head,
would be brought about, and under conditions that could not but affect
him. Truly, the precautions he had taken should reassure him, but after
all there remained no less a troublesome uncertainty. Who could tell? He
preferred that she should not leave her room, and that Nougarede should
find a way to obtain her deposition without taking her to court; he
would then feel more reassured, more calm in mind, and with a more
impassive face he could go to court.

Was he really unrecognizable? This was the question that beset him now.
Many times he compared his reflection in the glass with the photograph
that he had given Phillis. The hair and beard were gone, but his eyes
of steel, as his friend said, still remained, and nothing could change
them. He might wear blue eyeglasses, or injure himself in a chemical
experiment and wear a bandage. But such a disguise would provoke
curiosity and questions just so much more dangerous, because it would
coincide with the disappearance of his hair and beard.

But these fears did not torment him long, for Phillis, who now passed a
part of every day in the Rue Sainte-Anne with Madame Dammauville, came
one evening in despair, and told him that that day the invalid had been
able to leave her bed for a few minutes only.

Then she would not go to court.

This apprehension of meeting Madame Dammauville face to face had begun
to exasperate him; he felt like a coward in yielding to it, and since he
had not the force to shake it off, he was happy to be relieved from it
by the intervention of chance, which, after having been against him so
long, now became favorable. The wheel turned.

"See Madame Dammauville often," he said to Phillis, "and note all that
she feels; perhaps I shall find some way to repair this impediment,
something that I may suggest to Balzajette without his suspecting it.
Besides, it is reasonable to believe that the recrudescence of cold that
we are suffering from now may have something to do with the change in
her condition; it is probable that with the mild spring weather she may
improve."

He hoped by this counsel to quiet Phillis's uneasiness and to gain time.
But it had the opposite effect. In her anguish, which increased as the
time for the trial approached, it was not probabilities, any more than
the uncertain influence of the spring, that Phillis could depend on; she
must have something more and better; but fearing a refusal, she forbore
to tell him what she h