"Eh, mon Dieu!" he said; "get in, get in!" The carriage had mouldy straw on the floor, and the musty odour of it mounted in the hot air. Dangeau complained of it sharply. "A devil of a smell, this, Goyot!" and the little surgeon fixed him with keen, watchful eyes, as he nodded acquiescence. What house they came to, or how they came to it, Dangeau knew no more than his unconscious wife. She lay across his breast, white and still as the dead, and when he laid her down on the bed in the upper room they reached at last, she fell limply from his grasp, and he turned to Goyot with a groan. A soft, white-haired woman, dark-eyed and placid,—afterwards he knew her for Goyot’s housekeeper,—tried to turn him out of the room, but he would go no farther than the window, where he sat staring, staring at the houses across the way, watching them darken in the gathering dusk, and mechanically counting the lights that presently sprang into view. Behind him Marie Carlier came and went, at Goyot’s shortly worded orders, until at last Dangeau’s straining ears caught the sound of a faint, fluttering sigh. He turned then, the lights in the room dancing before his burning eyes. For a moment the room seemed full of the small tongues of flame, and then beyond them he saw his wife’s eyes open again, whilst her hand moved in feeble protest against the draught which Goyot himself was holding to her lips. Dangeau got up, stood a moment gazing, and then stumbled from the room and broke into heavy sobbing. Presently Goyot brought him something in a glass, which he drank obediently. "Now you will sleep," said the little man in cheerful accents, and sleep he did, and never stirred until the high sun struck across his face and waked him to France’s new day, and his. For in that night fell Robespierre, cast down by the Convention he had dominated so long. The dawn that found him shattered, praying for the death he had vainly sought, awakened Paris from the long nightmare which had been the marriage gift of her nuptials with this incubus. At four o’clock on the afternoon of the 10th Thermidor, Robespierre’s head fell under the bloody axe of the Terror, and with his last gasp the life went out of the greatest tyranny of modern times. When Goyot came home with the news, Dangeau’s face flamed, and he put his hand before his eyes for a moment. Then he went up to Aline. She had lain in a deep sleep for many, many hours, but towards the afternoon she had wakened, taken food, and dressed herself, all in a strange, mechanical fashion. She was neither to be gainsaid nor persuaded, and Dangeau, reasonable once more, had left her to the kind and unexciting ministrations of Marie Carlier. Now he could keep away no longer; Goyot followed him and the housekeeper met them by the door. "She is strange, Monsieur," she whispered. "She has not roused at all?" inquired Goyot rather anxiously. Marie shook her head.