"Yet you were expecting me, were you not?" queried La Vireville, glancing at the bed and the book lying open on it. "_She_ told you, of course, that she might send me? On the whole it seemed best, though to be sure he--you know whom I mean--will suffer by it." Anne's gaoler was, he trusted, gravelled by this pronouncement, which was devoid of meaning even to himself; but it was impossible to tell. The man with the goat's eyes merely said curtly: "I saw you downstairs with that fool of a versifier. Why did you not speak to me then?" "Juste ciel!" exclaimed the émigré, putting down his candle. "What imprudence! You know her recommendation!" "I don't know your business--or your credentials!" snapped the other. "I will show you both," quoth La Vireville sweetly; and, opening his coat, he pulled out the thin leather case in which he had put the passports. From this he carefully drew forth Anne-Hilarion's, and spread enough of it before his adversary's vision to show him the boy's name. "Why, what have you there?" exclaimed M. Duchâtel, shaken out of his self-possession. And he added something under his breath about a trick and an old vixen, while, eager for a fuller sight or complete possession of the document, he hastily laid down the pistol on the mantelpiece. It was the moment for which the Chouan had been waiting. He gave the passport bodily into those incautious hands, and a second later smote their owner with exceeding force on the point of the jaw. M. Duchâtel staggered back, his arms going wide, and the passport flew half across the room as La Vireville followed up with a smashing blow over the heart. The tall mahogany bedpost, which the kidnapper's head next violently encountered, finished La Vireville's work for him with much completeness, but before the inanimate body could slide to the floor La Vireville had grabbed at it and pulled it on to the bed. "If I have killed him!" he thought, as he bent over his victim, for it looked rather like it. "No; that kind does not die of a good honest blow." With luck, however, he might be unconscious for hours, but it was as well to be on the safe side; so, since it repelled him to cut the throat of a senseless man, he tied his feet with the bell-pull, which he hacked down for the purpose, his hands with the curtain cords. Then he stuffed a towel into his mouth, tied it in position with another, and flung the quilt entirely over him.