"I have thought!" she answered, with a passionate gesture. "I have thought. But he was my father's steward, Monsieur, and he is my brother's; if he has sinned, it was for them. It is for them to pay the penalty. And--after all, it may not come to that," she continued, her face changing, and her eyes seeking mine, full of sudden terror. "They will not dare, I think. They will never dare to----" "Where is he?" I asked hoarsely. She pointed to the corner behind her. I looked, and could scarcely believe my eyes. The man whom I had left full of a desperate courage, prepared to sell his life dearly, now crouched a huddled figure in the darkest angle of the tapestry seat. Though I had spoken of him in a low voice, and without naming him, he heard me, and looked up, and showed a face to match his attitude; a face pallid and sweating with fear; a face that, vile at the best and when redeemed by hardihood, looked now the vilest thing on earth. _Ciel!_ that fear should reduce a man to that! He tried to speak as his eyes met mine, but his lips moved inaudibly, and he only crouched lower, the picture of panic and guilt. I cried out to the others to know what had happened to him. "What is it?" I said. No one answered; and then I seemed to know. While he had thought all in danger, while he had felt himself only one among many, the common courage of a man had supported him. But God knows what voices, only too well known to him, what accents of starving men and wronged women, had spoken in that fierce cry for his life! What plaints from the dead, what curses of babes hanging on dry breasts! At any rate, whatever he had heard in that call for his blood, _his_ blood--it had unmanned him. In a moment, in a twinkling, it had dashed him back into this corner, a trembling craven, holding up his hands for his life. Such fear is infectious, and I strode to him in a rage and shook him. "Get up, hound!" I said. "Get up and strike a blow for your life; or, by heaven, no one else will!" He stood up. "Yes, yes, Monsieur," he muttered. "I will! I will stand up for Mademoiselle. I will----" But I heard his teeth chatter, and I saw that his eyes wandered this way and that, as do a hare's when the dogs close on it; and I knew that I had nothing to expect from him. A howl outside warned me at the same moment that our respite was spent; and I flung him off and turned to the window.