"Do you really think so?" she said, wavering a little.
"I'm positive of it, because he asked me and no one else. Come, Bérangère, be sensible."
She hesitated. I went through and closed the door upon her.
CHAPTER II
THE "TRIANGULAR CIRCLES"
What was known at Meudon as Noël Dorgeroux's Yard was a piece of waste-land in which the paths were lost amid the withered grass, nettles and stones, amid stacks of empty barrels, scrap-iron, rabbit-hutches and every kind of disused lumber that rusts and rots or tumbles into dust.
Against the walls and outer fences stood the workshops, joined together by driving-belts and shafts, and the laboratories filled with furnaces, pneumatic receivers, innumerable retorts, phials and jars containing the most delicate products of organic chemistry.
The view embraced the loop of the Seine, which lay some three hundred feet below, and the hills of Versailles and Sèvres, which formed a wide circle on the horizon towards which a bright autumnal sun was sinking in a pale blue sky.
"Victorien!"
My uncle was beckoning to me from the doorway of the workshop which he used most often. I crossed the Yard.