Her husband and his pupil were, as usual, shut up in "the workshop." The studio had been changed for some new fancy of the crack-brained pair; they had packed aside the plans and models and had set up a lathe, a forge and a miniature foundry.

To the clang of hammer and the squeak of file was added the detonation now and then of some explosive which did not emit the sharp sound or pungent smoke of gunpowder or the more modern substitutes' characteristic fumes.
At each shock, Cesarine had trembled like the guilty.

They had told her that she was born in St.Petersburg when her mother was startled by the blowing up of the street in front of their house by an infernal machine intended to obliterate the Czar; in the sledge in which he was supposed to be riding, a colonel of the _chevalier-gardes_, who resembled him, had been injured, but the incident was kept hushed up.
One of the old servants whose age entitled his maunderings to respect among his superstitious fellows had, thereupon, prophesied that the new-born babe would end its life by violence.
"It is time I should quit the house," she muttered, drawing her veil over her eyes, of which the lids nervously trembled.

"I cannot hear those pop-guns without consternation." She hurried forth without a regret, and passed, as a hundred times before, the family vault in the cemetery, where her murdered infant reposed, without a farewell glance, although she might never see the place again.
On coming within sight of the station, she perceived a solitary figure, that of a man, in a fashionable caped cloak, crossing the fields in the same direction as hers.

It was probably the viscount going to it separately in order not to compromise her and give a clue to the true cause of her flight.
Sometimes the unexpected comes to the help of the wicked.