colleague and every one concerned, blaspheming against the interminable
length of the road, against the cold and against the wet.

Early in the evening on the second day of the journey he had met with an
accident. The prisoner, who presumably was weak and weary, and not over
steady on his feet, had fallen up against him as they were both about to
re-enter the coach after a halt just outside Amiens, and citizen Heron
had lost his footing in the slippery mud of the road. His head came in
violent contact with the step, and his right temple was severely cut.
Since then he had been forced to wear a bandage across the top of his
face, under his sugar-loaf hat, which had added nothing to his beauty,
but a great deal to the violence of his temper. He wanted to push the
men on, to force the pace, to shorten the halts; but Chauvelin knew
better than to allow slackness and discontent to follow in the wake of
over-fatigue.

The soldiers were always well rested and well fed, and though the delay
caused by long and frequent halts must have been just as irksome to him
as it was to Heron, yet he bore it imperturbably, for he would have had
no use on this momentous journey for a handful of men whose enthusiasm
and spirit had been blown away by the roughness of the gale, or drowned
in the fury of the constant downpour of rain.

Of all this Marguerite had been conscious in a vague, dreamy kind of
way. She seemed to herself like the spectator in a moving panoramic
drama, unable to raise a finger or to do aught to stop that final,
inevitable ending, the cataclysm of sorrow and misery that awaited her,
when the dreary curtain would fall on the last act, and she and all the
other spectators--Armand, Chauvelin, Heron, the Soldiers--would slowly
wend their way home, leaving the principal actor behind the fallen
curtain, which never would be lifted again.

After that first halt in the guard-room of the Rue Ste. Anne she had
been bidden to enter a second hackney coach, which, followed the other
at a distance of fifty metres or so, and was, like that other, closely
surrounded by a squad of mounted men.

Armand and Chauvelin rode in this carriage with her; all day she sat
looking out on the endless monotony of the road, on the drops of rain
that pattered against the window-glass, and ran down from it like a
perpetual stream of tears.

There were two halts called during the day--one for dinner and one
midway through the afternoon--when she an