I slept well into the following day. Meanwhile some one must have entered the room, for I saw on a table a hunk of new bread and a bottle of water. The cell which I occupied was a small one. Enough light to enable me to see came through the slats of a wooden shutter, which was firmly barricaded outside, as I discovered after opening the narrow window. One of the slats was half broken. Through the gap I perceived that my prison overlooked from a height of three or four feet a strip of ground at the edge of which little waves lapped among the reeds. Finding that, after crossing one river, I was facing another, I concluded that Velmot had brought me to an island in the Seine. Was this not the island which I had beheld, in a fleeting vision, on the chapel in the cemetery? And was it not here that Velmot and Massignac had established their head-quarters last winter? Part of the day passed in silence. But, about five o'clock, I heard a sound of voices and outbursts of argument. This happened under my room and consequently in a cellar the grating of which opened beneath my window. On listening attentively, I seemed on several occasions to recognize Massignac's voice. The discussion lasted fully an hour. Then some one made his appearance outside my window and called out: "Hi, you chaps, come on and get ready! . . . . He's a stubborn beast and won't speak unless we make him." It was the tall fellow who, the day before, had forced his way through the crowd in the Yard by making an outcry about a wounded man. It was Velmot, a leaner Velmot, without beard or glasses, Velmot, the coxcomb, the object of Bérangère's affections. "_I'll_ make him, the brute! Think of it. I've got him here, at my mercy: is it likely that I shouldn't be able to make him spew up his secret? No, no, we must finish it and by nightfall. You're still decided?" He received two growls in reply. He sneered: "He's not half badly trussed up, eh? All right. I'll do without you. Only just lend me a hand to begin with." He stepped into a boat fastened to a ring on the bank. One of the men pushed it with a boat-hook between two stakes planted in the mud and standing out well above the reeds. Velmot knotted one end of a thick rope to the top of each stake and in the middle fastened an iron hook, which thus hung four or five feet above the water. "That's it," he said, on returning. "I shan't want you any more. Take the other boat and go and wait for me in the garage. I'll join you there in three or four hours, when Massignac has blabbed his little story and after I've had a little plain speaking with our new prisoner. And then we'll be off."