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But he regained that through the necessity--as it appeared to him
imperiously--to do something at once. To do what? Why, to get her out of
the house as quickly as possible. He was desperately anxious to do that.
I have told you he was terrified. It could not be about himself. He had
been surprised and annoyed at a move quite unforeseen and premature. I
may even say he had been furious. He was accustomed to arrange the
last scene of his betrayals with a deep, subtle art which left his
revolutionist reputation untouched. But it seems clear to me that at
the same time he had resolved to make the best of it, to keep his mask
resolutely on. It was only with the discovery of her being in the house
that everything--the forced calm, the restraint of his fanaticism, the
mask--all came off together in a kind of panic. Why panic, do you ask?
The answer is very simple. He remembered--or, I dare say, he had never
forgotten--the Professor alone at the top of the house, pursuing his
researches, surrounded by tins upon tins of Stone's Dried Soup.


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