m, walked in. Clarissa gave a low cry and her face
turned livid.

Prison atmosphere enveloped Bastide. The shaggy hair, the long,
neglected beard, the staring, somewhat dazed look, the slight stoop, as
of a carrier of burdens, of the gigantic form, the secretly quivering
wrath upon his newly furrowed brow--all proclaimed their cause and
origin. Yes, he seemed to carry about him the invisible walls which
filled him with agony and gloom, and which, month after month, pictured
to him with more and more hopeless brilliance the images of freedom,
until finally they refused to delude him with blooming tree or
flourishing field; then they resembled the desolate gray of an autumn
evening, when the air already smacks of winter, the hearse rattles
oftener than usual past the garden-gate toward the little churchyard,
and the rising half-moon floats in glowing radiance in the misty azure
like a bleeding, divided heart.

And yet that haughty eye, in which shone the resolve to be true to
himself? And yet that strangely bitter scorn in his mien which might be
compared to the cautious and at the same time majestic crouching of a
tiger cat? The infinite contempt with which he looked at the hands of
the clerks, prepared to write, his inner freedom and grand detachment
in spite of the handcuffs and the two soldiers?

It was this that wrung the cry from Clarissa's lips, and drove the mad
merriment from her face. Not, indeed, because she was forced to behold
the former genius of the woods and wilds bound and shattered, but
because she recognized as in a flash of lightning that that hand could
not have wielded a murderous knife, that such a deed did not touch the
circle of his being, even if he may have been capable of the act, and
that all was in vain, an incomprehensible intoxication and madness, an
impenetrable horror, an exhibition of hypocrisy and disease, A
dizziness seized her as if she were falling from a high tower. She was
ashamed of her showy dress, its conspicuous finery, and in passionate
excitement she tore the costly lace from her arms and, with an
expression of the utmost loathing, threw it on the ground.

Monsieur Jausion must have interpreted it differently. Again he smiled
at Monsieur Pinaud, but this time in triumph, as if he would say: the
sample tallies. "Do you know this lady, Bastide Grammont?" he asked the
prisoner. Bastide turned his head aside, and his look of careless,
bitter disdain cut Clarissa to the quick.