"Yes," answered the widow, without turning her head. "Enter, sir," said the warder. Martial entered. The veteran remained in the dungeon, the door of which was left open as a matter of precaution. Through the gloom of the corridor, half lighted by the increasing day and by a lamp, several soldiers were seen sitting or standing. Martial was as pale as his mother; his countenance expressed deep and profound anguish, his knees trembled under him. In spite of the crimes of this woman, in spite of the aversion that she had always shown for him, he had thought it a duty to obey her last wishes. As soon as he entered the dungeon, the widow cast on him a searching look, and said to him in a hollow and angry voice, as if to awaken in her son a feeling of revenge, "You see what they are going to do with your mother and your sister!" "Ay! mother, it is frightful; but I warned you of it, alas!--I told you." The widow bit her pale lips with rage; her son did not comprehend her; she resumed: "They are going to kill us, as they killed your father." "Alas! I can do nothing--it is finished. Now, what would you have me do? Why did you not listen to me--you and sister? You would not have been here." "Oh! it is so," answered the widow, with her habitual and savage irony; "you find it all right, do you?" "Mother!" "Now you are satisfied; you can say, without a lie, that your mother is dead; you shall no longer blush for her." "If I were a bad son," answered Martial, quickly, shocked at the unjust harshness of his mother, "I should not be here." "You came from curiosity." "I come to obey you." "Oh! if I had listened to you, Martial, instead of listening to my mother, I should not be here," cried Calabash, in a heart-rending voice, and yielding at length to her anguish and terror, which, until now (through the influence of her mother), she had restrained. "It is your fault: I curse you, my mother!" "She repents--she curses me! you must be delighted now!" said the widow to her son, with a burst of diabolical laughter. Without replying to her, Martial approached Calabash, whose agony continued, and said to her, with compassion, "Poor sister! it is too late now." "Never too late to be a coward!" cried the mother, with fury. "Oh! what a race! what a race! Happily Nicholas has escaped; happily François and Amandine will escape you. They have already the seeds of vice: poverty will cause them to grow!" "Oh, Martial! watch well over them, or they will end like my mother and myself. They will also lose their heads," cried Calabash, uttering a hollow groan. "He will do well to watch over them," cried the widow, vehemently; "vice and misery will be stronger than he, and some day they will avenge father, mother, and sister."