A month into the seclusion, La Motte seems restored, and his wife credits Adeline's cheerful attention for it. Then he turns suddenly gloomy and secretive and spends hours alone in the forest, always vanishing at one spot where Peter, following at a distance, loses him. Madame La Motte tries every kind of affection to win his confidence and fails. When Peter tells her of the disappearances, she can find no other reason for them, so she decides that her husband loves Adeline, who after all takes long walks alone. Jealousy cools her manner towards the girl, who cannot work out what she has done, and Madame sends Peter to spy on his master. At last she falls at La Motte's feet and asks him outright. He answers that a man who has lost almost everything may grieve, and hide his grief, without being blamed for it. She is a little relieved, but she keeps watching Adeline.
A real alarm cuts across the private one. Peter returns from Auboine and, after much rambling, tells how a stranger with a pipe asked in the blacksmith's shop for anyone called La Motte, how Peter tried to be clever by denying that he knew the name, and how he then rode home by the direct road instead of the roundabout one. La Motte curses his folly and tells Madame La Motte and Adeline that they are discovered and must leave for Switzerland. But the coach wheel was never mended, and the nails Peter bought have been used on the abbey. With night coming, La Motte remembers the trap-door in the closet. He goes down alone, forces a decayed door into a stone room, and finds in a chest the remains of a human skeleton. Beyond it is a chain of vaulted cells. He decides they can hide the family, though the narrator remarks that his reasons at the trap-door show more selfish prudence than tenderness for his wife.
By dark the household has moved its furniture into the cells and Peter has turned the horses loose. La Motte cuts a notice over the tower door, naming an exile who sought refuge in the abbey and has gone, to mislead any officers. He hurries his family past the chest so that they will not see the skeleton. Madame La Motte weeps at the cells, and La Motte tells her they are a palace beside the Bicêtre or the Bastille. At supper he snaps at her suggestion of sending Peter to the town, then apologises when he sees her tears. Adeline lies awake afterwards, seeing that if La Motte is seized she will have no friends and no money, and that her father is an enemy she must flee. She prays, and sleeps. Peter keeps watch on the stair, and above them the abbey is silent.
Coming Up in Chapter 5
At dawn Peter is found snoring at his post, and La Motte creeps up through the trap-door to see a stranger sitting by a window. He flees back to the cells, and Madame La Motte's shriek echoes. Adeline offers to scout the ruin alone, and a soldier chases her through the cloisters, saying he must see La Motte.
