He had actually cut his way a half-dozen yards before a hand--the woman’s--seized him from the back and dragged him to the ground. With a groan he fell, trampled into a forest of tattered legs. “Cry to me for mercy!” screamed the harlot. “No,” he answered faintly. She yelled then, beating a space about her with her hands. “Lucien, it is the moment that has come!” Snarling and dribbling, a hideous thing broke through the press and flung itself upon the fallen man. * * * * * * * * Torn and breathless, Ned shouldered his way at last into the little bloody arena. A woman--her foot upon the neck of something, some bespattered creature that whimpered and prayed to her--looked stupidly down upon the dead and mangled body of the man she had destroyed. “Accursed! oh, thou accursed!” panted the new-comer in terrible emotion. “It is not he, St Denys, that thou hast murdered.” CHAPTER XII. From the day of the massacre in the Cour des Feuillans, when--a casual and involuntary witness of the opening deed of blood--he had made a desperate attempt to save the life of the man who, as he supposed, was being sacrificed to a misconception, Ned had no thought but that he was fallen, a second time and inextricably, under the deadly spell of the city that was at once his horror and his attraction. That he had not paid the penalty with his own life of so quixotic an interposition rather confirmed him in the sense of fatality that had overtaken him. He could afterwards only recall vaguely the expression of terror with which Théroigne had accepted his furious impeachment of her barbarity; the resentful rage of the mob over his denunciation of its idol; his imminent peril, and the immunity from personal harm suddenly and unexpectedly secured him at the hands of the very loathed object of his execration. He had given her no thanks for her advocacy. It had condemned him merely to prolonged struggle with an existence that had grown hateful to him. Defrauded of his love, disenchanted with life, his residue of the latter was not, he felt, worth the devil’s purchase. And yet this sentiment carried with it a certain wild passion of personal irresponsibility that was not without its charm. Into the being of the people that had waived for the present, it seemed, all thought of consistent conduct, he was absorbed without effort of his own--absorbed so helplessly, that even the wounding stab of a certain question, once engrossingly poignant to himself, dulled of its pain and could be borne. It was as difficult to think collectedly, indeed, in the Paris of those days as it is while rushing through a strong wind.