Having given his instructions, William set out at a run towards the house. He left the girl, alone, exposed to a danger of which he was ignorant and which she did not suspect. Ralph, who was at a distance of about fifty yards from her, gazed at her greedily, and reflected that another gaze, that of the hidden man must also be fixed on her through the cracks of the worm-eaten door. What was he to do? Warn her? Carry her off, as at Beaucourt, and protect her against unknown dangers? But stronger than his perplexity was his curiosity. He wished to know. In the midst of this imbroglio in which was a very entanglement of opposing actions in which attacks came from opposing quarters, without its being possible to see from which quarter one would come first, he hoped some guiding thread would present itself and allow him, at a given moment, to choose one path rather than another and no longer act haphazardly from an impulse of pity or the lust to avenge. The girl remained leaning against a tree and played idly with the whistle which she was to use in case of surprise. The youngness of her face, almost a child’s face, though she was certainly not less than twenty, surprised Ralph. At that distance he could not see the color of her strange eyes, but her hair beneath her hat, which she had pushed back a little, shone like curls of gold and formed a halo of light and gaiety. The moments slipped by. All at once Ralph heard the hinges of the padlocked door creak, and saw, on the other side of the hillock, a country-woman who came up the path, singing, and took her way towards the house, a basket of linen on her arm. The girl with the green eyes had also heard her. She tottered, sank to the ground under the tree, and raised the whistle to her lips. She was so overcome with terror that she had not the strength to blow it; the laundress went on up the path without having perceived that figure, hidden behind the trunks of the shrubs which stood at the fork of the path. Terrible minutes slipped away. There is nothing more terrifying than to wait for an event which every circumstance foretells will be dramatic. What would William do, disturbed in the very middle of his burglary and confronted with this intruder? Did not the thief’s actions during the attack in the express enable one to guess the dénouement? Ralph made ready to intervene, when there came an unexpected happening: the laundress entered the house by a side door; and the moment she disappeared, William came out of the front door, carrying a newspaper parcel of the shape of a violin case. He and the laundress did not meet. The girl, hidden among the trees did not at once see this, and during the stealthy approach of her confederate, who was walking noiselessly on the turf, she wore the mask of terror she had worn at Beaucourt, after the murder of Miss Bakersfield and the two men. Ralph filled with detestation of her.