Bad as the man was, he must save him, though, no matter what happened, he must give the alarm.

His reflections tortured him.

Why had he not stopped the nightfarer?
Even as these thoughts passed through the lad's mind, the clac-clac had faded away into the murmur of the stream flowing by the Rue d'Egypte to the sea, and almost beneath his feet.

There flashed on him at that instant what little Guida Landresse had said a few days before as she lay down beside this very stream, and watched the water wimpling by.
Trailing her fingers through it dreamily, the child had said to him: "Ro, won't it never come back ?" She always called him "Ro," because when beginning to talk she could not say Ranulph.
Ro, won't it never come back?
But while yet he recalled the words, another sound mingled again with the stream-clac-clac! clac-clac! Suddenly it came to him who was the wearer of the sabots making this peculiar clatter in the night.

It was Dormy Jamais, the man who never slept.