The girl in the vision--so strikingly like the girl in the chair that she seemed a duplication of her personality--drew herself erect on the edge of the crowd and wiped her eyes. Evidently, with a great effort, she was mastering herself. The girl in the chair drew a hard breath, as though of some supreme determination. Then, taking a few steps, the figure that they watched moved close under the houses of the nearer side of the square and, looking up at the doorways as though seeking an inscription, commenced to walk along the pavement. The crystal held her still as its centre--like the lens of a cinematograph following always the chief personage upon the screen--and, watching her, the man and woman in the chair forgot the globe that they held with cataleptic rigidity, forgot the diminished scale of the vision. Their perceptions adjusted themselves like those of children who day-dream among their toys, and it seemed to both of them that they gazed into a real scene with full-sized human emotions at clash in the acute earnestness of present life. The girl, her face white and tense, her eyes fixed in the courage of timidity brought to despair, moved along the houses. Suddenly she stopped, looking upward to a portal surmounted by a trophy of tri-coloured flags and a shield on which the three words “_Liberté--Egalité--Fraternité_” were crudely emblazoned. A couple of ruffianly men in quasi-military uniform, exaggeratedly large cocked hats coming down over their ears, short pipes in the mouths hidden by untrimmed, pendent moustaches, enormously long muskets with bayonets fixed leaning against the bandoliers across their chests, guarded the doorway. The girl spoke to them, with vehement gestures, evidently imploring entrance. They barred her path, callously untouched by her agonized entreaty. She pointed up to an inscription below the trophy “_RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE--Réprésentant en Mission_,” smiled at them in a heart-breaking assumption of coquetry, candid innocence never more purely virginal. One of them shrugged his shoulders and spat upon the cobbled pavement without removing his pipe. The other winked broadly, and, still retaining his musket, reached out with his disengaged hand. The girl shrank back, horror in her eyes--and then, as if bethinking herself of an unfailing resource, felt feverishly in the neckerchief which covered her bosom. She drew out a packet of notes, offered them. With a broad grin on their faces, the two ruffians parted to allow her passage. She climbed an uncarpeted, dreary staircase and hesitated for a moment outside a door inscribed “_le citoyen réprésentant du peuple Desnouettes_.” She knocked timidly, opened, and entered.