Dangeau and Aline were the last, and when they came to the steps he moved to go before her, then cursed himself for a coward, and stood aside to let her pass. She looked sweetly at him for a moment and passed on, climbing with feet that never faltered. She did not note the splashed and slippery boards, nor Sanson and his assistants all grimed and daubed from their butcher’s work, but her eye was caught by the sea of upturned faces, all white, all eyeing her, and her head turned giddy. Then some one touched her, held her, pulled away the kerchief at her breast, and as the sun struck hot upon her uncovered shoulders, a burning blush rose to her very brow, and the dream in which she had walked was gone. Her brain reeled with the awakening, heaven clouded, and the stars were lost. She was aware only of Sanson’s hot hand at her throat, and all those eyes astare to see her death. The hand pushed her, her foot felt the slime of blood beneath it, she saw the dripping knife, and all at once she felt herself naked to the abyss. In Sanson’s grip she turned wide terror-stricken eyes on Dangeau, making a little, piteous, instinctive movement towards him, her protector, and at that and his own impotence he felt each pulse in his strong body thud like a hammered drum, and with one last violent effort of the will he wrenched his eyelids down, lest he should look upon the end. All through the journey there had been as it were a sword in his heart, but at her look and gesture—her frightened look, her imploring gesture—the sword was turned and still he was alive, alive to watch her die. In those moments his soul left time and space, and hung a tortured point, infinitely lonely, infinitely agonised, in some illimitable region of never-ending pain. There was no past, no future, only Eternity and his undying soul in anguish. The thousand years were as a day, and the day as a thousand years. There was no beginning and no end. O God, no end! He did not hear the crowd stir a little, and drift hither and thither as it was pressed upon from one side; he did not see the gendarmes press against the drift, only to be driven back again, hustled, surrounded so that their horses were too hampered to answer to the spur. Suddenly a woman went down screaming under the horses’ feet, and on the instant the crowd flamed into fury before the agonised shriek had died away. In a moment all was a seething, shouting, cursing welter of struggling humanity. The noise of it reached even Dangeau’s stunned brain, and he said within himself, "It is over. She is dead," and opened his eyes. The scaffold stood like an island in a sea grown suddenly wild with tempest, and even as he looked, the human waves of it broke in a fierce swirl which welled up and overflowed it on every side.