th fury and cried:

"Oh, I swear to heaven, my beauty, the executioner won't stand on such
ceremony when he catches hold of your son!... And you give yourself
airs! Why, think, it'll happen in forty hours! Forty hours, no more, and
you hesitate... and you have scruples, when your son's life is at stake!
Come, come, no whimpering, no silly sentimentality... Look things in
the face. By your own oath, you are my wife, you are my bride from this
moment... Clarisse, Clarisse, give me your lips..."

Half-fainting, she had hardly the strength to put out her arm and push
him away; and, with a cynicism in which all his abominable nature stood
revealed, Daubrecq, mingling words of cruelty and words of passion,
continued:

"Save your son!... Think of the last morning: the preparations for the
scaffold, when they snip away his shirt and cut his hair... Clarisse,
Clarisse, I will save him... Be sure of it... All my life shall be yours
... Clarisse..."

She no longer resisted. It was over. The loathsome brute's lips were
about to touch hers; and it had to be, and nothing could prevent it.
It was her duty to obey the decree of fate. She had long known it. She
understood it; and, closing her eyes, so as not to see the foul face
that was slowly raised to hers, she repeated to herself:

"My son... my poor son."

A few seconds passed: ten, twenty perhaps. Daubrecq did not move.
Daubrecq did not speak. And she was astounded at that great silence and
that sudden quiet. Did the monster, at the last moment, feel a scruple
of remorse?

She raised her eyelids.

The sight which she beheld struck her with stupefaction. Instead of
the grinning features which she expected to see, she saw a motionless,
unrecognizable face, contorted by an expression of unspeakable terror:
and the eyes, invisible under the double impediment of the spectacles,
seemed to be staring above her head, above the chair in which she lay
prostrate.

Clarisse turned her face. Two revolver-barrels, pointed at Daubrecq,
showed on the right, a little above the chair. She saw only that: those
two huge, formidable revolvers, gripped in two clenched hands. She saw
only that and also Daubrecq's face, which fear was discolouring little
by little, until it turned livid. And, almost at the same time, some one
slipped behind Daubrecq, sprang up fiercely, flung one of his arms round
Daubrecq's neck, threw him to the ground with incredible violence and
applied a pad of cotton-wo