"They talk of heroism," cried she, frantically--"it was massacre! And when they speak of chivalry, they mean the slaughter of women and children!" She looked round, seeing that her niece had left the room, suddenly dropped her voice to a whisper, and said, "Think of her mother's fate; dragged from her home, her widowed, desolate home, and thrown into the Temple, outraged and insulted, condemned on a mock trial, and then carried away to the guillotine! Ay, and even then, on that spot, which coming death might have sanctified, in that moment, when even fiendish vengeance can turn away, and leave its victim at liberty to utter a last prayer in peace, even then, these wretches devised an anguish greater than all death could compass. You will scarcely believe me," said she, drawing in her breath, and talking with an almost convulsive effort, "you will scarcely believe me in what I am now about to tell you, but it is the truth--the simple but horrible truth. When my sister mounted the scaffold there was no priest to administer the last rites. It was a time, indeed, when few were left; their hallowed heads had fallen in thousands before that. She waited for a few minutes, hoping that one would appear; and when the mob learned the meaning of her delay, they set up a cry of fiendish laughter, and with a blasphemy that makes one shudder to think of, they pushed forward a boy, one of those blood-stained 'gamins' of the streets, and made him gabble a mock litany! Yes, it is true: a horrible mockery of our service, in the ears and before the eyes of that dying saint." "When? in what year? in what place was that?" cried I, in an agony of eagerness. "I can give you both time and place, sir," said the marquise, drawing herself proudly up, for she construed my question into a doubt of her veracity. "It was in the year 1793, in the month of August; and as for the place, it was one well seasoned to blood--the Place de Grève, at Paris." A fainting sickness came over me as I heard these words; the dreadful truth flashed across me that the victim was the Marquise D'Estelles, and the boy, on whose infamy she dwelt so strongly, no other than myself. For the moment, it was nothing to me that she had not identified me with this atrocity; I felt no consolation in the thought that I was unknown and unsuspected. The heavy weight of the indignant accusation almost crushed me. Its falsehood I knew, and yet, could I dare to disprove it? Could I hazard the consequences of an avowal, which all my subsequent pleadings could never obliterate. Even were my innocence established in one point, what a position did it reduce me to in every other.