“I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “But shall I tell you something? There are no two cats in the world that cry like that. Well, on the night of the murder I also heard the cry of the Bête du bon Dieu outside; and yet she was on my knees, and did not mew once, I swear. I crossed myself when I heard that, as if I had heard the devil.” I looked at the keeper when he put the last question, and I am much mistaken if I did not detect an evil smile on his lips. At that moment, the noise of loud quarrelling reached us. We even thought we heard a dull sound of blows, as if some one was being beaten. The Green Man quickly rose and hurried to the door by the side of the fireplace; but it was opened by the landlord who appeared, and said to the keeper:— “Don’t alarm yourself, Monsieur—it is my wife; she has the toothache.” And he laughed. “Here, Mother Angenoux, here are some scraps for your cat.” He held out a packet to the old woman, who took it eagerly and went out by the door, closely followed by her cat. “Then you won’t serve me?” asked the Green Man. Daddy Mathieu’s face was placid and no longer retained its expression of hatred. “I’ve nothing for you—nothing for you. Take yourself off.” The Green Man quietly refilled his pipe, lit it, bowed to us, and went out. No sooner was he over the threshold than Daddy Mathieu slammed the door after him and, turning towards us, with eyes bloodshot, and frothing at the mouth, he hissed to us, shaking his clenched fist at the door he had just shut on the man he evidently hated: “I don’t know who you are who tell me ‘We shall have to eat red meat—now’; but if it will interest you to know it—_that_ man is the murderer!” With which words Daddy Mathieu immediately left us. Rouletabille returned towards the fireplace and said: “Now we’ll grill our steak. How do you like the cider?—It’s a little tart, but I like it.” We saw no more of Daddy Mathieu that day, and absolute silence reigned in the inn when we left it, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our feast. Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson’s estate. He halted for some ten minutes at the corner of a narrow road black with soot, near to some charcoal-burners’ huts in the forest of Sainte-Geneviève, which touches on the road from Epinay to Corbeil, to tell me that the murderer had certainly passed that way, before entering the grounds and concealing himself in the little clump of trees. “You don’t think, then, that the keeper knows anything of it?” I asked. “We shall see that, later,” he replied. “For the present I’m not interested in what the landlord said about the man. The landlord hates him. I didn’t take you to breakfast at the Donjon Inn for the sake of the Green Man.”