Master Zacharius looked intently at Gerande, and did not reply. Suddenly he uttered a cry, carried his hand eagerly to his heart, and fell fainting on his old leathern chair. “Father, what is the matter?” [Illustration: “Father, what is the matter?”] “Help!” cried Aubert. “Scholastique!” But Scholastique did not come at once. Some one was knocking at the front door; she had gone to open it, and when she returned to the shop, before she could open her mouth, the old watchmaker, having recovered his senses, spoke:— “I divine, my old Scholastique, that you bring me still another of those accursed watches which have stopped.” “Lord, it is true enough!” replied Scholastique, handing a watch to Aubert. “My heart could not be mistaken!” said the old man, with a sigh. Meanwhile Aubert carefully wound up the watch, but it would not go. CHAPTER III. A STRANGE VISIT. Poor Gerande would have lost her life with that of her father, had it not been for the thought of Aubert, who still attached her to the world. The old watchmaker was, little by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and a human existence seemed to have departed from him, to give place to the extra-natural existence of the intermediate powers. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the sinister rumours which had spread concerning his labours. The news of the strange derangements which his watches betrayed had a prodigious effect upon the master clockmakers of Geneva. What signified this sudden paralysis of their wheels, and why these strange relations which they seemed to have with the old man’s life? These were the kind of mysteries which people never contemplate without a secret terror. In the various classes of the town, from the apprentice to the great lord who used the watches of the old horologist, there was no one who could not himself judge of the singularity of the fact. The citizens wished, but in vain, to get to see Master Zacharius. He fell very ill; and this enabled his daughter to withdraw him from those incessant visits which had degenerated into reproaches and recriminations. Medicines and physicians were powerless in presence of this organic wasting away, the cause of which could not be discovered. It sometimes seemed as if the old man’s heart had ceased to beat; then the pulsations were resumed with an alarming irregularity.