A devil stirred in him, subtly malicious, tempting him with an intellectual bait that was the disguise of passions of whose reality he was but vaguely cognizant. These proud _aristos_! The bitterness of a youth of humiliations surged up in him, avid for vengeance. He encouraged it as a protection against himself. He would show them--these oppressors of the people, these enemies of the republic--who sent their womenfolk to corrupt the virtuous representatives of the nation! Two could play at that game! He smiled in the thought of the insult he prepared. With a quick movement he rose from his seat and, on an impulse that was almost blind in its swift fulfilment, put his arm round the girl’s waist and kissed her full on the mouth. The act was done before her instinct of self-protection could assert itself--and then she pushed him away in sudden revolt, stood facing him with panting bosom and a countenance where emotions chased each other in alternations of white and red. For a moment she contemplated him, breathing tumultuously, and then, with a gesture of disgust, she wiped her lips. Her eyes looked straight into his with angry dignity, withered him with their fierce disdain. A bitter smile wreathed her lips. “_Er, bien, citoyen_--you have had your pay. My father’s life!” Did he actually hear the words? The low, scornfully vengeful laugh which came involuntarily from him was like an echo, far off, of that mocking laugh, inaudible now, in the bare room where the young commissary, arrogant with the outrage he had inflicted upon this representative of a superior race, drew himself up in his conscious incorruptibility. “Your father dies to-morrow, _citoyenne_!” The marble coldness of his voice was a triumph of which he was not sure until it rang in his ears. He exulted in its echo, like a saint self-consciously a victor over temptation. Their eyes met, looked into each other with a sudden furious, unappeasable hatred--a hatred which flooded them with a passion that was bigger than themselves--that soul-devouring hatred, clutching instinctively at death for its expression, which is the other face of violent love. Between these souls, in commotion far beyond their consciousness, indifference was not possible. They had met, and the world was in upheaval. He heard the hiss of a long breath drawn in through clenched teeth--he distinguished no longer between the girl like a brooding invisibility in the chair beside him and the panting girl confronting that suddenly pale young patriot whom he watched with inexpressible fascination. He saw the insult, like livid lightning, in her face before she hurled it at him. “_Canaille!_” The word rang close in his ear, and yet infinitely far away, on an accent of vindictive emphasis that struck to his soul. A fury surged up in him, a blind fury that annihilates with one ruthless blow of its insulted strength. He stamped a signal on the floor.