A young girl—she—she of the bare room overlooking the square, she of—of—he failed to identify another appearance he knew ought to be familiar—started up from a bed of straw where she had been sitting in company with an old man. She approached, in quiet command of herself, neither hastily nor reluctantly. Obviously, she was indifferent to whatever might be required of her. Only when she perceived the identity of her visitor did she start back in a sudden little hesitation, vanquished as soon as felt. She came coolly up to him, regarded him with contemptuously hostile eyes, awaited his business with her.
He was trembling with emotions that almost overpowered him—the soul that watched felt itself gripped in an agony of remorse, of fear, of—something else that he would not acknowledge. He stammered evidently as he spoke.
“Citoyenne, come with me—you are free!”
She looked at him in blank surprise.
“Free?”
The inaudible words were plain to those two watching souls who had long ago forgotten the crystal that they held. Both thrilled with a sense of crisis in which they were intimately involved.
The young man reiterated his assertion eagerly.
“And my father?” The girl turned her head toward the melancholy figure bowed in dejection on its heap of straw.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Your father is guilty of a crime against the Republic. I can do nothing for him. But you have committed no crime, citoyenne”