The young man reiterated his assertion eagerly. “And my father?” The girl turned her head toward the melancholy figure bowed in dejection on its heap of straw. He shrugged his shoulders. “Your father is guilty of a crime against the Republic. I can do nothing for him. But you have committed no crime, _citoyenne_” Her eyes looked into his, probed him. “Nor have many here. Why do you release me?” He lost control of himself in his eagerness to withdraw her from the danger into which he had himself wantonly plunged her. “Because--because I love you! Because I cannot let you die!--Because--I cannot help it--you are all of life to me, _citoyenne_!” She looked at him, her face like a carven sphinx, her eyes inscrutable. “I go--wherever my father goes!” He stood, deathly pale, wrestling with a terrible temptation. She watched his agony, without malice, without sympathy, cold like a slave in the market who may be bought--for a price. All of him that was human yearned for her, yearned for her unutterably in a surge of desire that all but overcame him--and yet an austere inner self, that self which had vowed itself to the idealized service of the Republic in youthful fanaticism, stood firm although it agonized. He felt himself a worthy spiritual successor of that Scaevola who stood with his hand in the fire, as he answered, cold sweat upon his brow. “_Citoyenne_, it is impossible. I cannot buy even your love with my dishonour. Your father has committed a crime against the Republic--but you have committed none.” She shrugged her shoulders in calm indifference. An insulting smile came into her face. “Then I will do so!” She turned toward the prisonful of victims with the exultant gesture of a martyr who demands the stake, and cried, evidently with full lungs: “_Vive le Roi! À bas la République!_” “_Vive le Roi!--À bas la République!_” came like a murmured echo from somewhere beyond defined space, in defiant mockery of all that he craved. He watched her turn away from him, an immense despair submerging him, and went slowly, head down, toward the door as though himself condemned. She turned for one last look at him as he disappeared, a strange wild ecstasy in her face--and then flung herself face downward upon the straw in a paroxysm of hysteric sobs. Whence came those murmured words, charged with unutterable passion, with the intensity of a soul that gathers its essence for its leap into the infinite dark? “Now--now I can love him! Death, death! come quickly!--now I have the right to love!” There was a glimpse of a face suddenly radiant through its tears--and then again blackness, a suspense of thought.