The torturing hours crawled by, until the day turned to a deeper gray, and the North was reddened by Pelée's cone which the thick vapor dimmed and blurred. Paula was suffered to fight out her battle alone. She could not have asked more than this. A thousand times she paced across her room; again and again straining her eyes northward, along the road, over the city into the darkness, and the end of all things--the mountain.... There was a moment in the half-light before the day was spent, in which she seemed to see Quentin Charter, as Father Fontanel had told her, hemmed in by all the storms and hates of the world. Over the surface of her brain was a vivid track for flying futile agonies. The rumbling that had been incessant was punctuated at intervals now by an awesome and deeper vibration. Altogether, the sound was like a steady stream of vehicles, certain ones heavier and moving more swiftly than others, pounding over a wooden bridge. To her, there was a pang in each phase of the volcano's activity, since Quentin Charter had gone up into that red roar.... She did not go down for dinner. When it was eight by her watch, she felt that she could not live, if he did not return before another hour. Several minutes had passed when there was a tapping at her door, and Paula answering, was confronted by a sumptuous figure of native womanhood. It was Soronia. "Mr. Charter is at the wine-shop of Pere Rabeaut in _Rue Rivoli_," she said swiftly, hatefully, as though she had been forced to carry the message, and would not utter a word more than necessary. "He has been hurt--we do not think seriously--but he wants you to come to him at once." "Thank you. I will go to him at once," Paula said, turning to get her hat. "Pere Rabeaut's wine-shop in the _Rue Rivoli_?... You say he is not seriously hurt----" She had not turned five seconds from the door, but the woman was gone. There was much that was strange in this; many thoughts occurred apart from the central idea of glad obedience, and the fullness of gratitude in that Pelée had not murdered him.... The _Rue Rivoli_ was a street of the terraces, she ascertained on the lower floor; also that it would be impossible to procure a carriage. Mr. Stock had been forced to buy one outright, her informer added, and to use one of his sailors for a driver.... So she set out alone and on foot, hurrying along the sea-road toward the slope where _Rue Victor Hugo_ began. The strangeness of it all persistently imposed upon her mind, but was unreckonable, compared to the thought that Quentin Charter would not have called for her, had he been able to come. From this, the fear of a more serious wound than the woman had said, was inevitable.