While Olivier was studying his friend with a super-acute and almost mechanical tension of the nerves, these three names occurred to him again and again. Ah! how he longed for another sign among all these indications; for one irrefutable proof, something that would drive away and annihilate the first hypothesis, the one that he had seen for an instant as in a flash, and yet plainly enough for him to be already possessed by it as by the most ghastly, threatening nightmare. Toward eleven o'clock Pierre withdrew upon the pretext that the travellers must be longing to rest. Olivier, having taken leave of his wife, felt that it was impossible any longer to support this uncertainty. Often, in former days, when Pierre and he were together in the country, if one was suffering from insomnia, he would awake the other, and they would go out for a walk in the night air, talking incessantly. Olivier thought that this would be the surest way of exorcising the idea that was again beginning to haunt him, an idea that stirred up in him, without his knowing why, a wave of unreasoning, violent, almost savage, revolt. Yes, he would go and talk to Hautefeuille. That would do him good, although he did not know how nor of what they would talk. The most elementary delicacy would prevent him speaking a word that could arouse the suspicions of his friend, no matter what were the relations that existed between Pierre and Ely de Carlsberg. But the conversations of close friends afford such opportunities! Perhaps an intonation of the voice, a look, a movement, would furnish him with the passionately desired sign after which he would never again even think of the possibility of Pierre having a sentiment for his former mistress. He was already in bed when this idea seized him. Automatically, without any further reflection, he rose. He descended the staircases of the immense hotel, now silent and in semi-darkness. He arrived at Hautefeuille's door. He knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again, and again there was silence. The key was in the lock. He turned it and entered. By the light of the moon that flooded the room through the open window, he saw that the bed was undisturbed. Pierre had gone out.