Peter, the La Mottes' servant, draws Adeline into the hall recess and then the cloisters, begging her to swear by the Holy Virgin never to say he told her. He starts to whisper about the night the Marquis slept at the abbey and sat up late with La Motte, but he keeps breaking off, once because he glimpses his master through the trees, and he leaves her alarmed and vexed. That evening Madame La Motte weeps at Adeline's concern and leaves the room. At midnight Adeline reads on in the manuscript. The prisoner writes of a night of horror, and she remembers the dagger and decides that murder was done in these rooms. She thinks she hears a sigh, prays until she is calm, and reads that he was told he had three days to live and could choose poison or the sword.
Adeline now links the dreams, the village tales, the manuscript and the figure she believes she saw, and resolves to tell La Motte about the hidden chambers. Before morning the wind shakes the arras, a voice seems to say her name, and she faints. She wakes Madame La Motte, who calls her husband. La Motte scolds her for letting fancy rule her reason, but when she mentions the chambers he insists on going at once, and makes the others come. Peter carries the light, and La Motte lifts the arras and enters the first chamber. Then he stops short and puts off the search until morning because of the damp. Peter points to the iron bars on the high windows and says the room looks like a prison, and La Motte, who had not noticed those windows, studies them before he orders the light carried out. The next day he calls the manuscript a strange romantic story.
In the avenue Peter admits the voice at her door was his, and then tells his tale in the order he likes. The story of her father, he says, is all fudge, because nobody has sent after her. The Marquis has been courting her, Jaques, the Marquis's man, told Peter that she is only a foundling, and Peter takes it for granted that the Marchioness is alive, which Adeline has never been told. Listening at the parlour door, Peter heard the Marquis say he would bury the past only on certain terms, and La Motte promise that if the Marquis returned that night, Adeline would be his. Adeline asks him to help her escape. They agree that she will wait in an old tomb in the forest, which he shows her, in a cell below a grate, while the household searches the vaults and Peter brings a horse and knocks three times.
Alone again, she weeps, then tries to believe that Madame La Motte stays silent only from terror of her husband, though the narrator remarks that this only softens her guilt. At dinner La Motte drinks recklessly, Madame La Motte looks at Adeline with tears in her eyes, and Adeline nearly throws herself at her feet before sense checks her. She withdraws from the room to wait for dusk.
