"Yes, citizeness," he said, addressing her, "your courage is French courage, your virtue French virtue, and the good heart of the nation sees in you a daughter of the people. Incarnating the spirit of the race, be welcome at the tables of fraternity, and accept the homage of all hearts."
At a motion of his hand the secretary hastily filled in her certificate, and Dominique, without waiting for his own, hurried her away. Even as they left they heard Wife Gougeon scream—
"Death to the aristocrat!"
They hastened across the Place de Grève, but had not yet reached the corner of the street beyond, when in the dusk Cyrène heard the sound of rushing wheels, felt herself choked by a gag from behind, and was pushed helpless by rough hands into a coach and driven away. Behind her she heard a sound of scuffle and the voice of Dominique cry aloud in anguish—
"They have finished me!"
"Be quiet, my lady," spoke the voice of Abbé Jude.
She knew no more till she woke in darkness.
[CHAPTER L]
JUDGMENT DAY
Germain, left alone in the house, bolted the door, returned with trembling limbs to the room above and threw himself down in his chair blanched and nerveless. They who have experienced the minutes when a well-loved one hangs between life and death can alone know what he suffered. It was now that the fleeting poverty of the ideals he had been following became visible. The elegance, the pride, the historic glamour, the fine breeding of the Old Régime, by which he had been fascinated, had they not fallen to pieces like a flower whose petals are scattered in the tempest? Even the burning hope of his heart, the dream of a life of earthly bliss with his love, was showing its insecurity and dropping asunder. His ship was sinking in the ocean of Eternity. How futile his intrigue, how mean his deceptions, how insufficient his excuses. The Everlasting Presence gazed through them, and in its all-illumining blaze they fell and sank away. He saw that that which underlies life and death and all that is, is a living Conscience, to which all must perforce conform. Pride, deception, selfishness, uncontrol of passion, the taking of that which was not his, and the injuring of honourable men—these excrescences he saw upon his soul, and that without their surgery it would never be divine. He remembered the prophetic warning of his father that "Eternal Justice calls us to exact account"; and the pertinacity of Retribution in the matter of the Golden Dog. He saw that the justice of this life and the next are one, and are absolutely complete in their demands. One great conclusion came to him with overwhelming force; he saw that it was the plan of Heaven that no man must profit by any fruit of his wrong. He now himself must meet that justice and make that retribution.