"It is like turning a dog out of his kennel," retorted Leroux with a snarl. "And who is to sleep at the Lodge to-night? Mathurin cannot leave the foundries. There are fifty thousand barrels of powder stacked in the shed behind the Lodge ... and fifty men working overtime to-night. Who is going to look after them? Who is going to see that the fifty thousand barrels of gunpowder are not blown into kingdom come through the carelessness of one of them?"
"Surely not you," rejoined de Maurel quietly, "whose disobedience is only equalled by your criminal carelessness. Yesterday, after closing hours, I found the side gate open and unguarded."
"Carelessness is not a crime," riposted Leroux in a more conciliatory tone. "We are all worked to death at the factory like galley-slaves ... I more than the rest.... I forgot to see to the side gate—what? It is not a crime. If I am to be turned out of my bed like a cur," he reiterated sullenly, "who, I should like to know, is going to sleep in it to-night?"
"I am," replied de Maurel simply.
"You!"
The word came simultaneously from two pairs of lips. Madame had spoken it instinctively, just as—instinctively—she had risen to her feet, and Leroux had uttered it hoarsely and raucously, as he suddenly turned on his heel, and once more faced the master whom he hated and feared.
"You?" he reiterated in an indefinable tone of incredulity, of rage and of terror.
"I spoke plainly enough," rejoined de Maurel unmoved. "Did you perchance think that I was jesting?"
For a moment or two the man was silent. He stood immovable and quite close to de Maurel, the while his shifty gaze tried to probe in the other's dark eyes what lay hidden within their depths. And Ronnay, from his great height, looked down on the coarse and evil face which was turned up to his; he, too, was trying to fathom all that was going on behind that narrow, receding forehead and behind the pale, protruding eyes, with their flaccid lids and lines around them of recklessness and dissipation. For that brief moment there was deadly silence in the room, silence through which the crackling of Madame's silk dress could distinctly be heard, as she was quivering from head to foot.
Then Leroux, challenged by de Maurel's fixed gaze, replied slowly: