“How do I know? It is possible, but I suspect the laboratory contains horrible things, the very sight of which would drive any one mad. Donovan had never been in it. He must have seen some ghastly things.” I then remembered the chimpanzee, and the horrible impression its death had made upon me. Emma might be right. The incident of the monkey strongly supported her hypothesis, but instead of trying to find the answer to each riddle in detail, should I not have gone back four years, to that critical moment when so many problems had started? Should I not have studied closely the mysterious period when so many doors had closed, in order to find the key which should open them all? * * * * * A little foot peeped from the coverlet, and lay, white and pink, on the pale yellow cover; it was smooth, and like a strange jewel in its case. “Good gracious, my dear, can you really walk with that pretty little thing, with its nails polished like Japanese corals--this living ticklish jewel--that a mustache drives away.” The little foot went back into its cover, but however dainty and tender and quick it was, it recalled another one to me by contrast--the one in the forest clearing--that sinister thing, which I now felt sure was a piece of dead flesh in the old shoe. Suddenly it seemed to me that I was wandering alone in a night full of ambushes. “Emma, suppose we run away!” She shook her Mænad’s locks, and refused. “Donovan proposed that to me. No, Lerne has promised me I shall be rich; besides, on the day you arrived, he swore he would kill me if I deceived him, or tried to escape. I found out long ago that he could fulfill his first threat, and I know now that he could carry out the second.” “That is true. When he introduced us to one another, you had the shadow of death in your eyes.” “Now,” she went on, “we can hide our love, but we could not hide our running away. No, no, let us stop where we are, and keep our eyes open. Let us be careful.” Half-past four was striking on the clock when I left my mistress, in order to return to Grey-l’Abbaye. CHAPTER VIII RASHNESS I made my way as fast as I could back to Grey. The _fête_ was in full swing, and the crowd of merry-makers received me with impertinent remarks and jokes. Five by the station clock! I profited by the time at my disposal to arrange things a little, so that my uncle might the more easily fall into the snare which he had spread with his own hands when he set me the task of repairing part of the machine of which I had a duplicate. Having put on my blue overalls, dirtied my hands and face, taken out my tool-box, and turned everything in it upside down, I slightly dented the new carburetor, with light taps of a hammer, and dirtied it with blacklead. With a few scrapes of a file I succeeded in giving it the sort of rough look of a newly forged piece of metal.