on tiptoe to his side.  And now he too could look in.  He saw a brightly lit bedroom with a made bed.  On his left were the shuttered windows overlooking the lake.  On his right in the partition wall a door stood open.  Through the door he could see a dark, windowless closet, with a small bed from which the bedclothes hung and trailed upon the floor, as though some one had been but now roughly dragged from it.  On a table, close by the door, lay a big green hat with a brown ostrich feather, and a white cloak.  But the amazing spectacle which kept him riveted was just in front of him.  An old hag of a woman was sitting in a chair with her back towards them.  She was mending with a big needle the holes in an old sack, and while she bent over her work she crooned to herself some French song.  Every now and then she raised her eyes, for in front of her, under her charge, Mlle. Celie, the girl of whom Hanaud was in search, lay helpless upon a sofa.  The train of her delicate green frock swept the floor.  She was dressed as Helene Vauquier had described.  Her gloved hands were tightly bound behind her back, her feet were crossed so that she could not have stood, and her ankles were cruelly strapped together.  Over her face and eyes a piece of coarse sacking was stretched like a mask, and the ends were roughly sewn together at the back of her head.  She lay so still that, but for the labouring of her bosom and a tremor which now and again shook her limbs, the watchers would have thought her dead.  She made no struggle of resistance; she lay quiet and still.  Once she writhed, but it was with the uneasiness of one in pain, and the moment she stirred the old woman’s hand went out to a bright aluminium flask which stood on a little table at her side.

“Keep quiet, little one!” she ordered in a careless, chiding voice, and she rapped with the flask peremptorily upon the table.  Immediately, as though the tapping had some strange message of terror for the girl’s ear, she stiffened her whole body and lay rigid.

“I am not ready for you yet, little fool,” said the old woman, and she bent again to her work.

Ricardo’s brain whirled.  Here was the girl whom they had come to arrest, who had sprung from the salon with so much activity of youth across the stretch of grass, who had run so quickly and lightly across the pavement into this very house, so that she should not be seen.  And now she was lying in her fine and delicate attire a captive, at the mercy of the very people who were her accomplices.

Suddenly a scream rang out in the garden—­a shrill, loud scream, close beneath the windows.  The old woman sprang to her feet.  The girl on the sofa raised her head.  The old woman took a step towards the window, and then she swiftly turned towards the door.  She saw the men upon the threshold.  She uttered a bellow of rage.  There is no other word to describe the sound.  It was not a human cry; it was the bellow of an angry animal.  She reached out her hand towards the flask, but before she could grasp it Hanaud seized her.  She burst into a torrent of foul oaths.  Hanaud flung her across to Lemerre’s officer, who dragged her from the room.