Now, it has happened to me, when out shooting, to see a dog run away when a gun is leveled at it; he knows its deadly power. That this should happen in presence of a pistol seemed to me decidedly less ordinary. Had Nell already experienced the effect of the weapon? That was a plausible theory; but I fancied that she had understood the English--English being Macbeth’s tongue--rather than my uncle’s revolver. She calmed down, as at the voice of Orpheus, cowered and with her tail between her legs, made for the gray buildings which Lerne was pointing out to her. He ran after the hound, and the darkness swallowed them. In my clock the imperishable Harvester mowed down several minutes. In the distance a door banged noisily. Then Lerne came in again. That was all. So there were at Fonval two beings whose existence had till then been unsuspected by me; Nell, whose pitiful appearance hardly showed her to be happy, Nell, abandoned doubtless by her master in a hasty flight--and the practical joker. For this latter could not, in reason, be either of the two women or one of the Germans; the nature of the joke betrayed its author’s age. Only a child could divert itself at the expense of a dog. But nobody to my knowledge lodged in that wing. “Ah,” Lerne had said to me, “I am using your room.” Who, then, lived in it? I was determined to find out somehow. If the hidden presence of Nell in the gray buildings invested them with a new interest, mysterious as they already were, the closed rooms of the _château_ became yet another center of attraction. At last my objectives were clearing. And as the prospect of hunting down the secret made me quiver with excitement, a presentiment warned me that I should do well to pursue it to the death, and so defy Lerne’s first command before breaking the second. “Let me find out first what it is all about,” said my conscience; “there is something wrong. After that, I can attend to the baggage in peace.” Why did I not follow my own advice? But conscience speaks in a very low voice, and who can hear it when passion begins to blare? CHAPTER V “THE MADMAN” A week later on, I was in ambush behind the door of my former bedroom--the yellow one--with my eye to the keyhole. Oh! it was not easy, or it did not appear so. Never had the left wing of Fonval been so jealously closed, even in the days when the monks had been cloistered there. How had I got in there? In the simplest manner possible. The Yellow Room is reached by the central hall--where every one could walk if he liked--by a series of three rooms. The hall joins on to the drawing-room, then comes the billiard-room, which opens into the boudoir, and finally this boudoir opens, on the right, into the Yellow Room, which lies back towards the park.