“’Tis very long to wait,” she sighed; “why not to-day? It could not matter to them.”

“You are, then, very wretched?” asked the priest after another silence.

“I am very cold,” said she.

She took her two feet in her hands— the habitual gesture of the unfortunate who are cold, and which we have already remarked in the recluse of the Tour-Roland— and her teeth chattered.

From under his hood the priest’s eyes appeared to be surveying the dungeon. “No light! no fire! in the water!— ’tis horrible!”

“Yes,” she answered with the bewildered air which misery had given her. “The day is for every one, why do they give me only night?”

“Do you know,” resumed the priest after another silence, “why you are here?”

“I think I knew it once,” she said pressing her wasted fingers to her brow as if to aid her memory; “but I do not know now.”

Suddenly she began to weep like a child. “I want to go away from here, sir. I am cold, I am frightened, and there are beasts that crawl over me.”

“Well, then— follow me!” And so saying, the priest seized her by the arm. The unhappy girl was already frozen to the heart’s core, but yet that hand felt cold to her.

“Oh,” she murmured, “’tis the icy hand of Death! Who are you?”

The priest raised his cowl. She looked— it was the sinister face that had so long pursued her, the devilish head that she had seen above the adored head of her Phœbus, the eye that she had last seen glittering beside a dagger.

This apparition, always so fatal to her, which thus had thrust her on from misfortune to misfortune, even to an ignominious death, roused her from her stupor. The sort of veil that seemed to have woven itself over her memory was rent aside. All the details of her grewsome adventures, from the nocturnal scene at La Falourdel’s to her condemnation at La Tournelle, came back to her with a rush— not vague and confused as heretofore, but distinct, clear-cut, palpitating, terrible. These recollections, well-nigh obliterated by excess of suffering, revived at sight of that sombre figure, as the heat of the fire brings out afresh upon the blank paper the invisible writing traced on it by sympathetic ink. She felt as if all the wounds of her heart were reopened and bleeding at once.

“Ah!” she cried, her hands covering her face with a convulsive shudder, “it is the priest!”

Then she let her arms drop helplessly and sat where she was, her head bent, her eyes fixed on the ground, speechless, shaking from head to foot.

The priest gazed at her with the eye of the kite which after long hovering high in the air above a poor lark cowering in the corn, gradually and silently lessening the formidable circles of its flight, now suddenly makes a lightning dart upon its prey and holds it panting in its talons.

“Finish,” she murmured in a whisper, “finish— the last blow!” And her head shrank in terror between her shoulders like the sheep that awaits the death-stroke of the butcher.

“You hold me in horror then?” he said at last.

She made no reply.


  By PanEris using Melati.

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