Aline closed her eyes. All her young life ran hotly in her veins, but the force of its recoil from the man beside her was stronger than the force of its recoil from death. "The Citizen insults me when he assumes there is a choice," she said, with cold lips. "The prison is so attractive then? The embraces of the Guillotine so preferable to mine—hein?" "The Citizen has expressed my views." Hébert cursed and flung away, but as she moved on he was by her side again. "After all," he said, "you may change your mind again. Until to-morrow, I can save you." "Citizen, I shall never change my mind. There is no choice; it is simply that." An inexorable decision looked from her face, and carried conviction even to him. "One cannot save imbeciles," he muttered as he left her. Mademoiselle walked home with an odd sense of relief. Now that the first shock was over, and the danger so long anticipated was actually upon her, she was calm. At least Hébert would be gone from her life. Death was clean and final; there would be no dishonour, no soiling of her ears by that sensual voice, nor of her eyes by those evil glances. She knelt and prayed for a while, and sat down to her work with hands that moved as skilfully as before. That night she slept more peacefully than she had done for weeks. In her dreams she walked along a green and leafy lane, birds sang, and the sky burned blue in the rising sun. She walked, and breathed blissful air, and was happy. Out of such dreams one awakes with a sense of the unreality of everyday life. Some of the glamour clings about us, and we see a mirage of happiness instead of the sands of the Desert of Desolation. Is it only mirage, or some sense sealed, except at rarest intervals?—a sense before whose awakened exercise the veil wears thin, and from behind we catch the voices of the withdrawn, we feel the presence of peace, and garner a little of the light of Eternity to shed a glow on Time. Aline woke happily to a soft May dawn. Her dream lay warm against her heart and cherished it. In the evening she was arrested and taken to the prison of the Abbaye. CHAPTER XV SANS SOUCI In after days Aline de Rochambeau looked back upon her time in prison as a not unpeaceful interlude between two periods of stress and terror. After loneliness unspeakable, broken only by companionship with the coarse, the dull, the cruel, she found herself in the politest society of France, and in daily, hourly contact with all that was graceful, exquisite, and refined in her own sex,—gallant, witty, and courteous in the other.