believe there is the danger that you imagined in the first moment of alarm.”

“It was natural.”

“Very natural, I admit, but reflection must show how little foundation there is for it.  The button has not the name of the tailor who furnished it?”

“No, but it has the initials and the mark of the manufacturer; an A and a P, with a crown and a cock.”

“Well!  Among two or three thousand tailors in Paris, how is it possible for the police to find those who use these buttons?  And when the tailors are found, how could they designate the owner of this button, this one exactly, and not another?  It is looking for a needle in a bundle of hay.  Where did your brother have these trousers made?  Did he bring them from America?”

“The poor boy brought nothing from America but wretchedly shabby clothes, and we had to clothe him from head to foot.  We were obliged to economize, and a little tailor in the Avenue de Clichy, called Valerius, made this suit.”

“It seems to me scarcely probable that the police will find this little tailor.  But if they do, would he recognize the button as coming from his stock?  And, if they get as far as your brother, they must prove that there was a struggle; that the button was torn off in this struggle; that your brother was in the Rue Sainte-Anne between five and six o’clock; in which case, without doubt, he will find it easy to prove where he was at that moment.”

“He was with us—­with mamma.”

“You see, then, you need not feel alarmed.”

CHAPTER XVIII

A GRAVE DISCUSSION

Phillis hurried to return to the Rue des Moines, to share with her mother and brother the confidence that Saniel caused her to feel.

She pulled the bell with a trembling hand, for the time was past when in this quiet house, where all the lodgers knew each other, the key was left in the door, and one had only to knock before entering.  Since the newspapers had spoken of the button, all was changed; the feeling of liberty and security had disappeared; the door was always closed, and when the bell rang they looked at each other in fear and with trembling.

When Florentin opened the door, the table was set for dinner.

“I was afraid something had happened to you,” Madame Cormier said.