Leo did, then, what probably most of us would have done in his place: he did not budge.

His eyes fixed on the blue slipper and the little red brook that touched it, he stayed a long time as if fascinated, while a cold sweat wetted his temples, and his heart beat to bursting in his breast.

A crowd of thoughts and queer horrible pictures obsessed him, and an inner voice called out to him every moment, ‘In an hour, all will be known, and it is your fault’. Yet, by dint of saying, ‘What business of mine is it in this galley?’ in the end he saw some rays of hope. He said to himself at last:

‘If we leave this cursed hotel before the discovery of what has occurred in the next room, perhaps we could manage to obliterate our tracks. Nobody knows us here; I have only been seen in blue spectacles, she has only been seen under a veil. We are two steps from a railway station, and in an hour we shall be far away from N—’

Then, as he had studied the time-table at length to organize his expedition, he remembered that a train passed at eight o’clock going to Paris. Soon after, they would be lost in the immensity of that town where hide so many criminals. Who would be able to unearth two innocent people there? But wouldn’t somebody go into the Englishman’s room before eight o’clock? All the crux of the question was in that.

Quite convinced that there was nothing else to be done, he made a desperate effort to shake off the torpor which had possessed him for so long: but, at the first movement he made, his young companion wakened and embraced him madly. At the touch of his icy cheeks, she let out a little cry.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said to him uneasily, ‘your brow is cold as marble.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered in a shaky voice. ‘I heard a noise in the room next door.’

He disengaged himself from her arms, and first of all removed the blue slipper, and placed an arm-chair before the communicating door, so as to hide from his lady the fearful liquid that, ceasing to spread, had now formed a pretty big stain on the floor. Then he half opened the door which gave on the corridor and listened attentively: he even dared approach the Englishman’s door. It was shut. There were already signs of movement in the hotel, and from the second floor, an officer came downstairs and his spurs rang. He was going to preside at that interesting task, more agreeable to horses than to men, which in technical terms is called ‘Forage the horses’.

Leo returned to the blue room, and, with all the circumspection that love could impart, with a great expenditure of circumlocutions and euphemisms, he set before his lady the situation in which they found themselves.

Danger in remaining: danger in going away too precipitately: still greater danger in waiting in the hotel till the catastrophe in the next room was discovered.

It is useless to tell of the terror caused by this communication, the tears that followed it, the insensate proposals which were brought forward: how many times the two unfortunate lovers threw themselves in each other’s arms, crying, ‘Forgive me!’ Each thought himself the more to blame. They promised to die together, for the young woman had no doubt but that justice would find them guilty of the murder of the Englishman, and, as they were not sure if it were allowable to kiss each other still on the scaffold, they kissed to suffocation, vying in watering each other with their tears. At length, having said lots of absurdities and lots of tender, heartrending words, they recognized, amid a thousand kisses, that the plan thought of by Leo, that is to say the departure by the eight o’clock train, was in reality the only practical one, and the best to follow. But there remained still two mortal hours to pass. At each step in the corridor, they shuddered in all their limbs. Each creaking of boots announced for them the entrance of the imperial prosecutor.

Their little bundle was tied up in the twinkling of an eye. The young woman wanted to burn the blue slipper in the fireplace, but Leo picked it up, and, after having wiped it on the rug, kissed it, and put it