'Your hands! your hands! dear mistress; if I can only reach to this opening, I am saved.'
Aurelia obeyed almost mechanically, for the menacing voice of the Seigneur Gremion drew nearer and nearer.
The slave, after having placed one of her feet in the hollow of the two hands of her mistress, rested her other foot lightly on her shoulder, thus reached the opening, contrived to place herself on the thickness of the wall, and rested for a few moments kneeling under the half arch.
'But in jumping into the street,' suddenly exclaimed Aurelia in fear, 'you will hurt yourself, poor Genevieve.'
At this moment arrived the Seigneur Gremion, pale, enraged, and holding a lamp in his hand.
'What are you doing there?' he cried, addressing his wife; 'reply! reply!'
Then perceiving the slave kneeling above the door, he added:
'Ah! wretch! you would escape, and ‘tis my wife who favors your flight?'
'Yes,' replied Aurelia courageously, 'yes; and should you kill me on the spot, she shall escape your ill treatment.'
Genevieve, after looking down into the street from the elevation where she had crept, saw that she would have to jump twice her own length; she hesitated a moment, but hearing the Seigneur Gremion say to his wife, whom he had brutally shook by the arm to make her abandon the chain of the door to which she had clung: