“Well, then, the mark of the traveller’s footsteps remained in the clay, and I saw that he had nails under his shoe in the form of a cross.”
“How in the form of a cross?”
“Look!” said Dagobert, placing the tip of his finger seven times on the coverlet of the bed; “they were arrange: thus beneath his heel:”
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“You see it forms a cross.”
“What could it mean, Dagobert?”
“Chance, perhaps—yes, chance—and yet, in spite of myself, this confounded cross left behind him struck me as a bad omen, for hardly was he gone when misfortune after misfortune fell upon us.”
“Alas! the death of our mother!”
“Yes—but, before that, another piece of ill-luck. You had not yet returned, and she was writing her petition to ask leave to go to France or to send you there, when I heard the gallop of a horse. It was a courier from the governor general of Siberia. He brought us orders to change our residence; within three days we were to join other condemned persons, and be removed with them four hundred leagues further north. Thus, after fifteen years of exile, they redoubled in cruelty towards your mother.”
“Why did they thus torment her?”