She came close, poured out her trouble in a flood of nervous, anguished speech that he comprehended perfectly without being able to arrest a single definite word in his memory--it was as though that part of him which understood was something deep down, lying beyond the necessity for spoken language. Of course! he comprehended with a kind of awakening memory--that old _émigré_ who had stolen back disguised, in defiance of the laws, whom he had arrested for plotting against the safety of that Republic One and Indivisible of which he was the incorruptible servant, whose name he had but just put on the fatal list of the next batch for the guillotine! He chilled, mercilessly; wondered for a moment at his own inexorability, and then, as his identification with the scene completed itself, understood it. For a crime against himself, against another individual, he might have had compassion. The conspirator against that fanaticized ideal of his soul, the young Republic fighting in rags for its life, for the ultimate freedom of all humanity, was guilty of the unforgiveable sin. He steeled himself, in a pride of approximation to that Brutus, to those other sternly incorruptible Roman republicans with whom his imagination was filled. No human tears, no human despair however poignant, should move him from his path of duty. He felt his teeth set hard over the absurd feebleness in his breast as his eyes rested, coldly he hoped, upon that beautiful girl who stood, strangely disturbing in her closeness, and stretched out her arms to him in agonized appeal. As if telepathically, his soul was filled with her passionate, eloquent entreaty--he had to fight down the tears which threatened his eyes in sympathy with those which suffused the beautiful orbs which looked into his, in despair of softening them. And she--the woman in the chair, remote spheres away, trembled at a trouble in her soul, at an awakening of something else in her--something that was wrong, unpardonably at variance with every standard of her life, as she looked into those stern but fascinating eyes in the ascetic face and pleaded her cause. She despised herself for the blush she felt creep over her. Her father’s life--her father’s life!--what else dared she think of? This superb young man was an enemy, an implacable enemy, the incarnation of all the crimes wreaked upon her class! Yet her dignity imposed upon her, and she dared not practice that false coquetry upon him that, in a sublime abnegation of her own pride, she had promised herself to use as a supreme resource. She could only plead, plead passionately, in utter sincerity, the best in her appealing to the best in him--and she scorned herself for admitting that there was that best to evoke.