"Going away from town and me?"
"The work of the Assembly of which I am a member has terminated, and I have no motive to stay here."
"Not even to be useful to us?"
"Not even that." He smiled sadly. "For indeed I cannot be useful to you in any way now. My strength lay in my influence over the House and at the Jacobin club, in my painfully acquired popularity, in short; but the House is dissolved, the Jacobins are broke up, and my popularity is lost."
He smiled more mournfully than before.
She looked at him with a strange glare which resembled the glow of triumph.
"You see, sir, that popularity may be lost," she said.
By his sigh, she felt that she had perpetrated one of those pieces of petty cruelty which were habitual to her.
Indeed, if he had lost it in a month, was it not for her, the angel of death, like Mary Stuart, to those who tried to serve her?
"But you will not go?" she said.