The position was terrible, and they felt all its tragic horror. It seemed to them as though they were already dead, once they were enduring the same trial endured by others and that they were still enduring it under the same conditions. There was nothing to enable them to escape any of the phases through which the other two, his father and her mother, had passed. The similarity between their own and their parents' fate was so striking that they seemed to be suffering two deaths, and the second agony was now commencing. Coralie gave way and began to cry. Moved by her tears, Patrice attacked the wainscoting with new fury, but its boards, strengthened by cross-laths, resisted his efforts: At last he read: "What is happening? We had an impression that some one was walking outside, in the garden. Yes, when we put our ears to the stone wall built in the embrasure of the window, we thought we heard footsteps. Is it possible? Oh, if it only were! It would mean the struggle, at last. Anything rather than the maddening silence and endless uncertainty! "That's it! . . . That's it! . . . The sound is becoming more distinct. . . . It is a different sound, like that which you make when you dig the ground with a pick-ax. Some one is digging the ground, not in front of the house, but on the right, near the kitchen. . . ." Patrice redoubled his efforts. Coralie came and helped him. This time he felt that a corner of the veil was being lifted. The writing went on: "Another hour, with alternate spells of sound and silence: the same sound of digging and the same silence which suggests work that is being continued. "And then some one entered the hall, one person; he, evidently. We recognized his step. . . . He walks without attempting to deaden it. . . . Then he went to the kitchen, where he worked the same way as before, with a pick-ax, but on the stones this time. We also heard the noise of a pane of glass breaking. "And now he has gone outside again and there is a new sort of sound, against the house, a sound that seems to travel up the house as though the wretch had to climb to a height in order to carry out his plan. . . ." Patrice stopped reading and looked at Coralie. Both of them were listening. "Hark!" he said, in a low voice. "Yes, yes," she answered, "I hear. . . . Steps outside the house . . . in the garden. . . ." They went to one of the windows, where they had left the casement open behind the wall of building-stones, and listened. There was really some one walking; and the knowledge that the enemy was approaching gave them the same sense of relief that their parents had experienced.