"Do you think it will be for to-night?"
"Yes; there is something in the air that makes me think so."
Their way soon involved them in a network of dusky, gaping streets. On each side somber walls, peopled with dim, curious flecks of headgear, strained upward and back in a bulging effort to draw down a little more of the allotted strip of sky. The windows of taverns, on the ground floor, were beginning to redden and to cast faint streaks across the black, oozing streets; but the frugal inhabitants of upper stories, in deference to the price of candles, still hung on the sills, causing the evening to resound with the nervous chatter of window-to-window speculation.
At times the tension of conjecture and discussion would be broken by the bass voice of a passing laborer thundering forth,
"Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!"
Above the soprano of women's voices and the thin piping of children responded feverishly:
"La liberté s'établira:
Malgré les tyrans tout réussira!"
They found the cabaret beginning to fill up by twos and threes—workingmen for the most part: water-carriers divesting themselves of their barrels at the door with a sigh of contentment; wood-carriers, with relaxed limbs, slipping gratefully into the hard wooden benches; women of the markets, corpulent, quick-tongued, smelling of onion and garlic; erstwhile actors still with the strut of the stage; an occasional bourgeois in misfortune; a handful of gamins, impudent and witty—all discussing feverishly the projected attack.
The two girls, perceiving the congestion in the outer room, elbowed their way to where, by an inner door, a waiter of exceptional but broken height was scanning the crowd with an eye to orders.