y who had stopped to look on, but more especially workmen,
loafers, poor women, and ladies of questionable appearance, stood in
serried ranks on both sides of the row of carriages. Humorous remarks
and coarse witticisms in the vulgarest Parisian dialect hailed down upon
the passing carriages and their occupants.

She heard words which she had not heard for many years, and she blushed
at the thought that she was perhaps the only one in this whole long line
of carriages who understood these low expressions of the dregs of Paris.

She began to look at the faces around her: it seemed to her as if she
knew them all. She knew what they thought, what was passing in each
of these tightly-packed heads; and little by little a host of memories
streamed in upon her. She fought against them as well as she could, but
she was not herself this evening.

She had not, then, lost the key to the secret drawer; reluctantly she
drew it out, and the memories overpowered her.

She remembered how often she herself, still almost a child, had devoured
with greedy eyes the fine ladies who drove in splendor to balls or
theatres; how often she had cried in bitter envy over the flowers she
laboriously pieced together to make others beautiful. Here she saw the
same greedy eyes, the same inextinguishable, savage envy.

And the dark, earnest men who scanned the equipages with
half-contemptuous, half-threatening looks--she knew them all.

Had not she herself, as a little girl, lain in a corner and listened,
wide-eyed, to their talk about the injustice of life, the tyranny of the
rich, and the rights of the laborer, which he had only to reach out his
hand to seize?

She knew that they hated everything--the sleek horses, the dignified
coachmen, the shining carriages, and, most of all, the people who sat
within them--these insatiable vampires, these ladies, whose ornaments
for the night cost more gold than any one of them could earn by the work
of a whole lifetime.

And as she looked along the line of carriages, as it dragged on
slowly through the crowd, another memory flashed into her mind--a
half-forgotten picture from her school-life in the convent.

She suddenly came to think of the story of Pharaoh and his war-chariots
following the children of Israel through the Red Sea. She saw the waves,
which she had always imagined red as blood, piled up like a wall on both
sides of the Egyptians.

Then the voice of Moses sounded. He stretched out his s