The reporter was astonished at not finding Natacha either in Matrena’s apartment or Feodor’s.  He asked Matrena where her step-daughter was.  Matrena turned a frightened face toward him.  When they were alone, she said: 

“We do not know where she is.  Almost as soon as you left she disappeared, and no one has seen her since.  The general has asked for her several times.  I have had to tell him Koupriane took her with him to learn the details from her of what happened.”

“She is not with Koupriane,” said Rouletabille.

“Where is she?  This disappearance is more than strange at the moment we were dying, when her father — O God!  Leave me, my child; I am stifling; I am stifling.”

Rouletabille called the temporary doctor and withdrew from the chamber.  He had come with the idea of inspecting the house room by room, corner by corner, to make sure whether or not any possibility of entrance existed that he had not noticed before, an entrance would-be poisoners were continuing to use.  But now a new fact confronted him and overshadowed everything:  the disappearance of Natacha.  How he lamented his ignorance of the Russian language - and not one of Koupriane’s men knew French.  He might draw something out of Ermolai.

Ermolai said he had seen Natacha just outside the gate for a moment, looking up and down the road.  Then he had been called to the general, and so knew nothing further.

That was all the reporter could gather from the gestures rather than the words of the old servant.

An additional difficulty now was that twilight drew on, and it was impossible for the reporter to discern Natacha’s foot-prints.  Was it true that the young girl had fled at such a moment, immediately after the poisoning, before she knew whether her father and mother were entirely out of danger?  If Natacha were innocent, as Rouletabille still wished to believe, such an attitude was simply incomprehensible.  And the girl could not but be aware she would increase Koupriane’s suspicions.  The reporter had a vital reason for seeing her immediately, a vital reason for all concerned, above all in this moment when the Nihilists were culminating their plans, a vital reason for her and for him, equally menaced with death, to talk with her and to renew the propositions he had made a few minutes before the poisoning and which she had not wished to hear him talk about, in fearful pity for him or in defiance of him.  Where was Natacha?  He thought maybe she was trying to rejoin Annouchka, and there were reasons for that, both if she were innocent and if she were guilty.  But where was Annouchka?  Who could say!  Gounsovski perhaps.  Rouletabille jumped into an isvo, returning from the Point empty, and gave Gounsovski’s address.  He deigned then to recall that he had been invited that same day to dine with the Gounsovskis.  They would no longer be expecting him.  He blamed himself.