Bertrand Moncrif, very pale, still looking scared and wild, had quietly entered the room. "You wish me to go, Theresia," he said simply. "You did not think surely that I would do anything that might endanger your safety. My God!" he added with passionate vehemence, "Do you not know that I would at any time lay down my life for yours?" Theresia shrugged her statuesque shoulders. "Of course, of course, Bertrand," she said a little impatiently, though obviously trying to be kind. "But I do entreat you not to go into heroics at this hour, and not to put on tragic airs. You must see that for yourself as well as for me it would be fatal if you were found here, and----" "And I am going, Theresia," he broke in seriously. "I ought never to have come. I was a fool, as usual!" he added with bitterness. "But after that awful fracas I was dazed and hardly knew what I was doing." The frown of vexation reappeared upon the woman's fair, smooth brow. "The fracas?" she asked quickly. "What fracas?" "In the Rue St. Honoré. I thought you knew." "No. I know nothing," she retorted, and her voice now was trenchant and hard. "What happened?" "They were deifying that brute Robespierre----" "Silence!" she broke in harshly. "Name no names." "They were deifying a bloodthirsty tyrant, and I----" "And you rose from your seat," she broke in again, and this time with a laugh that was cruel in its biting irony; "and lashed yourself into a fury of eloquent vituperation. Oh, I know! I know!" she went on excitedly. "You and your Fatalists, or whatever you call yourselves! And that rage for martyrdom! . . . Senseless, stupid and selfish! Oh, my God! _how_ selfish! And then you came here to drag me down with you into an abyss of misery, along with you to the guillotine . . . to . . ." It seemed as if she were choking, and her small white hands, with a gruesome and pathetic gesture, went up to her neck, smoothed it and fondled it, as if to shield it from that awful fate. Bertrand tried to pacify her. It was he who was the more calm of the two now. It seemed as if her danger had brought him back to full consciousness. He forgot his own danger, the threat of death which lay in wait for him, probably on the very threshold of this house. He was a marked man now; martyrdom had ceased to be a dream; it had become a grim reality. But of this he did not think. Theresia was in danger, compromised by his own callous selfishness. His mind was full of her; and Régine, the true and loyal friend, the beloved of past happier years, had no place in his thoughts beside the exquisite enchantress, whose very nearness was paradise. "I am going," he said earnestly. "Theresia, my beloved, try to forgive me. I was a fool--a criminal fool! But lately--since I thought that you--you did not really care; that all my hopes of future happiness were naught but senseless dreams; since then I seem to have lost my head--I don't know _what_ I am doing! . . . And so----"