Marthe, pale with anxiety, did not reply. She had had the same awful thought from the first moment. But Suzanne exclaimed: "In any case, Marthe, you need not be alarmed. Philippe did not take the road by the frontier." "Are you sure?" "We separated at the Carrefour du Grand-Chene. M. Morestal and papa went on by themselves. Philippe came straight back." "No, he can't have come straight back, or he would be here now," said Marthe. "What can he have been doing all night? He has not even set foot in his room!" But Mme. Morestal was terrified by what Suzanne had said. She could now no longer doubt that her husband had taken the frontier-road; and the shots had come from the frontier! "Yes, that's true," said Suzanne, "but it was only ten o'clock when we started from Saint-Elophe and the shots which you heard were fired at one or two o'clock in the morning.... You said so yourself." "How can I tell?" cried the old lady, who was beginning to lose her head entirely. "It may have been much earlier." "But your father must know," said Marthe to Suzanne. "Did he tell you nothing?" "I have not seen my father this morning," said Suzanne. "He was not awake...." She had not time to finish her sentence before an idea burst in upon her, an idea so natural that the two other women were struck by it also and none of them dared put it into words. Suzanne flew to the door, but Marthe held her back. Why not telephone to Saint-Elophe, to the special commissary's house? A minute later, M. Jorance's servant replied that she had just noticed that her master was not in. His bed had not been touched either. "Oh!" said Suzanne, trembling all over. "My poor father!... Can anything have happened to him?... My poor father! I ought to have...." They stood for a moment as though paralyzed, all three, and incapable of taking a resolution. The man-servant went out saying that he would saddle the horse and gallop to the Col du Diable. Marthe, who was nearest to the telephone, rang up the mayor's office at Saint-Elophe, on the off-chance, and asked for news. They knew nothing there. But two gendarmes, it seemed, had just crossed the square at a great pace. Thereupon, at the suggestion of Mme. Morestal, who had taken up the second receiver, she asked to be put on to the gendarmery. As soon as she was connected, she explained her reason for telephoning and was informed that the sergeant was on his way to the frontier with a peasant who declared that he had found the body of a man in the woods between the Butte-aux-Loups and the Col du Diable. That was all they were able to tell her.... Mme. Morestal let go the receiver and fell in a dead faint. Marthe and Suzanne tried to attend to her. But their hands trembled and, when Catherine, the maid-servant, appeared upon the scene, they both ran out of the room, roused by a sudden energy and an immense need of doing something, of walking, of laying eyes upon that dead body whose blood-stained image obsessed their minds.