Was he really unrecognizable?  This was the question that beset him now.  Many times he compared his reflection in the glass with the photograph that he had given Phillis.  The hair and beard were gone, but his eyes of steel, as his friend said, still remained, and nothing could change them.  He might wear blue eyeglasses, or injure himself in a chemical experiment and wear a bandage.  But such a disguise would provoke curiosity and questions just so much more dangerous, because it would coincide with the disappearance of his hair and beard.

But these fears did not torment him long, for Phillis, who now passed a part of every day in the Rue Sainte-Anne with Madame Dammauville, came one evening in despair, and told him that that day the invalid had been able to leave her bed for a few minutes only.

Then she would not go to court.

This apprehension of meeting Madame Dammauville face to face had begun to exasperate him; he felt like a coward in yielding to it, and since he had not the force to shake it off, he was happy to be relieved from it by the intervention of chance, which, after having been against him so long, now became favorable.  The wheel turned.

“See Madame Dammauville often,” he said to Phillis, “and note all that she feels; perhaps I shall find some way to repair this impediment, something that I may suggest to Balzajette without his suspecting it.  Besides, it is reasonable to believe that the recrudescence of cold that we are suffering from now may have something to do with the change in her condition; it is probable that with the mild spring weather she may improve.”

He hoped by this counsel to quiet Phillis’s uneasiness and to gain time.  But it had the opposite effect.  In her anguish, which increased as the time for the trial approached, it was not probabilities, any more than the uncertain influence of the spring, that Phillis could depend on; she must have something more and better; but fearing a refusal, she forbore to tell him what she hoped to obtain.

It was only when she had succeeded that she spoke.

Every day, on leaving Madame Dammauville, she came to tell him what she had learned, and for three successive days her story was the same: 

“She was not able to leave her bed.”

And each day he made the same reply: 

“It is the cold weather.  Surely, we shall soon have a change; this frost and wind will not continue beyond the end of March.”

He was pained at her desolation and anguish, but what could he do?  It was not his fault that this relapse occurred at a decisive moment; fate had been against him long enough, and he was not going to counteract it at the time when it seemed to take his side, by yielding to the desire that Phillis dared not express, but which he divined, and by going to see Madame Dammauville.

When she entered his office on the fourth day, he knew at once by her manner that something favorable to Florentin had happened.