’We took you in last night, a stranger; and now we have been robbed, which never happened before in all our lives.  My sister says it was you she saw in our room.  As soon as I could get the candle lit I found you here, and Jacques Morin says that you have opened your window so that you would be able to escape at once.  What is the use of saying that you are not a robber?’

He made another defiant statement of his own version of the story.

The girl had given some command in French to Morin; to Courthope she spoke again in hasty sentences, reiterating the evidence against him.  Her manner was a little different now—­it had not the same straightforward air of command.  He began to hope that he might persuade her, and then discovered suddenly that she had been deliberately riveting his attention while the command which he had not understood was being obeyed.  A noose of rope was thrown round his arms and instantly tightened; with a nimbleness which he had not expected Morin knotted it fast.  Courthope turned fiercely; for a moment he struggled with all his force, bearing down upon Morin from his greater height, so that they both staggered and reeled to the foot of the stair.  At his violence the voices of the Morin women, joined by that of Eliz, were lifted in such wild terror that a few moments were sufficient to bring Courthope to reason.  He spoke to Madge with haughty composure.

’Tell him to untie this rope at once.  There is some villain about the house who may do you the greatest injury; you are mad to take from me the power of arresting him.’

Madam Morin, seeing the prisoner secured, hastened with her lamp to his bedroom.

Madge, feeling herself safer now, came a little way down the stair with her candle.  ‘How can we tell what you would do next?’ she asked.  ’And I have the household to protect; it is not for myself that I am afraid.’

The anger that he had felt toward her died out suddenly.

It was not for herself that she was afraid!  She stood a few steps above him; her little candle, flashing its rays into the darkness of the upper and lower halls, made walls and balustrades seem vast by its flickering impotence to oust the darkness.  Surely this girl, towering in her sweeping robe and queenly pose, was made to be loved of men and gods!  Hero, carrying her vestal taper in the temple recesses, before ever Leander had crossed the wave, could not have had a larger or more noble form, a more noble and lovely face.

Well, if she chose to tie his arms he would have preferred to have them tied, were it not for the maddening thought that more miscreants than one might be within reach of her, and that they would, if skilled, find the whole household an easy prey.

Madam Morin came back from the room with the open window, making proclamation in the most excited French.

‘What do they say?’ asked Courthope of Madge.

The Morin girl was following close to her mother, and Jacques Morin was eagerly discussing their information.