“Oh, something terrible! … But it’s all the better for us. … When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time … he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trapdoors.”
She shivered again. She was still holding him in her arms. Then she sighed and said, in her turn:
“Suppose it were he !”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said.
For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was careful to avoid the trapdoors. Her agitation only increased as the hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition unless she first told him the secret of the man’s voice.
“Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name! Suppose he heard you, you unfortunate Raoul!”
And Christine’s eyes stared wildly at everything around her.
“I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you shall not think of him any more.”
“Is it possible?”
She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragement, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far, very far from the trapdoors.