"I will," she promised, "as soon as they will let me. Good-bye, poor little King!" And as Barelle led her away, she called back: "Good-bye, Little Capet!" But the child heard only her last whispered, "poor little King," and he gratefully pressed the packet of Moufflet's hair to his heart. Four weeks had passed in which Marie Antoinette had heard not a word concerning the welfare of her little son,--weeks of fear, uncertainty, and foreboding, terrible in their dragging length. Each day she eagerly questioned the visiting municipals, but they answered merely that he was well and studying with a tutor. At length circumstances favoured her, and help arrived from an unexpected quarter. This was nothing less than the astonishing change of disposition in the spy Tison and his wife. Madame Tison fell suddenly very ill, and in her sickness begged the Queen's pardon for all her former meanness and spite. Marie Antoinette forgave her freely, but the poor woman's mind had become so unsettled through remorse, that she had to be moved from the Tower to a hospital. Then Tison himself entreated the Queen's forgiveness: "I never knew you till you came here. I never dreamed what noble, true characters you all were, till I was set to act as a spy upon you! Oh, forgive me also!" Tison it was then, who came to the Queen's aid in her hour of need. Making himself acquainted with all that he could gather about her son's welfare, he gave her daily accounts of all that he thought would interest her. More than this, he showed her a loophole in the wall, tiny it is true, but through which she could sometime catch a glimpse of her boy as he passed up the stairs daily to take the air on the turret. She was deeply shocked when she learned in whose care her tender child had been placed, and horrified when she saw his appearance through her loophole, clad in the red suit of the Commune. But once as he passed, she heard him humming softly the air of a little cradle-song she used to sing him: "Sleep, my child, and cease thy weeping! Sleep, my child! my heart is sad." By this she knew that his thoughts were still with her, and her heart was a trifle comforted. But a great change was to come. At two o'clock in the morning, on the first of August, 1793, the Queen was awakened and told that she must prepare to leave the Temple Tower. She was transferred to the prison of La Conciergerie where she was kept two months and a half in a small, damp cell. After that she was obliged to undergo a trial that was even more of a flimsy mockery than the one accorded to Louis XVI. "Anything, anything to be rid of her!" was the one idea of this terrible tribunal. The end, like her husband's, was a foregone conclusion. On the sixteenth of October, she bravely, calmly, proudly gave up her life, happy in being reunited at last with her beloved husband, regretting only that she must leave her children to so uncertain a fate.