in wait, the
same crowd, some off-shoot of the black procession seen vaguely at the
end of a street, defiling slowly in the rain to the sound of muffled
drums, a dull heavy sound like that made by earth falling bit by bit
into a hole.

What torture for Felicia! It was her sin, her remorse passing through
the streets of Paris in all that solemn pomp, that funereal
magnificence, that public mourning reflected even in the clouds; and the
proud girl rebelled against the affront that circumstances put upon her,
fled from it to the depths of the carriage, where she remained with
closed eyes, overwhelmed, while old Crenmitz, believing that it was her
grief which so affected her nerves, strove to comfort her, wept herself
over their separation, and withdrawing into the other corner, left the
cab-window in full possession of the great Algerian _slougui_, his
delicate nostrils sniffing the air and his forepaws resting despotically
on the sill with heraldic rigidity.

At last, after a thousand interminable detours, the cab suddenly
stopped, moved slowly forward again amid shouts and insults, was then
pushed this way and that, lifted from the ground, its equilibrium
threatened by the trunks on its roof, and finally halted for good and
all, as if anchored.

"_Bon Dieu!_ What a crowd!" murmured La Crenmitz in terror.

Felicia emerged from her torpor.

"Where in heaven's name are we?"

Beneath a colorless, smoky sky, with a fine network of rain drawn like
gauze over the reality of things, lay a great square, filled with a
human ocean flowing in from all the adjoining streets, immobilized
around a lofty column which towered above that sea of heads like the
gigantic mast of a sinking ship. Cavalry in troops, with drawn sabres,
artillery in batteries lined the sides of an open pathway, a complete
warlike host awaiting him who was soon to pass,--perhaps to try to
rescue him, to carry him off by force from the redoubtable foe in whose
power he was. Alas! cavalry charges, cannonades were of no avail. The
prisoner was firmly bound, protected by a threefold wall of solid wood,
of metal and of velvet, inaccessible to shot and shell, and not at the
hands of those soldiers could he hope for deliverance.

"Drive on. I do not wish to remain here," said Felicia frantically,
pulling the driver's dripping cape, seized with a mad fear at the
thought of the nightmare that pursued her, of what she could hear
approaching with a ghastly rolling