d his fulfilling. She might escape! True, many in her place would
have feared a worse fate and harsher handling. But there lay half the
merit of her victory. It had left her not only in a better position, but
with a new confidence in her power over her adversary. He would insist
on the bargain struck between them; within its four corners she could
look for no indulgence. But if the conditions proved to be beyond his
power, she believed that he would spare her: with an ill grace, indeed,
with such ferocity and coarse reviling as her woman's pride might
scarcely support. But he would spare her.

And if the worst befell her? She would still have the consolation of
knowing that from the cataclysm which had overwhelmed her friends she had
ransomed those most dear to her. Owing to the position of her chamber,
she saw nothing of the excesses to which Paris gave itself up during the
remainder of that day, and to which it returned with unabated zest on the
following morning. But the Carlats and her women learned from the guards
below what was passing; and quaking and cowering in their corners fixed
frightened eyes on her, who was their stay and hope. How could she prove
false to them? How doom them to perish, had there been no question of
her lover?

Of him she sat thinking by the hour together. She recalled with solemn
tenderness the moment in which he had devoted himself to the death which
came but halfway to seize them; nor was she slow to forgive his
subsequent withdrawal, and his attempt to rescue her in spite of herself.
She found the impulse to die glorious; the withdrawal--for the actor was
her lover--a thing done for her, which he would not have done for
himself, and which she quickly forgave him. The revulsion of feeling
which had conquered her at the time, and led her to tear herself from
him, no longer moved her much while all in his action that might have
seemed in other eyes less than heroic, all in his conduct--in a crisis
demanding the highest--that smacked of common or mean, vanished, for she
still clung to him. Clung to him, not so much with the passion of the
mature woman, as with the maiden and sentimental affection of one who has
now no hope of possessing, and for whom love no longer spells life, but
sacrifice.

She had leisure for these musings, for she was left to herself all that
day, and until late on the following day. Her own servants waited on
her, and it was known that below stairs