“No, I am not afraid. It is the sense of helplessness which weighs upon me and angers me. I have always ordered my life to suit myself; I have always had control of the circumstances which concerned me. Yet here I am now, caught like a rat in a trap. I can break my teeth against the bars, and all in vain. I must wait for some miracle to deliver me, and not only myself but my dearest friends. Meanwhile their home, their beautiful home, is burned before my eyes, and I must look on helpless while a mob of drunken brutes rejoices in its destruction. I know that no miracle can restore it. And yet, M. de Tavernay, you ask me to fancy myself in some fool’s paradise!” “It was a paradise,” I agreed; “whether a fool’s or a wise man’s does not matter. Paradise is always paradise.” “Not for the onlookers!” she retorted. “But what need those within care for those without? Ah, I understand--you class yourself as an onlooker. You have not love to work the alchemy for you,” I added sadly. She looked up at me slowly with luminous eyes. “Perhaps you are right,” she said. “I have never been really within the pale. I have always stood outside, peering in, wondering why others thought it so beautiful.” I know not what folly I was about to utter, when a sudden tremendous crash sounded behind me. “The roof has fallen in,” said M. le Comte quietly, as we rushed to the parapet. “That is the end of it.” The flames leaped high into the air with a roar like the passing of a mighty wind over a great forest. The mob seemed for the moment to have forgotten us in the grandeur of that spectacle; but always at the foot of the tower that little group of armed men stood apart. The sudden burst of light threw their faces into strong relief, and Pasdeloup, who had been staring down at them, uttered a sharp cry. “He is there!” he said. “He is there!” “Who is there, Pasdeloup?” demanded his master. “Goujon! See!--that one with the cloak about him--there at the right!” Quick as a flash M. le Comte snatched out his pistol, levelled it and fired. There was a cry of pain from below and a man fell--but it was not Goujon. M. le Comte put up his pistol with an oath of anger and disappointment. But hell itself had broken loose and such a fusillade of bullets rained against the tower that we were forced to retire from the parapet. All the fury of the ages seemed whirled upon us; all the blind madness which centuries of oppression and injustice had engendered. Those of the mob who were unarmed danced shrieking about the tower, shaking their fists at it, or assailed the great stones with their nails. It seemed that the very uproar was enough to shake it from its foundation. “That was not wise,” said Pasdeloup gloomily. “It was the one thing Goujon needed.”