The ruffian who had just administered the kick slipped and fell upon her, whereat the crowd fairly split with laughter. It was so droll!
But the man did not join in this, for he saw that he had slipped in a thin red stream that flowed sluggishly towards the gutter, 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 Panthéon. Blind to the glare of the wine-shops, deaf to the gay chanson of a group of students and grisettes swinging by from the Café 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.