The scouts always denied success. Then a chorus arose: "She's hiding it!" "Show us your basket!" "Eh, and under your dress!" Once, in the Rue St. Honoré, a slip of a girl had almost freed herself of the questioning crowd, when a lean dog with a sharp nose bounded, sniffing, to her side. There was a quick turning in the crowd, and the nearest woman, leaping to her feet, shouted hysterically: "I smell dried fish!" The next moment, up the street a scuttling speck fled before a frenzied cloud from which shot out white arms and grasping hands. Through such mad scenes of famine, Nicole arrived at the Hall of the Convention; where, being early, she entered the Tuileries to await the arrival of Barabant. The gardens that once resounded with the hum of life, that once were gay with the swish of many colors, were now brown with the uninterrupted stretch of earth, rustling with the pervading sigh of leaves. Already in the trees, in the air, and in the tired soil was the melancholy of the parting season. Each breath that disturbed the branches, however slightly, set free a caravansary of fluttering leaves, and the leaves were sear. She seated herself on a bench and abandoning the basket and clasping her knee, watched the whirling leaves heap themselves about her feet. One or two poised on her shoulder, in her hair, without her heeding them. Presently Goursac, also on his way to the Convention, joined her. "This is the work of the cursed Montagne!" he said grimly, viewing the desolate gardens. "And yet Javogues is not satisfied. He would turn it into a cemetery!" "Listen, my friend," she said earnestly. "If the Girondins fall, you will not stay to sacrifice your life to Javogues?" "Do you think that I, a Girondin, would fly from that rascal!" he cried indignantly. "He works in the dark; he is incapable of striking in the open." "And if the Girondins fall?" she persisted. But he refused to entertain the suggestion. "This reminds me," he said, with a sweep of his arm, "of the time we were here a year ago. Do you remember?" She nodded. "Well," he said brusquely, "are you happy?" "Yes." "As happy as you thought?" "No," she said slowly, "but it is my fault. The fault of my position, if you wish. I am jealous!" "Of Louison?" "No! Of what may happen." "Why shouldn't he marry you?" he said angrily. "Because I have not asked him," she answered wearily. "And because I would not have it." "Why?" "Because I love him, my friend," she said in rebuke. "And because a waif of the streets does not marry a man of education and position unless she wishes to drag him down." Goursac, to her surprise, leaned over and patted her hand; then, as though ashamed to have shown such tenderness, he added gruffly: "That is the only thing that can make you happy." She did not deny it. "I know what you have passed through." She shook her head incredulously. "It is but the history of womankind," he said laconically.