ips were white, her
eyes staring.

The patriotesses, who sat knitting on the stand erected near the machine
for their daily delectation, agreed that she was an excellent diversion.

All at once her difficulty in pushing forward ceased and the brutes
around her made way.

"Give her a good place," she heard one cry, and many hands impelled her
to the foot of the guillotine. Bloated faces, wicked jests, fists
grasping pipes and bottles, a tumult of the coarse and passionate,
swayed, about her, organised under one being, the Admiral, jeering in
his low power. Never had his head, his face, shown more completely their
resemblance to a skull.

As he stretched up his arm with a gesture of ferocious, gleeful malice,
the wretches around the scaffold, as one man, broke into intoxicated
laughter, joined hands and swayed in and out in the popular dance--

"Hurrah for the sound
Of the cannon."

Meanwhile two of his henchmen held Cyrene before him.

"Look!" he cried to her. "See!" and pointed up to the guillotine. Her
eyes involuntarily followed.

She saw the flash of the descending blade. Wild and speechless, she hung
petrified on the arms of the two men holding her. But now she was
oblivious of everything except that another head, another form, far
above all else to her, was on the platform. His face was pallid, his
bearing sweet, solemn, and brave.

"Death to the aristocrat!" shouted the excited mob. His lips moved with
a brief appearance of words. Had she been closer she would have beard
him say quietly: "It is just."

The executioner Sanson turned from the last victim and seized him. At
the very instant he felt the grasp he caught sight of the face of his
beloved, held there in the grasp of the two Jacobins. This was the
crowning agony. The immensity of his retribution swept over him in an
overwhelming flood.

"Oh God, does Justice require this too?" he cried.

Sanson's sinewy assistants thrust him against an upright plank. In the
last remnants of her congested, distorted vision, Cyrene saw the bright
knife fall like a lightning vengeance.

At night in the Cemetery of the Madeleine near by la Tour, searching
anxiously with a lantern, found her lying across the common trench into
which the bodies and heads of the executed were indiscriminately thrown
and hastily covered. There, her arms stretched across as if to embrace
as much of it as she could, her wonderful golden majesty of hair strewn
upon them, h