The belfry of St. Cloud sounded half past ten.
This time, without knowing why, d’Artagnan felt a cold shiver run through his veins. Perhaps the cold began to affect him, and he took a perfectly physical sensation for a moral impression.
Then the idea seized him that he had read incorrectly, and that the appointment was for eleven o’clock. He drew near to the window, and placing himself so that a ray of light should fall upon the letter as he held it, he drew it from his pocket and read it again; but he had not been mistaken, the appointment was for ten o’clock. He went and resumed his post, beginning to be rather uneasy at this silence and this solitude.
Eleven o’clock sounded.
D’Artagnan began now really to fear that something had happened to Madame Bonacieux. He clapped his hands three times—the ordinary signal of lovers; but nobody replied to him, not even an echo.
He then thought, with a touch of vexation, that perhaps the young woman had fallen asleep while waiting for him. He approached the wall, and tried to climb it; but the wall had been recently pointed, and d’Artagnan could get no hold.
At that moment he thought of the trees, upon whose leaves the light still shone; and as one of them drooped over the road, he thought that from its branches he might get a glimpse of the interior of the pavilion.
The tree was easy to climb. Besides, d’Artagnan was but twenty years old, and consequently had not yet forgotten his schoolboy habits. In an instant he was among the branches, and his keen eyes plunged through the transparent panes into the interior of the pavilion.
It was a strange thing, and one which made d’Artagnan tremble from the sole of his foot to the roots of his hair, to find that this soft light, this