“Monsieur, she made no defence. ‘_Vive la tyrannie_!’ she cried, ‘I love the aristocrats!’ (Ah, praise to heaven, monsieur, that she put it in the plural!) ‘I would sooner be spurned by one,’ she said, ‘than exalted by an upstart chicaneur.’ That was a stroke at the Public Accuser. ‘Maybe thou shalt be exalted, nevertheless,’ said he, ‘to a prominent place. And which of us was it, lover of aristocrats, that thou design’dst to murder?’ ‘What needs to specify?’ she cried. ‘When one wants to die, any poisonous snake will serve for one to handle!’” A little terrible groan broke from the listener. “Monsieur--monsieur!” cried Théophile in emotion. “But they condemned her--they condemned her. Oh, the poor child! And she revealed nothing; refused to answer any questions as to her associates, her place of abode, her manner of life. To-day she was to be taken to the scaffold. If she has kept silence, we are safe.” Ned looked upon the speaker with a shocking expression. “If she _has_ kept silence?” he muttered. “Monsieur,” said the little man (the tears were trickling down his lean cheeks), “the carts passed but ten minutes ago. I hurried forth, and ran till I could get glimpse of them down a side-street. She was there. She sat with her arms bound, looking up and smiling; and the snow fell upon her blue eyes, like feathers from the wings of the angels that fluttered overhead awaiting her.” He uttered a little cry, staggered, recovered himself, and clutched feebly at the figure that drove by him. “Monsieur! It is too late--it is useless! In God’s name do nothing to compromise us!--monsieur!” He followed, sobbing and piping, down the stairs. The rush passed from him; the door slammed back in his face. “_Mon Dieu_!” he wailed to himself, “he will ruin all!” Ned tore upon his way. To see--to gain speech with her, if only at the foot of the scaffold--“Oh, merciful Christ! not so to make this agony everlasting!” He sobbed and panted as he ran: “You didn’t kill him! You didn’t kill him!” He kept crying it, as if he thought his hurrying voice might reach her before ever his feet could cover the distance. Once he pictured her--the soft sinning child that had whispered to him, kissing his hand that night in the hot still secrecy of the room--under the hands of the callous ruffian who had spoken with him from the guillotine, and his wild prayers swung into frightful blasphemies. Some of the few he met in his headlong rush shrunk from him, leaving him the road. Others, who appeared likely to obstruct his passage, he cursed as he fled by. They were all ghosts to him, glimmering, impalpable--flashing past in a white foam of flakes. At length he broke into the place of the guillotine, and, without pausing in his mad race, beat the snow from his eyes--and saw. Here at least, by reason of the bitter cold, was no gala-day, and the crowd stood not so thick about the scaffold but that he might charge into and penetrate it.