Was Marsa awaiting him?  Would she not call for help, drive him forth, treat him like a thief?

Suppose the gate was barred from within?  He looked at the wall, and saw that by clinging to the ivy he could reach the top.  He had not come here to hesitate.  No, a hundred times no!

Besides, Marsa was certainly there, trembling, fearful, cursing him perhaps, but still there.

“No,” he murmured aloud in the silence, “were even death behind that gate, I would not recoil.”

CHAPTER XVI

“It is A man they are devouring!”

Michel Menko was right.  The beautiful Tzigana was awaiting him.

She stood at her window, like a spectre in her white dress, her hands clutching the sill, and her eyes striving to pierce the darkness which enveloped everything, and opened beneath her like a black gulf.  With heart oppressed with fear, she started at the least sound.

All she could see below in the garden were the branches defined against the sky; a single star shining through the leaves of a poplar, like a diamond in a woman’s tresses; and under the window the black stretch of the lawn crossed by a band of a lighter shade, which was the sand of the path.  The only sound to be heard was the faint tinkle of the water falling into the fountain.

Her glance, shifting as her thoughts, wandered vaguely over the trees, the open spaces which seemed like masses of heavy clouds, and the sky set with constellations.  She listened with distended ears, and a shudder shook her whole body as she heard suddenly the distant barking of a dog.

The dog perceived some one.  Was it Menko?

No:  the sound, a howling rather than a barking, came from a long distance, from Sartrouville, beyond the Seine.

“It is not Duna or Bundas,” she murmured, “nor Ortog.  What folly to remain here at the window!  Menko will not come.  Heaven grant that he does not come!”

And she sighed a happy sigh as if relieved of a terrible weight.

Suddenly, with a quick movement, she started violently back, as if some frightful apparition had risen up before her.

Hoarse bayings, quite different from the distant barking of a moment before, rent the air, and were repeated more and more violently below there in the darkness.  This time it was indeed the great Danish hounds and the shaggy colossus of the Himalayas, which were precipitating themselves upon some prey.

“Great God!  He is there, then!  He is there!” whispered Marsa, paralyzed with horror.

There was something gruesome in the cries of the dogs, By the continued repetition of the savage noises, sharp, irritated, frightful snarls and yelps, Marsa divined some horrible struggle in the darkness, of a man against the beasts.  Then all her terror seemed to mount to her lips in a cry of pity, which was instantly repressed.  She steadied herself against the window, striving, with all her strength, to reason herself into calmness.