Chabot ensconced himself as comfortably as possible in the hard wooden chair which the warder had vacated.
"Let us be sensible," he said, after a pause. "Your little game is over, you know. You have lost."
"I have won!" exclaimed Charlotte, with a touch of triumph in her voice.
"We will not discuss the point," said Chabot. "I do not argue with women. I wish you to tell me what you were unwilling, and very naturally unwilling, to admit at your trial—the true motive of your crime. I want to know the source from which came the inspiration. You have executed the deed alone, but you cannot have planned it alone. Others have helped you. You are to die, remember, alone; to suffer alone; and yet it is not you alone who are guilty. There are, there must be, others who have urged you to commit this crime. The Girondist Barbaroux, for instance," he suggested, "a friend of yours, who has just been arrested——"
"Had nothing whatever to do with it," exclaimed the girl, breaking in upon his unfinished sentence. "What I have done, I have done alone, and I am proud of it! I confided in none; I asked advice of none. The idea was my own; the conception was my own; and I carried it out by myself!"
There was in her voice a note of exultation, of glory, of triumph in the success of her crime; she seemed almost to boast of the solitude of her guilt, as though conscious of the fact that one executes but ill that which another's brain has conceived.
"Oh, it is very loyal of you to try and conceal the identity of your accomplices," said Chabot, with a sneer.
"My loyalty is for my country alone. It was my love of her that inspired me to plan my project; my love of her that helped me to undertake it; my desire for her welfare that gave me strength to carry it out!"
"Indeed," said the Deputy sardonically. "And doubtless it required unusual strength to deal so fatal a blow, straight to the heart!"
The girl looked at him in surprise.