Robespierre came toward her, furious with passion. "I will have none of your escapades," he said fiercely; "give me that key or I will"—
"Keep off! keep off!" cried out La Liberté, bounding lightly out of his reach with a little mocking laugh. "Don't catch me about the waist; I carry my sting there."
"You wasp! I will crush you!" he cried out, foaming with rage.
"Better take care how you handle wasps," was her rejoinder as she perched herself upon the edge of a desk and shook her brown curls defiantly at him.
"Come, Liberté," he said, trying a coaxing tone, although his anger almost choked him; "I know you will open the door at once when I tell you that woman has obtained from me by a skillful ruse a pardon in blank. I don't know whose name will be filled in. Perhaps some great enemy of the Republic will be set at liberty, unless I can send word at once to the conciergerie and forestall it."
"I know who will be liberated," sang La Liberté, swinging her feet.
"You do!" vociferated Robespierre in genuine astonishment. "Is this a plot? Are you concerned in it?" And he came toward her, his small eyes winking rapidly.
"You don't get it yet," laughed La Liberté, sliding over to the other side of the desk. "I am concerned in enough of a plot to keep you from sending to the scaffold a man to whom I've taken a fancy. I do not very often take a particular interest in any one person, but when I do, it is lasting." And she regarded him airily from her point of vantage.
"I'll send you to the guillotine," hissed Robespierre between his teeth, striking his clenched fist upon the desk in front of him. "I'll have you arrested to-night. I'll bear with you no longer. I have permitted you to swagger around in public, to come into the Jacobin Club and flourish your pistols, because it amused the populace, and I laughed with them at your antics; but now you have overstepped the line. This meddling with national affairs will cost you your life."
For a moment La Liberté confronted him from behind her barricade, her eyes darting fire.