ark terror took possession of her. The rain trickled
over her bosom....

"Keep your cloaks round you!" she again admonished her daughters.

Then she went on, dragging herself along and the girls as well, beside
her, stumbling on their feet...

But a whirl of people swept across the Opera Square; there seemed to be
a fight in progress: a heap of men, surrounding a group of
police-constables and soldiers, in whose midst a madman wrestled with
forcible gestures; a coarse clamour rose on high. At the lighted, open
windows of the opera-house, above the perystile, still decked in its
bright, festal illumination, face after face, appeared, actors still in
costume looked on....

"Mamma, we shall never get through!" sobbed Eleonore, softly.

The duchess thought in despair of the great Empress Avenue in which
their town-house stood; it was so far away: how would they ever reach
it, how would they ever get home?...

"They're murdering him, they're murdering him, they shan't murder him!"
bleated the people round them.

Then the duchess understood, then she saw and the girls also saw: the
mob, furious, foaming at the mouth--avengers now, though at first
malcontents, perhaps even anarchists: such were the Liparians!--the mob
pressing against the soldiers and constables, in the midst of whom the
emperor's murderer still made fight with his large, frenzied gestures.
And the avengers stormed this circle of protecting police; they dragged
the man out.... They dragged him right under the eyes of the duchess, of
her daughters....

"Ugh, ugh, ugh!" they roared brutally, men and women alike.

They tore the clothes from his body, they beat him; and he howled back.
They struck him to the ground with cudgels and trampled on him with
coarse shoes; his blood flowed; his brains spattered from his crushed
skull....

Then, at the sight of blood, they became like wild beasts; they grinned
and smacked their lips with delight.

Eleonore fell back fainting against the duchess, but Alexa shook her by
the arm:

"Keep up, keep up, for God's sake keep up, can't you?" she cried out
aloud. "I can do nothing with you if you faint!"

Her strong hands goaded the little marchioness back into life and again
she dragged them on, staggering....

5

The emperor, who refused to die, lived by sheer energy for two days
longer, with his perforated lungs, panting for breath.

And such were the Liparians: the man, the murderer, seized in the
opera