The concierge took up the tale again:
“And the worst part of the story you haven’t heard yet. Mr. Paperer—she knows the villain who assaulted her! Seems it’s one Fandor, a low fellow who once had to do with her, and who actually ... Why, what’s wrong with you now?... God bless my soul! stop him!”
Spinning round on his heels, like a madman, Jérôme Fandor had abruptly left fat Mme. Doulenques in the very middle of her narrative.
And truly it was a mad thing the journalist had been guilty of in so acting. Commonly so careful and deliberate, so much master of his feelings, for this once he had failed to govern an overmastering impulse. So Elisabeth Dollon was the workgirl he had saved the night before from the pursuit of the street patrol! And Elisabeth believed that Jérôme Fandor, whom she had had time to recognize, was one of her assailants! What cared he now for any further details Mme. Doulenques might have to give?
Elisabeth lived on the fifth floor, and thither he rushed, panting, filled with a frantic eagerness to proclaim his innocence to the woman he loved, to clear up this new, this fatal misunderstanding. While the portress, in sheer terror of the man’s strange behaviour, in the very middle of a conversation bolting away like a thief to dash up to her tenant’s rooms, was screaming hoarse, half-stifled cries for help, Jérôme Fandor sprang up the stairs four steps at a time.
Yes, there on the fifth floor he saw to his left a door with a green bell-pull beside it. He rang a peal, so loud and peremptory he could hear someone on the other side of the door hurrying forward at a run. A voice, Elisabeth’s voice, challenged:
“Who’s there? What’s wanted?”
Fandor had a gleam of common sense, enough to make him disguise his voice:
“Someone from M. Moche’s to see Mlle. Elisabeth Dollon.”
There was a sound of a key turning in the lock and the door fell ajar, while Jérôme could faintly catch a confused clamour reaching him from the courtyard below.