[CHAPTER XI]
THE MARRIAGE PROPOSAL
At sight of the horrible machine, which stood before her house, Mademoiselle de Brumpt ordered all the windows in the front closed.
When Comte de Brumpt, leaving the prison without guards and on his own parole, arrived within sight of his own house, he found it shut like a sepulchre, with the scaffold before it. He asked himself what it meant and whether he dared go forward. But this hesitation did not last long; neither scaffold nor tomb could hold him back. He walked straight to the door and knocked in his accustomed manner—two blows in quick succession, and a third after a long interval.
Clotilde had retired with Madame Gerard, her companion, to a room in the back of the house overlooking the garden. She was lying among the sofa-cushions and weeping, so ominous did Schneider's answer to her petition seem to her. When she heard the first two strokes of the knocker she uttered a cry, at the third she sprang to her feet.
"My God!" she cried.
Madame Gerard turned pale.
"If your father were not a prisoner," she said, "I would swear that was his knock."