I did not try to restrain her. She slipped softly between the nearest two sheds. I followed close upon her heels.
In this way we stole to the end of the open ground which occupied the middle of the Yard and we saw Noël Dorgeroux standing by the screen. He had not yet drawn the black-serge curtain.
"Look," Bérangère whispered, "over there: you see a stack of wood with a tarpaulin over it? We shall be all right behind that."
"But suppose my uncle looks round while we're crossing?"
"He won't."
She was the first to venture across; and I joined her without any mishap. We were not more than a dozen yards from the screen.
"My heart's beating so!" said Bérangère. "I've seen nothing, you know: only those—sort of eyes. And there's a lot more, isn't there?"
Our refuge consisted of two stacks of small short planks, with bags of sand between the stacks. We sat down here, in a position which brought us close together. Nevertheless Bérangère maintained the same distant attitude as before; and I now thought of nothing but what my uncle was doing.
He was holding his watch in his hand and consulting it at intervals, as though waiting for a time which he had fixed beforehand. And that time arrived. The curtain grated on its metal rod. The screen was uncovered.
From where we sat we could see the bare surface as well as my uncle could, for the intervening space fell very far short of the length of an ordinary picture-palace. The first outlines to appear were therefore absolutely plain to us. They were the lines of the three geometrical figures which I knew so well: the same proportions, the same arrangement, the same impassiveness, followed by that same palpitation, coming entirely from within, which animated them and made them live.