"Let us wait a while," said the Marquis, "till all this curiosity is satisfied, so that we may go and look in our turn."
The engineer, M. Aubry-Pasteur, who had just arisen with very great difficulty, replied:
"For my part, I am going back to the village by the footpaths. There is nothing further to keep me here."
He shook hands, bowed, and went away.
Doctor Honorat had disappeared. The party talked about him, and the Marquis said to his son:
"You have only known him three days, and all the time you have been laughing at him. You will end by offending him."
But Gontran shrugged his shoulders: "Oh! he's a wise man, a good sceptic, that doctor. I tell you in reply that he will not bother himself. When we are both alone together, he laughs at all the world and everything, commencing with his patients and his waters. I will give you a free thermal course if you ever see him annoyed by my nonsense."
Meanwhile, there was considerable agitation further down around the site of the vanished hillock. The enormous crowd, swelling, rising up, and sinking down like billows, broke out into exclamations, manifestly swayed by some emotion, some astonishing occurrence which nobody had foreseen. Andermatt, ever eager and inquisitive, was repeating:
"What is the matter with them now? What can be the matter with them?"
Gontran announced that he was going to find out, and walked off. Christiane, who had now sunk into a state of indifference, was reflecting that if the igniting substance had been only a little shorter, it would have been sufficient to have caused the death of their foolish companion or led to his being mutilated by the blasting of the rock, and all because she was afraid of a dog losing its life. She could not help thinking that he must, indeed, be very violent and passionate—this man—to expose himself to such a risk in this way without any good reason for it—simply owing to the fact that a woman who was a stranger to him had given expression to a desire.