“But can he understand you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” said Villefort, inexpressibly delighted to think that the inquiries were to be made by him alone⁠—“oh, be satisfied, I can understand my father.” While uttering these words with this expression of joy, his teeth clashed together violently.

D’Avrigny took the young man’s arm, and led him out of the room. A more than deathlike silence then reigned in the house. At the end of a quarter of an hour a faltering footstep was heard, and Villefort appeared at the door of the apartment where d’Avrigny and Morrel had been staying, one absorbed in meditation, the other in grief.

“You can come,” he said, and led them back to Noirtier.

Morrel looked attentively on Villefort. His face was livid, large drops rolled down his face, and in his fingers he held the fragments of a quill pen which he had torn to atoms.