“You also, _citoyenne_, will die to-morrow!” The decree, cold as the bloodless lips which uttered it, echoed in him to a savage satisfaction. The girl remained motionless, head high, in superb indifference to his threat. The door behind her was flung open. The two ruffianly guards ran in, sprang to grip her arms in obedience to his imperious gesture. She smiled at him, splendid in unshakable disdain. “_We prefer to die!_” He motioned them out, livid with a rage beyond words. She went, proudly, unresistingly between her brutal captors. At the door she turned her head and smiled at him again, a smile full of significance. “_Canaille!_” He sat down to his table and, in a furious scrawl, added a name to his list. ... The vision dissolved in blackness, in an obliteration, for timeless moments, of all thought.... They found themselves looking into a long dark hall, its gloom inadequately relieved by high barred windows. Straw littered the floor and was collected into little heaps along the walls. Dimly discerned in the shadows was a throng of people, men and women--some promenading up and down in solitary dejection, some in groups seated upon the straw at a game of cards, some leaning propped against the wall in listless despair. He gazed into that Hades-like abode of misery with a curious anxiety at his heart, an anxiety whose cause for the moment eluded him. He watched, waiting in a vague expectation of some event that approached and was yet unseen. A door in the foreground opened and, with a little intimate shock, he saw enter that mysterious duplication of his personality that was he and yet was not he--the sternly ascetic young _répreséntant en mission_ whose plumed hat and sash of office proclaimed his authority in this dreadful place. A subservient turnkey followed at his heels, called a name. A young girl--_she_--she of the bare room overlooking the square, she of--of--he failed to identify another appearance he knew ought to be familiar--started up from a bed of straw where she had been sitting in company with an old man. She approached, in quiet command of herself, neither hastily nor reluctantly. Obviously, she was indifferent to whatever might be required of her. Only when she perceived the identity of her visitor did she start back in a sudden little hesitation, vanquished as soon as felt. She came coolly up to him, regarded him with contemptuously hostile eyes, awaited his business with her. He was trembling with emotions that almost overpowered him--the soul that watched felt itself gripped in an agony of remorse, of fear, of--something else that he would not acknowledge. He stammered evidently as he spoke. “_Citoyenne_, come with me--you are free!” She looked at him in blank surprise. “Free?” The inaudible words were plain to those two watching souls who had long ago forgotten the crystal that they held. Both thrilled with a sense of crisis in which they were intimately involved.