He looked to the open door of the tent as he spoke. The flap was rolled high to let in the air, and showed a slope, planted with vines in stiff rows, and, above, a space of sky. This seemed to consist of one low, bulging cloud, dark with suppressed thunder, and in the heavy bosom of it a pulse of lightning throbbed continually. With each throb the play of light grew more vivid, whilst out of the distance came a low, answering boom, the far-off heart-beat of the storm. Dangeau’s eyes rested on the prospect with a strange, sardonic expression. Danton was dead, and dead with him all hopes that he might lead a France, purged terribly, and regenerate by fire and blood, to her place as the first, because the freest, of nations. Danton was dead, and Paris adrift, unrestrained, upon a sea of blood. Danton was dead, and the last, lingering, constructive purpose had departed from a confederacy given over to a mere drunken orgy of destruction—slaves to an ignoble passion for self-preservation. To Dangeau’s thought death became suddenly a thing honourable and to be desired. From the public services of those days it was the only resignation, and he saw it now before him, inevitable, more dignified than life beneath a squalid yoke. All the ideals withered, all the idols shattered, youth worn through, patriotism chilled, disenchantment, disintegration, decay,—these he saw in sombre retrospect, and nausea, long repressed, broke upon him like a flood. A flash brighter than any before shot in a vicious fork across the blackening sky, and the thunder followed it close, with a crash that startled Vibert to his feet. Dangeau sat motionless, but when the reverberations had died away, he leaned across the table, still with that slight smile, and said: "And what do you say of me in your report, Vibert?" Still dazed with the noise, the man stared nervously. "My report, Citizen?" "Your report, Vibert." "My report to the Convention?" Dangeau laughed, with the air of a man who is enjoying himself. After the dissimulation, the hateful necessity for repression and evasion, frankness was a luxury. "Oh, no, my good Vibert, not your report to the Convention. It is your report to Robespierre that I mean. I have a curiosity to know how you mean to put the thing. ’Emotion at hearing of Danton’s death,’ is that your line, eh?" "Citizen——" "What, protestations? Really, Vibert, you underrate my intelligence. Shall I tell you what you said about me last time?" Vibert shifted his eyes to the door, and seemed to measure his distance from it. "What I said last time, Citizen?" he stammered. Once out of the tent he knew he could break Dangeau easily enough, but at present, alone with a man who he was aware must be desperate, he felt a creeping in his bones, and a strong desire to be elsewhere. Dangeau’s lip lifted.