And she beat the hand pitilessly.
“Help! help!” cried Pierrette, the blood flowing.
At that instant, loud knocks were heard at the front door. Exhausted, the two women paused a moment.
Rogron, awakened and uneasy, not knowing what was happening, had got up, gone to his sister’s room, and not finding her was frightened. Hearing the knocks he went down, unfastened the front door, and was nearly knocked over by Brigaut, followed by a sort of phantom.
At this moment Sylvie’s eyes chanced to fall on Pierrette’s corset, and she remembered the papers. Releasing the girl’s wrist she sprang upon the corset like a tiger on its prey, and showed it to Pierrette with a smile,—the smile of an Iroquois over his victim before he scalps him.
“I am dying,” said Pierrette, falling on her knees, “oh, who will save me?”
“I!” said a woman with white hair and an aged parchment face, in which two gray eyes glittered.
“Ah! grandmother, you have come too late,” cried the poor child, bursting into tears.
Pierrette fell upon her bed, her strength all gone, half-dead with the exhaustion which, in her feeble state, followed so violent a struggle. The tall gray woman took her in her arms, as a nurse lifts a child, and went out, followed by Brigaut, without a word to Sylvie, on whom she cast one glance of majestic accusation.
The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth), accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death. She slowly went down the stairs, listened to the front door closing behind them, and came face to face with her brother, who exclaimed: “Then they haven’t killed you?”