possibly be received
by Justice Hubert. He stopped short on the threshold: not a soul was to
be seen!

"Wherever has that young man got to? Taken himself off, most likely!...
I expect he was one of those lawyer's clerks--confound them! A nice fool
I should have looked if his Honour, Justice Hubert, had said he would
receive him!"

With this reflection the messenger went back to his newspaper, not
without having ascertained that it was four o'clock, and therefore he
had still an hour to wait before he could have his coffee and cigar at
the "Men of the Robe."

* * * * *

Through the great windows of the Court of Assizes, carefully closed as
they were, not a ray of moonlight filtered into the court room. And this
obscurity lent an added terror to a silence as profound as the grave, a
silence which, with the falling shades of night, assumed possession of
the vast hall, where so many criminals had listened to the fatal
sentence--the sentence of death.

* * * * *

When the Court had risen, the assistants had, as usual, proceeded to put
the place in order; then the police sergeant had made his rounds, and
had gone away, double locking the doors behind him. After this the
chamber had gradually sunk into complete repose: a repose which would be
broken the following morning when the bustling routine of the legal day
commenced once more.

Little by little, too, the many and varied noises, which had echoed and
re-echoed the whole day through in the galleries of the Palais de
Justice, had died down, and sunk into silence.

The custodians had made their last round; the barristers had quitted the
robing-room; the poor wretches who had slunk in to warm themselves at
the heating apparatus in the halls had shuffled back to the cold
street, and the whistling blasts of the north wind. The immense pile was
entirely deserted.

A clock began to strike.

Then, hardly had the last stroke of eleven sounded, awakening the echoes
of the empty galleries, than in the Court of Assizes itself, under the
monumental desk, before which the justices sat in state by day, a noise
made itself heard, long, strident, nerve-racking--the noise of an alarum
clock!

Just as the alarum ceased its raucous call, a loud yawn resounded
through the empty spaces of the chamber. The sleeper, who had selected
this spot that he might indulge, all undisturbed, in a revivifying
sleep, evidently too