Woman-like, she laid the insult to Dangeau’s account. It was another stone added to the wall which she set herself night and day to build between them. It rose apace, and this was the coping-stone. Now, surely, she was safe. Behind such a wall, so strong, so high, how could he reach her? And yet she was afraid, for something moved in the citadel, behind the bastion of defence—something that fluttered at his name, that ached in loneliness, and cried in the night—a traitor, but her very heart, inalienable flesh and blood of her. She covered her face, and wrestled, as many a time before, and after awhile she told herself—"It is conquered," and with a smile of self-scorn sat down again to her task too long delayed. Outside, Paris went its way. Thousands were born, and died, and married, and betrothed, in spite of scarce bread, war on the frontiers, and prisons full to bursting. The Mountain and the Gironde were only held from one another’s throats by Danton’s strong hand; but though their bickerings fill the historian’s page, under the surface agitation of politics, the vast majority of the population went its own way, a way that varies very little under successive forms of government, since the real life of a people consists chiefly of those things about which historians do not write. Tragedy had come down and stalked the streets of Paris, but there were thousands of eyes which did not see her. Those who did, talked loudly of it, and so it comes that we see the times through their eyes, and not through those of the silent and the blind. In the south Dangeau made speech after speech. He wrote to Danton from Lyons: "This place smoulders. Words are apt to prove oil on the embers. There are 900 prisoners, and constant talk of massacre. Chalier is a firebrand, the Mayor one of those moderate persons who provoke immoderate irritation in others. We are doing our best." Danton frowned heavily over the curt sentences, drawing those black brows of his into a wrathful line. He turned to other letters from other Deputies, all telling the same weary tale of jangle and discord, strife and clamour of parties unappeased and unappeasable. Soon he would be at death-grips with the Gironde—force opposed to philosophy, action to eloquence, and philosophic eloquence would go to the guillotine shouting the Marseillaise. His feet were set upon a bloody path, and one from which there was no returning. All Fate’s force was in him and behind him, and he drove before it to his doom. CHAPTER XIV A DANGEROUS ACQUAINTANCE It was in April that Fate began to concern herself with Mlle de Rochambeau once more. It was a day of spring’s first exquisite sweetness—air like new-born life sparkling with wayward smiles, as the hurrying sunbeams glanced between one white cloud and the next; scent of all budding blossoms, and that good smell of young leafage and the wet, fecund earth.