"Are you afraid of him?"
"No, no, of course not," she said.
For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was
careful to avoid the trap-doors. Her agitation only increased as the
hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her
face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul
resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed
when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition
unless she first told him the secret of the man's voice.
"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name! Suppose HE heard you, you unfortunate
Raoul!"
And Christine's eyes stared wildly at everything around her.
"I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you
shall not think of him any more."
"Is it possible?"
She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragernent, while
dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far,
very far from the trap-doors.
"I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where HE can not
come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away ...
as you have sworn never to marry."
Christine seized Raoul's hands and squeezed them with incredible
rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her
head.
"Higher!" was all she said. "Higher still!"
And she dragged him up toward the summit.
He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very
roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses,
the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have
run from tree to tree in a forest.
And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every
moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own
shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she
did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.
As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in
front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.