have never felt the power of my love for you.--Oh!
follow me. You shall take your time to love me after I have saved you.
You shall hate me as long as you will. But come. To-morrow! to-morrow!
the gallows! your execution! Oh! save yourself! spare me!"

He seized her arm, he was beside himself, he tried to drag her away.

She fixed her eye intently on him.

"What has become of my Phoebus?"

"Ah!" said the priest, releasing her arm, "you are pitiless."

"What has become of Phoebus?" she repeated coldly.

"He is dead!" cried the priest.

"Dead!" said she, still icy and motionless "then why do you talk to me
of living?"

He was not listening to her.

"Oh! yes," said he, as though speaking to himself, "he certainly must be
dead. The blade pierced deeply. I believe I touched his heart with the
point. Oh! my very soul was at the end of the dagger!"

The young girl flung herself upon him like a raging tigress, and pushed
him upon the steps of the staircase with supernatural force.

"Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood
of both of us make an eternal stain upon your brow! Be thine, priest!
Never! never! Nothing shall unite us! not hell itself! Go, accursed man!
Never!"

The priest had stumbled on the stairs. He silently disentangled his
feet from the folds of his robe, picked up his lantern again, and slowly
began the ascent of the steps which led to the door; he opened the door
and passed through it.

All at once, the young girl beheld his head reappear; it wore a
frightful expression, and he cried, hoarse with rage and despair,--

"I tell you he is dead!"

She fell face downwards upon the floor, and there was no longer any
sound audible in the cell than the sob of the drop of water which made
the pool palpitate amid the darkness.

CHAPTER V. THE MOTHER.

I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than the
ideas which awake in a mother's heart at the sight of her child's tiny
shoe; especially if it is a shoe for festivals, for Sunday, for baptism,
the shoe embroidered to the very sole, a shoe in which the infant has
not yet taken a step. That shoe has so much grace and daintiness, it is
so impossible for it to walk, that it seems to the mother as though she
saw her child. She smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to it; she
asks herself whether there can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the
child be absent, the pretty shoe suffices to place the sw