er, and that
his hands were covered with warm blood.

"Pardieu! she's dead," he whispered.

And they gently turned her over, and found that it was so.

Madeleine had fallen upon her arm, and the terrible knife was yet
embedded in her heart.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, unconscious of this pursuit and its fatal consequences,
Mlle. Fouchette had swiftly passed from the narrow Rue St. Jacques
into Rue Soufflot, and was flying across the broad Place du Pantheon.
Blind to the glare of the wine-shops, deaf to the gay chanson of a
group of students and grisettes swinging by from the Cafe du Henri
Murger,--indeed, dead to all the world,--the grief-stricken girl still
ran at the top of her speed--towards----

The river?

Her poor little overtaxed brain was in a whirl. She had no definite
idea of anything beyond getting away. As a patient domestic beast of
burden suddenly resumes his savage state and rushes blindly,
pell-mell, he knows not where, so Mlle. Fouchette now plunged into the
oblivion of the night.

Unconsciously, too, she had taken the road to the river,--the broad
and well-travelled route of the Parisian unfortunate.

Ah! the river!

For the first time it occurred to her now,--how many unbearable griefs
the river had swallowed up.

There were so many things worse than death. One of these was to live
as Madeleine had lived. Never that! Never! Not now,--once, perhaps;
but not now. Oh, no; not now!

The river seemed to beckon to her,--to call upon her, reproachfully,
to come back to it,--to open its slimy arms and invite her to the
palpitating bosom that had soothed the sorrows of so many thousands of
the children of civilization.

And Fouchette was the offspring of the river. Why had she been
spared, then? Had it proved worth while?

She recalled every incident of that eventful period. She remembered
the precise spot where she had been pulled out that gray morning,
years before.

This idea had flitted through her mind, at first vaguely, then, still
unsought, began to assume definite shape.

Eh, bien,--soit! From the river to the river!

Mlle. Fouchette, as we have seen, had all the spontaneity of her race,
accentuated by a life of caprice and reckless abandon. To conceive was
to execute. Consequences were an after-consideration, if at all worthy
of such a thing as consideration.

She stopped. But this hesitation was not in the execution of her
suddenly formed purpose. I