They, too, were all looking at him, not with the wrath and contempt to which Madge had risen, but with cunning desire for revenge, mingled with the cringing of fear.

There was a minute's hush, too strong for expression, in which each experienced more intensely the shock of the mysterious alarm.
It was Madge who broke the silence.

Her voice rang clear, although vibrating.
'Jacques Morin, he came into our room to rob!' She pointed at Courthope.
The thin voice of Eliz came in piercing parenthesis: 'I saw him in the closet, and when I screamed he ran.' Madge began again.

'Jacques Morin, what part of the house is open?
I feel the wind.' All the time Madge kept her eyes upon Courthope, as upon some wild animal whose spring she hoped to keep at bay.
That she should appeal to this dull, dogged French servant for protection against him, who only desired to risk his life to serve her, was knowledge of such intense vexation that Courthope could still find no word, and her fixed look of wrath did actually keep him at bay.

It took from him, by some sheer physical power which he did not understand, the courage with which he would have faced a hundred Morins.
When Jacques Morin began to speak, his wife and daughter took courage and spoke also; a babel of French words, angry, terrified, arose from the group, whose grey night-clothes, shaken by their gesticulations, gave them a half-frenzied appearance.
In the midst of their talking Courthope spoke to Madge at last.