The two friends hastily made their way through the crowd until, at the end of twenty minutes' patient endeavor, they reached the foremost ranks. A calm spread among the unseen throng, broken by sudden tensions at each new alarm. The people, who had greeted the first appearance of the guillotine with cries of disappointment and demands for the more spectacular gallows, were now impressed by the cloak of mystery the night drew about the scaffold. The machine was no longer mere wood and iron; it had tasted blood: it was human. Barabant, from his position of vantage, could distinguish the upright shafts, where from time to time, as Goursac explained the mechanism, some reflection from a torch falling on the knife above, there appeared the dull display of steel like the sudden threat of a brutish fang. Turning from the scaffold, Barabant examined the crowd, where, seeking for Nicole, he perceived Louison worming her way toward them. Suddenly a whisper ran over the heads and rose to a breeze of exclamations. The masses tightened. Those in front were swept against the guards as those behind surged forward, stretching to tiptoe. Louison, caught in the press, was imprisoned not twenty feet away. This time the alarm was not vain. From all sides burst the growl of the mob. "Hu! hu! hu!" A long, tedious moment succeeded, then suddenly the scaffold swarmed with dark figures. The hooting and the screeching gave place to a burst of hand-clapping. Barabant, astonished at the implacable ferocity of the crowd, turned to examine it, but his eye encountering Louison, remained there. The radiance of a neighboring torch redeemed her figure from the obscurity. Her head was strained slightly forward, while one hand clutched the kerchief at her throat as though to restrain her eagerness. The lips were parted, the eyes glowed with the intensity of fascinated contemplation, but her whole figure, in contrast to the unbridled passions of the crowd, remained, as during the attack on the Tuileries, controlled and insensible. So unnatural was her attitude that Barabant could not have averted his eyes had not the hand of Goursac recalled him to the drama before him. He sought in the gloom and the shadows, seeing nothing, until suddenly out of the darkness came the shoot and the thud of the knife. A woman, with a cry, caught his arm, burying her head in his sleeve. Another woman, holding a baby, was shouting wildly: "Bravo! Bravo!" A tottering veteran, in the costume of the Invalides, questioned him eagerly: "Is it over? Tell me, citoyen, is it over?" The woman on his arm continued to gasp hysterically. Himself recoiling at this death out of the darkness, he returned to the contemplation of Louison.