yor, and he is coming
up to fetch him." He nodded towards the partition, and she knew that her
secret was known.

"It is Pierre," she said, trembling violently, and turning first crimson
and then a dull sallow hue.

"I know it, Jeanne. It was excellent of you! Excellent! It is long since
you have done such a day's work."

"You will not give him up?" she gasped.

"My faith, I shall!" he answered, affecting, and perhaps really feeling,
wonder at her simplicity. "He is five crowns, my girl! You do not
understand. He is worth five crowns and the risk nothing at all."

If he had been angry, if he had shown anything of the fury of the
suspicious husband, if he had been about to do this out of jealousy or
revenge or passion she would have quailed before him, though she had
done him no wrong, save the wrong of mercy and pity. But his spirit was
too mean for the great passions; he felt only the mean and sordid
impulses, which to a woman are the most hateful. And instead of
quailing, she looked at him with flashing eyes. "I shall warn him," she
said.

"It will not help him," he answered, sitting still, and feeling anew the
edge of the hatchet with his fingers.

"It will help him," she retorted. "He shall go. He shall escape before
they come." She rose impetuously from her seat.

"I have locked the door!"

"Give me the key!" she panted. "Give me the key, I say!" She stood
before him, her trembling hands outstretched, her figure drawn to its
full height. Her look was such that he rose and retreated behind the
table, still retaining the hatchet in his grasp.

"Stand back!" he said sullenly. "You may awaken him, if you please, my
girl. It will not avail him. Do you not understand, fool, that he is
worth five crowns? Five crowns? And listen! It is too late now. They are
here!"

A blow fell on the door as he spoke, and he stepped towards it. But at
that, seeing the last chance leaving her, despair moved her, she threw
herself upon him; for a moment she wrestled with him like a wild-cat,
but in the end he prevailed; he flung her off, and, brandishing his
weapon in her face, kept her at bay. "You vixen!" he cried, retreating
to the door, with a pale cheek and his eyes still on her, for he was an
arrant coward. "You deserve to go to prison with him, you jade! I will
have you in the stocks for this! I'll have you jailed!"

She leaned against the wall where he had flung her, her white despairing
face seeming to shine in the