She bounded from her seat as if under an electric shock. Incredulous and stupefied, she protested in spite of herself. "It is not true!" she exclaimed. "How can it not be true? Leonard heard it from the driver who took you to Paris. Robespierre was a few yards off our house at the Carrefour de la Chèvre. It was from that very spot he set his agents upon you." These details brought back the scene to Clarisse's memory. And she thought of Vaughan, undoubtedly arrested also. Olivier recalled her to the present, continuing to speak. "Yes, it was Robespierre, the infamous wretch!" She threw herself on him. "Oh no! Hush! I implore you!" He struggled to continue, but she prevented him, trying to drown his words. "I am sure you are mistaken.... Leonard is mistaken.... It is certain.... I should have known.... If it were he ... I should have known!" "No! You could not have known. You yourself said so just now. Why should they account to you for their actions? It is he ... he and no other!" And Olivier then gave her minutely every detail as the gardener had told it to him. How one of the agents had conferred with Robespierre after the arrest, at the Carrefour de la Chèvre, where he was enjoying a picnic. Ah! Clarisse needed no such explanations. It was he, she knew it too well. But how was she to persuade Olivier to the contrary? How prevent the son from cursing his father? She tried to excuse Robespierre, attributing to him other motives. "You see," she said, "he doesn't know who we are.... He is mistaken.... His agents have misled him.... There could be so many misunderstandings...." Olivier shrugged his shoulders. "How credulous you are! Bah! he knows very well what he is doing! It is his thirst for blood. Oh! you don't half know what he is, that Rob...." Clarisse, horror-stricken, put her fingers to his lips, to arrest the words. "No! No! Don't pronounce that name in such a way!" And seeing him look at her in bewilderment, she tried to give him plausible reasons. "You might be heard, and you would be compromised." "But how? Here? Where everybody holds his name in execration?" "Yes; but then there are turnkeys coming and going at every moment. And what if there are spies among the prisoners...?" And, as if clutching at a straw, she followed up the idea. "Yes, spies--traitors? You must not betray your feelings before them." "True! there is no lack of infamy among the populace!" He then told his mother of the incidents of his wanderings in Paris, of his utter astonishment at the apathy of the crowd round that accursed scaffold which was being transported to the Place de la Bastille, amidst the preparations for the Festival of the Supreme Being.