oster-mother, now bending towards her. With a handkerchief
Louise tenderly wiped it, her fingers gave loving little pats of the
heaving neck and bosom, she kissed the stained cheeks, and then the
girls' lips met--met long and passionately! No words were spoken, none
was needed for a reunion that was also a farewell.

The cart moved. The loving lips were parted. Now one might see
Louise's imploring arms still held out toward the sad receding little
figure.

* * * * *

It was indeed a busy day for the executioners. Batches of men and
women preceded Henriette and Maurice. Two of these were beautiful
young girls who, in default of priest, were saying the last offices of
the Church as they knelt on the bare ground. In tragic glory Faith's
clear credo rang out: "_I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live!_"

Their lovely heads dropped in the basket as the knitting women clicked
their needles and cried "Two!" Henriette, with a physical retch at the
sight, fell back half-fainting on Maurice. Roughly the soldiers yanked
them asunder.

"Citizeness, your time is come!" said one of the brawny butchers. He
half led, half supported her up the steps of the guillotine....

The Chief executioner turned Henriette about, inspecting her fine
points as an equine connoisseur would inspect a filly. He gloated over
her not yet budded form, the swan-like neck, unlined piquant features,
the golden head-curls that fell in ringlets.

"A pretty one--eh, Jean?" he commented to his assistant.

Between the two, they had strapped her unresisting on the board. They
lowered it below the razor edge of the knife, so that she lay prone
with her neck directly underneath. The finale was to fasten on the
neck piece, a round-holed cross board which prevented the head from
drawing back....

Alas! what avails it that five miles away--in the heart of the
city--the hoofbeats of a company of cavalry resound rhythmically over
the flagstones?

Danton and his Northern riders are straining every nerve, galloping
their steeds furiously--eyes fixed on the seeming-impossible goal.
Rather are they modern centaurs, each rider and steed a unit of
undivisible will and energy: Danton a furious resistless hippogriff,
fire-striking, fire-exhaling, in unity with his white charger; the
lean-jawed, sternly set Captain on his lean galloping Arabian,
cyclonic, onrushing lik