wed the path
toward the exit from the cemetery, he again saw himself on the terrible
night of December 3d and 4th, 1851, lying weltering in his blood, with
failing consciousness, upon the wet pavement of the Rue Montmartre, a
bullet in his right hip. The memory of that moment was so vivid, that
he fancied he again felt the pain in his hip and began to limp, as he
had done for months after the wound. In the broad avenue leading to
the main entrance new visions rose before him, made still more intense
by the recollections of the coup d'etat evoked by the sight of Baudin's
grave. At the right he saw the monument of Gottfried Cavaignac in the
midst of the great common grave, into which all the nameless victims of
the street fights were thrown in a horrible medley. This blood-stained
bit of earth surrounds a circular border of flowers, in whose centre,
above a low mound covered with stone slabs, rises a plain iron cross.
Rudolf entered the sinister circle and paused beside it. Very peculiar
emotions stole over him. It seemed as though he were standing within a
cabalistic line which divided him from the world and life. The air
within the magic circle appeared more chill than without. He imagined
he felt a stir and tremor in the ground beneath his feet as if the dead
below were moving, and scraping with their bony fingers on the cover of
their narrow abode.

"I should now be lying there with the rest, if the bullet had taken a
little different course!" he thought, drawing a long breath of relief.
He glanced around him. At the foot of the cross was a heap of wreaths
and bouquets, and several women were kneeling on the stone slabs,
murmuring silent prayers. "Are there still, after the lapse of
twenty-seven years, mourners who remember the dead? No one would have
come for my sake, if they had thrown me there too."

He was standing beside one of the kneeling women, at whom he gazed with
deep sympathy. She was dressed in black, a long black veil hung from
her head, and she seemed wholly absorbed in her fervour. Feeling a
steady gaze fixed upon her, she involuntarily looked up. Their eyes
met. She sank back with a stifled cry which seemed to issue from a
throat suddenly compressed. Involuntarily stretching her arms toward
him, while her eyes half closed and consciousness seemed failing, her
blanching lips whispered:

"Rudolf! Rudolf!"

He had retreated a step, astonished and bewildered, at the first cry,
now h