Fortunately for me, the Prussians were probably not very numerous, and the darkness and the unknown forest frightened them. I heard them call in their dog, who kept up in front of the gate, the continual howl and whimpering of an animal on the track. However, he at last went off, and the sound of him bounding through the brushwood and over the dead leaves died out in the distance. The silence that followed appalled me. A man was there, opposite to me. Through the round opening of my attic window, I tried to peer into the darkness. The keeper’s little house was still silent and gloomy, with the black apertures of its dreary windows in the white wall. I imagined the unhappy man hiding in a corner, benumbed with cold and perhaps wounded. Should I leave him without help? . . . I did not hesitate long . . . But just at the moment when I was gently opening my door, it was violently pushed from the outside, and some one burst into the room. [Picture: Dog waiting at doorway] —Don’t be afraid, Mr. Robert. It is I . . . It is Goudeloup . . . It was the farmer of Champrosay, he whom I had seen with the rope round his neck, ready to be swung up in his farmyard. I recognised him at once in the firelight; and yet there was something different about him. Pale and emaciated, his face hidden by an unkempt beard, his sharp glance and tightened lips made a very different being of the well-to-do, cheerful farmer of former days. With the end of his smock, he wiped the blood off his hands. —You are wounded, Goudeloup? He laughed significantly. —No—no . . . I have just been bleeding one of them on the road. Only this time I had not a fair chance. While I was at work, some others came up. Never mind! He will never get up again. And he added, with a short, fierce laugh which showed his wolfish-looking teeth: —That makes the fifteenth that I have laid low in two months . . . I think that is pretty well for one man alone, and with no other weapon but this. He drew forth from under his smock a pair of pruning-shears—those large kind of scissors that gardeners use to cut rose-trees and shrubs. I had a shudder of horror at the sight of the assassin’s tool, held by that bloody hand; but I had been so long silent, and deprived of all intercourse with human beings, that, the first feeling of repulsion overcome, I made the unfortunate creature welcome to a place at my table. There, in the comfortable atmosphere of the room, by the heat of the faggots, at the smell of the pheasant, which was becoming brown before the flame, his wild-beast expression seemed to soften. Accustomed to the darkness of the long nights, he blinked his eyes a little while he related his history to me in a quiet tone.