She seemed to listen to the moaning entreaty that never ceased at her feet. The president shifted in his chair and was restless with some papers. This situation--it was interesting, tragic, spiced with unexpected revelation; but the occasion, apart from it, was peremptory; the killers were clamorous outside over the unaccountable break in the programme. “My honour,” cried Théroigne, “my early innocence, my faith and peace of mind! If I name the return to me of these as the price of blood, what is thy answer?” His moaning rose only like a wind of despair. She drew herself erect and turned to the judges. “Messieurs--the price?” The whole company seemed to spring to its feet. A roar went up from it--and subsided. “It is answered,” said the president. “Take M. St Denys away.” There was a scurrying forward of men--a sudden stooping--a struggle. Shriek after shriek came from the ground. Ned leapt into the fray like a madman. “To subscribe,” he screamed, “to the revengeful fury of a wanton! It is not liberty or justice. Why, look at her, look at her. The beast that would murder twenty innocents to secure the destruction of one that had wounded her vanity. Gentlemen! to be so governed by a harlot--to be----!” He choked as he fought. There were savage hands at his throat. “Do not harm him. I would not have him harmed.” It was Théroigne that spoke. She stood apart, white and chill as a figure of ice. He spat curses at her, that mingled with the deadlier tumult. Monsieur le président made his voice heard above the din. “Eject this person, without hurt, from the rear of the prison.” Seized, then, despite his frantic struggles; protesting; striving for foothold; conscious always of the desperate outcry--faint, and fainter--of the unhappy man he had sought to befriend, Ned felt himself hurried along corridors, borne down steps and by way of echoing dank vaults--thrust violently into a world of spacious silence. A door shut with a steely clang behind him. Before, stretched a desolate waste tract of fields. The moon was at its full-flood light, and the whole world seemed to float quietly on a sea of peace. He threw himself, face-downwards, amongst the tufts of coarse grass, and cried upon the flood to overwhelm him. CHAPTER XIV. At the end of November the young Viscount Murk was still a sojourner in Paris. Always reserved and self-contained, he was become by then a creature of wilful and habitual loneliness, with something, indeed, of the moral dyspepsia that is induced of the morbid appetite that leads one to feed upon one’s own heart. And when the heart is so inflamed of love as to be sensitive to the least imaginary slight, assuredly the dyspepsia, as in Ned’s case, shall be acute.