During those tragic days the wretched woman lived with her eyes fixed on the horrible ex-voto, which grew larger to her vision, became enormous. The patches of rust looked like red blood. The house was still as death. Toward evening a step was heard. Monsieur d'Heurteleure again entered bearing a lamp and a basket. His head had grown white, he did not now so much as glance at the unhappy being who groveled at his feet, but he never failed to stare greedily at the key. Then at last Madame d'Heurteleure understood the desire which gnawed, which was devouring him--to see his rival in death, to gloat over his vengeance, to feel of the corruption that had once been flesh and blood, to take down that key he had hung on the wall in place of the Sign of Pardon, the ivory emblem of which he had shattered to substitute an iron symbol of eternal rancor. But alas! vengeance never is satisfied, always she craves for more; frenzied, insatiable, she feeds on her own vehemence to the very dregs of memory, until the end of life. Monsieur d'Heurteleure felt that she guessed his morbid longing and that added to his torture. The adamant of his pride was streaked with veins of blood. One night when Madame d'Heurteleure slumbered, stretched on her bed, she heard her door open softly and saw her husband on the threshold. He carried a lamp with the flame turned low, and walked as lightly as a shadow without a sound, as though the sombre somnambulism of his fixed idea had made of him an imponderable fantom. He crossed the room, reached up, took down the key and went out again. There was a dead silence. A fly awakened by the light buzzed for an instant and then ceased. The door remained on the latch. Madame d'Heurteleure bounded up. In her bare feet she slipped into the hall. Her husband was going downstairs; she followed him. At the ground floor he continued to descend; the stairway plunged into gloom, but she could hear along the subterranean corridors the steps which preceded her. They were now in the ancient substructions of the castle. The walls sweated, the ceilings were vaulted. A last stairway twisted its spiral into the rock. At its base the light of the vanishing lamp still glimmered on the slimy pavement. Bending forward, Madame d'Heurteleure listened. A grating sound reached her and the light disappeared. At the foot of the stairs she found a circular chamber. An opening in the wall revealed a shallow bay; she still crept on, until, at the end of the passage, by feeling her way, she recognized a door very slightly ajar. She pushed it open. In a sort of square hole, vaulted above and tiled below, Monsieur d'Heurteleure was seated beside his little lamp. He was motionless, staring with wide-open eyes. He looked at his wife without seeing her. A nauseating odor came from the cell, and beyond the shadow spread over the tiles lay a fleshless hand already greenish in hue.