spered rapidly:

"Quick! they are going to fire again!"

It was true; excepting, this time, the gendarmes had recourse to their
carbines, the dismounted one having picked his up from the briars, and
found the cap secure. At that short range, the student would be a dead
man if he awaited the double discharge.

Heated with the action, inhaling the acrid smell of gunpowder, the
demon possessed him which at such moments hisses: "Kill, kill, kill!"
into a man's ear. The angelic demon there had supplied him with the
weapon, and he fired three shots as rapidly as the mechanism would work.

The dismounted gendarme had come out on an unlucky day; a bullet in his
neck laid him lifeless in the rushes beside the strangled horse; his
comrade, pierced so that he bled internally, drew off to the roadside
mechanically--the image of despair; nothing more heartrending than the
anguish on his convulsed visage and the increasingly hopeless
expression.

Here was a double tragedy, but it was the major who, under the eyes of
Fraulein von Vieradlers, was to furnish the comedy of the incident. His
horse took the bit in its teeth and ran away with him along the bank of
the brook, threatening at any moment to lose footing and roll the two in
the water.

"Victory!" said the girl, with a joy-flushed cheek, alighting and
displaying no more compassion for the soldiers slain in doing their duty
than for the chaise horse--or the old woman beside its heaving carcass.

"She is dead," remarked Claudius. "But what did she say? She spoke in
Polish--I understand it--I caught the words, but they were not
intelligible."

"Were they not?" continued the girl, not displeased.

"She said, 'my child!'"

"Very well! I am her grandchild. That was not all, though--she
affectionately recommended you to me, as my cousin."

"Cousin? your cousin?" repeated Claudius, without contradicting the
speaker on his impression that Baboushka's face had not worn a soft
expression, in his eyes.

"It would appear that you do not know yourself as Felix Clemenceau?"

"Clemenceau?" echoed the student, remembering what he had heard in the
music-hall.

"Yes; your father was the famous sculptor."

Was his predilection for art a hereditary trait? the son of a celebrity?
then his essays in design were unworthy of his name. Abashed, inclined
to despair, having a glimpse of a tumultuous rabble shouting: "At last
he is here!" before the ruddy guillotine on a raw morning, a pal