Yet never a man among them was stopped by the bloodstain barring the door.

Zoe was still preoccupied by this stain; it was a simple mania with her, for she was a clean girl, and it horrified her to see it always there.

Despite everything her eyes would wander in its direction, and she now never entered Madame's room without remarking: "It's strange that don't go.

All the same, plenty of folk come in this way." Nana kept receiving the best news from Georges, who was by that time already convalescent in his mother's keeping at Les Fondettes, and she used always to make the same reply.
"Oh, hang it, time's all that's wanted.

It's apt to grow paler as feet cross it." As a matter of fact, each of the gentlemen, whether Foucarmont, Steiner, La Faloise or Fauchery, had borne away some of it on their bootsoles.
And Muffat, whom the bloodstain preoccupied as much as it did Zoe, kept studying it in his own despite, as though in its gradual rosy disappearance he would read the number of men that passed.