she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar off,
gesticulating but impotent. His fury might be dangerous like a torrent
or a gust of wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared or braved, it
should never be respected. And with that there came in her a sudden glow
of courage and that readiness to die which attends so closely upon all
strong passions.

"I do scorn you," she said.

"What is that?" he cried.

"I scorn you," she repeated, smiling.

"You love another man!" said he.

"With all my soul," was her reply.

The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with it.

"Is this the ----?" he cried, using a foul word, common in the South;
and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to the ground. There
he lay for the least interval of time insensible; thence fled from the
house, the most terrified person in the county. The heavy measure had
escaped from his hands, splashing the wine high upon the wall. Paradou
caught it. "And you?" he roared to his wife, giving her the same name in
the feminine, and he aimed at her the deadly missile. She expected it,
motionless, with radiant eyes.

But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the
unconscious rivals stood confronted. It was hard to say at that moment
which appeared the more formidable. In Paradou, the whole muddy and
truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy; the lust of
destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in his face but it
talked murder. Balmile had dropped his cloak: he shone out at once in
his finery, and stood to his full stature; girt in mind and body; all
his resources, all his temper, perfectly in command; in his face the
light of battle. Neither spoke; there was no blow nor threat of one; it
was war reduced to its last element, the spiritual; and the huge
wine-seller slowly lowered his weapon. Balmile was a noble, he a
commoner; Balmile exulted in an honourable cause. Paradou already
perhaps began to be ashamed of his violence. Of a sudden, at least, the
tortured brute turned and fled from the shop in the footsteps of his
former victim, to whose continued flight his reappearance added wings.

So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself,
Marie-Madeleine transferred to him her eyes. It might be her last
moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable courage and
illimitable valour to protect. And when the momentary peril was gone by,
and the champion tu