"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?"
"One would think that some evil genius was at work against her. A few days later, the traveller would no longer have found us at Milosk; and if he had joined us further on, it would have been too far for the medal and papers to be of use—since, having set out almost immediately, we shall hardly arrive in time at Paris. 'If they had some interest to prevent me and my children from going to France,' said your mother, 'they would act just as they have done. To banish us four hundred leagues further, is to render impossible this journey, of which the term is fixed.' And the idea overwhelmed her with grief."