he signal agreed upon between the
priest and the executioner.

The crowd knelt.

"_Kyrie eleison_,"* said the priests, who had remained beneath the arch
of the portal.

* "Lord have mercy upon us."

"_Kyrie eleison_," repeated the throng in that murmur which runs over
all heads, like the waves of a troubled sea.

"Amen," said the archdeacon.

He turned his back on the condemned girl, his head sank upon his breast
once more, he crossed his hands and rejoined his escort of priests, and
a moment later he was seen to disappear, with the cross, the candles,
and the copes, beneath the misty arches of the cathedral, and his
sonorous voice was extinguished by degrees in the choir, as he chanted
this verse of despair,--

"_Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt_."*

* "All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me."

At the same time, the intermittent clash of the iron butts of the
beadles' halberds, gradually dying away among the columns of the nave,
produced the effect of a clock hammer striking the last hour of the
condemned.

The doors of Notre-Dame remained open, allowing a view of the empty
desolate church, draped in mourning, without candles, and without
voices.

The condemned girl remained motionless in her place, waiting to be
disposed of. One of the sergeants of police was obliged to notify Master
Charmolue of the fact, as the latter, during this entire scene, had been
engaged in studying the bas-relief of the grand portal which represents,
according to some, the sacrifice of Abraham; according to others, the
philosopher's alchemical operation: the sun being figured forth by the
angel; the fire, by the fagot; the artisan, by Abraham.

There was considerable difficulty in drawing him away from that
contemplation, but at length he turned round; and, at a signal which he
gave, two men clad in yellow, the executioner's assistants, approached
the gypsy to bind her hands once more.

The unhappy creature, at the moment of mounting once again the fatal
cart, and proceeding to her last halting-place, was seized, possibly,
with some poignant clinging to life. She raised her dry, red eyes to
heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds, cut here and there by a blue
trapezium or triangle; then she lowered them to objects around her, to
the earth, the throng, the houses; all at once, while the yellow man was
binding her elbows, she uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy. Yonder, on
t