Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile and
submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the greatest and
the hardest thing that she could ever do far less than all that she
would willingly have done. And as she looked upon the host whose
thousand and ten thousand voices rang up to the noonday sun in her
homage, and in hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face,
that for once was white and still and very grave;--none who saw her face
then, ever forgot that look.

In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud and pure
ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, in all its
perfect splendour. In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born
of a people's love and of the impossible desires of genius in its youth,
comes to so few human lives--knew that which was known to the young
Napoleon when, in the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed
the Conqueror of Italy.

* * *

She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old
Invalide had done in the '89--a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the
Cannebiere who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her
for a woman of his own order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like
scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter, and the
languid lustre of sweet contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her
wrong in silence--she was a daughter of the south and of the populace,
with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced
with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy
mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won,
while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the
people were made drunk at the bridal of their _chatelaine_ in those hot,
ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by
the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the
scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the axe fall
down on the proud snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent
there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and
smote the lips his lips had kissed, a cruel blow that blurred their
beauty out, and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and
drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and
over the rough stones of the town, and through