"Yes, alone. He is alone," she repeated.
And at this decisive moment she passionately threw herself on his neck, she pressed her burning lips to his. It was a prolonged embrace, in which she would have wished to have conveyed her own blood to him. How she loved him! and how she execrated the other! Ah! had she but dared, twenty times over she would have done the business herself, to spare him the horror; but her hands were unequal to the effort, she felt herself too feeble, it required the fist of a man. And this kiss, which was without end, was all she could breathe to him of her own courage.
A locomotive whistled in the distance, casting to the night a melancholy lamentation of distress. At regular intervals they could hear the loud strokes of a colossal hammer coming from an undeterminable direction. The vapour ascending from the sea sailed across the sky in chaotic confusion, while drifting shreds seemed at moments to extinguish the bright sparks of the gas-lamps. When Séverine at length removed her mouth from his, it seemed as if she had ceased to exist, as if all her soul had passed into him.
Jacques abruptly opened the knife. But with a stifled oath, he exclaimed:
"It's all up! He's off!"
And so it was. The moving shadow, after approaching to within fifty paces of them, had just turned to the left, and was retreating with the even step of a night watchman who had no cause for alarm.
Then she pushed him.
"Go on, go on!" said she.
And they both started. He ahead; she close at his heels. They glided behind the man, hunting him down, careful not to make a noise. Then as they took a short cut across a shunting-line, they found him twenty paces at the most away. They had to take advantage of every bit of wall for shelter. One false step would have betrayed them.
"We shall never reach him," said he, in a hollow voice. "If he attains the box of the pointsman he will escape."