“Because,” he answered in a strange tone, which I could scarcely recognize as his. “Because the death of Larsan, who is carried out dead from a place which he never entered dead or alive, terrifies me more than his life itself!” CHAPTER XIII IN WHICH THE FEARS OF ROULETABILLE ASSUME ALARMING PROPORTIONS It was literally true that he was frightened. And I was more terrified myself than words could express. I had never seen him in such a state of mental inquietude. He walked up and down the room nervously, occasionally stopping in front of the mirror and passing his hand over his forehead, as if he were asking his own image, “Can it be you, Rouletabille, who have such thoughts? How dare you harbor them?” What thoughts? He seemed rather to be upon the point of thinking than to be actually doing so, and to be using every means of driving thought away. He shook his head savagely and started for the window as though he meant to leap out, leaning forth into the night, listening for the slightest noise on the distant bank of the sea, expecting, perhaps, to hear the wheels of the little carriage and the echo of Toby’s shoes. One might have thought him a beast at bay. The surf was quiet; the waves had grown entirely appeased. A white ray appeared suddenly shining over the black waters. It was the dawn. And in a moment the old château seemed to rise out of the night, pale and livid with the same pallor as our own--the pallor of one who has not slept. “Rouletabille,” I asked, trembling as I spoke, for I felt that I was intruding upon ground where my feet had no right to tread; “your interview with your mother was very brief and you separated in silence. I want to ask you, my boy, whether she told you the story of the accident with the revolver on the night stand that Bernier told me?” “No,” he answered without turning his face toward me. “She told you nothing of that kind?” “No.” “And you did not ask her for any explanation of the pistol shot nor of the death cry--the cry that was the echo of the one which we heard two years ago from her lips in the ‘inexplicable gallery’?” “Sainclair, you are too curious--you are more curious than I. I asked her nothing.” “And you swore to see nothing and to hear nothing without her saying anything to you about the pistol shot and the cry?” “Truly, Sainclair, it was necessary for me to believe--for my part, I respected the secrets of the Lady in Black. I had nothing to ask of her when she said to me, ‘We must leave each other now, my child, but nothing can ever separate us again!’” “Ah, she said that to you--‘Nothing can ever separate us again’?” “Yes, my friend--and there was blood upon her hands.” We looked at each other in silence. I was now at the window and beside the reporter. Suddenly his hand touched mine. Then he pointed to the little taper which was burning at the entrance to the subterranean door which led to Old Bob’s study in the Tower of the Bold.